Net Neutrality

by Fredy Künzler

I had an interesting discussion recently with "eyeballs" (being myself content-heavy with both Init7 and Zattoo) about Net Neutrality. It ended up with the unanswered question "what is more valuable, content or users?"

From my point of view, both are equal. Even more: content and users are symbiotic. If no content would exist, noone would buy a broadband connection and still rely on old dial-up modems to send and receive their emails. On the other hand, without a decent number of users, all nice drawn business models of content owners would be maculature.

Not new thoughts, though. Still there are many network people out there which consider (heavy bandwidth-consuming) content the root of all evil, completly ignoring that their residential broadband customers provide their paycheck.

Of course "eyeballs" are in trouble if the market price for an avarage DSL | Cable connection is below cost. This happens quite often, in some European countries due the fact that the incumbent is squeezing margins, and the regulator is weak | deaf | ignorant. What to do in such a case?

Cost optimization ... reconsider everything. Especially old-worn IP transit contracts. After 12 to 15 month the latest one should re-negotiate price with the current vendor, and ask other vendors, too. (Independent) eyeball networks should also consider buying from content networks, as they tend to have a lot of excess capacity and may be willing to sell ridiculously cheap.

On factor remains: the user. Commonly they have no clue about the political aspect of Net Neutrality, and they don't care either. Therefore I'll point to an old Youtube-Video, in case someone typing "Net Neutrality" into a search engine and gets pointed to this blog entry ...