Berin Szoka and Brent Skorup write that everyone assumes that cable
companies have all the market power, and so of course a bigger cable
company means disaster. But content owners may be the real heavyweights here: It was Netflix that withheld high-quality streaming from Time Warner Cable customers last year, not vice versa and it was ESPN that first proposed to subsidize its mobile viewers' data usage
last year. 'We need to move away from the fear-mongering and
exaggerations about threats to the Internet as well as simplistic
assumptions about how Internet traffic moves. The real problems online
are far more complex and less scary. And it's not about net neutrality,
but about net capacity.' The debate is really about who pays for — and
who profits from — the increasingly elaborate infrastructure required to make the Internet do something it was never designed to do in the first place:
stream high-speed video. 'While many were quick to assume that
broadband providers were throttling Netflix traffic, the explanation
could be far simpler: The company simply lacked the capacity to handle the "Super HD" video quality it began offering last year.' A two-sided market
means broadband providers would have an incentive to help because they
would receive revenue from two major sources: content providers (through
sponsorship or ads), and consumers (through subscription fees).
'Unfortunately, this kind of market innovation is viewed as
controversial or even harmful to consumers by some policy and Internet
advocates. But these concerns are premature, unfounded, and arise mostly
from status quo bias: Carriers and providers haven't priced like this
before, so of course change will create some kind of harm,' conclude
Szoka and Skorup. 'Bottom line: The FCC should stop trying to ban prioritization outright and focus only on actual abuses of market power.
