> If anybody gets to pick winners and losers like that, it should be a democratically elected government, but it would be far better to just prohibit last-mile providers from imposing unfair artificial limits or costs.
Isn't it the proper authority of the FTC or DOJ to enforce anticompetitive behavior? Do we need the FCC also dipping in to impose penalties on firms who may have already spent a lot of money in the spectrum auction?
What privileges does winning the spectrum auction permit companies?
To your last point, what if T-Mobile showed that by following its preferred QoS scheme it actually transferred more information over its last mile link?
Economic incentives typically reward the highly efficient use of a resource. Being able to get an extra bushel of corn from an acre of land is one example, as is being able to get an extra Megabyte of data over a pipe each hour.
In the case of residential bandwidth packages, the metric for how effectively an ISP is maximizing the available resource should simply be its own competitive choices. Should T-Mobile sacrifice $1M in profit each month simply so that any customers who happen to be using an obscure protocol can get slightly better service?
It seems that Net Neutrality is akin to the government forcing corn farms to plant 25% of their fields with different crops, just in case anyone wants to buy them, and to force those farmers to offer them for sale even if they don't believe anyone wants to buy them.
I think if we want to go down the path of the fine-grained allocation of the spectrum as a public good, there would be large scale, sweeping changes that we'd make. Why should we waste spectrum broadcasting over-the-air TV in 1080i? Why should soap operas be broadcast in full quality or even broadcast at all? Why should anyone have LTE bandwidth when some people can't afford 2G?