Well, I certainly did not mean to say that overbooking was necessarily a good idea, but rather point out that at the very least it is seen as the airline's fault and thus responsibility.
However, I wouldn't dismiss overbooking outright: Overbooking gives you better utilization of resources, and thus has the potential to reduce prices/improve service at a given price point, if there is competition/a functional market. I don't know how big the effect is in the case of flights, but it's certainly considerable in the case of IP connectivity: Having a gigabit link available certainly is useful for large downloads, even if your average bandwidth use is far below that, but actually reserving a gigabit for everyone on the backbone and backhaul lines would be pretty expensive, so it's actually a good idea to overbook links to give you that advantage at a much lower price point.
I think the problem there is more one of transparency and lack of guarantees of mimimum bandwidth. In the case of flights as in the case of IP connectivity, you should have the option to buy "non-overbooked", at whatever the price for that is, and if you buy overbooked, it should be clearly specified what the statistical properties and minimum bandwidth is, so you can actually know in advance that there will always be enough bandwidth for your phone call, if that is what you need. While most people don't really need gigabit 24/7, it is actually important to know whether you get minimum 100 Mbit/s with gigabit available 95% of the time, or minimum 32 kbit/s with gigabit available 1% of the time.
> No, they made a contract with me that they would, on average provide me with an n Mb/s pipe and 6 pages of reasons why it's not their fault if at any point in time that doesn't happen.
Well, yeah, that certainly should be regulated. A market cannot work if, when agreeing to a contract, you can't actually know what you'll be getting.
> It's giving my a pipe only some of the way and interacting with other pipes (and with the FCC's net neutrality rules, what appears to me to be a poor definition of what a "lawful" destination for the pipe is). Compared to that problem, I just don't see why net neutrality is being treated as the final battlefield for a free and open Internet by everybody.
I think all of that pretty much boils down to net neutrality when you think about it.
As explained above, I don't think forbidding oversubscription would actually be a good idea, at least not in the strict sense of requiring fixed reserved bandwidth. As long as it is clear what guaranteed properties the link has, that should be perfectly fine. And I guess you shouldn't be allowed to advertise with some essentially made-up maximum bandwidth, but rather only with values that actually sensibly reflect the actual service that you would get.
But apart from that, the problem is that you probably don't want to have the actual prices regulated if you can avoid it, and you also don't want to regulate what bandwidths ISPs have to provide for the most part, at least as long as there is some competition, because you kindof need the market to discover the products that people actually need and what they are worth.
But especially the problem of defining what a "lawful destination of a pipe" is really is probably best suited for leaving that to the market, and that kindof is what net neutrality is all about. Net neutrality essentially just ensures there actually is a market. There really is no need to specify any particular location or distances or whatever as to where the ISP has to guarantee bandwidth, if you instead specify that the ISP can essentially specify the other end of the pipe arbitrarily, as long as other parties can connect to that other end without buying anything from the ISP. So, they could just define that the "other end" is at their local CO ... but they'd have to allow anyone who wants to to bury a fiber to their CO and to plug it into their router to do so, possibly charging their own costs of doing so, but nothing more.
It's just really not sensible to regulate in detail the bandwidth from any specific point on the internet, and it's also pretty pointless, if you can make sure there are markets everywhere that ensure that monopolistic price gouging doesn't happen, and that customers are informed enough about products to actually make informed choices.