This is absolutely the best answer. Competition would fix this more effectively than net neutrality regs, but competition in ISPs is typically blocked by state-enforced monopoly laws or by the technical and economic challenge of deploying an ISP.

Wired ISPs are what is often termed a natural monopoly.

One solution would be to open up a lot more wireless spectrum to ISP use and license it to many upstarts. This would allow wireless alternatives to last-mile wired connectivity such as what would amount to neighborhood-scale WiFi. That would dramatically reduce cost of entry for the ISP business.

Until or unless we can find a way to open the ISP business to a lot more competition, net neutrality regulations are absolutely essential to preserve the Internet as a medium for open innovation.

> natural monopoly

I don't think so. Here in Germany I can choose my provider for power and natural gas provider freely although there is only one line for each to my house. For the last mile, we have mandatory must-route rules which work quite well.

You're agreeing with the parent. There is only line line for each to your house, meaning, whatever entity owns and maintains that line is a natural monopoly. The mandatory must-route rules are what bring competition back into the picture. That is the system I think we would all prefer ... except, of course, Comcast and AT&T.

Agitating for the net neutrality rules to be preserved is what we do because we don't think we have the political power to get real competition like you have.

Wireless would help, but not very much. You can get a whole lot more bandwidth through a fiber network than you can through air, because you can double your bandwidth by laying another fiber next to the first - or put in 20 more fibers, or a thousand. Those don't interfere with each other, whereas free space radiators do.

Wireless could help with the literal last mile. The cost of deploying broadband becomes exponentially higher as you near the edge due to the sheer number of links.

Hundreds of megabits with one mile range is easy now and is faster than many cable plans. Gigabit is on the horizon and probably achievable within 5-10 years, especially with enough spectrum. The problem is that current available bands are a poor choice for this. Some bands dedicated to last mile ISP service that have better range and less interference would really help.

Natural monopoly? In what way does that make sense. Where google put down fiber people suddenly had one more choice. When Chattanooga put down fiber people suddenly had one more choice. In areas with multiple cable ISPs, multiple companies are laying their lines down. That's it, there is no natural monopoly, there are only monopolies granted by governments.

Google has deemed Fiber a failed experiment. It's great for consumers that got it, but if not even a corporation with a giant war chest and the right kind of incentives can make it happen on a scale that goes further than selected neighborhoods in a few cities, then it's clearly not suitable as a model for the rest of the country.

Chattanooga is one of very few cities. Personally, I think it's a great model, because crucial infrastructure that needs to be shared among competitors is exactly the kind of investment that should be built and owned by taxpayers, i.e. governments or their arms-length subsidiaries. It's good for everyone except Comcast & Co. who want their overcharged rent extraction to continue forever, and call it a free market.

Now imagine what kind of outrage it would be if people said, you know, let's make a one-time investment on a country-wide scale financed with some extra taxes so that we can get reasonable broadband prices for everyone for the indefinite future and invest in society instead of guaranteeing the profit margins of local monopolists.

You're right in that the ISP monopolies are granted by governments - on the one hand, by having due process in place to make sure people and companies can't just dig up streets or add new cables whenever they just feel like it (which would be a mess, and America had it before, and it wasn't pretty), and on the other hand, by resigning to inaction to do the right thing, which is to provide important infrastructure without respect for currently rent-seeking incumbents who already made more than good on their original investments. People always complain about the former, when the sensible way to solve this issue is to de-stigmatize the latter.

Preserving the gains we've made with telecommunications is critical for our future as a civilization, but this still bothers me. The lobbying efforts by ISPs will keep it a monopoly, and the best we can expect is for the government to sanction that monopoly?

I wouldn't be so fatalistic. While I personally find some of the ideological currents behind Trump abhorrent, his rise does prove that a huge grassroots movement focused on a specific goal can generate results.

That's an encouraging thought, but here are two problems with it (sorry):

1. In my understanding many Trump supporters were reacting to their own suffering since the end of the 20th-century manufacturing boom in America. I'm skeptical that a movement of similar impact could succeed organically without its supporters having to suffer a fair amount first. As my middle-school history teacher would say: "Real change only happens when people die."

2. This currently does not resemble a "grassroots" movement at all. It has a snazzy website, the major players are plastering calls to action across their homepages, etc. It's basically the content owners battling it out with the infrastructure owners, and even though I understand the risks (and am a content owner myself) I'm not terribly encouraged to join up.

One small reassurance: At least the content owners aren't the same as the infrastructure owners.

The first point is pretty valid. The second I don't buy. Pretty much everyone but the ISPs has aligned interests toward net neutrality.

You could say that internet access makes it possible for anyone to be a content owner, so I guess I agree in a way.

Alongside competition you also need a level of transparency. The consumer needs to be able to get proper information about what they are buying. There's laws around that already, but they often need to be accompanied by regulations that define what that means for a particular industry (I'm being a bit vague here because I'm not American, so I don't know the precise issues in the US).

Before Joan Citizen signs up for on a 24 month contract with Super-Cheap-ISP, she needs to know that they throttle Netflix (because that way they keep their bandwidth requirements down and their prices low). That might be exactly the tradeoff she wants, but she needs to be able make an informed decision.

Or that there will be extra charges midway through the contract. And the charges have no description besides "fees and services."

But where are the people actually advocating for more competition amongst ISPs? Google Fiber couldn't even break into the market in silicon valley and nobody seems to care. Instead people seem to have been sold on the impression that we can regulate our way into better service, which is ridiculous.

Until we actually do something about getting last mile competition, last mile connectivity will continue to stagnate and we will continue playing these inane cat and mouse games with what an ISP should be allowed to do with their networks.

> But until we have that, we need Network Neutrality

"We have X, which is bad, so we need Y to counteract X, though Y is also bad" is how these things proliferate. Net Neutrality is - as you state above - a lipstick on a pig to hide the fact that ISPs are granted local monopolies in the US.