How many ISPs do you have to choose from? Personally, I have two: Comcast and AT&T. Comcast has been a nightmare recently, with almost weekly outages and frequent periods of severely degraded bandwidth. AT&T (even their supposed "Fiber" offering) requires a working copper twisted-pair RJ11 outlet where the gateway is to be installed, which I don't have and which would require an electrician and multiple holes in my walls to supply.

So I'm on Comcast. Reluctantly. Now what if Comcast decided to charge more for access to HN?

Where's your free market god now?

In some places, you don't have a choice of which ISP you use. It's comcast or nothing. The free market doesn't automatically fix everything, because of the high cost to entry related to infrastructure.

For the same reason the "free market" doesn't afford you competitive choice in power or gas delivery, sewer service, trash pickup, road paving outside your driveway...

Physical residential networks are, like all other civil infrastructure, natural monopolies. They don't work in a "free market" and never have. The insistence on the part of glibertarians that somehow this "regulation-free" mode will work for data when it hasn't for literally a century and a half of experience with other utilities is... frustrating.

Because the telcos in America have legislated the market away. If you live in a major city like New York, you probably have many options - which boil down to the big 3 telcos and their resellers. If you live in a city of under 3 million, you likely don't even get this illusion of choice.

More and more people are moving into condos in cities where a board picks one ISP and that's what you get. Are you really going to move just to switch ISP's?

It could work like that if you have a choice in ISPs in your area. Many people don't and are subject to the whims of the single ISP that serves their area.

I live in a major tech hub in a neighborhood full of Amazon and Microsoft engineers, and the only available ISP is Comcast.

If I had literally any other choice, I would never give Comcast another dime. Given the prohibitive cost of last mile infrastructure, I can't see how I'll ever have another option in a deregulated market.

It costs a lot of money for ISPs to expand their areas of service. As such, they explicitly avoid expanding into areas where a competitor already exists (riskier rate of return).

To counter this, government at all levels have provided tax subsidies or outright payment to ISPs to expand into their localities. And regularly, the ISPs simply take the money and do nothing, relying on the fact that they are large enough that they can fight it out in court.

The end result is a nation of monopoly coverage.

Where I live now, I have two ISP choices. There's no actual evidence of collusion, but their prices are high, eerily similar, and far different from their prices in higher-competition markets.

Where I lived before this, I had one ISP choice. And the local government had given them a legal monopoly, so the free market was incapable of offering me an alternative.

Even if the market arguments are sound in theory, net neutrality is happening in the world we actually have. That's a world where ISP competition is somewhere between "scarce" and "illegal".

Where do you live that gives you more than one choice of a decent ISP?

Do you really think even if you had half a dozen good providers, they wouldn't play ball and snatch up premium data deals?

Who do you think is lobbying for this change in policy to begin with? All of our ISPs, uniting against a common enemy: the savvy consumer.

When you hear and agree with things like "but free market competition will save us!" you are buying directly into their propaganda campaign.

I live in an area with one ISP. What do I do? Please do not tell me to 'start my own'.

In many parts of the US there is no real choice.