Why not? I pay my satellite TV provider for access to some basic channels, and extra for some others. Then other groups pay for advertising, and still others pay to have part or whole of their entire show played.

The FCC mandating how payments are made in the system will undoubtedly distort the market. The computer industry as a whole has consistently driven down prices and upped capability. When the government mandates certain bundles, such as not allowing ISPs to charge other ISPs for high usage, the ISPs will either 1) stop delivering that service in the same manner, or 2) charge us for it.

When Congress passed Obamacare and mandated that health care insurance companies that sold individual policies for minors ignore preexisting conditions, the insurance companies have nearly all stopped selling those policies. It's the natural cost-avoidance of unprofitable mandates.

Similarly, ISPs are either likely to stop selling unlimited bandwidth services, or pass all of those costs to the end consumer. I'm OK if Google cares enough about its content that they pay Comcast to deliver it, rather than Comcast charging me for it. One way or the other, the market will come up with an efficient, fair payment system.

The vast majority of shrill comments and ad hominem I've seen are on the pro-side. Yours is a blessed cool breeze, and I appreciate that.

The government has its hands in so many things, it's nearly impossible to find something that your tax dollars didn't help fund. Or, better yet, both fund and restrict, like tobacco.

To stick with a close analogy, roads and rail have been largely built by government dollars. However, UPS, FedEx, and USPS can charge different rates to different customers who ship large and small, and heavy and light packages.

With an Internet "utility" it's about impossible to provide different rates on speed of delivery, such as you can with a physical shipment. (Heck, higher latency traffic is generally more expensive, like satellite based providers.) Bandwidth and uptime are what they have that they can use for pricing.

The FCC has shown over its decades that it is not geek-friendly. It restricts speech (the seven word you can't say on television, the fairness doctrine), and it restricts technology (cell phones weren't allowed for about 20 years after the technology was developed).

I think what's most likely is that the FCC starts relying on an RFC/ANSI/W3C-like system -- slow, behind, though partially useful.

Ah, another Net Neutrality article on Slashdot. Be prepared for a suite of polite, reasoned arguments.

Note:Anti-Net Neutrality arguments are automatically marked down as "troll."

The claim that Net Neutrality is "government regulation of the Internet" is a lie perpetuated by politicians acting on behalf of the cable and telephone monopolies.

Correct. The FCC instituting new rules on Internet providers is in no way, shape, or form the government regulating the Internet. The FCC is now a separate business headquartered in the Conch Republic

The free market is allowed to have choices in services. Not so much in Government services, though.

Feel free to continue to ignore possible negative secondary consequences.

Well intentioned laws are not allowed to have bad consequences. If an Internet 911 call was dropped because the network provider was not allowed to give it priority, the network provider would be sued.

Geeks everywhere who don't want to pay for the bandwidth they use have been betrayed by the FCC. The Federal Communications Commission, having been delegated the Constitutional powers of Congress to regulate Interstate Commerce, absolutely refused to tell all network backbone providers that they were unable to set their own rates for using their services.

"I can't believe the FCC won't make AT&T pay for all the bandwidth I want to use on my iPhone" says Liam McCrossen, who hacked his first iPhone years ago, and has only bricked two since. "Just because I want to see streaming video of the old COMDEX conventions doesn't mean I should have to pay for it." McCrossen, who hasn't taken any economics or business classes, is pretty sure the network providers will raise everyone's rates equally rather than just bumping up the cost of his unlimited data plan. "I'm also against paying for trash removal by the trash can" McCrossen opined.

The FCC has been unavailable for comment in their failure to "stick it to the man" and allow some companies to freely enter into contracts.

Yeah, Nixon would probably be thrown out of the GOP. He got the US off the gold standard, instituted wage and price controls, and ended the Vietnam war.

The USPS had to change how they operated for next-day mail service when FedEx and UPS came into the market through a loophole in the postal monopoly laws. Heck, USPS contracts with those two for some of their air transportation. And I don't know if you can count REA as a government success. The first commercial US nuclear power plant was built in 1958, and it only took the government 36 more years to string power lines in all the rural areas. Success!

Before commercial companies got into building the Internet infrastructure, the 'net was "for me, not for thee." The Department of Defense and the universities didn't bring the Internet into homes. Commercial companies did, because they thought they could make a profit at it.

And now we get to the rub. Your argument is based on the assumption that the government is inherently allowed to set all rules, except when someone can petition for not being regulated in some small area. My argument is based on the assumption that government regulation is only authorized in some small areas, and to exercise authority there the government has to make a specific action to remove that authority from someone else.

Your scenario has subjects, not citizens. And a whole lot more lobbyists.

No, I'm saying that you can't use the fact that _some_ regulation didn't get the outcome wanted as a complete excuse that _lots_ more regulation or nationalization are appropriate and logical follow on choices. Other choices include doing nothing, or undoing what was done before.

It hasn't even been established that there is a problem that requires net neutrality as a solution.

Of course I listed sources of monopoly power instead of types of monopolies. Under the definition on monopoly, any company or industry can become a monopoly, so the types of monopolies are unimportant. Anyway, we're talking about net neutrality, so that restricts any of the types of monopolies we'd have.

You state that we have monopolies here because of a combination of 1) high cost of entering the market, and 2) existing government restrictions to enter the market. Your solutions are both variants of complete government control. The first is fascistic (private ownership but complete regulatory control of the business), and the second is socialistic (nationalizing the business).

I reject that the cost of entering the market is too high. Computer automation costs continue to decline, there's plenty of dark fibre lying around, and plenty of historical examples in early electrification of multiple companies and how they were able to work out issues with multiple lines going to residences and businesses. Also, businesses such as phone companies are already forced to share their lines with other companies so you have choice in POTS and DSL companies, so other lines don't need to be run, and there are wireless and satellite options, too.

Which leaves us with regulation as causing the monopoly. It's pretty silly to argue that because the government has regulated an industry so much that it can't behave properly, that the only choice is to regulate it further, or nationalize it.

I haven't even seen that there are any good arguments that the consumers are being harmed and so require regulation!

And the all_mail_in_one_folder M2 mail client, with "labels" so you can filter just the messages you want to see. Which Google copied into Gmail.

Cool, last time I was marked "troll" it was because I quoted scientists in Newsweek. At least this time it was because I just stated an opinion.

Or perhaps you should take a free market economics one?

So, to be exhaustive, there are three basic types of monopoly. The most common is one where other groups are forbidden by law to enter the market. As you will see shortly, this is the version we were talking about through a quick process of elimination.

The second is where there are too-significant economic barriers to enter the market. We just discounted the last mile argument, and I've seen ISPs run in basements with cast-away servers, so that doesn't account for the "local internet" version of a non-free market.

The third is usually structured around a monopoly price, where one company has a price so low that it drives all other firms out of the market. The theory then leads you to believe the company racks up the price to gouge consumers, but it pretty well never happens. Again, we are talking about many ISPs, so a monopoly price has not taken effect.

Many definitions will caveat that there doesn't have to be only one company for a monopoly to exist -- it just has to exert significant enough control of the market to mostly control the price or conditions of the sale. This definition has very little practical value, especially since it expands the grouping usually represented by a prefix like "mono" to a group that can be "almost any size."