The physical lines are what kills competition in the home ISP business and largely breaks the market. If you look at countries where they've freed the physical last mile lines, the issues are a lot fewer as there is greatly increased competition.
Cell carriers are a completely different case which isn't comparable - bandwidth costs them a lot more than it does to landlines due to air time costs and the associated impact on other customers, the sheer cost of spectrum also prices many smaller players out of the game altogether, limiting the real ability for competition in the cellular space.
Freeing those last mile lines results in plentiful and cheap bandwidth - something unavailable in the cellular space and an easy tool for small competition to use against the big guys.
EDIT: Sorry if that seems contradictory to what I said before, just trying to make the point that the cases are quite different and more appropriate examples would be better, I'd mistakenly oversimplified this before.
Wonder if he's gutsy enough to change his mind.
Okay, fine. Let's pretend this is a credible argument.
"Companies won't prioritize traffic" - they do, and they have. Cell carriers routinely do, counting traffic to ~their~ paid services as not counting against their data cap.
"Or else consumers will just change providers" - there is very little choice in ISP in most of the country, and almost entirely owned by large, established players. 'Duopoly' it's called. And due to the costs, it makes it hard for a scrappy third party to come in. Also, Pai is pushing for "competitive" to literally mean "at least one other high speed provider providers service within half a mile of a residence". Meaning he'd say there was no monopoly even if you literally had choice of only one ISP. So trying to act like competition will save people, when he's actively trying to fight against competition being required, and the market is too expensive for a non-incumbent to enter, is really disingenous.
"Some companies take up more bandwidth". Actually, no. The -consumers- do. Netflix isn't using that bandwidth; consumers are. They're demanding to use the connection and bandwidth -that they paid for-, on whatever service they want to use it on. To correct Shapiro's analogy, this is like charging the person taking delivery of a truck a fee for a certain number of trucks, then turning around and charging the companies operating those trucks differing amounts -because you feel like it-.
Yes, the network can be 'reasonably managed'. If you want to clarify that, that's fine, and an -entirely different argument-.
"Create barriers to entry" - actually, the reverse is true. Again, see what has already happened with mobile carriers, and their prioritizing their own services (or services willing to pay them money) over others. This is obvious. Heck, the article even negates their own example (which is just...-one- example) by showing that Google has taken both sides of the issue.
"Technological stagnation" - whoa whoa whoa. This says the landscape isn't competitive; didn't this guy just say back in the first paragraph that consumers will just change ISPs, implying the landscape -is- competitive?! Otherwise this is a completely different issue; stagnation was there even before net neutrality. 2015, we were way behind everyone. You can't claim net neutrality is even related.
"Internet taxes could happen" - "could". Or Pai could just say "Hey, we totally support net neutrality, and we're not collecting fees". He's totally able to do that. Same as Wheeler was doing. We're done here.
"Content restrictions from the government" - I believe there's a couple of amendments here, that would lead to a legal showdown. And regardless there's nothing preventing, say, Congress, from passing legislation to mandate this anyway. Again, red herring.