My guess is that the companies who sell connections to the rest of us have made assumptions that have been wrecked by P2P networks and streaming video. They didn’t expect us to use the bandwidth they sold us. Here in the UK, the phone company has given them a chance to increase prices, by deploying new technology. What might be the selling point in the USA, because nobody here would dare increase prices without some benefit they could point to?

Net Neutrality is an artificial idea which only occurs in the absence of true competition. While I respect the opinions of the economists and legal experts, it does not require their input to see that there’s a real fundamental problem in the United States broadband market.

And Deborah Tate? To be pedantic, give me a break. She continues to say their is, and I quote, “fierce competition” in the broadband market. Has she read the statistics published by her own FCC agency? Wireless and Wireline is some 95%+ owned by cable and telephone incumbents. She recklessly cites vapor technologies such as broadband over powerline (BPL) and WiMax as serious competitors. BPL has less than 10,000 connections in the US (compared to some x million other high speed connections) and WiMax has barely made it off the drawing board (see San Fran. public Wifi cancelled just this past week).

Conversely, the FTC does have a report from June of this year which does address discrepancies between the European/Asian markets and the US. However, this report gives rather hollow and unsupported bases for why these gaps arose (e.g. geographic, etc.).