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The free market is also not the panacea that many people think it is. Broadband is an industry where there is a natural monopoly, which is never good for consumers. Last mile infrastructure just costs too much and you can't have umpteen different companies digging holes in the street and stringing wires.

I've said for a while that we could rely on a free market solution to the broadband market with one very large change from the way that things are done now. Last mile infrastructure should be publicly owned and customers should be allowed to choose any provider. Once that's the case, then you can have a truly competitive market that's more likely to give consumers choice. Short of that, heavy regulation is better than allowing monopoly/duopoly players to behave in whatever way they want.

"Last mile infrastructure just costs too much and you can't have umpteen different companies digging holes in the street and stringing wires."

If you remove all the regulatory overhead last mile is cheap, something on an order of $100 per customer in urban areas.

I understand you just through out a number but you're at least an order of magnitude off. This is an article which is about 7 years old. I can guarantee you the prices have not lowered since then.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/fiber-its-not-al...

Sure -- let's say free market is a solution? Free market only works if I have choice. Right now, my only choice for internet service is Comcast. Free market won't do a thing until I have actual choices here.

Government handed comcast monopoly over the wire to your door. Now we're sweeping the problem under the rug by policing what goes down the wire. The way to get more choices is to let anyone compete to be your ISP, by liberating the wire. Remember how long distance phone service improved in the 90's?

> Government handed comcast monopoly over the wire to your door. Now we're sweeping the problem under the rug by policing what goes down the wire.

> The way to get more choices is to let anyone compete to be your ISP, by liberating the wire.

While he's killing net neutrality, Pai is also doing what he can to limit broadband competition. So, thanks to him, we're getting the worst of both worlds: less consumer-friendly regulation AND less competition.

* FCC removes competition requirement from Charter-TWC merger conditions (https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/3/15161456/fcc-charter-merge...)

* ISPs who don’t want competition get good news from FCC chair: FCC to kill merger condition that required competition in 1 million locations (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/isps-who-dont-wa...)

* One broadband choice counts as “competition” in new FCC proposal (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/one-b...)

Comcast is the big ISP in most areas because it was unregulated. DSL was regulated under title II and cable wasn't. So capital flowed to cable companies who weren't subject to invasive regulations. That's why cable internet is so popular in America compared to the rest of the world. It wasn't until telecom ISPs were classified title I that Verizon and ATT decided to upgrade their dsl services.

> That's why cable internet is so popular in America compared to the rest of the world.

I'm not so sure about that. The coax used for cable is a higher-bandwidth cabling than the POTS twisted-pair lines used for telephone service, so the cable companies started out with better infrastructure. DSL also has distance/bandwidth limits ("distance from the central office") that cable internet doesn't have, so many people are unable to get DSL that rus at acceptable speeds. Cable television has also been widespread and popular in the US since the 80s, at least. I'm not sure if that's true in countries were DSL has been popular.

I, personally, would attribute cable internet's popularity (in the US) to the technical superiority of the legacy infrastructure it is built on.

and why do you only have comcast as a choice? Government granted monopolies. Void all local contracts with ISPs (cable or telco), and you will have choices.

Rewind. Why did the government grant monopolies to these companies in the first place?

To entice them to invest in their area because nobody else would.

Infrastructure isn't software development. It requires billions of dollars of capital investment. That investment isn't going to go to many areas unless it's nearly guaranteed a return, hence the labyrinth of monopolistic guarantees bestowed upon ISPs.

It's not clear to me that consumer options would flourish if you were to roll back all ISP related regulations and void existing contracts. I suspect the current system would just become more entrenched.

Not to mention that big-name ISPs like Comcast will litigate their smaller competitors out of existence.

>you will have choices.

No, companies will go with the cheaper route i.e. continue the comfy collusions they have now. You're insane if you think they'll magically start sharing their own infrastructures with each other.

no, I expect them to build redundant connections to homes / neighood POPs. Especially for cities that plan well and design for easily pulling new wire through existing conduit.

The first build out of fiber to the curb is expensive. 2-N is cheap if you do it right.

Outside of large cities, most of America can't even afford the upkeep associated with their existing infrastructure. I'm not sure how you think they'll be able to afford large scale fiber deployments.

