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RE: it ain't neutral
Connection is most important, but capacity is partly what drives connection. As certain areas have abundant or excess capacity, your business can no longer be one of only providing more capacity as people won't pay for it, or at least as much as they used to. At that point capacity is just a commodity that's only differentiated by price (which might be 0 or free), so you either supply capacity to new or under serviced markets, which increases the number of connections, or you turn the capacity business into a cash cow and open new revenue streams on top if that, and other companies finish the job of servicing capacity needs. That's why I like your post on carrier S3s, but not as a counter argument for net neutrality. Ideally, other services like S3s or something else is where telcos and cablecos should be looking, but currently, they see their perfect world in light of the trifecta (TV, phone, and lastly internet). They see themselves fundamentally as capacity providers, and changing that mindset is ultimately what matters. They must see capacity as a secondary product to something they've connected to that capacity like an S3 service. It's like Google's business as an advertiser where search (and YouTube) is secondary to the actual product, but they still have to compete in the search business (which they give away for free) as it drives their advertising business (which not ever search user clicks). In contrary to what you thought, that's the comparison or analogy we have. I don't think we should give up or switch away from the net neutrality fight in hopes of steering the carriers into new business models, though. For one, new competition is being driven away (sharing line laws), and two, current companies don't appear interested in servicing the rest of the market (and regulators like the FCC have flawed measurements that say the market is fully served). New revenue streams are the carrots we show carriers, but if that doesn't work, then the public has the stick of net neutrality, written in law possibly, to follow through. I see this like Fair Use and the content industry. Fair Use is a good and valuable principle that's partly been written into law, but after decades of being out of sight and mind, corporations have, or are rewriting what that means in the minds of the public and also in the minds of politicians (and in turn the law). There's a struggle that won't naturally be fixed by the market as failures in the market make it appear more profitable to harm consumers and lock everything up. Interesting link: Study by University of Florida links net neutrality to increased investment in architecture: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070311-study-net-neutrality-law-would-spur-service-improvements.html
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