[notyourday]

> Pissing off customers has many failure points. Without video many people could just stick with their cellphone bandwidth and drop their cable plan entirely.

Congratulations, you have just made anti Net Neutrality argument.

[sanderjd]

Could you expand on this a bit? I haven't heard this argument, and I just listened to a pretty long conversation with FCC Chairman Pai (on the Fifth Column podcast, if you're interested). His argument was that it will reduce the burden on small ISPs, which would then pop up everywhere, creating a pro-consumer competitive market. (Which is either magical thinking or just disingenuous, but that was his argument, such as it was.)

[notyourday]

Sure:

"Pissing off customers has failure points" is the core of the anti-NN arguments. There's no need to regulate what ISPs can do with the traffic - if they slow down access to some websites, or stop providing access to some of them or increase prices on the access of the "entire internet", then the customers would go to competitors who do not impose such restrictions.

[_asummers]

What competitors? Many Americans have access to one ISP, and if they have access to more than one, it's often a false choice (DSL v Cable, e.g.) where the speeds are not comparable. I live in Chicago, the third most populous US city, and I have access to only AT&T and Comcast. I've searched for alternatives, but RCN isn't allowed to service my area for some reason, WOW! doesn't serve my area. So I'm stuck with Comcast. AT&T is completely insufficient for my needs, so if I don't like Comcast (which I do not, at all) what do I do?

[notyourday]

That's a different argument from Net Neutrality. What you should argue for is that localities cannot interfere with IP traffic via franchising the rights to provide telecom/cable services.

[_asummers]

It is an argument that goes along with it. The refrain (and argument given by parent) about NN is that you can use your voice as a consumer to go elsewhere (to another competitor) in a non-NN world if they are dissatisfied with their ISP's NN policies. The problem I outlined shows that isn't really an option for many Americans.

[notyourday]

It does not.

The issue is that the population of localities does not want competition. That's why the population does not want cell phone towers ( eyesore ), the population does not want more wires on poles (wires, eww!) etc etc etc. And the population wants to protect the busy bodies that attempt to block things ( because busy bodies are typically nice old people who should really be helped to remain in their homes and they really really really like stuff to be the same as it was fifty years ago ).

[sanderjd]

The argument for net neutrality is entirely that it is necessary in the absence of competition, and that competition is indeed absent in practice. The two things are inseparable - if there were a competitive market for internet service, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

[nneonneo]

Of course, that’s assuming that competitors will pop up to do that. Sadly, the airline, cable, cellular plan and ISP industries have all demonstrated that oligopolies are alive and well - you can bet that ISPs will use the new income from enhanced market segmentation to shut out competitors, not improve their service.

[notyourday]

The lack of competition in cable/telecom is purely caused by local rules.

[sanderjd]

What makes you say that? It is caused by the physical reality that it doesn't make sense to build the same last-mile infrastructure multiple times. We figured this out decades ago when competing cables blotted out the sky in New York. If you think there are better solutions, that might be an interesting thing to discuss, but there are physical limitations that you can't just hand wave away.

[notyourday]

Spending first ten years building a promising local ISP, directly in the trenches.

The "there's no need to do last mile infrastructure multiple times" is bunk. It is easy, it is doable and no, you won't have 100 companies running lines. You would have 4-5 and that will be enough to push Comcasts and Verizon to get their prices down.

[Retric]

No, I simply bounded what ISP's can do.

An ISP can leach off of internet traffic by shaping it so say Netflix is limited to low quality. But, that doesn't not mean they can simply block it without getting into issues. The problem is as demonstrated by China simply degrading websites bandwidth is is massive leverage.