What effect will Net Neutrality have on developers and domainers?

[harleyx]

At first glance, it looks like it's going to crush startup developers and put a severe dent in the profitability of running small sites. That is assuming Net Neutrality does NOT happen in the U.S.

If it did that however, it seems like those who could afford to keep their onramp to the freeway would only get more popular as they absorbed the traffic that was previously going other places.

Seems like it's going to knock out a bunch of smaller competition eventually, as telco's begin to abuse what the system was intended for (as monopolistic often do).

What do you think the end result will be, and how will it affect domainers? Will it remove many of the crappy domain names, since the market will have shifted to bigger companies with bigger budgets?

 

[Dale Hubbard]

Interesting content about this here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality

 

[Steen]

Not sure I completely understand this, although I read a Forbes article which was strictly against the new proposals.

 

[harleyx]

Currently we (the US) have no legislation preventing internet providers from giving different speeds to different websites. While it hasn't been a major problem as of yet, it's expected to become an issue as more people hop on cable and bandwidth intensive media becomes more popular.

As it stands now, they could give priority to those people who paid them an extra fee, allowing users to download from the fee-paying website much faster than a non-fee paying website. This is where the problem lies, because as we all know monopolistic companies never self regulate well for very long.