OPINION: BITCOIN MAY BE WHAT GETS US REAL NET NEUTRALITY

THE RECENT NET neutrality victory at the FCC is not a silver bullet. We can expect costly court challenges, complicated enforcement, and the risks that come with entrusting a large government bureaucracy to manage a technological problem. More competition would be a better solution – and that’s where Bitcoin could help.
As Marc Andreessen recently told The Washington Post, ‘The ultimate answer would be if you had three or four or five broadband providers to every house.’ In such a world, Andreessen explained, ‘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.’
But how do you get more last-mile competitors?
‘I think you actually have the potential for that depending on how things play out from here,’ Andreessen said. ‘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.’
That last one – using unlicensed spectrum – has been a tough nut to crack. This is actually rather strange given that we are awash in internet connectivity over unlicensed spectrum bands. I’m talking about the Wi-Fi routers in every home, apartment, coffee shop, and office across the country that surround us at all times. The problem, of course, is that all of these network on-ramps are locked.

This post was published at Wired on 03.09.15.

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