The monopoly is a “natural” one in that there is only so much spectrum to go around and two companies can’t share it.

Oversubscribing is a vastly preferable economic solution in this case. Everyone who can pay a small amount gets access to the network, and most of the time they get the bandwidth they need.

Selling a limited number of tickets at a massively increased price, or selling a massive number of tickets each with a dedicated data rate that was almost always idle are both strictly inferior solutions by very wide margins.

That throttling is essential to network management is undisputed. There were even carve outs in the old NN refs for it. The problem is if the “throttling” is not just limited video streams in general during peak times, but actually just limiting just certain services’ streams.

First, that’s not relevant to this particular thread, since there are several major wireless ISPs. Second, it’s besides the point. All gyms oversubscribe because that’s the only sensible model for consumer access. If you didn’t allow oversubscription, Google could sell only a 75/35 service (each GPON has 2.4G down /1.2G up shared by 16-32 users). Would that be better?

> Yes, but with a gym, you can switch if you keep seeing overcrowdedness. Not so with an ISP that has a monopoly.

And this is the real problem.

The U.S. should require access-network sharing (at least for fixed-line, mobile seems to limitations here), like most other countries do ...

Then you wouldn't need to over-regulate how ISPs operate ... you could let the market decide.