[notdonspaulding]

> "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

[DiThi]

> 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.

[0] (response to a comment I made wrongly stating it doesn't cost a cent) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891156

[convolvatron]

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.

[Can_Not]

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).