Also expect to see someone like Cuban challenge this on 1st amendment grounds. Given that for the 1% mindset spending money equals speech, the government stopping them spending money to again an advantage is in their mind a restriction on speech. Sad but true.
So very true. I'm an ISP owner. The other factor is peering agreements over those last miles but, yes, totally agree.
An update to original article lends evidence to what you said:
Note: 2:08 pm. Thursday. As readers have noted, Cuban has been a celebrity spokesman of sorts for AT&T, appearing in a series of commercials for the wireless giant.
Whatever dialog he spurs is going to be an intellectual dead end.
BTW, why isn't anyone talking about the Interstate Commerce Commission, the predecessor to the FCC, and the similarities between common carrier status of railways and Internet service providers?
We have over a hundred years of actual evidence to support the pros and cons of regulating public communications. Why are we choosing to instead resort to blind conjecture based on talking point samples from the last decade?
If we had a functional market, the excesses of the ICC would be a cautionary tale of great impact. Unfortunately the behavior of the ISPs has illustrated that we don't have that functional marketplace. I think we should follow the path successfully implemented (in most places) for utilities like water, electricity and the legacy telephone service.
Anyways... I'm not disagreeing with you. I agree that we should follow historical precedent and that ISPs should be regulated as Type II common carriers.
The railways that the ICC were primarily established to regulate were most definitely not a functional market. Railways at the time were also charging different fees for the different things they were transporting. Their customers also didn't have a choice of competitors and suffered under collusion between companies. Network Neutrality is essentially an extension of the same conversation.
The ICC also had statues for regulating communication. The FCC took over for the ICC's role in regulating communication in 1934 and the organizational was modeled on the ICC with 5 member appointed by the president.
We should be talking about what worked with the ICC and what didn't. If people are offering conjectures about what the results of these FCC regulations will have on the Internet they have plenty of historical evidence to use for their arguments. We can point to how the railroads abused and had a negative impact on society. We can show how overregulation harms industry. We can show example of regulatory capture. We can show example of tragedies involving unmanaged shared common resources.
Railways and the ICC are a very similar analogy but we can reason about all sorts of other precedent. We can find examples from the Hanseatic League, the Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch East Indies Company, the South Seas Bubble or anything else from our history. It all applies and led to our existing systems of government, business and law.
The reality is that building core network capacity to handle the likes of Netflix and 8k television is possible and gets cheaper as time goes on. I just participated in the buildout of new datacenter... The cost of building densities of network interconnect and compute unfathomable in 2005 is actually lower than the old 1gb stuff. WAN and telecom equipment that used to take up 10k ft^2 now take two racks and cost 80% less.
The capital investment issues the ISPs face have nothing to do with interconnect -- their dollars are spent in the last mile.
The public interest isn't compatible with Mark Cuban's ability & desire to throw millions of dollars at telcos to give his ventures an advantage. Market forces don't apply when the ISP business is slowly consolidating into a circa 1965 AT&T redux.