Also, for everyone, billing would become more complexified, obscured to extract more money from consumers and thwart cost calculation and comparing with (the few remaining, if any) competitors.
Fellow Americans, does it exist?
Edit: I meant to imply that 4G would be more expensive. After checking briefly, the best offer I'm finding starts at $30/month for 5GB.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...
That could change though as more providers are rolling out fiber. (AT&T just rolled out Fiber to the Home in my neighborhood, and Comcast says they will do the same soon.)
And Google's competition heavily incentivized that rolling out fiber. Imagine what the threat of a new entrant offering unthrottled internet would do to these hypothetical plans?
> Even these numbers overstate the amount of competition, because an ISP might offer service to only part of a census block. The percentage of households with choice is thus even lower.
This is especially true with DSL @10mb - it’s common for DSL providers to have lower speeds for some customers due to distance limitations. Also, is 2 providers at 10mb really enough ‘choice’ to force the market to do the right thing here? Especially considering that those 2 providers are likely one of only 3 or 4 national ISPs...
I am a huge proponent of market freedom and market choices, but the system we have now has embedded natural and regulatory monopolies and duopolies - that’s the opposite of a free market.
Why not create regulation in response to real scenarios that have actually happened instead of hypothetical ones that are already have plenty of other drawbacks?
http://www.businessinsider.com/verizon-netflix-youtube-throt...
Your other points hold up equally poorly: there are no unsolved technical hurdles in throttling or blocking specific sites or services -- as evidenced by the fact that they can and have already done so. As for "marketing" and "business model" and it being an "unpopular idea", these again fall back to the issue of consumer choice: in an effective monopoly, it doesn't matter a whit whether the populace dislikes the idea. It's not like Comcast is winning any popularity contests as it is.
And the current FTC regulations in question didn't do anything in regards to that issue you linked to?
It's the flip side of the same coin. Without net neutrality, ISPs will be able to charge content providers like Netflix a toll to not be throttled out of viablity -- who will then presumably pass the costs on to end consumers -- or the ISPs can directly charge end consumers an extra toll for access to the full internet. (Of course they'll do both, after some experimentation to find the best profit::outrage ratio.)
> And the current FTC regulations in question didn't do anything in regards to that issue you linked to?
...they kinda did? In that Verizon had to back off and wait for net neutrality to be repealed before they could try again?
(I assume you meant FCC, not FTC, in all of this. The FTC, of course, doesn't have any authority here until after the common carrier regulations are lifted. So, roughly a month from now.)
The FCC adopted NN principles in 2004 and did reactive, case-by-case enforcement of the principles without general regulation up until the federal courts stopped that approach in 2010. The two regulatory packages in 2010 and 2015 were largely based on the actual things that had been observed in the 2004-2010 period. That is, while they did consider and seek to preempt some new violations of the same principles, they were very much reactions to real scenarios that happened.
Comcast didn't count movies streamed through there service against the monthly cap. They did count movies streamed through netflix.