The ISPs wouldn't be so well off once you make their main product free. Investment in network infrastructure would go to zero in this system. They would all go bankrupt pretty quickly actually. The only way to keep the internet running with a mandate to offer it free would be to nationalize it. And once it's nationalized, forget about improvements to the network or new generations of mobile internet tech.

Internet costs <$50 a month. You want to effectively nationalize an entire industry because that's too expensive in your opinion.

Why not? If the government has a monopoly on internet access, it becomes easier for voters to call for certain sites being blocked or certain sorts of traffic be monitored and/or intercepted.

That's an entirely different issue from what I was commenting on.

> And let's not forget, there is no competition - because the ISP has a legal monopoly, also enforced by the government.

You're forgetting that ISPs are natural monopolies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly:

>> "A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market; examples include public utilities such as water services and electricity.[1] Natural monopolies were discussed as a potential source of market failure by John Stuart Mill, who advocated government regulation to make them serve the public good."

> Yep, government regulation sounds great. /s

You're right, it does sound great; especially when you remove the blinders of misunderstanding. Admittedly, it's not entirely without it's own problems, but those problems are best solved without re-introducing the problems that regulation successfully mitigates.

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.

Uh huh. And... you don't see any problems with the argument you just made?

Hint: a lot of countries controls utilities/internet. Literally as a government organization.

I really hope nobody thinks that applies to Internet service in the real world. All evidence suggests that there is no free market, the resulting service is not better, nor less expensive, and it has cost the taxpayers a significant amount.

Eventually these companies will work towards making internet difficult to access so their own sites can have the monopoly.

Internet isn't impossible to provide eventually every one will have access. But to do it this way will create problems which takes decades to solve.

Australia has done this on a national scale. There is now a government owned network which the existing providers were forced to sell their networks into. The ISPs then compete for services over the top of this network.

The idea is that eventually the national network is also privatized but constrained into being a dumb pipe by regulation.

This model has some problems - for ex. it has prevented some genuine innovation in providing broadband, but there are many benefits to accepting that internet infrastructure is a natural monopoly.

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.

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.

I think that "right" is the wrong way to express the idea, because it leads down a path to arguing over the metaphysics of rights instead of all the important practical considerations. Internet access is becoming necessary in the same way as transportation is necessary and society needs to accommodate that fact.

Among other things, that means that we have a vested interest in making sure that there's a healthy marketplace, that everyone can get connections at a decent speed, and that you can't just arbitrarily get kicked offline forever.

Isn't that already covered under freedom of speech?

This is still the case with the Internet. Who do you think subsidized the construction of the physical Internet infrastructure?

And most of the major pipes and cables are owned and operated by large megacorps that work closely with governments.

It's not like citizens ran the fibre optic cables themselves and now the government wants to come in and take over.

I mean, legally, they are public utilities. From my limited understanding, the utility companies MUST provide for either everyone in an area or no one, for example, amongst other regulations. This is not true for internet access, not in most places.

> Excuse my ignorance, but how does network neutrality stand in the way of commoditizing the Internet?

If people are able to "pay" for better, faster internet access, how can we regulate it as a public utility for everyone? One might argue that it seems "unfair" (for certain definitions).

This is related to internet billing: Do we bill the downloader? The uploader? How do we measure it? How do we verify the measurement? What if someone MITM injects packets?

We need to make decisions and figure things out in order to get internet to the level of, say, electricity.

Wait, you don’t get to choose who your electricity and gas provider is either ?

Here we get to choose from literally dozens of providers. Same goes for internet. I can choose from 13 different ISPs at my address on fiber alone.

I thought the US believed in competition and free markets ?

Everything should be shielded from government interference. That's the point.

> Furthermore, most incumbent ISPs were even built using government money and privileges! We wouldn't be having this debate if there were a vibrant market for Internet access.

Agreed. Governments (if they must exist) should not grant funds, tax breaks, or monopoly privileges to ISPs or any other service providers.

This is a little imprecise; "free" and "free of governmental interference" are not the same thing. More likely it is because you have a _competitive_ ISP market. That might in turn be because of how free your market is, but in order to really know we'd have to know how your area solved the problems that led city governments to grant monopolies in the first place.

Except it's not just a zero-profit margin; it's the money that you pay in taxes for that municipal ISP, which you cannot decide to allocate instead to another ISP. If you want to use an alternative ISP, you have to pay both.

If the public ISP doesn't actually receive tax money, then why would the government need to start it? Anyone can start a non-profit ISP.

(Note: I'm not saying I'm against the idea, just arguing a specific point)

To fully understand the question, we need to understand the alternative.

The only viable, practical alternative to a free, ad-supported internet is basically a monthly subscription one, where your ISP charges an extra $20/mo. (or allows metered usage) and the money gets distributed through some proportion of the pages you visit and the minutes of videos you watch. Basically the same way you pay Spotify $10/mo. and the money gets distributed to the artists you listen to, more or less.

But this would have required the government to step in and set this all up in a mandatory way which would have been totally against the original decentralized ethos of the internet. It requires massive tracking and so forth, and a centralized authority to manage all of the billing and payments.

And basically very few people want that. Hackers and libertarians are against the centralization and tracking, left-wingers are against the poor having to pay more for internet because it's almost like a regressive tax, consumers in general don't want to pay more for internet, and so forth.

Whereas nobody likes advertising, but they'll put up with it or just block it if they can.

(And the other funding alternative -- micropayments -- is dead in the water because everybody hates them. Nobody wants to be constantly deciding whether it's worth $0.02 or $0.07 or $0.12 or $0.87 to read this one news article on this one site when it might turn out to be a crappy, useless article anyways.)