> As wireless proliferates, it will become increasingly important, and competition in wireless is alive and well.

Ignoring the laws of physics tends to make for bad public policy.

Wireless will never be able to compete against wired services. This disparity will only grow over time, not shrink. There are only two ways for wireless providers to substantially increase the speed of their offerings: by acquiring more spectrum, or by increasing spectrum re-use by shrinking cell size. Since all the good spectrum is in use, acquiring more means using spectrum that is inherently more limited in coverage. Thus, both strategies boil down to deploying more wired infrastructure.

You assume that high-speed wideband that is always getting faster and wider is of paramount importance. I doubt this is the case. Furthermore, more spectrum is not necessarily needed to improve bandwidth as technology improves.

The assumption isn't perfect, but it's close enough. Techniques like MIMO offer diminishing returns for their cost to handset complexity and battery life. There are no big leaps to be had in wireless that are comparable to eg. switching from DSL to fiber. And it is very clear that demand for bandwidth is growing with no sign of stopping. Users want 4k streaming and cloud backups/storage, and display resolutions are still growing.

> I am struck by the arrogance of the belief that the government knows best how to regulate this market.

No worse than the belief that companies, in natural monopoly, will act in the best interests of consumers either. There are many places in the world where the government does work well and in the best interests of their populations - I'm disappointed the "government is inherently bad" meme is so well-entrenched in the USA.

Not for nothing, but most people of that mindset don't believe that the government is inherently bad, but that government powers should be closely and judiciously kept to a minimum to prevent it being used for bad.

There's a difference there, but like most arguments on the internet, the nuance tends to get lost in the retelling.

Regarding net neutrality, if memory serves correctly, it was but a few short weeks after the passage of NN that somebody was wanting to leverage the FCC's new powers to censor ISIS off of the internet. Wheeler, being a good guy, connoted that they didn't have that authority, and that even if it could be construed that they did, he was disinclined to exert it and give credence to the argument that they did have that power.

All of that was done basically in "the right way", but given the wild swings in administration changes, who's to say that some other head of the FCC wouldn't have been inclined to leverage the power that they might now have for exactly that reason? Are we sure that the courts would agree that NN doesn't give the FCC the right to censor individual websites? Are we sure that the courts of tomorrow won't?

Yes, I know that this is a slippery slope argument, and I understand the inherent pitfalls therein, but that doesn't change the fact that power can be used maliciously, and for some of us, the question of whether or not the problem is worth potentially sacrificing much larger swaths of the first amendment falls differently than for others. I personally don't fault any individual for whichever way they've decided, as there are possible curtilages of free speech on either side of the coin, but I'd like us to agree that being suspicious of vesting power unto an agency otherwise wholly unaccountable to the public is perhaps not the dumbest thing that Americans do.

Could you explain who this was, and how ISIS and NN intersected? This seems like an...odd argument. NN is protecting business as usual, so using NN to censor isis is kinda novel.

I originally heard it while watching CSPAN, but I'm glad to be able to find a source that at least confirms the high points:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/17...

Wireless competition is only alive because the government blocked the merger of T-Mobile and AT&T and then of Spring and T-Mobile. This then forced T-Mobile (and now Sprint) to get creative in trying to compete with Verizon and AT&T.

Also, wireless is not really competition for home internet. Try cancelling your home internet service and relying solely on one of the wireless carriers and see how far you'll get. The latency, bandwidth and reliability of wireless are much worse than wired networks. The wireless carriers simply don't have the spectrum to provision the same capacity that people routinely use on their home internet connections. With the move to unlimited data plans the only solution will have is severely throttling the traffic of people that actually try to use a substantial amount of data.

Wireless is not for everyone--not yet. However, many people do not use a lot of bandwidth and they may find wireless to be quite adequate. As wireless bandwidth goes up in quality and down in price, people might truly start to "cut the cord".

Twenty years ago you could substitute "cellular" for "wireless" and "landline" for "home internet" and make the same claims. No one dreamed people would eliminate land phones back when only a few had a "car phone".

A strange thing I've noticed about telecoms in the US is that prices never fall - instead consumers just get more value and are constantly upsold higher-value offerings - this is not a bad thing in itself, but whereas in the UK and most of Europe I can get a a few gigs of 4G/LTE data for my phone for about €10 - something you'd have to pay $50+ for in the USA. The same goes for home internet - the cheapest non-promotional rate in my area is $45/mo for 10mbps, but pay $20/more and you get 100mbps. Why isn't there a sub-$30/mo offering? I believe these prices remain comparable to what they cost (sans-handset subsidy cost) over the past 20+ years.

