How does “government price control” relate to simply forbidding double sale?
All NN does is to disallow ISP from tiering the internet and double dipping on both sides of the network.
Imagine if you had to pay a different subscription to call only family, another also for friends, anyone on the Bell directory, anyone on other directories, businesses. You’d imagine telephones would have remained a novelty to this day
One of the examples net neutrality proponents have been pointing to in order to justify it is Vodafone Australia's packages allowing customers to add unlimited usage of various groups of services on top of the bandwidth they get in their mobile internet plans. There are hugely popular viral tweets claiming this is the terrifying future of American internet access if net neutrality is repealed. That's not simply preventing double dipping on both sides of the network, it's controlling what products ISPs are allowed to sell consumers and how they can price that internet access.
As far as I know, net neutrality only applies to wired ISPs, not mobile ISPs. So those sorts of deals are still possible in the US, just not from your cable company. And why would you need that when you have access to virtually unlimited data through them?
What market? I recently had fiber optic service installed in my building, raising my broadband choice to a whopping two companies. That is not remotely enough to talk about a market.
"There simply needs to be fewer barriers to entry for new ISPs to come into the market."
If you want a market-based approach, you need to have line sharing rules. We used to have that in America with DSL, but the Bush administration ended that and left us with the current situation of local monopolies. I would be all for Pai's proposal if it included a reinstatement of line sharing requirements for ISPs, but as it stands Pai has proposed almost nothing to foster the competition needed for a market to exist, and has instead lied about the broadband choices available to Americans.
They’ve already sold it to the consumer. If I pay an ISP for X bandwidth and Y latency, then decide I want to use that to watch Netflix, the ISP has no business interfering with my use of the Netflix service. It isn’t Netflix traffic, it’s my traffic which I’ve already paid the ISP for.
This isn’t about protecting Netflix, it’s about protecting the consumers right to use the product they bought - internet bandwidth - for what they choose without having that choice interfered with or constrained by back room extortion rackets. If the ISP wants to set up a special fast lane for my connection to this or that service, they talk to me. Not Netflix, or anyone else.
Supermarkets don't have government price controls, and they also have very little government intervention. Yet I assume you don't worry about "back room extortion rackets" occurring with the pricing there.
This is because there is a healthy amount of competition with supermarkets, something the ISP market lacks.
Again, it comes down to lowering barriers of entry for new ISPs, rather than falsely labeling all network traffic the same, and pretending that solves a problem.
It’s simply unrealistic that the barriers to entry for new ISPs will be low enough any time soon for the free market to sort this out. There are many different reasons for this including:
1. Very, very high costs to get started
2. Exclusive agreements that buildings have with a particular ISP already
3. Many regulations that would prohibit laying new broadband connections to every house, e.g. because there are already houses and streets in the way
4. Economies of scale that prevent small ISPs from being profitable
5. Competition from megacorps that can treat broadband as a loss leader (or low margin side business) to get customers for their other services such as cable TV, landline telephone, or video streaming
6. Difficulty competing with much larger competitors since they would generally be offering a nearly identical commodity service without the advertising budget or brand recognition
7. Larger competitors actively lobbying against new rules that would devalue their investments
You might be able to find a way around some of them (like #7) but most of those issues are basically intractable given the current technology.
Imagine if a new company wanted to run cables to your building in a crowded city each month. You’d have to keep tearing up the roads and other infrastructure to make improvements and you’d have tons of essentially duplicated cables. You’d basically want to push for laws that required shared access to the cables to eliminate redundancy which leads quickly to either the government owning the cables and leasing them out (quite a good option in my view) or a major ISP like Comcast owning the cables and leasing them out.
Don’t get me wrong, governments should incentivize way more competition among ISPs. But we aren’t even close to it being an industry with low barriers of entry. Until we have better wireless technologies, we are probably stuck burying fiber which Google has shown is enormously expensive.
They don’t have price controls, but they do have sanitation standards, quality of goods laws, food standards legislation and mandatory returns requirements and restrictions on misleading pricing.
If you don’t like the price at a Supermarket you can usually drive 5 minutes to the next store, but changing ISPs can take weeks and you’re locked into long contracts.
Maybe if we can lower the barriers to entry and give people a genuine choice of ISPs first. That would be the equivalent of talking to the customer about special deals for certain content and giving the customer the power to choose. Do that, then we can talk. Wiping out net neutrality without a genuine choice for consumers is a blatant stitch up.
what you describe can't exist in the free market.
else you would either need to allow that anybody can dig holes to build a network or you need to oust the network from the ISPs and sell them to anybody who wants to resell it for common rates.
no country that I'm aware of supports any of the above.
Simple minded “free market” doesn’t work where there are natural monopolies in place. When absolutely arbitrary purchasing choices are not allowed the whole model falls to pieces, ignoring that is like ignoring friction and claiming reality is only bound by the First Law of Dynamics. Pretty stupid imho
