[microtonal]

There is no technical capacity limit at play here.

This. The US market is ripe for disruption or regulation. Sure, if you live remotely in Arizona, it may be hard to get a fat pipe, but it seems that even most cities have outrageous prices.

I currently live in Germany. We have 150MBit downstream, 5 MBit upstream, plus phone and television for 40 Euro per month. When we lived in The Netherlands we were on 130 MBit downstream internet. Even in the stone age (2004) we had 20MBit downstream DSL for 20 Euro per month. Since downloading music and movies was legal in the Netherlands until recently, many families were saturating their connections. Netflix is not that demanding in comparison.

The current situation in the EU shows that it is possible to get high-speed low-cost internet with net neutrality.

[shubb]

Strikes me folks here are really complaining about a broken cable market, made up of local monopolies.

I googled the American cable market a bit, and some of what was described - the cable majors carving up the country so as not to compete, or aggressively blocking new competitors - that stuff sounds like anti-competitive practice.

Writing from a country with a functioning cable market, when I hear 'ISP will charge for X', I think 'Well I will change ISP then'. If you can't do that, I think net neutrality is the least of your problems.