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Comment by YCode | Hacker News Reader

The free market argument is so frustrating to hear, and yet I do hear it from people...

You can't expect free market theory to work when you take net neutrality with one hand while giving ISPs the right to practically pen state legislation, deny access to lines and sue up and coming competitors into oblivion with the other.

You end up with the worst of both worlds: government sponsored unrestrained monopolies.

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That's the underlying problem here. If most people had a reasonable amount of choice in ISPs, the large ISPs would be forced to actually provide value to compete. What we have right now, as far as Internet access goes, is not a free market; it's more along the lines of crony capitalism.

Because we have virtual monopolies/duopolies across most of the United States, customers can't get away from any sort of shady stuff their ISP pulls, meaning we have to regulate it out of existence.

This is why I oppose net neutrality on principle. In practice, however, I feel it is unfortunately necessary due to the existing regulations. The ideal solution would be to remove the existing regulations and thus remove the need for net neutrality (since new competition would finally be allowed to easily enter the market), but I simply don't forsee that happening in my lifetime.

There is misconception that "free market" means "no regulation". Actually free market theory works (perfectly) under extremely specific conditions, see for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition

Often government regulation (not intervention) can be useful to get closer to such ideal conditions for the market to work efficiently. One example is taxes that cancel externalities. Can net neutrality also be justified in that way?

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