| I think your mail analogy falls apart because mail carriers are end-to-end, while ISPs are part of a much larger heterogeneous network. If Amazon can get a special deal from FedUps to deliver a package from their warehouse to my door, that's reasonable since it's just a standard business deal exchanging services for money. The international postal network is a bit more analogous. Let's say you order something from Widget Industrie in France. They pay La Poste to send it to your door in the US. La Poste transfers it to USPS, and pays USPS part of the postage to handle their end of it. Now imagine that USPS leaves your package on the warehouse floor for three weeks because Widget Industrie didn't sign up for their "expedited service" plan. Widget Industrie has never even talked to USPS, maybe doesn't even know that USPS exists. Of course, international mail is regulated and has had "mail neutrality" since the 19th century, so you don't have to worry about that. If some company wants to provide specialized data services so that Netflix can send data through their service to customers, that's fine with me. But that's not "the internet." These companies should decide whether they want to provide "internet access" or just specialized paid data access. Back to the mail analogy, FedEx and UPS have much more flexibility in terms of how they operate than USPS does, but as a consequence they don't get to participate in the international mail system. And indeed, this already happens. Many ISPs provide phone and TV services separate from "internet" services. Nobody is complaining that Netflix can't get into your cable TV package, even though it's all just digital bits on the wire these days. But they don't call it "internet service." When they call a service that, there are certain expectations. I agree that a lack of competition is the major problem here. If any given ISP customer had a dozen services to choose from, this would all go away. But that's a vastly more difficult problem. Saying we shouldn't worry about net neutrality because the real solution is competition is like saying we shouldn't worry about social security because the real problem is aging. Yes, if we solved aging we wouldn't need social security, but that's not a realistic approach. |