The people that say "networks are private property and I don't want no government in my private property" are forgetting that most of those networks were built during periods of guaranteed profits (AT&T) or just regional monopolies (cable companies). It's not like these companies were little mom-n-pop shops that were built from nothing with no help from anyone, and now the 'big bad government' is coming in to kill them off by helping their competitors. These companies where weened off the government's teat.
The people that want to bring in the government to restrict the internet are forgetting that there is a whole can of worms that will be opened if the government starts getting their hands into the internet. Sure it could be just 'net neutrality' regulation now, but what you picture as what 'net neutrality' should be will not be what it looks like once an actual bill gets passed. Not to mention all the attempts to tack on 'child porn' filtering and crap (possibly creating some 'Internet Filter Czar' position in the Executive Branch).
Even solutions like: "the internet should be like the highways; built and run with tax-payer money." So the government now runs the major backbones of the internet in the US. This means:
1. Companies can easily become ISPs by hooking into
the backbone at reasonable rates
2. Congress will be salivating to pass bills to put filters
on these backbones to 'protect the children.'
3. The networks will be less secure as routers, servers,
etc are administered by incompetent administrators that
only have their positions because they know how to play
the government bureaucracy politicking games better than
more technically skilled colleagues.
Really? If someone advertised their ISP as 'BitTorrent-friendly' they would have to contend with the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, etc trying to sue their company back into the stone-age.
> If an ISP were left alone to manage the transmission of data packets across its property, it could profitably improve the speed of its network, it could profit from charging more for more bandwidth consumption, and it could profit from providing special services to certain customers, such as smoothly streaming high-definition video feeds. But because none of these things is possible under net neutrality’s rules, the property of Internet service providers is worth considerably less to them in terms of its profit potential. Accordingly, their incentive to expand and improve the infrastructure on which the Internet relies is greatly diminished.
The government poured billions into the country's major ISPs to 'upgrade infrastructure' and there was little to no return on that investment. Infrastructure was not upgraded and we are now at a point where ISPs are trying to claim that their networks can no longer handle capacity, so they are forced to do filtering and 'QoS.' Where did all of that money go? Shouldn't the free market have allowed the ISPs to use that money to improve their networks so that they could reap larger rewards from those better built networks?
The problem with trying to treat Internet Service Providers as some sort of 'free market' is that it isn't. There are huge barriers to entry in the market, and well-established incumbents. Most places in the USA only have 1 or 2 choices for internet service. How is this in any way a 'free market' that the government should say out of? In fact, the governments created this mess in the first place by creating phone company and cable company monopolies. Now these telcos preach about how 'the market should be free' just because they have a huge advantage (i.e. established customers and deep-pockets) against any possible competitors. Which is a hypocritical stance seeing as they are where they are today due to government-granted monopolies.
tl;dr The ISP business model: