[dingoonline]

"But the offer alarmed Swedish media companies, which warned that the deal gave Facebook an advantage over competitors, and Telia an edge over other telecom operators."

ISP's have a million and one other ways to be anti-competitive. Example, in New Zealand, one of the major ISP's runs 'Lightbox' a streaming competitor. If you sign up to any of their plans, you get free Lightbox.

This incentives the customer to not use other streaming services. You can talk about zero-rating all day long but no amount of neutrality regulation will prevent something like the example above from happening. What happens if Comcast decides that Hulu Plus will be free with their broadband? It has the same effect as if Comcast decided to zero-rate Hulu on their network.

For their to be real changes in the American ISP market, you need competition.

[dalbasal]

Well...if they are treating all traffic equally then the only advantage the ISP has is bundling. That's a marketing advantage, but not a total competition killer. Amazon bundles streaming with free delivery subscriptions.

Not treating traffic equally would mean they could eliminate Netflix as competition for their customers. That's worse. Same for mail, social networking, news, dating etc. Video is just more pertinent in 2017.

The big thing to protect is always categories that don't exist yet.

Competition helps, but infrastructure markets are always suboptimal.

[TheCoelacanth]

It wouldn't give an ISP advantage over other ISPs, but that doesn't matter because ISPs are for the most part regional monopolies. It would give Hulu Plus an advantage over other streaming video services, though.

[dingoonline]

There aren't marketing advantages in markets who have no other choice for ISP.

[rectang]

Well, we aren't going to get competition.

Destroying net neutrality regulations? Check. Destroying the regulations that protect the telecom monopolies? That can wait... forever.

[dominotw]

> regulations that protect the telecom monopolies?

curious, what is an example of this?

[TheCoelacanth]

Many states have passed laws that prevent local governments from creating municipal Internet services. Since Internet service is textbook inter-state commerce, the federal government would have authority to override those laws.

[dominotw]

>the federal government would have authority to override those laws.

Yea i guess thats more of an example of inaction. I was looking for a specific regulation that helps telecom companies.

[rectang]

That's exactly the problem: selective actions favoring the monopolists are pursued aggressively (e.g. demolition of Net Neutrality), while actions which might actually harm monopolists are deferred indefinitely. Thus the effect of supposed "deregulation" is to deliver the market to the monopolists.

[dominotw]

Yes but I was referring to comment saying there are current regulations that helps telecom monopolies that govt needs to destroy but it isn't. I was wondering what those regulations are that need to be destroyed.

[arkh]

> What happens if Comcast decides that Hulu Plus will be free with their broadband?

Maybe they could be sued like Microsoft was for offering IE with Windows.

[mtgx]

I think this is a reason not to allow ISPs to do any business that might conflict with their main business, like say ISPs owning a TV network, whose content passes through its cables.

[yndoendo]

More or less like the Three-tier system (alcohol distribution) in the USA? Large brewers cannot distribute their own product.

That might of helped prevent, unproven, Intel from exploiting Anti-Competitive tactics since DELL and HP would of had to go through a distribution company instead of Intel.

[zdragnar]

I've always been under the impression that smaller brewers are harder hit by this than larger brewers, as they have to convince distributors to carry their product, which was really difficult prior to the craft brew craze.

[smichel17]

That's where net neutrality comes in, so you don't have to convince ISPs not to throttle your streaming service.

Also, I'm having trouble imagining a small streaming service getting into the ISP business in order to reach a couple thousand people when they can reach hundreds of millions through the internet.

A small ISP getting into the streaming business to provide local content is less outlandish, but still seems rare; I think that's a reasonable price to pay, particularly given that the status quo makes it prohibitively difficult for small ISPs to exist at all, in many places.

[arbie]

This is the correct answer. Anything past this point is on the slippery slope.

[votepaunchy]

You don’t even need to ban bundling. Just require that customers be permitted to decline bundled services and receive the full-price discount.

[icebraining]

What's the full price when the product is only sold in the bundle?

[TheCoelacanth]

A price in line with what it costs them to provide that service. If they price it lower than that it is illegal dumping.

[icebraining]

I'm not sure that would be feasible; in a case like this, doing a reverse "hollywood accounting" would be easy. The bandwidth is "free", since it runs on their existing network. The content is "free", since it's included in their TV licensing. What can you impute just to the service? A bit of storage and a few hours of software development, divided by all their customers. That's probably about ten cents or so.

[arbie]

"Bundled content has no cash value if declined."

[MaxBarraclough]

So, effectively the same thing, but slightly less pro-consumer?

[rb808]

> What happens if Comcast decides that Hulu Plus will be free with their broadband?

Right now Comcast cable TV is pretty close to free with their broadband, is that any different?

Overall Europe and NZ seem to have better broadband available at better prices than the USA. They also dont have net neutrality so you can't say that NN is definitely good.

[Feniks]

Good point. ISPs do not want to be dumb pipes because frankly there's no money in that. Every ISP is looking at the lucrative media market, bundling their own services.