> free basic internet like Wikipedia and news at a lower cost.

I can't comprehend why you think ISPs would feel compelled to be so altruistic without any government intervention.

Except, since when was free wi-fi an impossible thing to find? Ever been to a coffee shop? Even in the "free shitty half-internet for everyone" pipe dream, the costs of such a service don't just magically disappear. Either way, someone's paying for that free internet, and it isn't the ISP.

Telecoms likely didn't deploy anything because this was obviously going to get overruled by the next non-Trump FCC. Even Ajit Pai has a long record of advocating for modernizing the FCC, which would explicitly involve the regulation of internet services. Abolishing net neutrality is only universally popular among communities where the underlying philosophy is "government is bad, and I'm gonna prove it by running it badly."

The internet, in it’s current non-net-neutral form, is very popular.

So the Internet before 2016 wasn’t popular because it had net neutrality? That’s definitely a new one. Is that you Pai?

> I can't comprehend why you think ISPs would feel compelled to be so altruistic without any government intervention.

Price discrimination. No altruism necessary. Kind of like my isp offering me different speeds.

Meta tried to offer free limited internet to poor rural Indians but idealistic tech workers from wealthy neighborhoods opposed it on moral grounds since it was against net neutrality so then they got no internet

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-india-rejected-facebooks-...

So Facebook would have provided access where Facebook-owned properties were zero-rated, leading to Facebook distorting those people's view of the world.

If you want to see what happens to countries where Facebook is essentially "the internet", look no further than Myanmar.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55929654

I'd genuinely like to understand why you think corporations, whose success is measured by profit and basically nothing else, are more likely to do things that are good for people than governments, whose success is measured at least a little bit by the wellbeing of their constituents.

I really want to better understand the thinking of people who hold opinions like yours.

It’s easier for me to switch which business I give my money to than it is for me to move or change governments. Most of the services I use are provided by private industry and I have choices. Everything from food, clothing, shelter. All private corporations I choose to buy from. I guess I can go get my food from a government soup kitchen or apply for government housing but my experience is these services are not competitive with private market even at the lower price (or free)

Interesting. Personally I believe people should have total freedom to change governments, but I'm a utopian thinker so /shrug though I wonder in such a world whether you'd feel the same way. "Too Like the Lightning" explored this if you enjoy sci-fi.

I'm hung up on something though - in this specific subject, there's been massive market capture in the USA by one to four ISPs, depending on region. For most of rural america (something insane like 80% of the geography) there's only one provider. In these situations, the provider provides subpar service, often asking for handouts from the government before being willing to build more infrastructure (hm.. is that still "private?").

On the other hand, some local governments have simply built their own broadband networks, with far better results: https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-map and they have some of the highest satisfaction ratings in the nation https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/teleco...

If the private market is better, why does Comcast, which routinely wins "worst company in america" awards, still exist, despite providing abysmal service to its customers? Surely a private enterprise could have eaten their lunch by now?

If the private market is better, why are local governments providing the highest rated internet services in America?

So basically, your feeling rests in the belief that you have more choice when it comes to private options - but in telecom, that doesn't seem to be the case, and of the options available, they're all widely considered to suck. Perhaps this isn't true for every industry, Stalin and Mao certainly showed us that it doesn't work for food, but does that mean the private option is better for everything we use? What does it mean to have a "private highway" system, or a "private fire department?"

I dont there's anything inherently different about Internet delivery. There's some last mile problems and some services no market exists because the cost would be higher than people are willing to pay. Internet service is expensive and maybe the high fixed cost makes it so only a few people can deliver and they can charge monopoly prices. There are also regulations that could make this expensive to provide too

But you can't just look at final price with a lower price being good. If some municipal service costs half the price but it costs taxpayers the other half, is that better? Maybe if you think they have a right to this service and you're okay with subsidizing it. But there is no free lunch, someone is paying.

I think ultimately you want it to be provided by private market if possible. So leaving it open at a high price encourages others to try and innovate. Think about starlink. If government was providing Internet to everyone for below market prices, no innovation would happen because they essentially crowded out private industry. So in the long run it would be much more expensive and opaque. You lose a market signal through artificially low prices

>But you can't just look at final price with a lower price being good. If some municipal service costs half the price but it costs taxpayers the other half, is that better?

Where, exactly, is that happening?

As I understand it, the vast majority of taxpayer monies for broadband doesn't go to municipally owned networks, but rather to private ISPs. And that's been the case for decades.

And those monies are given with a pinky-swear that this time, we'll actually spend the money on expanding broadband to under-served areas, with a similar likelihood that will happen as the last four or five times taxpayer monies were given to those folks.

