So, I'm very much in favor of net neutrality. I don't think there is much innovation to be had in ISPs.
However, there is some innovation to be had. Not much, but I think it's important for people to realize that there are valid anti-NN arguments. They're just not very substantive.
Here's an example:
So if I'm a big or medium-ish company on the eastern seaboard. My offices are located in the suburbs, because my employees prefer the green, lush (I say boring, but...) suburbs to the edgy urban environment of the city.
I might want to keep my servers in the office. Our guys are working on some hardware related stuff, and so they'll want first hand access to them. They'll also want a super fast connection, one you can't really get outside of a big city. So I might consider investing in running a really nice fiber connection into the city to get better speeds.
Now here's where net neutrality gets involved. Let's say that once I've got my really nice private connection, I notice that I've got a lot of excess capacity. Let's say 30% of the time, the line goes unused. Depending on how you interpret net neutrality, I might not be allowed to sell that excess 30% to my neighbors in my little suburban town.
The reasoning is that, I cannot give premium access to my traffic, on my connection, while simultaneously selling my excess at residential prices to my neighbors.
The question we need to ask is: how often does this happen? Is it worth it to just tell the people in the above situation to fuck off? (admittedly, that's totally a valid option) What are the economic effects of net neutrality?
I don't know the answers to these questions. I've got inklings, and I suspect that net neutrality is the correct answer. But food for thought, anyway.
Another thing I can see happening if this DOES go through unabated: it leads to a shitload of discussion about monopolies (which are supposed to be illegal in this country), and laws start getting changed. Instead of just having like one or two ISPs per area, a ton of local ones start popping up. Ones with traditional mom and pop values that don’t fuck over the consumers.
*waits for optimistic ratings*
Monopolies are indeed illegal in the US. Public utilities are considered "natural monopolies" in the US because we've come around to the idea that it's simply the topology of some kinds of problems that makes a monopoly the natural solution. So what we do is we allow the monopoly, but heavily regulate it, sometimes even just nationalizing it.
So for example, running gas lines. We don't want to dig up the ground and run fresh gas lines just because another gas company is offering gas for half a cent lower than your current guys.
When it comes to electricity and gas in my area, we have a centralized, quasi-public company (BG&E) that maintains all the infrastructure, and then individual little providers can sign you up and BGE will consider them your "supplier" for pricing purposes.
I'm not really sure how that would work for internet connections. It's the
last mile problem.
I don't know enough about internet infrastructure to really comment intelligently about what's feasible. Like, with FIOS, is it fiber optic cables all the way down to the final customer's address? Or do they just revert to copper when they get to the neighborhood level? Copper at the neighborhood level would help things, but still, I don't think two ISPs can share the existing copper network. It might need to be one ISP, one neighborhood.
Or maybe there could be a city-wide LAN with hardware maintained by the government, and then the ISPs only operate big trunk lines to/from the city LAN. But then the next question is: how much does the last mile contribute to (or rather, detract from) speed? If it's by a substantial amount, then a government run internet would be equitable and free and democratic... but just slow as fuck.
I don't know much about networking, so I'm just thinking out loud.
(ps
this is a pretty cool project, someone could probably build a local ISP based on it.)
Saying you want to force Ajit to use a toilet and not the nearest street corner may as well be a death threat tbh.
Them toilet witches tho. It's a legit risk.
