Post-Symposium Q&A

During the Net Neutrality Symposium, I had a lot of questions in mind for the panelists just in case there was a lull in the action. Well, there wasn't. In fact, the Q&A sessions were full of fireworks that were frankly more fun to watch than participate in, but since then I've had one question in particular running through my head.

So here goes:

The debate about net neutrality is largely framed around the limitations of bandwidth in distributing large files such as video. But instead of dreaming about bigger pipelines, why is the discussion not framed around providing greater levels of compression for these files, such as the H.264 video codec which provides near high definition quality at a fraction of the file size?

I have a bit of experience working with this method of compression, and I've been very impressed with the results. It seems to me that if Sony or Apple (or Google or Microsoft, for that matter) were to develop a codec that takes this high quality compression to a new level, they could not only bundle it with their proprietary software at a nice profit, but also make much of the debate about bandwidth restrictions an academic exercise.