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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I think you missed the point there wrt Google.

> The most expensive part? Litigating the ability to share real estate on telephone poles with companies like AT&T and Comcast. This privilege granted to the ISP’s is granted by local government regulations. Thanks to these regulations, Google Fiber was only able to upgrade 33 of 88,000 telephone poles in Nashville.

He/she is making the point that net neutrality addresses the symptom, not the cause. The cause is government regulation in the first place, so net neutrality is regulation to fix a problem created by regulation (not necessarily my position, but that's what I get from the author).

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If you had a large choice of ISPs, then Net Neutrality wouldn't be required. It would come by default as the client could move from a restrictive ISP to a less restrictive one.

Since there is virtually no competition in large parts of the world, it is very important to force the single monopoly to behave in the interest of the consumer with laws.

The regulations the author is talking about are not the same regulations that enforce net neutrality. Net neutrality has nothing to do with sharing telephone poles.

I agree with you up until the last sentence. You are right that:

> The regulations the author is talking about are not the same regulations that enforce net neutrality.

But net neutrality does have to with sharing telephone poles, because if there were actually choice in ISP then net neutrality would not even be necessary since a different ISP could come around offering a better more free package. So in other words, he/she's advocating treating the cause rather than the symptom.

I don't think that position itself is incorrect. I do believe the position that this justifies repealing NN is very incorrect. Repealing NN isn't going to do a thing regarding competition. We still have both problems. But if we keep NN in place, then we still lack competition, but at least we have a neutral net. We can then spend our efforts trying to attack the competition problem.

Agreed. Given our current state, NN is a positive IMHO. However, I hope that once the NN battle is over, regardless of the outcome, we start moving towards attacking the competition problem.

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