But I believe that this common interpretation is completely backwards. In my view, most of the technology industry is unfortunately wrong about net neutrality and think it's something that totally benefits the little guy. It's not. Like most regulations, it's ostensibly built to help the little guy, but what it really does is screw them over and prevents them from competing.
The biggest players like Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc either already have their own nationwide fiber networks or strongarmed ISPs into giving them free access or even hosting and get priority access for fastest service to end users.
It's the startups and littlest guys that don't have this that need the ability to purchase/rent the equivalent to compete. What these regulations actually do in many cases is prevent these little guys from having even the opportunity to compete. Companies that already have lobbyists don't want this because they're already set.
To be fair, I don't think the FCC can really improve the entire internet on their own because of local problems where various rules and regulations put in place have historically shut down ISP competition and you have limited providers in most areas. Until this is addressed, there's a distortion in the market that I don't think can completely be solved at the federal level.
b) I don't want to sidetrack too much from your own sidetrack, but there's a great deal of literature on the theory of public goods, why they don't actually exist, and why government isn't needed to create or manage them. Even if you want to argue that this isn't the case, I'm not sure how the internet would definitely be one.
c) You're free to make an argument that you like things like the roads and water system. But do you really love them? Yeah, the freeway system kind of works, sure. The water system kind of works, sure. But it's not really flourishing, there's no market pricing on these things that truly eliminates waste (how many roads actually need to be built? Is overproduction of roads crowding more efficient means of travel like rail out of the market?), and innovation in these fields moves at a snails pace.
https://mises.org/search/site/%22public%20goods%22/library/m...
There are also many papers on the site, but many of them are pretty dense and don't make for a good introduction.
b) I misspoke in one way, the government does kind of innovate in providing water. Take their decision to mass dose basically the entire country with fluoride. At best, fluoride's main benefits are for young kids about 4-10 years old in preventing child cavities. The point isn't to argue the health benefits of the substance, but to point out that they're medicating everybody without tailoring the dose to what's necessary for the individual. What's crazier than compulsory mass medication of an industrial byproduct that doesn't take into account individual dosage?
c) You presumably ingest food, created by non-government sources everyday. They look to cut costs all of the time. How often do they really screw up? And when they do, they immediately have to work to fix the issue and they're punished severely on top of that.
That already happens. What else would you call a CDN? Hell netflix gets a free fast lane at many ISPs via the open connect program. The same type of service a small start up would have to pay the ISP to get. Netflix gets it because it's a big company.
(Also, I actually heard a newspiece about this on my local public radio indie rock station last night, of all places. I think concern about it may be more widespread than you think.)
I don't think the average person spends much time thinking about politics. I think most may see some stuff online or on TV but are largely locked into their beliefs. You probably have +1 std. dev. who "pays attention" to politics as a bit of a hobby and +2 std. dev who make it one of their top priorities. That still leaves a lot of people who care far less than the average person does.
If you want to effect change in Washington, you either have to make people care more or find a candidate who people who don't care will still rally behind. I think both Trump and Obama fit that bill well but for much different reasons.
edit:
I wonder how it would play if during a debate, a candidate really drilled down into how the incumbent's policies negatively affected people in small ways they may not realize. This net neutrality thing may be one of them. "Your cable provider won't let you stream Netflix at full quality? That's Trump's fault".
They probably will. If the economic study of the history of regulations has taught me anything its that deregulation coupled with stable governmental institutions has over the longterm, always led to better products, increased production, increased competition, more rapid innovation and more satisfied consumers.
For a good study you need look no further than the histories of the FDA or even the FCC itself.
As an example, assuming some deregulation occurs like the article says, I would expect to see a lot of different pricing models and products pop up. Do you want access to particular websites say, wikipedia, youtube and yahoo, well just pay $5 a month. Now you also don't need google anymore, so your service provider can partner with other search startups to offer you built in search functionality. Or perhaps you want the "no video plan" well that would be much cheaper than $20 a month, etc. It would actually be very interesting to see what new industries would crop up and which major players could be disrupted.
1. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.159...
2. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2646905?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...
3. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/tpe.12.2006...
