Armchair technologists read an article about net neutrality on arstechnica and think it's black and white. News flash - telecom and ISP's have been shaping traffic since the beginning! You think NetFlix has high quality video on shitty connections because they are nice? Wrong! They pay for the privilege.[0]

I say, let the free market decide. The history of telecom is beyond insane. If you actually care about this stuff maybe you should learn more. This book is pretty esoteric but it gives the true history https://www.amazon.com/Great-Telecom-Meltdown-Fred-Goldstein...

[0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304834704579401...

This doesn't seem that arduous to me. The article estimates regulatory compliance will only take 6.8 hours.

>I say, let the free market decide.

Is that not the point of this regulation? It provides more information to consumers so they are better able to decide. Free markets only work when there is transparency about what is being bought and sold.

>I am involved with 2 MVNO's that have been trying to merge for over a year...

This has nothing to do with the regulatory rollback in the article.

>Armchair technologists...

We can discuss without getting bent out of shape.

How do you imagine there would be competition in, say, fibre? A bunch of companies all running their own last mile? That's incredibly inefficient.

Also, nobody advocating for "treating telecom like a utility" is actually advocating for that. Try looking up the cost of a county water/sewer hookup sometime. It's not free, and your $50/month water bill doesn't pay for it. I'm paying off a $30,000 bill to get "public utility" water and sewer access. That's pretty typical.

If we required every house builder to pay thousands of dollars up front to install fiber people would be frothing at the mouth.

Also, fiber would probably be pretty cheap once the infrastructure was already in place. A single phase overhead power line is often provided for free to new homes and underground service runs about $3.50/foot so I imagine fiber would be similarly cheap.

http://www.lincoln-twp.org/forms%20policies/New%20Water%20Co...

$2,520 is what they charge for water; not sure what it is for wastewater - they may not have a public sewer system - but it's about $3,500 where I live. It used to be $150 (seriously, not a typo) and people got really upset when they raised it by a few thousand dollars all at once a few years ago.

I guess it's not a very densely-populated area and the state is surrounded by water so that might explain why it's so cheap.

https://arstechnica.com/business/2015/08/how-a-small-city-of...

Assuming the city can get a 4% bond, and depreciates the asset over 20 years, about $27 of that $40 goes just to depreciation and interest.

That cost is actually fairly typical. What isn't typical is an 83% uptake rate. Average for municipal providers is about 54%, and average for private FTTH providers like Verizon is 30-35%. If your uptake rate is 35% instead of 83%, your monthly cost in depreciation and interest alone jumps to $64. That's before the cost of bandwidth, maintenance, customer service, etc., which typically eats up about half the monthly bill.

And given that most providers will make you pay to run a line to your house, you don't exactly have a leg to stand on

The only reason you could connect "any lawful device" after 1968 was because of the FCC "Carterphone" rulemaking.

In its absence, Ma Bell would have kept forced leasing of standard phones as long as possible. Perhaps I'm misunderstand you (or missing sarcasm?).