[vishal0123]

If there is competition, which ISP would you select? One that works with most of the sites or one that works with all sites? And if enough people selects the latter, and assuming blocking small percentage of site doesn't give big monetary gain to the ISP, there is no reason for ISP to behave the way you said in the example.

[supriyo-biswas]

Free market principles do not apply when the switching costs are non-trivial and information asymmetry makes it difficult for the consumer to know what’s really going on.

Nobody is gonna complain about their ISP when the conversation is simply this: “Aw, shucks, [startup-product] doesn’t work, at least [established-product] works everywhere. The new thing is probably crap anyway.”

[a-user-you-like]

We need common sense regulation in this space, not what we have now. What we have now is Google fiber being told to pound sand all over the country even though they offered to pay for everything when laying down a separate, competing fiber network. Why were they rebuffed? Verizon/Att has the local gov. wrapped up. Let’s break THAT gov-enforced monopoly.

[noirscape]

It's in some cases not even a choice. ISP service in the US is to my understanding also tied up in regional availability (it's less of an issue in Europe since afaict infrastructure is just... better in Europe, but even in Europe you have regions where the choices are between shit and slightly worse smelling shit; hence why net neutrality still matters here), and many of the more rural areas just have a single provider so your only choice to change ISP is to... move location. Which is frankly absurd.

The result is that said provider is basically running a regional monopoly, but this doesn't get regulated against because the total ISP market isn't monopolized.

[Spivak]

I’ll be the first to talk about market failures but the mere existence of friction does mean markets stop working. There’s some amount of friction with every market interaction. There is absolutely a market failing when it comes to ISPs but it’s not really friction that’s the issue, switching ISPs in an area where you actually have options is a few phone calls and scheduling a time for someone to do your wiring.

Now if every store in a 100 mile radius only had Coke, then switching to Pepsi just got a lot harder despite the two products being literal drop-in replacements for one another.

[quickthrower2]

Switching to pepsi is easier as it is a single dimensional change. Switching ISP will have a multitude of effects. Most unknown (how reliable is the new one? will they give me hidden extra charges? what are their TOS? are they blocking XYZ service I need down the road? do they spy on DNS traffic?) and so on. Let alone a decent amount of time on the phone organising it and potentially some early exit penalties.

[thayne]

Also setup costs.

[stale2002]

> which ISP would you select? One that works with most of the sites or one that works with all sites?

Some non negligible percentage of people might choose the one that only works with most websites, due to some other reason, such as they have reduced prices.

That non-negligible amount of people on this other service, could still be leveraged by that ISP to strongarm websites.

[AnthonyMouse]

And that business model produces market concentration.

An ISP grows a large user base by doing aggressive price competition, then starts shaking down services, rate limiting their traffic if they don't pay up. The services are over a barrel and pay, after which the ISP's users don't see slowdowns and have no reason to switch. Meanwhile they use some of the shakedown money to lower prices and get more users. Smaller ISPs don't have as much leverage to extract the danegeld so they can't compete.

It makes perfect sense to prohibit that business model as an antitrust measure.

[iptrans]

> An ISP grows a large user base by doing aggressive price competition, then starts shaking down services, rate limiting their traffic if they don't pay up.

Yeah, we’ve already seen this in the Comcast/Netflix debacle and Deutche Telekom vs the world. In fact a lot of large incumbents do this.

> Meanwhile they use some of the shakedown money to lower prices and get more users.

If things were even so rosy. The shakedown money is used for larger profits and monopoly positions to get more users.

[vishal0123]

My assumption was that ISP couldn't get big cost saving by restricting some sites. I think this assumption is valid as by definition the websites that consumes most of the data are popular sites, and I don't think ISP would touch that due to reputational harm. And banning few of the tail end of the sites wouldn't allow ISPs to reduce the cost by any margin.