> Unless my history is wrong, and please correct me if that is the case, until the Title II decision in 2015, there were no regulations preventing an ISP from discriminating network traffic. So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1980-2015 seems without merit.
The net neutrality was not necessary early on because it was not feasible in the past to control it on such large scale.
So between 1980-2015 net neutrality (did not exist as a law) but was there indirectly in forms of:
- the technology at the time did not allow for deep packet inspection
- net neutrality was indirectly present due to telecom regulations. For example telecom could not just block calls as they wished. So during dial-up times anyone could enter that market and provide service and cost was low. During the time of DSL there was a regulation that required telecom companies to lease their lines so again cost to enter and be DSL ISP was relatively low. There's no such thing with cable companies.
> Businesses, local and federal governments, have all contributed to the infrastructure that is the internet. So the private company can't say, "well it was all our investment" and equally the Government can't say "This is a public good."
I think you're misunderstanding it. This has nothing to do with Internet being a public good or not. It's all about controlling access to it.
What net neutrality does in a nutshell is preventing the ISPs (which provide Internet access) from being able to censor at their whim what you can access.
In normal scenario, free market would solve this issue. No one would use ISPs that place restrictions on their service and would move the competitors.
The problem is that we don't have a normal scenario, we have regional monopolies, and if you don't like your ISP, tough luck.
It's also nearly impossible to enter this market anymore, for example Google was attempting to deploy Google Fiber, but even they failed.
We need net neutrality now more than ever, because a single company essentially now will be able to control what content you can access. It would be a smaller issue if each region had its own separate company, but in reality the only companies that benefit on this you probably can count on your one hand.
Thanks for the in depth reply. Great point about technical capability to actually impact usage - and I would imagine the regional monopoly is one of the reasons that is possible.
Seems like breaking the local monopolies would solve all of these problems. Even with Title II it's still a huge problem and local ecosystems don't really benefit.
Since there's limited space and it's not only prohibitively expensive for companies to run their own fiber, but also impossible (due to limited space) for the city to allow every company to run their fiber, it would be great if city would create the infrastructure, maintain it and lease it to companies (of course at cost to cover the maintenance).
Although whenever city wanted to start providing internet access existing ISPs were fighting in courts to prevent that.
Another solution would be to do something similar to DSL that the cable companies are required to lease their fiber at reasonable price. The problem would be to determine what reasonable price is, and I'm sure the cable companies would fight against that.
But even then I still think net neutrality should be there. ISPs should just provide access to the Internet with parameters I agreed to paid for. They have no business to control what I can access (or even monitor my activity).
It's similar to electrical or water companies, they don't care what appliances you plug in[1], they won't charge you extra because you want to use 50" TV a dishwasher or add a water filter. All they care is how much electricity/water you consume, that's how it supposed to be.
[1] ok, with electricity there's thing called power factor (https://www.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/rates-energy-use/el...), which you should strive to be 1 (or 100% on the mentioned site) otherwise you might get charged extra if you're big consumer of electricity, but this is there to not waste energy
The net neutrality was not necessary early on because it was not feasible in the past to control it on such large scale.
So between 1980-2015 net neutrality (did not exist as a law) but was there indirectly in forms of:
- the technology at the time did not allow for deep packet inspection
- net neutrality was indirectly present due to telecom regulations. For example telecom could not just block calls as they wished. So during dial-up times anyone could enter that market and provide service and cost was low. During the time of DSL there was a regulation that required telecom companies to lease their lines so again cost to enter and be DSL ISP was relatively low. There's no such thing with cable companies.
> Businesses, local and federal governments, have all contributed to the infrastructure that is the internet. So the private company can't say, "well it was all our investment" and equally the Government can't say "This is a public good."
I think you're misunderstanding it. This has nothing to do with Internet being a public good or not. It's all about controlling access to it.
What net neutrality does in a nutshell is preventing the ISPs (which provide Internet access) from being able to censor at their whim what you can access.
In normal scenario, free market would solve this issue. No one would use ISPs that place restrictions on their service and would move the competitors.
The problem is that we don't have a normal scenario, we have regional monopolies, and if you don't like your ISP, tough luck.
It's also nearly impossible to enter this market anymore, for example Google was attempting to deploy Google Fiber, but even they failed.
We need net neutrality now more than ever, because a single company essentially now will be able to control what content you can access. It would be a smaller issue if each region had its own separate company, but in reality the only companies that benefit on this you probably can count on your one hand.