Or maybe you're saying that private ISPs will perform the deployment and then share their fiber? Which seems wildly unrealistic.

Rural flat areas: I expect fixed point wireless to be more prevalent.

firms specialize, it's an important attribute of a functioning free market. If there is demand for running fiber through conduits, local firms might specialize in that type of construction, especially if local knowledge and working with local governments can be leveraged across customers. Many industries are not vertically integrated where specialization is more efficient than vertical integration. (i.e. Ford stopped making tires and glass)

Why do you think net neutrality is a natural consequence of the free market? It seems like a completely orthogonal concept. It doesn't result in higher profits and it's not really a competitive advantage for ISPs.

Huh? My college roommate ran a little ISP on top of the POTS network back when compuserve, aol, and prodigy were "the internet" for most people in the US.

He was just some high school kid with little cash when he started the business, and eventually got acquired by one of the 100's (1000's?) of successful local ISPs that replaced the big walled gardens, and gave average people access to TCP/IP.

This was all with "european style top down regulation" of the telcos (which was actually invented and practiced in the US until lobbyists killed it).

> The free market is the solution

Famous last words. Free market caters to existing major players. Even the notoriously free financial markets are heavily regulated to prevent bigger players squeezing out smaller players. The idea that free market unregulated capitalism is the answer to everything has been shown as wrong many times over.

Most of the POTS system is fiber and has been for some time. The "sorry copper POTS network" enabled the future through any number of amazing technologies up to and including SS7 and lots of modern tech. If you're saying NN gets us something as long-lasting, ubiquitous and powerful as the POTS system, sign me up.

Not to mention POTS goes everywhere and provides basically the same service to everyone at roughly the same price nationwide. And it works even if the power is out. If broadband stood still at the speed it's at right now (my not-impressive suburban area is 40-60mbps) but matched the consistency and affordability of POTS nationwide, we would be in a far better place than we are now.

It puts a smile on my face every time someone refers to 60Mbps as not impressive... I live in a rural area, that is true, but it isn't that under populated or that far from a city. And we can get 6Mbps tops, unless we go to Verizon and pay per gig. Oh wait, actually Verizon service is pretty terrible here too.

Yeah I knew some people would say "60mb is really fast" while some others would say "I can't live without 1gig". For more populated areas in the US, 60mbps is pretty average these days, and if we spread that around to everyone equally I think we'd all be better off.

My grandparents were on T-Mobile for their Internet access until T-Mobile focused their tower in the opposite direction and they had to switch back to satellite Internet. They lost the ability to reliably Skype with their great-granddaughter, which is an absolute shame.

So there's regulation of the Internet, and regulation of the gatekeepers. Your example is of the former, a straw man I don't think you'll find any in support of; NN is an example of the latter.

I find it hilarious that so many people have forgotten why there is such good access to internet in this country in the first place. The US government made a deal with the devil (the telecoms) to run copper to every back assward town and county across the heartland. This has proved to be an awful deal, however, there would be no internet outside of the metro areas if not for the big scary government.

> The reason the internet grew into what it is today during the 1990s was precisely because it was so free of regulation and governmental control.

And massive government subsidies. In the early 90's, I lived in a region that basically could not get Internet. It was a dark time for me coming from a more urban area. A few years later every small community has been hooked up with broadband -- almost entirely due to government regulation and money.

Hi, European here. Do you want to compare access to broadband in ANY of our countries to the US so I can have a laugh?

http://broadbandcountrydata.law.upenn.edu/the-facts/

"Data analyzed for this report reveals, however, that the U.S. led in many broadband metrics in 2011 and 2012."

Anything more recent? I can tell you from my experience in the south of Spain that investment and availability in broadband has improved massively since that report was provided (e.g. I personally was struggling to get the full advertised 10Mbps in my area 5 years ago, I've had solid 300Mbps for around €25/month extra for a year now). I wouldn't be surprised if the study took place shortly before fibre and other investment in certain areas really came to fruition.

I also see they seem to be hedging things in the summary descriptions (e.g. mentioning cost as a positive on the US side, but then making excuses while they admit that US access is only cheaper at slow speeds), so that doesn't seem particularly convincing.