The solution to this is for the actual physical infrastructure that requires digging up roads to be owned by the city (or other local entity), so it only has to be put into place once, when the city is built; and for competing ISPs to either lease, say, fiber bandwidth from the city, or get a permit to pull their own cabling through already existing underground tunnels.
The problem is that every municipality that has tried this solution has been sued into oblivion by the ISPs, who want to prevent open competition by any means necessary.
Net neutrality is policing specific legal vs illegal behaviors, similarly to environmental protection laws. A "free market" doesn't really (at least not publicly) allow illegal services, because the action itself is illegal, both inside and outside the market offerings, so it is relatively orthogonal.
Certainly the maximization of profit (which has little to do with free market operations, but more of lock-in) would be helped if they were freely allowed to pursue any illegal activity in the name of profit. But it is the realm of the government, not the market, to decide what should be illegal for everybody including market participants, to mitigate predatory actions and destructive externalities.
Strictly speaking, yes. But free-market capitalism is also inherently at odds with ISPs having monopolies based on geographical area, which is the case for most of the US. Net neutrality regulation is an attempt to address the obvious issues with that, given the fact that the ISP monopolies are not going to go away any time soon. In other words, in an ideal free market, yes, net neutrality regulation would not exist; but we don't have anything close to an ideal free market in Internet access.
Because there is such limited competition in the broadband ISP space (most people only have one choice!) the free market can't work to drive down prices.
But even if there was a highly competitive ISP market, some ground rules would still be needed to ensure that the large players don't mess with the small players somehow, just maybe not as strict.
With perfect competition you still have the problem that a large amount of capital investment is required (making it impractical to challenge established companies) and ISPs from a pure profit motive have little incentive to serve less densely populated areas. The theory behind granting the monopoly is that in exchange they have to serve everyone and submit to more vigorous regulation.
Not if the capital investment is made, as it should be, by individual localities who want to own Internet infrastructure, or at least the capital intensive portion of it, that they then lease to ISPs. But ISPs sue localities who try this.
If you mean, run the basic fiber (or whatever broadband hardware the municipality puts in) bandwidth supply as a municipal service, and let competing service providers rent bandwidth, that is exactly what various municipalities have tried (and been sued for by the big ISPs).
If you mean, have the municipality be an actual ISP, I think some have tried that (and been sued by the big ISPs); but I'm not that actual ISP services are a natural municipal service the way the basic high speed hardware/right of way is.
The problem is only in very large cities is there any internet competition, information asymmetry and deceptive advertising practices harm consumers, and having free and open access to information is in societies best interests.
Capitalism requires that everyone play by the same rules, that those rules be fair, and that there be competition and alternatives. Without net neutrality, a single corporation can dictate to an unprecedented degree what information you have access to for any purpose whatsoever with no recourse. This isn't because they're in the business of generating information, but because they put themselves between the producer and the consumer. It's not any different from the anti-competitive practices of the robber-baron era where Standard Oil owned the rail roads, then priced out competition from transporting their oil to gain a monopoly. We know from the past behavior and the current behavior of ISPs in other countries that the reason they want to end net neutrality is so that they can price out and block YouTube to gain a monopoly on video services, or to do the same to any other area they want, simultaneously making more money and the world worse off because of it.
I love businesses. But when Standard Oil charges certain companies one rate for train fare and themselves a different one, or when Bell charges you extra fees to connect to non-Bell telephones (or blocks them entirely), then you have a market failure and the government needs to step in and break up those companies and force them to be competitive. Without competitive markets, you don't have capitalism, you have feudalism.
There is a long (although slowly being forgotten) history of vigorous regulation of the market used in the US to maintain competition and avoid a situation where a handful of large trusts control the entire economy. Do we really want to go back to Standard Oil doing whatever they want because nobody can do anything about it? Because that's the way we're headed.
No, it doesn't. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. Such a market is much more likely to exist in the absence of government regulation.
> Do we really want to go back to Standard Oil doing whatever they want because nobody can do anything about it?
You mean the days when Standard Oil obtained a de facto monopoly by selling oil cheaper than any competitor, and thereby saving us, the customers, lots of money? At least until the government stepped in and messed things up?
(For an even more egregious example, look up what happened to Alcoa Aluminum.)
Yes, but laissez-faire capitalism has been largely abandoned in favor of mixed market economies in the developed world for the better part of a century.
> My general understanding of HN culture is that it is generally capitalist
HN does not have a strong consensus on my economics. There is definitely a return-to-the-gilded-age faction, sure, but they aren't alone.
There are thresholds for when how markets operate starts to have effects that have sizeable socioeconomic effects. I don't think it's hyperbole to claim that the Internet is now an essential part of U.S. commerce with itself and the world. Whenever we talk about physical commerce, like stores or driving to work, we generally agree we need some form of government oversight and regulation so that the commerce can keep flowing.
For example if a highway has a wreck it can prevent millions of dollars being earned all across the board. This is in part why we have road safety standards, and standards for the vehicles that can be on it.
I think the internet is similiar in some ways. We now use it for work in lots of places. For government applications, and to buy and sell a significant amount of goods. Entertainment is included as services and goods.
When we consider commerce flowing freely we have to also consider the real bottlenecks to it in relation to monopalistic control. Is netflix's bandwidth actually a significant stress for Comcasts networks? If it is, is it because netflix's bandwidth is inherently too large for what Comcast can realistically afford, or is it because Comcast does not want to innovate and/or improve their infrastructure?
I was surprised when I found you can get a 1Gb/s dedicated line through Cogent or Hurricane Electric for about $150. This is transit network that has very low latency, and they're much smaller companies than U.S. ISP's. Residential internet is not dedicated, it's shared. I don't have the data on how much is actually used but I highly suspect only about 1/20th is used by most people overall, if not less.
I think as it stands right now, it's ISP's lack of competition leading to lack of effort to provide a good product. Given their position and lack of effort they are the ones who are actually hurting free commerce.
If they are hurting free commerce then what should be done about it? Well, as I originally stated, ISP's are in the business of infrastructure. You don't have realistic alternatives that do allow that commerce (In this case, bandwidth). So, do we just ignore commerce for the country being limited, or do we force the hand?
I think forcing the hand is a bandaid, but a true solution, competition, is much further out of reach. Any time anti-monopalization is brought up you get the same notions of 'free market' saying no, when monopalization puts down free markets.
The problem with internet services is that the infrastructure required creates a natural monopoly (ex: running fiber optic cables to each persons house), and there is a lot of regulation in many markets that ISPs are granted de facto monopoly power by the state itself in exchange for a guarantee of universal access for everyone in a given area, even if those customers are unprofitable/too expensive to service. If there was no monopoly at the ISP level, natural or otherwise, then there would be no need for net neutrality, as consumers would be able to choose alternatives and ISPs would compete on value. Net neutrality is an anti-monopolist regulation.