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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: 2) by gidds on Saturday October 18 2014, @12:58PM
Firstly, that's not a good start to any plan. To me, it rang the same sort of alarm bells as would:
But after reading the rest, my main concern is people misusing the term 'net neutrality'.
As I understand it, net neutrality is about preventing discrimination based on where the packets are going from/to. It should stop carriers charging twice for the same packets, holding your data to ransom — especially upstream carriers that you have no direct relationship with or choice about.
It is not about your own ISP charging differently for data at different times or different qualities. That's a matter between you and your ISP, and if you don't like their policies/pricing you can change to another. (At least in principle. I hear that in the USA you don't always have that option, but that's more a problem with your so-called 'free market' than with net neutrality or lack thereof.)
So the suggestions in this article don't worry me anywhere near as much as the submitter clearly thinks they should.
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