President Obama came out yesterday and voiced his strong support for net neutrality. I will be the first to admit that I do not agree with a lot of his policies, however I don't think it's possible to overstate the importance of net neutrality if America want's to remain the most innovative country on earth. Net neutrality has been on of the fundamental building blocks that has enabled American entrepreneur's to build innovative companies at an astonishing rate, improving the lives of billions of people around the world..
Everybody deserves to be treated the same, which is the way the internet has always operated, net neutrality is just embracing the way it has always been. To give the large telecoms the ability to prioritize or degrade certain internet services would threaten the internet as we know it. At the end of the day let's focus on protecting consumers, not corporations.
America ranks 26th in download speeds globally, roughly 1/3 as fast as Hong Kong. The telcos continue to argue that they cannot afford to invest in their networks and yet Verizon and AT&T have over $20bn in net after tax income cash and Comcast is somewhere in the neighborhood of $7bn. Maybe if they were investing in their networks so we can have the 100Mbps that people in Hong Kong get, I’d be a little more sympathetic to their argument (Thanks, Fred Wilson).