... but when the government starts rolling out Internet service, major ISPs lobby for laws to prevent it. The major ISPs can't say "Woe is us, we have to roll out service to unprofitable areas," then turn around and say, "Government, don't you dare service those people for us!"
It comes across like those years where the RIAA would argue to government that their business was falling apart and making music copying a criminal offense was the only way that the music industry wouldn't fall apart in a year. Then they would turn to investors and talk about how swimmingly their business was going, and how there was nothing to worry about.
Yes, this is true, and I should have mentioned it in addition to mentioning the lawsuits they file. I think something like 20 states now have laws prohibiting local municipalities from installing their own networks, passed due to ISP lobbying.
CDNs are about making more copies of content and locating them closer to users, in order to make the average route to users shorter. There's nothing in that that is inconsistent with net neutrality: traffic from a CDN server to a given user doesn't get to the user any faster than any other traffic over the same route.
"Fast lanes" are about privileging some traffic over other traffic over the same route. That is what is inconsistent with net neutrality.
Also, the post makes an invalid assumption about how upgrades to networks get paid for:
> Forcing Comcast to upgrade their network to support Netflix means forcing the majority of low-bandwidth customers to subsidize the high-bandwidth customers.
No, it doesn't. Comcast can simply charge users more for more bandwidth usage. Again, there's nothing in that that is inconsistent with net neutrality, as long as Comcast (or any other ISP) charges just for bandwidth. Then Comcast uses the extra money it gets paid for more bandwidth, to upgrade its network so it can carry more bandwidth. People who don't use the extra bandwidth (like me) pay a lower rate for our service, so the upgrade is really being paid for by precisely the right people, the ones who need the higher bandwidth.
But what Comcast wants to do is charge more for Netflix bandwidth than for other kinds of bandwidth. (It's actually charging Netflix instead of Netflix's users, but that doesn't change the essential point.) That is what is inconsistent with net neutrality.
The post does make one good point:
> government regulators...won't allow another company [besides Comcast] to come in and lay a fiber optic network unless that company agrees to lay fiber everywhere -- even the poor areas of town
This is a good point, but it's completely separate from the Comcast-Netflix question. I agree that governments should not expect for-profit corporations to provide a service that isn't profitable. If governments want to make sure that everybody has Internet access, then governments should provide it themselves.
And local governments have indeed tried to do exactly that--to build municipal fiber networks that cover entire communities. The problem is that every time a local government tries to do that, Comcast and the other major ISPs have kittens and say that they will be driven out of business and file lawsuits.
This tells me that the corporations actually prefer the current regulatory regime, because it allows them to buy protection from competition. If we had a sane court system, that wouldn't matter too much since the lawsuits would just be thrown out; but that doesn't happen.