Along the way, they will offer some 'discount' for a month or two and then raise your rate. Trying to request a downgrade usually takes a lot of your time to convince someone to actually put the order in.
There are plenty of abuses available if you just search for cable company abuses.
There is NO REASON for any of these companies to offer any true innovation or competition. While they're not strictly monopolists, they can pretty much guarantee little to no competition in their respective markets.
And where they might receive competition from cities who want to build out their own broadband services, they lobby to have the laws changed making it illegal to do so.
The only way around this is to offer some revolutionary new wireless network that sidestepped all of the fiber, cable, and telco providers. It would have to have massive bandwidth, buy-in from all kinds of hardware provides (mobile especially) and magically get approval for spectrum by the govt.
....Provided that said companies don't lobby against your effort.
The FCC wasn't going to fix all this overnight (or possibly ever), but it was a step in the right direction for the citizenry of the country it was created to protect.
Disrupting any of the cable/telco industry is a fantasy at this point.
No they do not. Yet, this is due to government regulation. If you'd like to read about the historical development of cable regulation this article provides a decent summary: http://www.uclalawreview.org/cracking-the-cable-conundrum-go...
Meanwhile setting up a site is cheap and comparably much easier, and can even be free or profitable in many situations for many audience sizes and site types and levels of effort. Pretty much anyone can do it, even children and teenagers, and reach arbitrary audience sizes. Content is often cheaply produced, and when it's text, cheaply delivered. Content is furthermore produced by people who don't have a share in the server itself, i.e. interactive users, and those users aren't required to exclusively post their content in one location, nor are they required to continue producing content at any given location. There are many sites in competition to host user content for free so that individuals don't even have to go through the hassle of setting up their own site when they can sharecrop on someone else's, and if they feel like it, move on later. The way browsers work doesn't require any visitor to view the website in the way intended by the site owner, either. More wide-spread encryption (and wide-spread damages for failing to encrypt or otherwise do security properly) makes it harder for anyone but the site owner and the user's computer to know what's going on.
There are so many fundamental differences with cable TV and with how the internet and web function and will continue to function (even if in a less universal way) that comparisons and predictions of everything becoming "packaged" like TV are laughably ridiculous and simplistic. Sure, we might see some business models attempted where ISPs charge for access to certain sites, but if those sites contain links to other sites and users don't have access to those, they're going to be annoyed. When more and more of the web is served over HTTPS, how can ISPs know? Furthermore the cost of plans like "youtube only" or "wikipedia only" can only in the limit ever be as expensive as the "cost per GB delivered" plan that VPN users will have. VPN will continue to exist, if not for the general public at least private parties and probably universities will still want because they can't predict what employees/students/professors will want to access or set up for access that they want it all (as it currently is). Not to mention work-from-home/remotely employees. I'm sure with less regulation many interesting and unforeseen business models could appear, some I'll have no interest in, but I don't foresee the destruction of some way to keep my internet experience more or less what it currently is.
My only concern would be not as a consumer but a big company. No neutrality law lets ISPs more easily attempt to shakedown large or popular companies like Netflix, Facebook, Google, etc. and put them in a standoff of who would survive customer outrage the longest if users couldn't access them anymore. I don't think ISPs can win that fight in the long term without strong support of the government to stop those other companies from providing their own methods of delivering their content to people. Google Fiber was a warning flag to the ISPs to show they're capable of it, and that was just Google acting alone.
>There are so many fundamental differences with cable TV and with how the internet and web function
They function differently, but they're delivered on the same wire. Under a completely different set of rules. Big part of the problem.
For Internet, yes. My phone is pulling over ten megabits.
You're trading innovation in the ISP marketplace for innovation in products that run on the ISP. You are making ISPs kingmakers which will necessarily reduce innovation in the space.
Speaking personally, I would rather my ISP not innovate by offering tiered pay models where they can push whoever they want to succeed. We had this model 30 years ago from compuserve and prodigy, and later AOL.
I guess tech is, indeed, cyclical.
Yay.
Do you have a link where Pai explicitly states that as his end goal, or plans to indiscriminately remove all regulations?
We've got another election this coming November. And another one next November. If you want consumer protection and some amount of oversight on big companies, turn out to vote every single year and kick the Republicans out of office.