You're mostly right but honestly the US free market is a joke when it comes to internet providers. There are non first world countries that have better internet connection coast to coast than the US does which is entirely because we have like...4 universal options to choose from, and in most places they're not all available. I remember in 2010 when the Galaxy s2 just came out I had got it on sprint. At the time 4g was still very new technology, but of all the carriers Verizon had by far the best 4g coverage. When sprint finally got it in a single city nearby I was blown away when I was getting 7mb download. That was miraculous. I could watch a YouTube video on mobile without it stopping to load. By 2011 most of Japan was covered in 4G that could (theoretically) reach 330 mbps. Point being, US internet has always sucked for 1st world countries. Our so called free market hasn't done much to spurn change outside of Google's fiber optic gigabit lines. And I really do hope Google takes over the world.
I knew you'd give the free market answer and I'm gonna call bullshit. I only have one high speed internet provider at my apartment, Xfinity. There's some slow dsl options but those are awful. So it's basically gonna be whatever Comcast wants to charge me when they decide they can. And I'm not the only one. I may have "options" but only one of them is actually viable if I want to actually use the internet for more than basic browsing. So yes, while I agree that monopolies in the telecom industry are a huge problem, you can't just ignore it and get rid of these rules in a state of monopoly. If there was actual competition for service between at least two providers, net neutrality rules probably wouldn't be needed. But there's not, hence the needed regulation.
Also which lobbying effort is gonna be more productive? Lobbying the government to maintain rules to ensure that monopolistic providers don't price gouge or throttle, or lobbying other ISPs to spend a ton of money to connect previously unconnected addresses just so those customers have the potential choice to use them? Answer is pretty clear to me.
Fix the monopolies or regulate what they're allowed to do? Regulate the monopolies so they can stay monopolies. That's what net neutrality was, except it was also a door to allow them to continue adding regulation in the future. You're all getting the wool pulled over your eyes with a fancy name. It's a big disinformation campaign. Just like the affordablecare act is affordable. Not.
Hey, at least I had the good grace to actually label it and conceal it - not my fault if anyone clicked :^) Re. Net Neutrality, there is no free market for terrestrial internet - there is, however, a much freer one in the mobile carrier market, where rates are at least somewhat competitive with each other and not tied to the old landed gentry of AT&T micro and macro monopolies from the 80s and 90s So Like Maybe it's a good thing? Depends on zoning regulations and satellite permits and things I guess
Except like I said before, there isn't jack **** we can do about the monopolization without convincing ISPs to spend tons of money to expand their infrastructure to give us more choices. Why would Verizon do that just to potentially gain a customer when they can just buy the FCC chairman to let them upcharge their own customers that they know don't have a choice themselves? Or we can try to get our local government to set up it's own affordable internet service as a public utility. Which costs money. Which taxpayers will have to foot. And you know what happens when you tell the average Joe their taxes are being raised, even if it's for their own benefit, they'll oppose it because taxes=bad duh. So trying to keep net neutrality is the one thing we can do to keep things from spiralling out of our control in the short term that doesn't cost a ton of money. It's the best we've got, so you sure as hell bet we're gonna fight.
What the fyaak you guys are talking about real topics that impact all of us get thayt crap out of here it doesn't belong in a halo forum