Unfortunately, the idea of government assisted monopolies rarely makes it into the net neutrality debate. :.
It seemed to be the opposite to me. A monopoly is a single supplier that dictates everything, esp price and service. Net neutrality is more like free market where it blocks artificial restrictions to boost benefits for consumers.
The Uber story is totally different.
Once you sell a internet connection to a customer, it seems to feel like a restraint of trade if you start messing with the traffic of some companies but not others.
Though I suppose it's not clear how this applies between state governments and cities.
The definition of monopoly ("the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service") makes this clearly false. Net neutrality is a policy, supported by legislation that gives the FCC the power to enforce that policy. In no way is that related to monopolies.
It does seem to me that net neutrality makes it effectively impossible for ISPs to differentiate, because they're all compelled to sell the same product - dumb pipes. This will likely make it difficult for two ISPs to exist in the same market, but it doesn't preclude competitors from entering the market at such time as the prevailing ISP becomes abusive. In other words, it's not worse than the status quo.
If ONLY they viewed themselves as a dumb pipe, I could actually shop on relevant metrics—price, availability, bandwidth, latency—and I would be happy to switch to the best available ISP in the market. As it is, it's actually very difficult to find any numbers on availability, bandwidth, and latency.
Instead, I'm forced to compare prices and offerings. The offerings are actually an UPPER bound on bandwidth, rendering comparison meaningless for comparing ACTUAL bandwidth. The pricing advertised is often not for internet but some "bundle" of varied services, most of which will drastically increase in price after the first year, and only one of which (broadband internet) I actually want. For instance, I see ads for FiOS all over the damn place—successfully suckering me in, I might add—but in spite of living in residential, downtown city for the last eight years of my life I've never actually found a place I can actually get fiber.
ISPs are already impossible to differentiate in terms of actual value. Selling dumb pipes can only improve.
Price and customer service is a good starting point for differentiate companies. Latency is an other point, since no ISP can have zero hops to every other ISP in the world, regardless of NN. The Internet is designed with routers in mind, and each router adds to the latency. Sadly there is currently little competition on latency, except of the world of stock trading.
For companies, there is the world of BGP. High reliability, anycast, and so on. Not something I see much competition on either. Providing network solutions for companies is something that ISP's don't tend to do (here in Sweden at least), yet much at the network edge could be provided by an ISP if they wanted to offer it.
Or perhaps "No company may dump doomtoxin into a river."
Both affect the market, but neither establishes a monopoly and the companies "harmed" are simply being prevented from doing ethically-dubious things that may harm others.
The consumer and supplier are both welcome to pay for faster service for all their packages but a particular supplier cannot be singled out just because of who they are or what they sell.
For example, people on both ends are paying their respective ISPs for traffic in both directions, and ISPs can artificially favor the content of their own sibling-companies without a payment occurring.
The important thing here is that such policies are not monopoly-grants, and their net effect is the opposite, to deter monopolies.
Au contraire. Net neutrality supports market efficiency, the same way that building a national highway system did. Incumbents want to raise their margins by decommodifying their services to confuse the market.
Now, creating regulations itself is inherently anti free market (just as collecting taxes to build highways was). Perhaps in the future we'll have ISP startups competitively bonded with prospective subscribers, and private covenants assuring what types of traffic will pass (although why would subscribers choose anything other than "all", given the majority expense of a last-mile ISP is the fanout). But until that prospect is even on the horizon, it's a moot point. Any proponent of free markets, even a dedicated ancap, should support the approach that results in markets actually functioning freer.
Personally, what I think we really need are better protocols designed to resist inspection by transit providers. The end to end principle fundamentally arose from engineering efficiency concerns, and its original implementation was never meant to be resistant to intermediate parties. But now that the industry is popular and computation has gotten cheap, the expense of a DPI box is dwarfed by the increased profit an SP can make by selling discrete "services" just like the Ma Bell good old days.
Such protocols also need to be widely adopted, so that ISPs can't just block them and still retain 95% of users.
Can you explain how that works? Who, exactly, is the monopoly referenced in that sentence?
It sounds like you mean that whatever is being referenced by the identifier "net neutrality" (guessing recent FCC decisions, but it is not clear) tilts the market towards consumers in ways that you believe are anti-free-market, but that has nothing to do with monopolies or antitrust.
If that is what is meant, I completely disagree - it is the legacy telco/cable companies who need a refresher in antitrust issues. They are the only ones I see using the government to restrict competition. Putting a floor on baseline requirements offered by market participants (such as actually offering the service advertised, or not extorting cash from third-party internet ventures) has nothing to do with restricting competition, any more that mandating lead-free paints in cribs or seatbelts in cars. (Yeah, I know some people still rant about seatbelts, but not on antitrust grounds.)
It has to do with constraining market participants who have already had a long history of preferential government treatment to not leveraging that into yet more ways to extract rent.
When government forces ISPs to be "neutral" an forgo the additional revenue it essentially denying the ISPs to exercise their innovation to benefit the voters.
There is no difference between government mandating net neutrality and government banning Uber to help local Taxi companies.
I think people mistake net neutrality for fairness because they think a lot of people benefit.