In a recent article. The Right Way to Fix the Internet, George Anders reports on innovative internet pricing approaches developed by Mung Chiang, a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton. Chaing suggested following the practice of some electric utilities of offering “off-peak” pricing. The result would be that people could choose when they downloaded large files, etc., and as a result could reduce their costs if they limited their work to times when the ISP didn’t have a heavy load.

This has a lot of merits, both by avoiding expense for the ISP and providing cost savings for the consumer. However, it apparently violates net neutrality, the idea that ISPs and content carriers (such as wireless phone companies) should treat all data and all users the same. Under Chiang’s plan two people could download the same file, but be charged differently, based on the time of day the did the download.

Net neutrality has been rejected by courts and governmental bodies several times, so what’s the problem? The FCC is trying to reformulate the rules yet again, in hopes of getting t instituted

As Anders reports, “At this point, net neutrality is only a principle and not a law. Though the FCC put an ambiguously worded version on the books in 2010, it was struck down this year by a federal district court. But now, as the FCC is deliberating how to redo the policy, it’s facing passionate demands to restore and possibly even tighten the rules, giving ISPs even less leeway to engage in what regulators have typically called ‘reasonable network management.'”

The artcle discusses the issue and the potential outcomes in detail here: The Right Way to Fix the Internet.

MIT Technology Review

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