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Tiktok would beg to differ. Starting a new social network is hard, but bandwdith/net neutrality is the least of your problems.


One of the issues here is decentralized services. If you're starting a new centralized service, you can pay a CDN which itself is already paying the danegeld or is too big to degrade without the ISP's customers blaming the ISP. That's a tax but if you're state-funded or VC-funded you can just eat it.

Whereas if you want to build something based on IPFS or just host your own website out of your home/business, ISPs have the incentive to thwart this, because then they couldn't double dip anymore. See also cable companies explicitly designing slow upload speeds into the most widely deployed versions of DOCSIS.

So then you're creating a bias towards centralized closed-source services instead of open standards and self-hosting.


This is some research it would be cool to see: was TikTok adoption measurably slowed in countries where net neutrality violations were common?

For example, it's the norm across Africa for providers to offer plans with radically lower per-GB costs for WhatsApp, Youtube, and other mainstream apps, as a way to price discriminate and charge a premium to tech and white collar workers who need access to the actual Internet. In such countries you would expect TikTok adoption to happen more slowly than expected.




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