So in the end, being an internet provider is massively profitable, and maybe another company decides to jump into the space to take a share of the highly profitable market. Maybe two companies, maybe three. Suddenly there are choices, these companies are competing on price, service, bandwidth, etc. for customers and everyone wins, all at the price of Mom's free blog being served 1/10th of a second slower in the interim.
Sounds good to me.
We actually have a much-less-free market for everyone except the ISPs, who operate in a totally-not-free market to begin with.
Way to go, free marketeers. Don't let those details fool you, just stick with the ideology.
Of course, if everyone gets the same quality lemonade and the government keeps pouring money into the big lemonade stands, you're actually creating a system where lemonade will never improve.
The only chance we have of having optimal lemonade is to deregulate the lemonade stands.
I'll outline the scenario that worries me. Comcast sends all internet data as second-tier data, unless the content provider pays Comcast to provide it as first-tier data. The difference between the two is small, say one or two tenths of a second in delivery time. The end user doesn't notice a difference. But, as Google has found, the extra tenth of a second has huge impacts on conversion for websites. So, Comcast effectively offers the same experience to users, but now also holds a huge sword over the head of content provides. Effectively, it is in an excellent position to leverage its ISP monopoly to create a massive extortion racket to content providers. And the magical free market isn't going to push back against Comcast, because the experience for the end-user has not noticeably suffered.
It's quite possible that under such a system the internet could actually be free, because it's subsidized by corporate content provider partners, and charging the content consumers becomes obsolete, although I doubt Comcast would suddenly drop a revenue source. However, it also raises the barrier to entry for small content providers, because they don't have the spare cash to pay Comcast for non-sub-standard conversion rates. In a (weasel) word, it's less democratic. Not to mention, Comcast can sustain its monopoly on ISPs by giving even shittier third-tier access to its competitors. The end result is a less-free internet, Comcast enriching themselves by abusing a monopoly, and all of this done without Comcast delivering a higher-quality internet to users. I think I'll take my stupid pipes, please.
I agree with the author insofar as I accept that his conclusion is consistent with Objectivism, although it's still debatable if owning the wires means owning the data that goes through the wires. Fortunately for me, I'm a pragmatist, not an Objectivist, and I think the loss of property rights (if any!) is perfectly acceptable for the benefits to expression and communication.