>who exactly is going to be paying for internet if it doesn't deliver what they want?
Everyone?
The problem is choice. Last-mile internet connectivity in the US is a natural monopoly, just like electricity (more so; at least there is the possibility of solar for electricity).
Our regulatory bodies seem more interested in enabling monopolies (or duopolies at best) than helping to provide choice. It is that simple: regulation and choice, or market freedom and monopoly.
See elsewhere the Shannon's law problem of wireless internet.
>>Contrast that with e.g. home internet, where in many parts of the US there's literally just a single company providing internet connectivity, a single ISP, and it's illegal to start a competing ISP.
You know, you might have shed some light on the core issue here. Usually for tangible goods, it is about choice, at an affordable cost. In the case of tech however, it is not about choice, but it is actually about access, at an affordable cost.
In theory, you could also just set up your own wireless mesh network to reach the internet. Its actually really simple: figure out the basic hardware, and then the software which goes with it, and then get the cooperation of your immediate neighborhood, and then the community at large, and don't centralize anything so you don't become branded as an ISP. Of course, the problem is that it is prohibitively expensive, at least in terms of time. So you might say "Well, it makes no sense. I will rather pay the very high price that my ISP charges". So you have just perpetuated the ISP's monopoly, because there is now one less person who has a good reason to potentially contribute to the wireless mesh network.
You can use Telegram instead of WhatsApp, but now you don't have access (because most of your friends are not going to move to Telegram just because you are such an amazing friend).
But here is the important thing: the fact that all these tech giants use every single dark UX pattern imaginable (to increase access on their products), and don't allow unfettered data export (to decrease access for competitors), means they are well aware of this and try to make access prohibitively expensive (again, in terms of time) if you chose one of their competitors.
I don't have a solution, but I think that is why the monopoly label makes sense.
>> The right way to solve the internet problem is "unbundling"; that is, the people who own the last mile lease it out to companies that sell you internet, video and other services.
That's terrible. The ISP should give me "internet access" which includes everything out there. They should not get to pick and chose what I can get.
>> If Comcast customers were getting a bad netflix experience they could switch to an ISP that gives a good one.
This is called competition. It's what you get with net neutrality. Since every ISP has to give you everything equally, the only way they can compete is by building better infrastructure and compete on ping time and bandwidth. This is how it should be. Allowing them to prioritize certain services for a fee (regardless of who pays) means allowing them to stagnate - in fact paying them to stagnate - which is bad for everyone.
>There is a free market way to ensure a fast and free internet -- using the government for such things has a tendency to lead us down roads we might not want to go down.
Because one crappy DSL provider and one Cable provider per town is a free market... Natural monopolies have a need to be regulated to prevent consumer abuse.
> How we got to the point where utility-style regulation is seen as the key to ensuring a free and open internet is a true puzzle.
It's not even vaguely a puzzle. There used to be a vibrant ISP market. Large existing companies destroyed it. The best case for most Americans is oligopoly; for many, there's effectively a monopoly.
Utility-style regulation is not as good as a vibrant market. But it's a lot better than monopolists stifling innovation and extracting monopoly rents.
> How we got to the point where utility-style regulation is seen as the key to ensuring a free and open internet is a true puzzle.
The answer is not that much of a puzzle. Is very hard to dig water pipes, draw power lines, copper, and fiber without direct cooperation with of the government. Every single utility provider more or less exist because they had cooperation with government, and any current monopoly status is a product of that. Governments, be that US or any other nation, has a responsibility to limit the harm from such monopolies. They created the mess so they got to clean it up.
Personally, I would have preferred if the state created monopolies could be out-competed by deregulation of "good" radio frequencies, thus allowing for cheap nationwide wireless ISPs, but the furthest we got with that is the mobile networks and its arguable if it can be said to compete with the last mile monopolies and fiber networks. Speed, latency and coverage being difficult problems to solve with current technology and frequencies regulation.
> What makes you think they are? Especially if you take mobile broadband, paid 'public' wifi and satellite internet into account.
Neither mobile nor satellite (even Starlink) can compete for the main Internet connection for the majority of people. Around 50-70% of the US population has exactly ONE choice of a wired broadband ISP, and maaaaybe 2 if you count ADSL as broadband.
Less than 10% of the population has access to 3 or more wired broadband ISPs.
> What we need is more competition, so I as a user will pick the ISP that does not slow down traffic for me to sites I want to visit, instead of choosing between people who want to screw me with vs without lube.
I agree, but once ISPs start dealing with expensive contracts to get preferential treatment we’ve already lost. No amount of competition will stop the oligarchs from consolidating even more power if NN is not put into law.
Imagine this scenario, national push to make Internet a utility, incredibly successful. Without NN, the new play for ISPs is to create exclusivity deals & priority packages with websites for access, not just segmenting the web but making it harder for smaller ISPs to compete with un-prioritized speeds to the websites everyone wants.
Choice and competition is important, but choice can only exist in a fair market. And NN is, in my opinion, the next step after turning the Internet into a utility.
I disagree that ISPs are a natural monopoly. It's crazy to think that my house could choose between two competing road systems, but my house already has multiple wired communications networks.
And if we all agree that ISP monopolies are real -- then we have a way of dealing with monopolies: break up the companies.
It seems to me that this is the proper solution -- yet for some reason it's never discussed and instead we just keep rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
> But if your idea of preserving maximum internet freedom is in effect to place a loaded gun to its head and then declare it is not a problem because it is the good guys who control it and who therefore will use it only for good purposes, then you have what you want with utility-style regulation of the internet.
The problem is with an oligopoly of effectively 0-2 providers in the majority of the US you really don't have a choice.
I'd prefer to have the gun in the hand of the government instead of a corporation who decided to stop investing in infrastructure and just milk the situation.
You really need substantial competition (10+ providers) for the free market to function.
> I wish we would fix that rather than regulating the monopolies.
See, that's the kind of bullshit that makes it hard to tell whether you're honestly misinformed, or disingenuous. The ISPs at issue are the ones providing last-mile connectivity. That's a textbook example of a natural monopoly. You can't make it not a natural monopoly. The free market will never settle on a strategy of providing competition in the form of multiple parallel and competing cables along every residential street and driveway. Regulation of the inevitable monopolies is the only solution that doesn't completely ignore reality and basic economic concepts. There's no alternative that can be expected to be at all effective.
> Can anyone think of any advantages to a non-neutral internet?
Yes! People who are always crowing about how the free market will save us all and how regulation is the enemy will start bitching about their slow Netflix speeds. Some of them may even realize what a terrible idea an unregulated free market is.
> don't you expect consumers to choose ISPs and services that don't do it?
Most ISPs have a monopoly in their local area. Perhaps a state-run option would be a good alternative but it would probably eventually get completely weighed down with bureaucracy and red tape.
In other words, the free market can't save us and neither can our government. A healthy mix of the two seems to be a working solution.
> until we swallow the pill of paying for what we use—like we do for other utilities
What other utility gets to charge the manufacturer of whatever you use consume their service for? What power company gets to charge Lenovo because I plugged a Lenovo laptop into an outlet?
You only touch on a portion of what the issue is. And quite frankly to deal with what you did mention, I pay for internet access, I expect internet access. Why should I be charged more because I then choose to use it? Why should I be penalized for the ISP oversubscribing and underestimating the usage.
I shouldn't because that's not how they sold their service.
> To play devil’s advocate, are we really ready for Internet to be regulated like a public utility?
Yes.
> Like water, we will need to pay more the more we consume.
We already do, though it's more noticeable for mobile broadband. Also, not all public utilities are metered—I’ve lived in places with unmetered public water, for instance, so the connection you draw between metering and public utilities is false.
> You and I can pay but what about poor people?
Public utilities are often subsidized for the poor (that's actually one way that broadband is already treated like a public utility).
