Are ISPs really going to stop abiding by Net Neutrality rules?
Wouldn't that offer a big competitive opportunity for an ISP that supports Net Neutrality?
Wouldn't that offer a big competitive opportunity for an ISP that supports Net Neutrality?
Ignoring Net Neutrality is something that financially benefits ISPs especially when ignored as part of a cartel. When noone does it, noone has the incentive to implement it.
Also, do you really think a new ISP can just appear, dig up new cables, wire up whole swaths of United States without being obstructed by existing ultra-rich companies lobbying in the local and federal government? (It's a rethorical question, here in my county the main Telecom used a lot of dirty tactics to make sure that the competitor had utter hell of a time trying to dig in their FTTH to compete with major telecoms obsolete copper system. The digging and building permits had to be fought on basis of every few city blocks due to bribery and friends in mayors office).
I can't simply move to a different ISP unless I want to give up on most things I do on the internet or move to a new apartment building.
I'm sorry, what?
While I'm sure you're going to beat a drum about "regulation" and "free markets" it might be worth stepping back and actually assessing the issue from a practical, rather than ideological stance
Utilities naturally gravitate toward monopoly. Would you want to have multiple sewer lines running to your house, because your upstairs bathroom costs more money than downstairs with a different "provider"?
Stringing up competing sets of coax cable, telephone lines or fiber optic cables is a losing proposition for the ISP's themselves
Why subject yourself to competition, when you can simply carve out your own market and be "the" provider in an area? Comcast doesn't want to overlap with Time Warner, because Time Warner is the incumbent provider. Even if Comcast offered a faster internet service, they'd be building their market share from zero
There's a reason why I regularly measure more than what I have contracted, on independent speedtests. It's not inefficiency, it's allowance.
Also, resilency/failover. If one connection goes down, you have a backup. It may be uncommon, but for some people who rely on Internet connectivity, this is useful.
Single provider just can't know best.
Talking about efficiency... For efficiency's sake it may make some sense to move demarcation point a little further, to some mini-PoP in the neighborhood, but to have choice the end-users need to own their lines there, and I'm not sure it's convenient and without the drawbacks.
I worked for an ISP company that grew from a tiny startup, connecting just a few buildings, to a successful ISP that covered a significant part (almost all, I believe) of small (200K) city in Russia.
I haven't really interacted much with our network builders department (worked on software, and left the company some years ago, moving to another city), but IIRC in overall it worked like this - people found our offers interesting and signed up to get their buildings/apartments connected. We chose new addresses we were able to physically reach, got the approval from the building owners and the city, and laid down the wires, extending the network's frontiers.
We laid our own fiber (or, sometimes, copper) and used wireless bridges whenever we weren't able to reach otherwise. We had also leased fiber from other companies (there are companies here that have business just by providing underlying infrastructure but not offering the Internet connectivity). It's not like adding an extra fiber to an existing conduit is comparable to installing a new sewer line.
In the end, having 4-5 actually different ISPs in a building - usually all with their own lines - was (still is) a norm where I had lived. Competing offerings drove prices down, and bad behavior (sans the state-mandated ones) were mostly non-existent.
What's so different in the US, that even Google had failed?
Things like this are not as much an issue in states like Texas that require only one permit to run cable anywhere in the state. Whether or not people would like to admit it, this is a case where we can see with our own eyes regulations are seriously hurting the ability for people to start up and compete, and is the only reason net neutrality is an issue in the first place.