"We’re building a platform ourselves, and we work hard to ensure that Stripe treats businesses of all size neutrally."<p>Since they set up the comparison themselves, I wonder if Stripe would be in favor of legislation that forced them to forever treat all their customers neutrally vs. us just trusting them to "work hard to ensure" that end. Perhaps making it illegal to offer sweetheart deals to bigger clients for example? Arguably payments is the next most fundamental piece to a functioning internet after bandwidth, so its not unreasonable to request. If MegaCorp A received much lower rates on credit card processing than little Startup B, how could we have fair competition after all?
"We’re building a platform ourselves, and we work hard to ensure that Stripe treats businesses of all size neutrally."<p>One assumes larger customers get more favorable processing rates than smaller customers. So if two services do largely the same thing and both use Stripe and one is substantially larger than the other then I suspect Stripe is directly, even if inadvertently, favoring one over the other. Stripe's in the payments business and they favor one set of customers over the other based on their size and pricing power.<p>My issue isn't with Stripe. It's with the language around net neutrality. Basically 1000+ entrepreneurs and VC's who generally bemoan all things government are now asking that this area be protected from market forces. Very awkward. Any half way decent free market economist will tell you that every non Netflix user is subsidizing the crap out of Netflix users under the current set up and that's not very free marketish.
Comparing themselves to an ISP does not do anybody any favors. It just confuses the issue. ISPs should treat all their customers (and their traffic) the same for reasons that do not apply to Stripe, and do not apply to the market Stripe is in.
Typically I'm very anti-regulation -- but it seems proven ISP's need to be regulated to some degree. An ISP should do nothing more (or less) than just pass data from point A to point B (aka. "dumb pipes"). We are in the Information Age and unhindered access to information should be a commodity.<p>It's a conflict of interest to be both an ISP and a content provider.
Until we find a way to truly achieve network neutrality which also means (from service provider's perspective) to throttle and keep in reasonable usage limit applications such as video streaming, specifically illegal torrent usage which chokes carriers bandwidth and prevents normal users too, this debate will continue. I don't see any thing principally wrong with providers point of view (i might be biased because i work in the industry that provides these tools/software. But logically, the word "neutral" to me should equate both sides - not prioritizing some high paying customer's traffic, but at the same time not allowing a regular user to eat every one else's bandwidth to download his favorite pirated content. I feel the discussion on the topic is mostly targeted at the former only. A side effect of such capability could also be better utilization of network resources i.e. charging customers ONLY when and what they use - there by decreasing costs as well.
The Internet is already divided into fast lanes and slow lanes. Netflix is currently paying Comcast for a fast lane, after previously having been cast into the slow lane.<p>Whether the FCC plan goes forward or not, will change nothing about what Comcast and others are doing. Courtesy of an extremely accommodating Obama Administration, Comcast has joined the government protected monopoly crew, with Verizon and AT&T. They are now untouchable, which is why there is nearly zero political opposition to their acquisition of a cable monopoly. They're going to continue to degrade major services as they see fit to exact fast lane tolls, and there is no political group that is going to stand up and do anything about it.<p>The people fighting this fight, are waging a war they lost a long time ago. An entirely new approach to dealing with the FCC, the Internet, and the monopoly telecom providers is necessary.
the vote is tomorrow, but I haven't seen a widespread, concerted effort to make a visible and effective protest online, as was done successfully with SOPA.<p>I wish all interested players (including the huge ones, especially Google!) had agreed to slow down all USA internet users to "dialup speed" for the day, explaining why it is being done, and prompting people to phone/email the FCC about it.
It's all very well to talk about "platforms", but wanting to separate mechanism and policy is one thing, outlawing policy is something much more serious.
The issue of Net Neutrality is consistently misrepresented. ISPs are not trying to extort the little guys (who have no money), they want to throttle YouTube and Netflix. The giant corporations have convinced average people to join their cause so they don't have to pay for their bandwidth hogs (which does cost ISPs more money than small sites).
"Why Net Neutrality Regulation is the Path to Ending Net Neutrality"<p><a href="http://hustlebear.com/2011/01/05/why-net-neutrality-regulation-is-the-path-to-ending-net-neutrality/" rel="nofollow">http://hustlebear.com/2011/01/05/why-net-neutrality-regulati...</a><p>Article is from 2011, but still pertinent.