Because they can actually make money from distributors who pay for content, and not the people watching for free with adblockers installed.

Not ETA: I do see some value in monetizing by limiting things with a limited time-frame: fresh content that is not already widely distributed, like news, shows, etc. Otherwise: we killed the music industry for a full decade and a half when they were too greedy.

We killed the music industry by distributing the content ourselves. We'll do it again. Witness, the complete American Hot Wax!

And AT&T doesn't have to overtly charge their customers to watch Vimeo, they can charge Vimeo for access to AT&T customers, or for a fast lane, or AT&T can not charge their customers for data on AT&T's streaming site, but demand that Vimeo pay if they want to be part of that deal. Then it's up to Vimeo to decide whether they want to lose a third of their customers, or pay the extortion.

(Oh shit, check that out! Thanks!)

Vimeo can filter too! It's two-way, this Internet. Why doesn't YouTube charge AT&T for its content?

Vimeo can filter what? Not sure what you're getting at. Vimeo could demand that AT&T pay Vimeo in order to provide AT&T customers with Vimeo content? And if AT&T laughs at them and says "no, you pay us?"

Yeah. I mean, I will filter all of AT&T's net blocks in about a half a day if they are trying to extort me. I don't think AT&T wins anything out of this proposition.

T-Mobile

Also: Please note that the exclusivity deals are an issue but are NOT the net neutrality issue. It's annoying that you have to subscribe to a million streaming services to get all the shows, but that's separate. Net neutrality proponents are not demanding that "Jessica Jones" be available on HULU.



Net neutrality is about ISPs charging content providers for access to the ISP's customers, even though the content providers are already paying their ISPs.


edited to add: The concept of exclusivity deals can get intertwined with net neutrality when the ISP also owns a content provider, and gives it preferential treatment.

Your initial example was that Youtube would not want to risk half their customers by blocking AT&T.


If you were an up and coming streaming content provider, and you reached the size where AT&T decided they wanted a cut, would you risk half your customers by refusing and/or preemptively blocking them? Even if their demand was only half of the money you would lose by doing so?



I would hope so, and I would hope that enough companies would join you, but I have little confidence that a privately held company would do so, and even less confidence that a publicly held one would. With net neutrality, they wouldn't have to make that decision.

So all those guys with business degrees will be so busy trying to out-maneuver each other, that they'll never be able to figure out how to extract more money from consumers, and/or build a business model that favors large-scale content providers and disregards guys with a web server in their basement?

And while we're busy debating this, they won't be quietly censoring political speech just like they were already doing before net neutrality?

Pretty much how it is now

If you decided to take the doors off of a prison, would the inmates walk out, or stay inside? Regulations are a thing that stops business from doing what you *know* its gonna do. Maybe not in two months..

I'm in favor of regulating what we know will happen... and against regulating what we "just know" will happen. We are not smart enough for that game.

This sort of for-pay access to ISP customers never happened *before* net neutrality was introduced. If you liked the Internet in 2015? I mean Comcast was throttling p2p for a while, that was a rough patch, but we got through it.

True: we are not smart enough to regulate capitalism. We should be, we could be, but we're not. I think this issue is just a litmus test of how you feel about capitalism, market forces, and the role of government.

Aside from the suppression of political speech aspect, which nobody really seems to care about as much.



ETA: Personally I think a capitalist system has legitimate motivation to suppress political speech, also.