[warlox]

If you knew the first thing about economics, you would know that the natural, regulation-free state of ISPs is for them to merge together into a single company the way that oil companies merged together to form Standard Oil at the turn of the 20th century. In that scenario, what you would get is the choice of one product, and you would pay an unreasonable amount of money for it.

Of course, since you don't know the first thing about economics, what we're treated to instead is some false ideological platitudes about the free market.

[malchow]

You are embarrassing yourself. Care to offer a testable hypothesis? You appear to predict that the market, with this rule repeal, will not yield any non-tracking ISP options. Is that your prediction?

You may wish to read this (now antiquated) document, which details why verticalization was market-motivated in the oil industry in the industrial age: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Vertical-Inte...

And, again, do you really want to be in the position of saying that the ISP industry will consolidate the way the oil companies have? Do you have any idea how rambunctious the energy industry is at the present moment? At best, you've shown that you are correct for a very short timeframe, and proven that you are wrong on a longer timeframe.

[vvanders]

Nice personal attack there.

For what it's worth the parent is right. I have a single ISP available to me, as is the case with the majority of the US(or maybe two if you're lucky enough to live in a large metro that hasn't signed exclusivity agreements).

The free market isn't going to bring a solution to this. When the internet started out there were tons of ISPs, now there's only a few large ones that are split by region so they have an effective monopoly.

[warlox]

You are embarrassing yourself. The concept of natural monopolies and why they are bad was settled economics in the 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

Also, I was talking about the oil industry 110 years ago, not the modern energy industry. A similar modern industry to ISPs is telecom, and the only reason that those companies haven't all merged together is because of antitrust law (which you would also want repealed if you were consistent at all).