> The same goes for home internet - the cheapest non-promotional rate in my area is $45/mo for 10mbps, but pay $20/more and you get 100mbps. Why isn't there a sub-$30/mo offering?

I know that Cox has some kind of "low speed, low price" offering, that I believe is under $30/month - but they kinda hide it on their site; I think you have to explicitly call and ask for it. See here (scroll near the bottom):

https://www.cox.com/aboutus/policies/speeds-and-data-plans.h...

Note the "Starter Package", then note the package one level up ("Essential"). If you click on the link next to the "Starter Package" for pricing, you will be taken to another page - where the lowest shown tier is for the "Essential Package". But I'm pretty sure you can get the "Starter Package" if you call first.

There's also this for low-income families:

http://connect2compete.org/cox/

Because the business model of the carriers is built on a fairly high ARPU of about $45-55. They need to protect that average revenue per user, so they don't really care what they sell you as long as they get the revenue. At first it was voice minutes. Then as those got cheaper more of the money was made on domestic roaming and long-distance charges. Then those went away and they replaced them with SMS charges. Then revenue shifted to data. At this point data makes up about 60% of the revenue, and I suspect this number will only continue to rise.

The only way for that ARPU to drop considerably is if a new player enters the market that can significantly undercut the existing players, because none of the existing players are willing to see that number drop by half or more. I don't believe such a new entrant will materialize anytime soon due to the high barriers to entry. I suspect the cost of building and operating a wireless network in the US is too high to support a carrier operating on a fraction of the ARPU.

4G networks average around 12 Mbps, a little faster than Comcast's lowest tier. The new "unlimited" data plans have throttling thresholds between 20 and 30 GB with even lower limits for tethering.

Governments did intervene against Microsoft, so I'm not sure the market gets all the credit for the fix.

> So in short I see no problem here to solve and I do not think government should get involved.

That's patently absurd. You can't just add a natural monopoly to a public good and come up with a competitive market. The most basic of economic analysis -- really, first semester stuff -- would tell you that these are the precise situations where external regulation is needed to even approach something that looks like an efficient distribution of resources.

I would describe your economic philosophy as something closer to a religion, but even most religions aren't provably incorrect.

The market for internet access is not just wires running in the street; it's also wireless. Railroads seemed a natural monopoly too, until trucks came along. Thus the Staggers Act, so the "natural monopoly" rail rates are not regulated.

Now it's the reverse. In the dawn of a new technological age, people want to shackle the old technology rather than deregulate it.

My economic philosophy is no religion; the government regulates the distribution of wireless spectrum and I have no objection to that, nor do I object to the regulation of wireline operators in exchange for their use of public rights-of-way. But this regulation should be measured and the minimum amount necessary. Net neutrality regulations are far beyond minimal.

So please continue on with demonstrating where what I have said is provably incorrect?

I understand your argument about how wireless Internet providers will compete with wired providers which would presumably mean NN becomes irrelevant - but that assumes the wireless providers are in competition with wired providers in the same way truck haulage companies compete with the railroad system.

The problem is: they don't.

There are 4 main wireless providers in the US (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint), the vast majority (if not all) of the other carriers are MVNOs that run on top of the Big 4's infrastructure. The problem is AT&T is also a major wired provider (U-Verse), as is Verizon. Only T-Mobile and Sprint have no horizontal-business interests in wired networks - but incidentally note that T-Mobile and Sprint also have the smallest service coverage areas compared to AT&T and Verizon - in some parts of the country AT&T is your only real option for wireless service, and AT&T has no compunction with simultaneously selling you a $100/mo wireless plan with a low data limit, a $65/mo DirecTV plan, and $70/mo U-verse wired home Internet plan - where they would gladly throttle Netflix to entice you to watch your DirecTV service instead. The invisible-hand-of-the-market cannot solve this problem because of the sheer start-up costs of physical infrastructure needed to set-up a competing wired (or even wireless!) Internet service - and as we've seen with Google Fiber and municipal Internet services the incumbents quickly drop their prices to prevent these newly competing services from becoming established, if not being completely obstructionist as we see with Comcast holding coax poles ransom. This is why we need to classify last-mile Internet access as a regulated public utility, not as a captive market for rent-seeking companies.

So in your example, at least, I don't see how competition from the wireless industry will budge wired services in consumers' interests, but instead corral us all into a much worse position.