This is absolutely untrue about 70+ million people in the US[1].
It's also functionally untrue for most of us who have a choice between 1-3 large companies. I live in a major US city, and my options are Comcast or AT&T. We don't even have Starlink yet.
When 3-4 companies control nearly 100% of the market, there isn't any real choice. It's easy for them all to just be terrible.
> Why do local ISP markets tend towards monopoly, even though it has been illegal since 1992 to grant local cable monopolies? Two words: universal access.
It's true that universal access is what causes networks in major cities to lack competition. But getting rid of it wouldn't solve the problem anywhere else, because there are still millions of people who live in areas that couldn't economically justify more than one ISP. The only way those areas can justify the investment is if the ISP can collect revenue from a majority of the customers (and/or not compete aggressively on price), meaning that a competitor entering the market would cause both ISPs to become unprofitable and so no rational investor will be the second to service that market. Those geographical areas are natural monopolies. There is very little realistic alternative to utility regulations in those markets, short of massive government subsidies to create market conditions that can sustain multiple competitors.
> There is no free lunch. You can have: neutrality, universal access, or a mostly privately-funded telecom infrastructure, but you only get to pick two. If you think universal access is important, and net neutrality is important, you have to be willing to publicly subsidize the construction of telecom infrastructure.
That isn't necessarily true. What it means is that without public investment, the subscription fees for internet service have to be sufficient to justify private investment. It isn't at all clear that they aren't already at that level. The lack of investment in many markets is at least in significant part attributable to the fact that neither competition nor regulation currently provides a large incentive to make infrastructure improvements. But there is no reason that in markets with insufficient competition, regulations could not be made to create that incentive, e.g. allowing ISPs to charge higher rates only if they provide higher speeds and then over time increasing the required speed for a given rate. And ironically the rates required to justify a given level of investment would be lower if we had less competition, because the cost to wire a street is in large part proportional to the number of miles of road rather than the number of subscribers, so Verizon and Comcast having to build parallel networks each with half the total number of subscribers causes each to be significantly less profitable and that much less likely to make future investments. "More competition" is not a panacea.
And more than that, why is public investment in infrastructure a controversial position? We have public roads, what's wrong with public last mile networks?
> Any ISP that decided to break the internet is going to fail
When there is a lack of competition then they don't fail and continue to become worse as people have no choice.
We don't need "innovation" for last-mile connectivity, cheap affordable access is all people want and the math works out fine. The problem is political with governmental regulations that make it incredibly difficult to get access to customers to serve them in the first place, and these blocking efforts are usually lobbied for and funded by the very ISPs that have no competition.
> How we got to the point where utility-style regulation is seen as the key to ensuring a free and open internet is a true puzzle.
We can break it down quite simply.
- Being an ISP is not a high margin business.
- ISPs, like any other business, are always seeking ways to make more money.
- Charging sites for the privilege of traversing their infrastructure, or charging customers by the sites they load (the "cable TV" model, if you will) is a way to make more money, so ISPs want to do it.
- Consumers don't want to be charged more money for the same bits, and neither do the owners of large sites.
- Consumers have little to no choice of ISP, because being an ISP is very expensive, and as mentioned, it's pretty low profit (in the grand scheme of things.)
Pretty simple, really.
Sure, in an ideal world, we'd just be able to change to an ISP that fits our particular political bent (no traffic shaping/filtering/prioritizing for me, thanks!) but that world does not exist.
The idea, in short, is that free speech (meaning, in this case, unprioritized w/r/t bits) is more important than ISPs ability to make money. That's not the perfect scenario but it is the most acceptable one, given the world in which we live.
Everyone?
The problem is choice. Last-mile internet connectivity in the US is a natural monopoly, just like electricity (more so; at least there is the possibility of solar for electricity).
Our regulatory bodies seem more interested in enabling monopolies (or duopolies at best) than helping to provide choice. It is that simple: regulation and choice, or market freedom and monopoly.
See elsewhere the Shannon's law problem of wireless internet.
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