Meanwhile, actual municipal broadband[0][1] pays for itself by charging multiple ISPs to access their last mile -- paying for the infrastructure and introducing (often for the first time) competition into the market.

What's more, nearly a third of states have laws[2] blocking/hindering municipal broadband. Most of which are related to model legislation promulgated by groups like ALEC[3]. Many of the artificial roadblocks put up by such laws make municipal broadband (both implicitly and explicitly[4]) more expensive than private broadband

[0] https://broadbandnow.com/municipal-providers

[1] https://www.theverge.com/23763482/municipal-broadband-biden-...

[2] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...

[4] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/virginia-broadba...

> I guess I can go get my food from a government soup kitchen or apply for government housing but my experience is these services are not competitive with private market even at the lower price (or free)

Because you have such limited experience with the world. Did you know there are countries out there — dozens of them even! — which are not American?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/realestate/paris-france-h...

We are talking about the U.S., though, not France.

In theory, if people don’t perceive corporations as improving their well-being, they will stop being customers. Also in theory, if people don’t perceive governments as doing so, they will vote in different politicians.

In practice, both effects exist, but are not perfectly efficient for lots of different reasons. That’s why neither Stalinist planned economies nor right-libertarian total lack of regulation work well overall, and the correct approach is somewhere in the middle and different for different sectors (and different countries).

> and the last few years have proven that we don't need this legislation.

Given that large states like California and New York passed independent net neutrality laws and there were continuing legal battles in almost half of all US states I don't think you can draw many conclusions. ISP behavior very likely never changed because they knew they were just one decision away from having to comply. Sort of proven by this very decision we're commenting on.

Here is something I found. Seems like "unfair" since they're favoring their videos but as a user its okay by me since I get something for free and preventing them from not counting their content doesn't mean they'll necessarily just drop their data cap.

If ISPs just behave because it's always just a ruling away, then I'm fine with that status quo. I don't want unintended consequences from invasive legislation that could eventually be used to control what ISPs can show us

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/veriz...

> invasive legislation that could eventually be used to control what ISPs can show us

What specific legal principle do you think would lead to this? Network neutrality is the polar opposite of that - it’s like arguing that we shouldn’t have restaurant health codes because the government could start requiring us to eat peas.

It's a precedent that government can tell ISPs and others what they can provide you. Once they have that in place, it's not a stretch to imagine them furthering that power for political purposes.

Think about surveillance legislation after 9/11. None of it applied to domestic population originally

It’s the opposite of that - it’s saying companies cannot discriminate – but also that argument doesn’t make any sense because governments already do that and nothing in network neutrality legislation grants new powers. If they want to ban a political party’s website they’re passing new legislation (or ignoring laws) whether or not network neutrality laws exist.

> In reality, no net neutrality would mean things like Netflix not counting as data on your mobile plan through some kind of sponsorship, or free basic internet like Wikipedia and news at a lower cost.

You seem pretty pro-free-market, so here's the free-market angle: things like zero-rated Netflix on your mobile plan and free "basic" internet are market distortions. Companies are abusing the lack of net neutrality to engage in bundling, discounting, and collusion practices, which are bad for you as a consumer - these are anti-competitive practices!

Everyone likes getting something for cheap/free, but that doesn't mean that it's actually good for you, other people, the market, or society as a whole.

I agree that most of the bad things that net neutrality advocates predicted would happen wouldn't, but the things that did happen are still bad.

What's wrong with bundling or discounting?

There's two ways to make money: bundling and unbundling. Zoom and slack unbundled video chat from places like Google workspace and similar software suites. A company like clickup tries to bundle all that stuff as a one stop shop (tagline is one app to replace them all)

If anything more offers would increase competitiom as it's a bigger vector to make a sale.

Another hypothetical: your isp zero rates the news sites with a given political leaning, but not yours. Reading the news that they want you to costs nothing, whereas reading the news that you want, or getting an alternative perspective on a story costs you something.

> There's two ways to make money: bundling and unbundling

This is pretty obviously wrong - you can sell things to make money, in a way that requires neither.

Now, the problem with bundling itself is that it introduces market distortions. The way that free markets work is that producers make things, and then buyers buy the best thing based on its price and other factors. Bundling impedes this process because it means that consumers no longer buy the best goods based on their individual price and merits.

Plus, bundling is usually used by monopolistic companies to anti-competitively extend their influence from one market to another, in a way that doesn't allow the market to work.

>these are anti-competitive practices

So why can't the solution be that the DOJ files antitrust lawsuits? Like every other antitrust issue. It really doesn't make sense to create a new set of rules when there already exists antitrust regulations.