Kill Network Neutrality, Get Slower Networks

If you want to predict the future, it helps to understand the incentives that guide action. Unsurprisingly, if a corporation has the option of being more profitable by investing less, it will do so. This is the smart conclusion of Bill Snyder at InfoWorld:
To understand their logic, consider this thought experiment: Imagine that you own a freeway -- say, Highway 101 through Silicon Valley -- and you had the power to pluck a car from a traffic jam with a helicopter and deposit it on a clear stretch of the road. Naturally, drivers who could afford the service would be happy to sign up. "That highway is like the Internet, and the individual cars are the packets of data. The ISP is essentially the gatekeeper that controls the flow of cars on the highway. If the ISP is allowed to snatch any car from the back of a very long line and put it in front of everybody else when the driver of the car pays a priority delivery fee, would the ISP have an incentive to keep the road congested or to expand the road capacity?" they wrote. The answer is pretty obvious: If you can make more money by keeping your network congested, why would you invest money to make it less crowded?
He was riffing on a paper, "The Debate on Net Neutrality: A Policy Perspective" by H Kenneth Cheng, Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay, and Hong Guo. I think many of us view this as a "well, duh" paper, but it is good to see a rigorous academic paper verifying our gut instincts. There is a very real danger to letting a few massive corporations control access to the Internet, which is one major reason we see so many communities building their own networks. They want to ensure everyone has fast, reliable, and affordable access to the Open Internet.