| 1. Monopolization has increased in markets in general (see: ATT-Time Warner merger). 2. ISPs have realized what they can do with their increased monopolies, and have started developing technical strategies for doing so. 3. Regardless of this, these companies are getting certain things from the public, such as right-of-way. They act like they owe nothing to the public, which is a lie. It's a logical mistake to assume that behavior of ISPs in the past is what they will do in the future. I'll start respecting the arguments against net neutrality when: 1. Private citizens and government entities are allowed to charge arbitrary rates for ISP lines to go over their property. 2. ISPs are legally responsible for the content of any and all packets going over their infrastructure. 3. All legal challenges / obstacles to public / municipal ISPs are dropped and eliminated. |
1. ATT and Time Warner didn't really compete prior to the merge.
2. ISPs have realized that basically every business is dependent on them to access their customers. Why wouldn't you try to extract value from that?
3. Hand-wavy feelings doesn't mean anything in government outside of impassioned speeches. They owe the public nothing other than providing their service according to the contracts they made. Large organizations where every individual has their own incentives don't really have feelings or a sense of duty.
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1. This is already true, as it turns out private citizens largely don't actually own the land where the poles are and governments don't want to charge.
2. You would hate this world. Content can't be encrypted because there might be illegal content contained within. All your traffic will need to be scanned and scrutinized. P2P is basically dead. Any site with user-generated content will be blocked. Sites will have to make legal agreements with ISPs to be whitelisted for strict content moderation.
3. Blocking municipal ISPs is not as mustache-twirlingly evil as people make it seem. Some ISP goes to a town where it would normally not be profitable to operate and makes a deal with city in exchange for exclusivity. The risk that the citizens of that town would just form a municipal ISP funded by tax dollars and undercut them once the market is established has a real cost which is going to be paid in one way or another.