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Comment by Sven7 | Hacker News Reader

The Indian Telecom landscape has no resemblance to the US or Europe. There is no AT&T/Comcast monopoly. Why? Because the regulator has done a pretty decent job ensuring access to voice and data stays cheap through competition.

As far as I know, in all the big cities you can choose between 7-8 major provider's. No contract. Dirt cheap access. Also worth mentioning is the existence of a reasonably large public sector ISP, with more or less a state mandate to loose money on providing access.

In such a competitive landscape how do the net neutrality arguments of the west apply? Lot of misinformed outrage imho.

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monopoly-regulation and net-neutrality are two unconnected issues. you can have a monopoly that does/does-not respect net-neutrality; you can also have a competitive market place where all members respect/do-not-respect net-neutrality.

net-neutrality is not about ensuring broad access or low pricing, whether accomplished by regulation or the free market. net-neutrality is about ensuring equality of access and equality of speech, accomplished by preventing those who control the pipes to pick and choose the priority of what is going through the pipes.

>monopoly-regulation and net-neutrality are two unconnected issues.

Not really. Competition can be relied upon to maintain net neutrality. It's what consumers will opt for when given a choice.

Only in monopolies and oligopolies can really get away with violating it (which is why the legislation is necessary in America).

Not really. Competition can be relied upon to maintain net neutrality. It's what consumers will opt for when given a choice.

Not in the face of anticompetitive schemes like "zero-rating" promoted web sites.

Every market is different and so are their rules. You are right that India has more players than the US or Europe markets but it also has more diversity and population density. Imagine paying all these multiple service providers to make your content free as a small company , non-profit , or startup to reach a billion people.

With multiple service providers available, why would you bother paying one? If they decide to make your service slow, their customers will notice, and if they care about your service, they'll switch. An ISP can only pull that kind of extortion when they're the only game in town.

The point of net neutrality is that without it, your new service will never have a chance to make any inroads at all, so customers won't know they can't access it. A competitive non-neutral market won't fix that.

You're assuming a world in which ISPs have managed to make themselves the gatekeepers for sites, which assumes they have the power to do so. Given competition among ISPs, no one ISP would have the power to do so, and a group of them getting together to do so would quickly find itself facing antitrust charges.

The ISPs don't have to be the first movers; enough megacorps paying enough ISPs to make a "free tier" would have the same effect, which is exactly what we seem to be discussing w.r.t. India.

This is already visible in the US with smaller sites; many video streaming sites, and subsections of even more video streaming sites, are exclusively available to customers of specific cable/sat network ISPs.

You are conflating ISP monopolies with software service monopolies.

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