Mark Cuban made billions from an open Internet. Now he wants to kill it

[Commentary] Over the last few weeks, billionaire and former tech executive Mark Cuban has become increasingly vocal on the subject of net neutrality. He said that he was in favor of creating "fast lanes" on the Internet that would ensure the quality of certain services. It’s worth pointing out what a hypocritical asshat he sounds like, pushing a position that would have been a death blow to the very startup that made him so rich in the first place.

The bulk of Cuban’s wealth comes from the sale of a company he created, Broadcast.com. How did he build that company? In 1995, Cuban and fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner started Audionet, combining their mutual interest in Indiana Hoosier college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and an ISDN line, Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for the second quarter. In 1999, during the dot com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in Yahoo! stock. This is the picture-perfect example of the permission-less innovation that the internet has fostered. A pair of entrepreneurs had an idea and built it using a set of free, open protocols that connected them to tens of millions of consumers. How well would this same idea have worked in a world full of dedicated "fast lanes" on the internet? Terribly.