Hacker News Reader

Selection bias. They only picked UK and US. Plenty of countries in Asia have robust competition and is arguably a reason why they are so cheap and so good. One company offers twice the speed for the same price. People quickly start switching and new accounts (people coming of age) go to that cheaper better company. The other companies are forced to follow suit or lose their customers.

View on HN

Yes, competition works for factors that the majority of consumers are aware of, like price and speed. But it doesn't work for enforcing net neutrality.

If you model it, how could competition work to protect a YC startup with 1,000 or 10,000 users?

You can't start an alternative ISP at that scale, so it's unthinkable that a new ISP would emerge just to serve that throttled startup's pissed off users.

And again, only a tiny minority of users would correctly attribute throttling-induced failure to the ISP. Most will attribute it to the new startup being janky.

Even or those who do correctly attribute it, what are they going to do? Convince everyone they want to use this new product with to switch ISPs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com