Who needs network neutrality?
Cuban, who loves to play the contrarian, wasn’t there to talk about his own companies but to argue that it’s “no longer the case at all technology improves with age.” Now that the consumer Internet has matured, Cuban argues that it needs significant investment in last-mile infrastructure, specifically fiber, and he encouraged the subcommittee to do anything it could to help this happen. While the Internet’s fiber backbone is in no danger of running out of capacity, last-mile bottlenecks (especially through twisted-pair wiring) make the system “pretty weak” for transmitting video. Even peer-to-peer networks, sometimes pitched as a solution to the problem, simply spread distribution from the center of the network, where bandwidth is available, to the edges, where bandwidth is constrained. Cuban was essentially making an extended argument for laying fiber everywhere. With fiber connections in place, the network neutrality issue simply disappears, he believes. It “goes away completely as b
