How is their cost basis on specific part of their business relevant? We're obviously not entitled to any one price point, much as HN threads seem to believe we are. Comcast's margins hover around 10-12%. If they need to keep them there, they can raise their consumer prices, or find alternative revenue streams. Why is it better that they raise prices for consumers?
My beef is that they sold me what purports to be internet service, not some kind of CompuServe or Prodigy or GEnie like service.
Finding alternate revenue streams is fine...but I don't see why they should be allowed to stop me from using the service they sold me in order to try to convince some entity, which they have no relationship with other than that they and that entity have mutual customers, to pay them something.
I'm fine with it if my ISP wants to find alternative revenue by establishing some kind of relationship with outside sites and selling them something, just as long as the ISP continues to provide the service they sold me, on the terms they sold it to me.
For example, something like AT&T's "sponsored data" is fine. That lets sites pay AT&T to not count data AT&T users exchange with those sites against those user's AT&T plan data limits.
That's fine because AT&T's customers get the service they paid for. If a site buys "sponsored data" some AT&T customers get more than they paid for. If a site does not buy "sponsored data", those AT&T users that use the site still get what they paid for.
The EFF and other leading net neutrality proponents would probably disagree with me on "sponsored data". This is the kind of thing I was thinking of in another comment when I talked about trying to shove things into net neutrality that do not belong there. Yes, "sponsored data" favors bigger, established content providers, so could harm competition. We've got antitrust law to deal with that.
