How much do Online Giants pay for Broadband?
Google, Yahoo, eBay, and Microsoft continue to try and hide how much the average American subsidizes their market-leading 80-90% gross profit margins.
Net neutrality is a dressed up name for a regulated average-pricing sheme. Under NN, below-average bandwidth users, the vast majority of Americans, pay much higher broadband prices in order to subsidize the average price that bandwidth hogs pay -- and bandwidth hogs make up a relatively small percentage of Internet users.
What Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, Amazon don't want anyone to know or figure out is that they are among the largest consumers of bandwidth in the country, and they pay a relatively minscule amount for it. It's certainly easier to be so super profitable if they can sucker everyone into paying their bills for them.
Itsournet.org, the coalition funded by the online giants, is quoted in Communications Daily today that the four Bells make $14 Billion in selling access to content companies. The deception here is their attempt to imply that the online giants pay a lot for bandwidth -- they do not. The online giants actual bandwidth bill would be easy for them to estimate, however, because it is so embarassingly low, they don't want to disclose it.
So Google, Yahoo, Mircosoft, eBay, and Amazon, how about coming clean with your coaltion and the American people and tell us how much you actually pay for your bandwidth. If you are such big contibutors to covering the costs of the Internet, you have nothing to hide -- disclose it!
Home internet users pay because they use
I find several flaws with your assumption that the internet is currently operating under a scheme that forces a majority of Americans to subsidize big-ebuisness.
The first is that a large portion of internet traffic doesn't even involve companies. Estimates say that BitTorrent P2P traffic uses 30% of the internet. I work for the ISP department of a public university, and I can confirm that traffic used by P2P is an order of magnitude more abundant than all web traffic combined. Home users pay a lot because, on average, they use a lot.
Second, home users pay more because of the last-mile. The amount Comcast charges me per month compared to any reasonable estimate of their per-user bandwidth charges illustrates the difference. I pay for delivery to my home, and only a fraction of that charge is for my actual bandwidth. (At my university, the budgeted portion of bandwidth per student comes out to around $3/month.)
Third, Google pays less for their internet access and that benefits me as a consumer. How? Let's assume that Google pays nothing for their bandwidth. (Which isn't true, but for the sake of simplicity let's pretend.) How do they get away with this? If you're an ISP, you pay for the traffic that leaves your network, or at the very least it's metered against your peering arrangements. So traffic from your customers to Google will cost you. Google comes knocking at your ISP's door to offer a peering-arrangement whereby they arrange for private transport into the ISP, and any requests from you for Google.com will traverse the private-peer rather than fill your ISP's backbone, which would cost them more. Of course the ISP will agree and work out what is a win-win agreement, resulting in a lower cost to provide consumer internet to you. Internet companies have been reducing costs by negotiating peering for years.
So if Google is paying a hypothetical zero for their internet, how could they be possibly be contributing to the costs of the internet? The easy answer is that they are enhancing the value of the service the consumer pays for, making money for the ISP and their upstream providers. You can't fund supply without demand.