“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice,” an aerospace engineer once said to me. “But in practice, I find that there often is.”
Those two short sentences sum up a lot of wisdom about the net neutrality debate.
In theory, there should be nothing wrong with allowing content providers like Netflix, YouTube and Yahoo to pay extra to broadband ISPs so that their content ends up in a “fast lane.” Online video is swallowing up an ever-rising percentage of the Internet’s total bandwidth. A fast lane should benefit users, and also the ISPs, which will invest that extra revenue in expanding services and increasing capacity. In theory, everybody wins.
