A Reasonable Argument for Title II Net Neutrality

I was shaking my head at Ben Thompson’s article praising Ajit Pai’s push to end net neutrality restrictions through Title II. I wished at the time that I had the energy or knowledge to refute it. Then I read Nick’s article last week. I have nothing to say now:

There is clearly plenty of evidence that ISPs will not treat data the same if offered the opportunity to do otherwise. And, I stress again, we aren’t simply talking about internet providers here — these are vertically-integrated media conglomerates which absolutely have incentive to treat traffic from friendly entities differently through, for example, zero-rating, as AT&T did with DirecTV, Verizon does with their NFL app, and T-Mobile does for certain services.

I don’t usually like to link to articles that Daring Fireball also links to but I’m making an exception to my loosely held guideline.1 I generally enjoy everything Nick writes. This might be his best work. It’s thoughtful, well organized, and full of references to actual events. If you want to get a quick handle on two sides of Ajit Pai’s personal agenda of killing net neutrality, read these two articles.2

  1. It’s not a slight to John Gruber. I just hate echo chambers. They’re lazy and generally not helping anyone but the author. ↩︎

  2. I say it’s a personal agenda because he’s forecast for quite some time that he doesn’t care about the process. He’s also followed up with oddly personal attacks on groups that disagree. ↩︎