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Letting go of an obsession with net neutrality could free technologists to make online services even better.
Two years ago Mung Chiang, a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton, believed he could give customers more control. One simple adjustment would clear the way for lots of mobile-phone users to get as much data as they already did, and in some cases even more, on cheaper terms. Carriers could win, too, by nudging customers to reduce peak-period traffic, making some costly network upgrades unnecessary. “We thought we could increase the benefits for everyone,” Chiang recalls.
Chiang’s plan called for the wireless industry to offer its customers the same types of variable pricing that have brought new efficiencies to transportation and utilities. Rates increase during peak periods, when congestion is at its worst; they decrease during slack periods. In the pre-smartphone era, it would have been impossible to advise users ahead of time about a zig or zag in their connectivity charges. Now, it would be straightforward to vary the price of online access depending on congestion and build an app that let bargain hunters shift their activities to cheaper periods, even on a minute-by-minute basis. When prices were high, consumers could put off non-urgent tasks like downloading Facebook posts to read later. Careful users could save a lot of money.
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/531616/the-right-way-to-fix-the-internet/
(Score: 1) by DrkShadow on Saturday October 18 2014, @11:43AM
I read this when it came out. It's unfortunate to see it here. This opinion piece is _not_ about net neutrality.
Consider the poster child of the article: a company that wants to make software so that the cell carriers can implement pricing as per time of day and amount of traffic at the moment.
Great idea! Not discriminating between source and destination of the traffic! Applying rules to _all_ traffic equally. How novel. What a sound way to _support_ net neutrality. In fact, this supports the _utility_ model as it could apply to the internet.
The rest of the article continues on with similar misunderstanding of what Net Neutrality is about, and I was truly hoping this article would just fall into the shadows, given it's calling for one thing, and arguing for... something else? Nothing at all? I'm actually not sure. I almost signed up to post comments ripping into the article at the time, but when I read the comments on this article, every single informed comment was ripping into what was said here. This is not a well-informed opinion-writer.