> ISPs and utility companies are natural monopolies. When you move to a new location, you're stuck with the ISPs that service that location; often just 1 ISP.
This is simply not true. With the wide availability of cellular service that provides broadband speeds pretty much everyone in the country has multiple choices of ISP.
Cell service is also highly monopolistic. It is honestly very strange we have 4 relatively competitive network operators in the US - it isn't a stable system to say the least, though, and it will almost always degenerate into two (and it almost did - for a while T-mobile and Sprint were non-competitive with AT&T and Verizon, and it took their complacency in the 3G->4G transition era to give the two underdogs a chance to reestablish themselves).
Fundamentally, though, nobody in the US can open a new cell phone operator now. The spectrum is bought and owned, the owners know how valuable it is, and owning light is a much scarcer and more valuable resource than any plot of land that billionaires are buying up in the present property investment bubble.
It is even worse than the ISP monopoly - ISPs are local monopolies. We have a national cartel of cell operators that can't face real competition because of a state guaranteed monopoly on radio waves. As is the nature of all business with guaranteed profits, eventually AT&T and Verizon will consume T-Mobile and Sprint, possibly even under this administration, where there will be much less anti-monopoly scrutiny, and then we will have two network operators controlling all the usable cellular bandwidth with no intent to let anyone else compete.
Just because we are in an... alright situation right now, doesn't guarantee that environment will persist forever. Cellular network operators are absolutely crooked and near guaranteed in a long enough time span to devolve into a duopoly, while we already have collusion between them today to screw over consumers.
If you live near a city this is often true (at least in the US). However, there are at least two problems with this:
1) often the broadband provided by mobile services is capped and/or much more expensive than the services provided by the 1 or at best 2 non-mobile ISPs you have access to.
2) in rural areas, often you do NOT have access to anything close to the same level of broadband speeds. There are a lot of places where the coverage is still spotty, and even where you have it, the speeds just aren't that great.
Why do all people need insanely fast broadband speeds and data download limits? I think the fact that a small percentage of the population wants those speeds should not dictate what the larger percentage of the population has to pay for. NN hurts low-income internet users.
Allowing ISPs to use publicly supported infrastructure and their natural monopolies to guide consumers towards ISP owned services helps low-income users how?
If 1 or 2 ISPs eventually own all commercial content creation, I can assure you it won't be good for low income internet users.
There are several possible solutions to this, ramped up enforcement of anti-trust laws, forced sharing of last mile infrastructure etc... Net neutrality isn't the only possible fix. Which fix do you prefer?
To your point about not needing fast download speeds. What's considered fast today is just "required to browser the internet" tomorrow. I used to get by with a 28.8kbps modem, but that's not a viable option today.
First off, I was neither arguing for nor against net neutrality. I was responding to "With the wide availability of cellular service that provides broadband speeds pretty much everyone in the country has multiple choices of ISP." From a practical standpoint, this is not true for many users.
Secondly, I was in no way referring to "insanely fast broadband speeds and data download limits". I was talking about practical limits. Where I live, if I depended on mobile connectivity for internet service, it would be impractical to do anything that involved any media of any significant size. The connectivity would at best be barely capable, and the data limits and plan costs would make it hideously expensive. Therefore I have pretty much one ISP that can provide me with tolerable service.
But you base where you live on the infrastructure available. If high internet speeds are important to you, then moving to a city with better options makes sense. If you want to lie in the boondocks, then that's more important to you than internet.
It is true that I accept more limited choices of certain things by living in a rural location. There are many benefits that I enjoy from being rural that I weigh against technological needs -- it isn't a simple "pick one or the other" situation.
However, the point I was trying to make is that your statement "With the wide availability of cellular service that provides broadband speeds pretty much everyone in the country has multiple choices of ISP." which was in response to the statement "ISPs and utility companies are natural monopolies. When you move to a new location, you're stuck with the ISPs that service that location; often just 1 ISP." is actually not true from a practical standpoint for many people in the US.
I don't just use the internet for entertainment. I use it for my work. And because of the limitations of where I live, that means basically one ISP can provide me with the service I need. The "broadband" service provided in my area by mobile companies, is first of all, not really "broadband" at all, and secondly, even if it was, it would not be practical given the high cost that said companies would charge for it.
I think that many people who live in cities underestimate the number of people who are in this situation (and no, I have not lived in a rural location for my entire career). It is certainly not true from a practical standpoint that "pretty much everyone" in the US has access to "broadband speeds" from multiple ISPs.
Ok, so you're past claiming that "pretty much everyone in the country" has the benefit of "wide availability of cellular service that provides broadband speeds."
This is completely unsubstantiated, and in fact quite likely the opposite. Often, rural WISPs will rely on other ISPs for backhaul. Imagine if ISPs could charge/throttle whatever they want, rather than treat the WISP's backhaul as an opaque pipe?
They're not, on any point (especially when you add "reliability" to the list--I've played the "upload a multi-gigabyte file over mobile" game before and paid for it in drop-outs!). There might be a day, ten or fifteen years from now, when I can do three-quarters of what I do today over a mobile link, but it certainly isn't today. It's so prima facie silly that it verges on bad-faith argument.
This is simply not true. With the wide availability of cellular service that provides broadband speeds pretty much everyone in the country has multiple choices of ISP.