A Net Neutrality Riddle

[Commentary] Here’s an interesting way to look at the often abstract topic of “net neutrality.”

Let’s say you are an online storage vault like Carbonite or Dropbox. Now, further assume that your company’s major technical activity is data inhalation. Petabytes of pictures, video, and so forth are uploaded to your servers every day. And you can’t help noticing that the major sending party is a Comcast, the giant Internet service provider (ISP). Outrageous. They’re paid by their customers, and now they are sending you all of this data, forcing you to upgrade your connections to handle the upload volume.

So in addition to whatever subscriptions you charge your customers, shouldn’t you also charge Comcast a toll for sending you all that traffic? It’s an absurdity. But it’s an intriguing piece of the argument that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings articulated.