While I do see your point, a similar approach worked fairly well for banks, law practices, and medical services, just to name a few. Sure, you can get a crappy deal, but regulation helps to at least roughly separate the wheat from the chaff, and people learned to distinguish between them.

But if you did have a legal definition of Internet requiring unmodified traffic, ISPs selling Internet service would have to, by definition, provide unlimited bandwidth insofar as their physical links are capable of. Which might actually be nice - we already know coax is fully capable of pretty incredible speeds, and being able to push data as fast as you can onto that link would be invaluable.

Of course, that also means the ISP has no requirement to ever upgrade their routing hardware - they would just have cheap stuff running 100% full load 24/7. But then its a consumer choice what ISP you use and whose hardware is best for the money - more expensive ISPs would be offering better routing hardware that can handle higher traffic, and cheaper ones would do the opposite. Well, that would work, if you lived in a sane country where infrastructure like coaxial lines or twisted pair or fiber to the home were public services rather than privately owned and monopoly controlled.

I always believed ISPs were operating at saturation levels.

Off-topic, but a thing I realized now - I have no clue what the real costs for ISPs are. I suppose it's mostly a) electricity, b) amortizing hardware and c) various personnel & paperwork expenses. Is there a comprehensive source that could tell me or help derive just how much my bits cost?

He's the CEO of AAISP, arguably the best and most transparent ISP in the UK (also quite a small one).

On costs, there's also contracts with other ISPs (most lines are leased from other ISPs, not leased by the ISP itself), customer hardware (routers and other gadgets), marketing, support, subcontracts for personnel across the country, etc.

> They made sure the paperwork is nontrivial, and the procedure not easy to discover - they did exactly what one would do if one had to provide a service but absolutely didn't want to do it.

I would basically describe this as the company doing a "work-to-rule strike." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule)

> you had to ... be personally present in Warsaw to pick up the SIM card. And pay the deposit. For the free SIM card.

I'm pretty sure that cell carriers the world over try to put some barrier between people and SIM cards (usually, it's that they cost $10) so that people won't be able to pump through burner SIMs like clockwork. Governments really knowing that whoever a cell carrier gives a SIM to (in exchange for metadata about them) is likely to be the same person who later plugs that SIM into a phone and uses it. Make SIMs "free"—and also easy to get—and individuals will be registering for 50 under different made-up aliases, or people who don't need "their" SIM will register and give it to a friend, etc.