
Net Neutrality Won't Save the Internet. Competition Will - lleddell
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/why-us-internet-is-slow-and-expensive,news-26251.html
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jasonkostempski
No, it'll get us several non-neutral providers offering odd assortments of
"packages", none of which will include everying most people want, like TV. We
need both neutrality and competition for different reasons.

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testerpjo
I don't really get his point, yes if we had more competition then prices would
go down, but I don't quite get his argument for how removing net neutrality
improves competition. Under net neutrality ISPs are not allowed to
discriminate between high bandwidth and low bandwidth users, but I don't
understand how removing net neutrality improves ISP competition. You could
have smaller ISPs throttle video data as to be faster for all the other users
but isn't the cost of this improvement that users have to pay for video?

Also it seems that ISPs by nature seem better suited to monopolies than
competition, like the grid or utilities. Not saying that natural monopolies
don't have their own problems but I don't understand why it's not less
efficient to have the network broken up into multiple sections owned by
multiple people.

Could someone help clarify?

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toast0
The argument is that forced unbundling (ala telecommunications act of 1996 and
examples in Europe) allows competition and will get us to better service and
pricing. And net neutrality doesn't really get us better service and pricing.

I think the details of networks will make neutrality hard to enforce. For
electricity it's easy to measure if a utility is providing good service -- is
the voltage and frequency correct, how much of the time is the service
available. For telephone it's pretty easy too -- is there dialtone, how many
calls aren't able to be completed because circuits are busy etc. For internet
it's much harder: there are many ways to run a network, and many places
congestion can happen, and I don't expect the FCC to issue effective guidance
on oversubscription and interconnection policies that covers what people think
of when they want neutral results. Ex: maybe a national network runs all their
transit interconnection through Chicago and Dallas, but does regional peering
with 'selected high traffic partners.' if you're small, you can't compete on
latency for their coastal users, because you're not big enough to peer, and
transit runs in the center of the country. ISP claims it provides cost
benefits and network management benefits to connect to transit it only two
locations.

