Yeah you definitely have bigger problems than net neutrality. I'm in the middle of Africa, 30km from the CBD of a small city, and I have 1gb local / 100mb international fiber with no caps or throttling for the equivalent of ~$85/month. Plus I can WhatsApp the tech support if something goes wrong and they'll drive over and fix it within 30 mins or so.

I also have a choice of about 8 different ISPs offering me fiber lines to my door who seem to be in a price war with each other at the moment.

I don't have net neutrality though. But surely the problem you're facing is ISP/government monopoly related, not the net neutrality bit? Or do you think it's something else causing the ISP issues there?

It's totally ISP/monopoly related, but convincing the government to keep net neutrality regulations is generally viewed as easier than convincing them to break up monopoly telecoms. It was hard enough getting them to block the AT&T/T-mobile merger. The last time a company's been threatened with being broken up was Microsoft in the late 1990s, and they got off with a slap on the wrist (albeit one that made them reluctant to enter new markets, which opened the door for Google & Facebook, and Apple's resurgence, in the early 2000s).

Is that 100 up as well as down? How's the roundtrip latency to get a packet to a US server and back? In any case you have better internet than me for cheaper, and I'm two miles from downtown Bellevue, WA USA not out in the sticks of a flyover state. :(

Generally speaking though I'm also not particularly sad that this NN regulation has been repealed, I agree with the assessment that our problems are not from NN, lack of NN is merely one of many unpleasant possibilities with the current system so even if it was fully fixed there's still all the other problems, most of which have no workarounds. Lack of NN has a workaround. The fact that many employees at many businesses require using a VPN to work from home means that most ISPs will have no choice but to accept extra money to give those people unthrottled / uncensored lines that they take for granted right now as part of the base fee.

Speaking of flyover states, I'm in Kansas and have symmetrical gigabit from Google Fiber. They've recently moved in and I think that if net neutrality is really an issue, competitors like Google will be able to handily out compete the existing companies that already exist here. I tried to get AT&T Fiber for almost a month before finally giving up and getting Google Fiber.

Symmetric gigabit at $85/mo is oversubscribed by a factor of 10

Have you considered that maybe your internet is bad in the heart of silicon valley for the same reason your public transit, housing, etc., is bad? Symmetric gigabit is ~$80/month where I live, and I'm having 2-gig installed in a couple of weeks for $150/month. We've got all our utilities on poles, zoning variances are a breeze to get, and nobody cares that my house never got its final inspection. But we've got lots of Trump lawn signs around so people in Silicon Valley would never stoop to moving here.

Just as a counterpoint, I'm also in the heart of silicon valley. I have 125Mbps internet, with a few other options available, at a not-unreasonable cost.

I recently redid our garage to create a laundry area, and the inspector collaborated with me to identify the most efficient (and safe and legal) way to implement the plumbing, drainage, and electrical. It was neither confrontational nor onerous; I truly got value from a helpful, knowledgeable person that wanted the project to succeed.

We have more jobs than houses, our local schools are some of the best in the state, I have 3 parks in walking distance and a network of bike paths that run through the city. Miles of protected open space, with trails, farms, and facilities are all nearby.

I'm more than happy to pay the taxes to live here and to support the regulatory regimes that protect all of the above.

Certainly considered it - I'm a political moderate, my political views are generally a mishmash from both parties (really all parties, I've been known to vote Libertarian and Green as well, sometimes on the same ballot).

But I'll say that my sister lives in Houston, TX, which has a basically diametrically opposite political philosophy. And it's fucked up in entirely different ways. Traffic and public transportation both suck here, but public transportation is basically nonexistent in Houston, and at least we don't have people shooting at each other because of road rage (which actually happened in my sister's neighborhood - some woman with a small child in the back seat cut off a guy in a pickup truck, so he pulled out a handgun and opened fire). Our house prices are ridiculous, but at least we can drive ten minutes and be in well-preserved, well-maintained open space preserves, while Houston's public parkland exists but is nowhere near as easy to get to or enjoy. Our Internet sucks, but PG&E is pretty reasonable and actually fixes outages fairly rapidly (even if it does have a tendency to burn down Santa Rosa), while my sister's electric bill goes through half a dozen companies, each of which tries to extract as much money from the customer while providing as little service as possible.

On balance I prefer the Californian system, though I'm open to compromise systems that combine the best of both worlds. (We're both initially from Boston, BTW, which is kinda in the middle of those two politically but fucked up in its own special charming way. At least the streets in both Silicon Valley and Houston are laid out in a grid, with more than one lane apiece and traffic lights in the appropriate places, and they can build a new public works project without the ceiling caving in.)

> and at least we don't have people shooting at each other because of road rage

Sorry, but yeah, you do. no major city is immune from crime, sadly.

> but at least we can drive ten minutes and be in well-preserved, well-maintained open space preserves

We can do that here too. I'm not in Houston, though, but Houston isn't representative of Texas. Neither is Dallas, though.

I found that I had more internet options when I moved away from San Jose and landed here. I had FIOS, Cox, Charter, wireless ISPs, even had that Clear service for a while. Now I live out in the cow fields and have Suddenlink for cable. My other internet options would be DSL or wireless. 200/20 down for $140/mo, business package with a static IP.

Most cities don't have poles, especially up here in the Northeast (snowstorms and such), so it's not like another cable company can come along and just string another wire to an existing pole.