This whole chain is just parroting reddit comments without thinking it through. You act as though there is nothing that happens with market forces other that monopoly corruption. Let's start with the fact that by market cap, Google is 590B and Comcast is 177B, so simply buying ISPs is a real possibility. You also just out of hand dismiss any other possible outcomes. So, here some off the top of my head.

* Local municipalities own the last mile, making ISP competition have less of a natural monopoly.

* Cities add regulations that don't require universal coverage which results in more competition over profitable locations. Poor or underserved areas could be subsidized in other ways if that was the goal.

* ISPs charges a toll to all the big companies, which makes installing lines more profitable, which increases competition and results in faster more available networks overall.

Net neutrality might be the best option on the balance, but talking about the alternatives as though there isn't a whole wide world full of ISPs that have different regulatory structures and different incentives is just silly to me.

This whole chain is the opposite of reddit, because it's the one place where networking and comp sci professionals tend to gather.

And there is a whole world of working ISP models - which America specifically chooses to ignore and instead follows it's usual free market/competitive religion.

Your ISPs are playing your country like a fiddle. I have personally taken notes and look for firms making the same moves as them as it is an excellent signal of market weakness and, political backing and weak regulators.

I mean, your guys hid post codes in bids for territory during auctions, so that they wouldn't have to compete.

American ISPs are in the business of making money with the least amount of outlay. Buy telecom stock, because looking at the disarray even places like HN, is clear who is going to be winning.

By the by - google/tech firms- will never buy an ISP, they aren't interested in a single business in America which is not their core competency. Instead ~~they will let NN fall,~~ edit: it is in their interest to, collude/pay ISPs their price and use their deeper moats to purchase other firms or services at even better prices than they can afford now.

There are more and more local municipalities that are doing just that, and finding that it makes their communities very attractive places to live and do business. Of course the big ISPs fight this by sponsoring legislation making it illegal for a municipality to own and operate a network.

> * Local municipalities own the last mile, making ISP competition have less of a natural monopoly.

> * Cities add regulations that don't require universal coverage which results in more competition over profitable locations. Poor or underserved areas could be subsidized in other ways if that was the goal.

The problem with these solutions isn't that they can't work, it's that they take time to implement. So first you have to do it, and then we can revisit network neutrality after you're done and there is actually vigorous competition. Doing it the other way around doesn't work, not least because it's all too easy to claim you're going to do something to create competition and then not actually do it well or at all.

> * ISPs charges a toll to all the big companies, which makes installing lines more profitable, which increases competition and results in faster more available networks overall.

That would never actually happen. It doesn't matter how profitable an ISP is, you haven't done anything to address the natural monopoly, which means that as soon as there is any real competition all the margins disappear. The second competitor knows that ahead of time and doesn't bother to make the investment, so the market remains a monopoly but now there are monopoly tolls.

I agree 100%.

Do you know of academic/scholarly articles or books on this topic?

Net neutrality strikes me as a topic with a lot more scope for disagreement on both goals and policy than the hardcore pro net-neutrality crowd admits. It's somehow taken as an article of faith that a non-market solution would be best, even as we're living in a time with more last-mile competition than ever before (due to wireless).

Further, I don't see the Internet as a "public good". RF spectrum is a public good; it exists in a purely physical sense, and can be used by anyone, any time, anywhere. Internet infrastructure takes massive capital investment over many years, as well as ongoing expensive maintenance, and there's no reason someone shouldn't earn a reasonable rate of return on that invested capital.

" It's somehow taken as an article of faith that a non-market solution would be best,"

It's not taken as an article of faith: we have decades of evidence showing what private players do. It's always same stuff that hurts consumers. They get as much territory as possible. They ensure through cut-throat competition, consolidation, and lobbying that there's little competition. Then they keep speed, innovation, and customer service as low as they can with prices as high as the market will sustain. This goes back to MA Bell.

Then, some pro-consumer regulations and billions in broadband subsidies made things better for a time. They also started upping their speed in areas where utilities or Google deployed high speed. As in, they could do it whole time but all big players chose to gouge customers instead. Obviously, one scheme works and one doesnt.