Marc Andreessen on net neutrality

So, I think the net neutrality issue is very difficult. I think it’s a lose-lose. It’s a good idea in theory because it basically appeals to this very powerful idea of permissionless innovation. But at the same time, I think that a pure net neutrality view is difficult to sustain if you also want to have continued investment in broadband networks. If you’re a large telco right now, you spend on the order of $20 billion a year on capex. You need to know how you’re going to get a return on that investment. If you have these pure net neutrality rules where you can never charge a company like Netflix anything, you’re not ever going to get a return on continued network investment — which means you’ll stop investing in the network. And I would not want to be sitting here 10 or 20 years from now with the same broadband speeds we’re getting today. So the challenge, I think, is to accommodate both of those goals, which is a very difficult thing to do. And I don’t envy the FCC and the complexity of what they’re trying to do.

The ultimate answer would be if you had three or four or five broadband providers to every house. And I think you actually have the potential for that depending on how things play out from here. You’ve got the cable companies; you’ve got the telcos. Google Fiber is expanding very fast, and I think it’s going to be a very serious nationwide and maybe ultimately worldwide effort. I think that’s going to be a much bigger scale in five years.

So, you can imagine a world in which there are five competitors to every home for broadband: telcos, cable, Google Fiber, mobile carriers and unlicensed spectrum. In that world, net neutrality is a much less central issue, because if you’ve got competition, if one of your providers started to screw with you, you’d just switch to another one of your providers.

The entire interview is interesting, including his discussion of the Obama administration and the possibility of a fragmented internet.  By the way here is Marc on EconTalk with Russ Roberts.

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