mdk said
True. Idunno. I live in a rural area of New Mexico where there's basically no coverage from Verizon or AT&T, and the only internet when I moved here (about three years ago) was Comcast. But a local-ish company called Yucca sprouted up, using basically a gigantic wi-fi; they got enough business to upgrade to fiber, so Comcast had to follow suit. Now Dish Network is in the game with crazy-cheap no-installation high speed, so all the prices are falling. In this area, everything's working as it should. In other areas, though, local municipalities signed deals with the big companies to save money, and now that's screwing everybody out of FiOS. I mean.... shit happens. I generally hang my hat on the less-regulated peg, so obviously any time an FCC thing comes down, I'm inclined to be happy, but there's probably no sure way of saying how this comes out. I have some faith in the invisible hand, but it's only faith.
That's rare, if it even happens. Typically the cable company like Comcast or Time Warner, etc., are the only provider in the area. Or, like in my area, all the providers offer essentially the same service for the same price, leaving no real alternatives. Not too many providers can actually get off the ground and manage to continue undercutting the big guys' prices in a rural area.
mdk said
.... ultimately what happens here is companies accounting for high bandwidth transfers are going to be accountable in *more* equitable amounts for the traffic they generate. The FCC has been falsely propping up Netflix, by preventing TimeWarner from charging them a fair rate. It's a market inefficiency. Removing these is almost always beneficial in the long run, though I can't say I'm excited for my UltraHD streaming account to get a price boost. Frankly, 'Net Neutrality' was probably complicit in the extinction of Blockbuster -- the corporations do frequently lose, after all.
Except that's not what Net Neutrality is there for. Net Neutrality stops ISPs from extorting money from websites and creating a
fast lane of traffic that only paying websites are served on. So you know how Youtube, Vimeo, Vine, Megavideo and a bunch of other video sites exist, all competing on the same, basic premise of user-uploaded videos? Now imagine that the ISPs can charge websites for fast lane access, now only the richest companies can pay. In this world, Vimeo manages to start up, but Youtube doesn't, nor does Vine, so now all your video watching takes place on Vimeo. Vimeo has an incentive to continue to have a stranglehold on the marketplace, they need the money to pay for the ISP's racketeering scheme, so if you happen to run afoul of one of Vimeo's policies, or you don't care for their website, that's just too damn bad. Any alternative site is going to be slow and laggy because they can't afford to pay, and users will gravitate away from them and back to Vimeo whenever they get tired of the slower speeds.
It's not that Net Neutrality is propping up the market, it's that Net Neutrality is
preserving the market. Why should the ISPs be in control of what content gets served or not? Their purpose is
no different than a telephone company providing phone service, an electric company providing power or a water company providing running water. None of the other utilities care how you use their service, or how much you use it; you just get charged based on how much you do use it. The ISPs are the same, they're simply dumb pipes conveying the content of the internet, but the FCC and the US Government is just too fucking scared to call them that. Until or unless they do, Net Neutrality is nothing but a pipe dream.
