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I recall the days of dial-up & DSL internet, where I had multiple national ISPs to choose from, as well as several local ISPs... all of which operated over phone lines... which meant they were covered by Title II.

This notion that everything was unregulated until two years ago is counterfactual.

Right! And the ISPs were subject to NN regulations that the courts deemed unenforceable in 2014. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._...

>which operated over phone lines... which meant they were covered by Title II.

Do you have a source on this??

I've seen this claim made a few times in this thread and have been unable to find anything to back it up. I was under the impression that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 dictated that all ISP's were information services and exempted them from common-carrier and the like.

The phone services themselves were of course under title II but I've not found anything that indicates the ISP's that created a network on top of the phone network were.

In 1996, "ISP" usually meant a third-party information service that used the phone company's lines. In the mid-2000s, the FCC reclassified DSL and cable lines as information services. That probably wasn't what Congress intended in 1996, but the Supreme Court ruled that the law was ambiguous.[1] That all but eliminated competition, so now "ISP" usually means a company that operates its own last-mile infrastructure, and talking about how things used to be gets confusing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Cable_%26_Telecommuni...

If we could actually get back to that model, having last-mile networking be a regulated title 2 neutral telecommunications entity (even municipal fiber, just maybe) and "ISP" be whatever service we connected to reach the wider internet, that'd be amazing.

ISPs could go back to being "information services", zero-rate, throttle, fast-lane, and generally do whatever they want, new ISPs could easily compete by popping up and connecting to the neutral backbone, and customers would have the ability to easily switch providers (just not the backbone).

IIUC, this is pretty much how the electrical utilities in Texas work, one local monopoly "distribution company" and a plethora of generating companies that consumers are free to choose from.

> prior to the rule change in 2014 did we have such a problem?

Cable ISPs were only moved from Title II (common carriers) to Title I in 2002, and dial-up and DSL in 2005.

And yes there were problems, here's a list of related issues and breaches: https://np.reddit.com/r/KeepOurNetFree/comments/7ej1nd/fcc_u...

Not to mention the move absolutely destroyed DSL competition (as its opponents had predicted) as it ended line-sharing requirements.

Furthermore, the FCC had Net Neutrality rules in place until 2014, when the courts decided it didn't have the power to enforce these under Title I.

Thank you, this is a great summary of many important points on this topic.

> prior to the rule change in 2014 did we have such a problem?

No, we didn't, mostly because ISPs didn't have the technical capability or demonstrate the intent to violate net neutrality. We didn't need rules to stop people from doing something they were simply incapable of doing.

Once they got that ability, and showed signs they would use it, we needed the rules.

The better question here is why are ISPs lobbying so hard for the right to do something they are also promising they would never do? Companies don't fight to overturn regulations they have no interest in violating. Or, at the least, if they do they tend to make a better argument for why that's happening.

> mostly because ISPs didn't have the technical capability

The major UK ISPs have been deploying deep-packet inspection since well, well before 2014. And this is in a jurisdiction subject, at least for now, to the EU's NN rules.

They use that to throttle 'bulk' traffic such as P2P in the evenings.

This is mostly very good, but it wasn't a lack of technical capability that kept the ISPs in line. It was the continued threat of having net neutrality legislation updated to apply to them (or worse, for them, having internet access regulated completely as a public service).

Consider also that the major ISPs are more desperate for new income now than they have ever been. Especially the cable TV providers.

I would have a hard time believing that they are NOT looking to compete directly with us (actual information services); considering the massive advantages they are technically capable of providing their own hypothetical services while they own the pipes. I imagine they won't do a very good job of it, considering how easily they can throttle, manipulate packets of, introduce latency to, and just plain break competition (or anything they don't like). Or they'll just take the easy route and tax both ends and sell your personal information to advertisers.

Dystopian future, here we come!

The only silver lining I can imagine is that we may get LAN parties back. I miss LAN parties. Everything else about this very likely version of the future is pretty depressing.

Maybe next the water companies will lobby not to be utilities anymore and provide clean, and mostly clean water. $20 premium for water guaranteed not to cause brain-damage.

Come to think of it, will there be anything stopping ISPs from literally injecting their own ads into our applications as they move along the pipe? I can see SSL offering some protection, unless they get to pick and choose who can use SSL (which they will be able to). That's a troubling thought.

The "rule change" in 2014 mostly served to codify as regulation the de facto practice in the US and in response to a US Federal court ruling that through out the previous FCC position on network neutrality.

Prior to 2014, ISPs in the US frequently tested the boundaries of what they could or could not block, with Netflix seeing routine "slowdowns", with the resulting penalty being typically not much more than a slap on the wrist.

The "benefits" you dismiss are the environment the Internet has thrived within since since commercialization of NSFnet in the early 1990s.

We’ve had NN since beginning. People don’t want the internet to become cable TV.

There is nothing magical about it. People know what the ISPs want to do and they prefer the pipes remain pipes and not become toll filters. There’s a lot of money for the ISPs in this rent seeking. Hence the never ending push to undermine NN.

> Surely if they are overpriced someone will step up and undercut them.

Then where are the real competitors to Comcast and Time Warner/Spectrum the consistently most hated companies in the US? Why does the US pay so much more for so much worse service than most everywhere?

Through extensive lobbying and regulators unwilling/unable to enforce the terms of infrastructure handouts the existing players are in pretty plum positions where they're able to drop prices a lot whenever a competitor starts to come in and thus starve them out. Look at how Comcast was magically able to provide double speeds for the same price as soon as Google Fiber started to move in in (iirc) Arizona.

1. Where is the incentive to keep growing?

Probably the huge tax payouts that they get to keep growing and then keep the same fiber rolled out with tax money dark to falsely create a narrative that there isn't enough pipe.

2. What if they forbid some traffic?

Yeah, enshrining that they can't is the WHOLE POINT of enforcing net neutrality.

3. Unlimited is not warranted unless it's being paid for.

It is being paid for. The US of A has some of the highest cost of internet for the lowest level of service in the developed world. You know that there are services in small farming towns in Romania (fantastic country, great food, great people) that have better access to internet than some cities in the US?

4. Prior to the rule change did we have this problem?

YES, it's why net neutrality was put in place in the first place. It's like you willfully chose to not do any research into the topic.

This whole idea that the market in any way helps the consumer is fallacious. The market helps businesses, which can, on the whole, help consumers when regulated by a sane government that has the interests of the people at heart. We're so far into regulatory capture at this point that we should be rioting. You cannot have a market with a natural barrier to entry or high startup costs that can in any way can be competitive without government intervention.