The Importance of an Open Internet Nov 5, 2009, 23 :02 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (4102 reads) (Other stories by Brian Proffitt)
"There's a lot of reasons why this analogy tends to fail. The most immediate one is that the utility companies have always had this sort of revenue model. There was never the sort of all-you-can-eat model that Internet carriers are using today. Although very early on some Internet providers charged customers based on a tiered data-usage price model, it quickly became the norm to charge not for data flow but for the size of the pipe. Internet carriers can't charge me more for downloading multiple Linux .iso images, but they can make me pay more if I want to get those images onto my computer faster.
"That's a simple breakdown of the analogy, but the more subtle one is this: the power company creates the electricity they send down the wire to my house, so there's no question about their right to get paid based on the amount of juice my family uses."
