Net Neutrality (Do we understand it!)

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Over the past few months everyone seems to have some opinion about this; but I haven't seen anyone explaining the concept from ground-up. Most arguments seemed one sided. So I thought, why don't I give it a shot to analyze this from ground-up, and see what it really means. (From First Principles in Elon Musk's words)

Internet
Internet is that to data, what road is to goods.
But unlike most roads which are maintained by Govt, Internet is maintainted by Private operators (Telephone/Cable operators etc. These are called ISPs -Internet Service Providers). There are some roads maintained by Private operators (toll roads), but I am not aware of any Govt ISP. So to compare apple to apple, we should compare Private ISP to Private road operators.

Services
Apps/website (email, video, e-commerce, messaging, call etc) are services which carry different kinds of data over internet. These are analogous to various services (cabs, parcel delivery, packers and movers, ambulance etc) that carry goods/people over road.

The Argument
Net Neutrality is said to exist, when anyone(subscriber) having access to internet, gets uniform treatment from ISP for all Apps/websites they access.
i.e App owners shouldnt be allowed to pay ISP to provide free/high speed access to their apps from the subscribers.

Ok, now I need to coin a new term Road Neutrality :) to explain anologous scenario.
In line with Net Neutrality definition, it might sound like, "Road Neutrality is said to exist, when anyone(road user) having access to roads, gets uniform treatment from road operators for all services.
i.e Service provider shouldnt be allowed to pay road operators to provide better services to end customers.

Lets take a scenario. Lets say a Road operator "RO" has two road connecting city-A to "city-B". One is a low-toll road (LTR) and another is a high-toll road(HTR) which is a high speed road. There are two packers and movers (PM-premium and PM-economy). Both  move household goods from city-A to city-B, but PM-premium does it in half the time.

How is that possible? Because PM-premium takes the high speed HTR by paying higher toll but PM-economy takes LTR by paying lower toll.

So if I send half of my house' goods with PM-premium and the rest with PM-economy, some of my goods travel faster to destination but some travel slower! Oh crap! this is not Road-Neutrality

PM-premium also provides free transport on the third transaction. How do they do that. Because they pay the road toll from their pocket to transport my goods. Oh crap! again this is not Road-Neutrality.

So in a Road-Neutral scenario how will things look like.
Only I can pay road toll to transport my goods; Packers and movers cannot.
So to transfer half of my goods in HTR and other half in LTR, I will have to purchase toll for both, and ask the packers and movers to transport the goods.
Becuase I paid the road toll, packers and movers will charge me a lower tariff. So at the end of the day, I end up paying the same.

In Road-Neutral case, I have to pay road operator some amount and packers and movers some amount to get a service. In Road-non-Neutral case, I just pay the packers and movers and they take care of everything. In both cases I paid the same amount but Road-non-neutral looks more convenient  as I have to pay only one person instead of two.
Also, since packers and movers carry goods from multiple people at once, they can bargain for discounted road toll (economies of scale), which I as an individual cannot. So even there, non-neutral case looks more effecient.

The same line of reasoning can be applied to net-neutrality. So, it looks like net-neutrality or not, it is not going to impact the end customer in terms of cost of service. But allowing more flexibility for nuanced agreement between App owners and ISPs might make the service more effecient and make it more convenient for end user. What should be checked is monopoly! as usual.

It is kind-of free-market vs regulation argument. Click this link which explains it in detail. So as an end user, probably we shouldnt be spending much time on this. I spent enough time writing this article. Retrospectively, I think I should have spent this time listening to my podcast back-logs. I'm off for now. I am very much interested in hearing you out on this topic! Feel free to leave a comment.




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