I think the reality of your example would follow the way cable companies offer their typical packages. This 'innovation' usually includes some base of certain channels that you don't even want. Then you can pay up for more premium channels.

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.

The crux of it is that competition is necessary though. Do cable companies in the US have any competition? I'd argue they do not

> Do cable companies in the US have any competition?

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...

It's also due (perhaps more) to the nature of television. The content producers due to copyright hold almost all the strings, and benefit from a small choice of delivery providers to bid against each other for exclusivity. The delivery providers also benefit from acquiring content producers (or otherwise delivering "original content" themselves). Content for television that people want to watch (in competition with other content currently available) is expensive which also has an effect on a price floor even if exclusivity deals can't be made. Content can only be watched one way, or at best a handful of ways depending on if the producer spent effort making it 3D-enhanced or whatever.

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.

Not really disagreeing, but:

>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.

"Do cable companies in the US have any competition?"

For Internet, yes. My phone is pulling over ten megabits.

> so your service provider can partner with other search startups to offer you built in search functionality.

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.

With the end result that you pay several hundred dollars per month for the same service you get now. Except that you are forced to use Bing because that is your provider's partner.

Yay.