Mike Fries, President and CEO of Liberty Global, has suggested that regulatory intervention in the net neutrality issue is counter-productive, that the whole topic is one that is widely misunderstood and abused, and that there is only one regulator that matters: the consumer.

Fries made his comments during the opening C-level panel debate at ANGA COM. He described discrimination of customers as “a red herring”, contending that net neutrality as an issue between corporations. “This has nothing to do with consumers. It’s about who pays the billions of dollars to build the highways and whether we pay them all by themselves, or whether … we share, in some way, the cost of the highway that everyone wants to go down at one hundred miles an hour,” he suggested.

He said that if a content provider such as ProSieben wanted to engage with Liberty Global for ‘fast lane’ access to consumers, then they should be free to do so, and contended that regulators had done nothing to make the Internet great, and they should stay out of the matter.

He noted that among the panellists, there was not one representing the customer. “There’s only one regulator that matters: the consumer,” he concluded.

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