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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

Except I live in one of the places that has widespread competition (Utah) and can pick from one of dozens of Fiber Internet providers, including some that can provide 10Gbps service, a cable company, and even technically Starlink.

How many of them are throttling content to prevent competition in this hypothetical anti-net neutrality scenario? Exactly zero.

Which is evidence to me that Net Neutrality is a sham, what more people need is a free market. Not another government monopoly with some regulations slapped on.

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They're two independent things. You can still require network neutrality in a competitive market with multiple providers.

Whether a market would converge on providers violating network neutrality depends on the characteristics of the market and its customers etc. But if nobody would have violated it anyway, what's the benefit of not having the law? Whereas if you don't have the law and do have violations, that's bad.

What if some people would be happy to pay more for priority, and others would be happy to receive cheaper non priority service.

These are very real things. Regulating them out of existence makes no sense.

How competative was the isp market in Utah before Google fiber subsidized the massive build-out?

Google threw in the towel on wiring more new cities about mid-way through the SLC build, which makes need think perhaps the biggest obstacle to your thesis bearing fruit, is upfront infrastructure investments…

Google all but abandoned Utah, as soon as we got municipal fiber in most cities (Utopia). Utopia was built out by government issued bonds and shares 0 physical infrastructure with Google. Google refused to participate in the program, because they didn’t like the idea of dark fiber where anyone could “choose a provider”.

Google wanted a monopoly.

The nice thing is that they can properly screw off, because now we have dozens of better options where I’m supporting the little guy instead of Silicon Valley Big Tech.

I live on (presumedly) the other side of Utah, right by the Arizona border, and we have no competition — a single real option. It’s the best, fastest, most reliable, and cheapest internet connection I’ve had access to in my life. What’s the lesson from this? No idea. There are some good companies out there I guess?

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