> "It's clear that we need regulation until there is sufficient competition..."
I don't think it's as "clear" as you seem to think it is. What does seem to be a matter of historical fact is that the FCC has never been an organization which has had an interest in, or been able by fiat to, increase competition in the telecommunications industry. The US basically went for the entire 20th century with a heavily-regulated, government-enabled, monopolistic telecom network (AT&T, Verizon landline systems & DSL). The parts of the internet which have seen investment, growth, and improvement over the last 30 years? Yup, the unregulated, non-common-carrier networks (cable and fiber).
> "why get rid of regulation before competition exists?"
Because lowering barriers-of-entry into a market is exactly the best way to encourage competition in any industry. Before anyone starts an ISP (or any other business), they consider the costs of doing so vs. the expected payoff if they succeed. Regulatory compliance (especially FCC common-carrier compliance) is an added cost of doing business which absolutely could be enough to keep a business from starting up.
You don't need NN to get telcos to behave. When did Comcast lower their prices and up their speeds? When Google Fiber came to town. When did Google Fiber come to town? When they got the municipality to remove as many barriers-to-entry as they could
> Regulatory compliance (especially FCC common-carrier compliance) is an added cost of doing business which absolutely could be enough to keep a business from starting up.
Have you calculated how much does that really cost? I'd say it's several orders of magnitude lower[0] than the consequence of other regulations that are the real cause there are no more ISPs.
what if its always more profitable to provide internet packages rather than equal access bits-are-bits service. even with several providers can you guarantee that at least one of them will charge flat rate or per bit rather than by content?
the cost of regulatory compliance in this case isn't an additional fixed cost like .. properly disposing of waste products, but avoiding business models that constrain and restrict access.
an internet where my usage - outside the question of compensating for last mile infrastructure and transit fees with a reasonable profit - is curated by some product management group solely interested in extracting the maximum profit from me and upstream services I might be using, isn't really an internet at all but cable television.
and if we're just talking about cable television, I can probably learn to live without the wealth of internet entertainment options I have today..but if you hack off the long tail and undermine the general free exchange of information because it isn't sufficiently interesting from a business perspective to my regional provider, you've lost something quite substantial just so someone else can make a buck.
maybe I'm in the minority, but as much as I enjoy having gigabit access, I would take an unrestricted 1Mb over a carefully controlled 1Gb in a heartbeat.
The barrier to entry for new ISPs is usually regional incumbent pre-existing monopolies. While NN is _technically_ a regulation, it adds no cost to ISPs, especially startups. NN essentially prevents ISPs from buying/building extraneous hardware+software for the purpose of indexing origins of megabytes per customer for the purpose of double billing or throttling based on the ISPs contract with the content service provider (who already paid their ISP).
Generally regulation and competition are in opposition to one another. Regulations inhibit innovation. See Airline regulation.
That's not say regulations are a bad thing - how much innovation do you want in the handling of your food? But at the same time it's worth being aware the regulations are written slowly, tend to be inflexible and get written by people who are informed about the subject matter which is to say are incumbents with a vested interest in the status quo.
That's exactly what's happening. But the FCC does not have the power to do that because that falls under the jurisdiction of the FTC.
They announced this a few days ago [0]. NN would have nationalized the internet which is the opposite of what we want. But everyone is spreading FUD online and calling for title II clasification. We don't want the government controlling the internet. We want them preventing bad business practices that hurt consumers (i.e. break up monopolies). The FCC can't do that, but they can work with the FTC who can.
I don't see how NN would slow down breaking monopolies. The cost of complying with NN for new ISPs is negligible. And what do you mean by government "controlling" the internet? What are they deciding, exactly? As far as I know, it's just making sure that NN (the default state of computer networks) is preserved, by having them disclosing some data to the public.
I think this is a damaging perspective. Sure, it's not a bad goal, but I strongly disagree with the implication that we should drop the fight for net neutrality in return for a faint sliver of hope of some small progress.
As far as I can tell, the only effective way to break up ISP monopolies would be to force allowing any/all companies to share the wires to your house. As long as one company owns the physical wires and a competing service would have to physically lay down new, redundant infrastructure, there's no chance due to the costs involved.
And it will be difficult, painstaking, and incremental to pass those kinds of laws (probably starts at the state and local level). It will take years and years.
NN was a simple, single federal law that protected all Americans everywhere and was already in place. So while improved competition is a good long-term goal to shoot for, it should be complementary to NN, definitely not a replacement.
Sharing wires is not where the problem is. These days last mile can be very very cheap as long as there is no rent seeking anywhere or regulations denying open access to the infrastructure for the last mile. So what is needed is a law that exempts ISPs somehow from the decades of anti-competitive regulations, guarantees open access to the infrastructure, prevents monopolies and local authorities from rent seeking, denying or overpricing such access.
It's clear that we need regulation until there is sufficient competition, so why get rid of regulation before competition exists?