Before answering, consider that the current head of the FCC is a former lobbyist for ISPs including Comcast and TimeWarner.
Or is the best response to increase competition among ISPs? How many people would choose the ISP that throttles Netflix?
By regulating the ISP as common carrier, you are actively encouraging competition, by forcing them to lease out the last mile to smaller providers who can give real service and actually have to compete. Net Neutrality is aimed directly at providing more competition on the last mile, where our current providers have failed so badly.
Why do you think we use cable for our internet and not phone lines? The phone system has been frozen in amber since the 80s. I'd be sad if the same thing happened to my internet pipe.
And how do we increase competition? The federal government could overturn local and state laws that make ISPs so expensive to roll out.
If Obama and many on HN are advocating for net neutrality, which is requiring a shift in the laws, perhaps that also means that CCD is up for change as well.
To me the heart of the matter isn't so much CCD is that ISPs would be treated as their name suggests -- simply a provider of Internet as a utility where packets go through unchanged. That they also own NBC or Hulu starts to complicate issues because their major potential is to multiply those businesses together while strangling alternatives. The opportunity is too great and allowing these mergers in the first place was a terrible idea.
The other issue is how to get them to actually compete in a meaningful way. Where I live, in SF of all places, I surprisingly have very little choice when it comes to the internet. Comcast is basically the only real choice as they blow away DSL speeds, and then that's that. No one else serves me as a consumer. And this is San Francisco! I think this is why municipalities are starting to get into the ISP business, which seems to be the only credible way to start actually giving these guys some kind of threat. That or Google fiber, but it's still pretty nascent. The US is just so big that without a meaningful way for high speeds to get distributed at a local level it's too expensive for anyone to enter. Either we need completely new technologies that allow people to enter at low cost, or we get local gov't somehow involved in facilitating basic infrastructure like water or power.
San Francisco is a city where red tape, bureaucracy and the people will not allow another local access provider build.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Sues-San-Francisco-Ov...
If San Francisco decided to build a municipal fiber network, they would be sued into bankruptcy by the ISP’s.
That's really the core problem. Coming from Europe, the US has terrible telecom infrastructure* that is controlled by vertical monopolists. Of course bad things happen then. Cities are difficult about letting companies add infrastructure (it's costly and disruptive to add cables to the ground, it's ugly and disrubtive to add cables to poles), and in some cases the telecom companies themselves have succesfully lobbied to prevent cities/counties/states from building that infrastructure themselves.
Ideally, you'd have a public infrastructure (wire/cable/fiber), that is then leased out at cost to the actual ISPs, kind of like the power industry in texas (wire's public, power plants are private).
But that would be too large a change which of course the existing monopolies are fighting tooth and nail to prevent, as it would break their vertical monopoly.
* and don't people go whining about "ah but rural this and distance that". Even the cities suck.
In that situation, if Netflix passes on ISP fees for users of that ISP, then the ISPs video offerings get more competitive. ISPs then have incentive to increase the fees even more. The outcome is that customers lose a competitor to good video services in Netflix.
On the other hand, if Netflix hides the ISP fees from their customers and averages it out to all their prices, then that essentially adds onto the costs in general and everybody's Netflix costs go up.
Currently, customers have no direct choice that they can act on which correlates to cost and thus have no feedback mechanism to correct the market to actually make it competitive.
Lobbyists are already making it illegal for local governments to address the problem by entering the fray themselves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband#Controversy