How don't you understand this? Simply put, we paid, via tax breaks to these telcos, billions upon billions of dollars to improve their infrastructure, which was just not done. Outrage aside, had they done what they were supposed to, we wouldn't be in this mess. But since they didn't, and because EVERYONE is watching Netflix, they're in a nightmare scenario of having to improve their infrastructure and have to take a BIG hit on their bottom line, ie, to pay for a buildout of something that 1. Should have already been done. 2. Already paid for by us. Neither happened, now they're scrambling to find a way to get the consumer to pay for it, but the consumer already paid for it in the 90s.
This seems like a good reason to be mad at telcos. It doesn't have any bearing on the question of whether or not net neutrality is good policy. Companies don't wait to try to maximize profits until they need to make new investments. It seems entirely sensible and predictable that companies would want to delay new investments until they are actually needed. 20 years of interest on whatever they were given amounts to a lot of money.
What is it that you want to change with regard to government policy as a consequence of the fact that telcos screwed people over? Do you think that the government should seize their businesses and force them to build infrastructure now? I just don't understand why you're bringing it up, except as a way to stress that telcos are the bad guys.
Again, this is just ridiculous. The reason why it hasn't been an issue is until VERY recently, average usage of a household was very limited. It wasn't until Netflix became a common thing for the average consumer to have, that bandwith spiked everywhere. Before, it was someone downloading movies on Napster, which was more fringe than anything. Even torrent usage was still fringe. Netflix made people's moms a high bandwith user. The fact youre focusing on internet access rather than utilization makes NO sense to me.
Whether utilization is "high" or "low", we'd expect companies to try to charge whatever they can to whoever they can. The profits to be made by charging different data differently may have been smaller in the past, but the profits that companies were used to pocketing were also smaller. I just have a really hard time believing there was this huge market inefficiency sitting around for twenty years.
Okay, so that's your claim, but where's the evidence for it? Why do you believe there's been a paradigm shift? I don't think things have changed very much. The Netflix throttling was the only really large problematic event that happened. It's possible to imagine it as the first of a huge potential wave of large acts of extortion that was only stopped by the Title II classification, but it's also possible to see it as an outlier or miscalculation, and I don't know why you favor the former view.
Read up on beer history. Hell, read up on any widely consumed commodity. I don't think you have. Judging by the fact that cable not having commercials was an "anecdote" shows me you're <30 and don't know much about the case at hand.
Okay, an appeal to experience, sure. I was hoping for more than that, but whatever. You got me, I'm under 30 and therefore shouldn't bother trying to have a conversation about my opinions. I forgot for a minute that all 30+ year olds have an instinctive sixth sense for market trends, which is why they're infallible investors. Silly me for wanting to see evidence of this supposed fundamental shift in how ISPs will do business.
Do you have ANY idea how business works? What you described is the death of the little guy. If I have a killer app, but cant afford to get proper bandwith to my site/app/concept whatever, I have to then share it with a network, which if what I had was that valuable, would make them privy to my IP. You describe the nightmare scenario and you say "not much worse", what are you even on about.
Imagine if I wanted to open up a burger joint, I had to pay BURGERCONGOLEMERATE INC a fee every month so they dont open up a mcdonalds or whatever near me and crush me in my rampup phase.
Regarding your restaurant example, franchise systems exist, and they seem analogous to what we're talking about. More generally, resource pooling and cooperation for the sake of mutual self-interest happens all the time. I don't know why you're so scandalized by the suggestion that it might happen here.
I agree with you that such a setup would be bad for competition and innovation. I was only qualifying your statements a bit by saying that it wouldn't totally destroy them. The outrage and condescension are disproportionate and not appreciated.
So, what, your a reactionary contrarian, who also doesn't have the facts, but want to be a dissenting opinion just cause? Net neutrality is the lesser of two evils. It's not some cherub OBJECTIVELY BETTER choice. But none of what you're saying here makes sense. Hell, look at the history of Standard Oil, look at the history of PacBell. One look at either of those would tell you why this is bad. Your entire argument is "prior to the 2015 rule change...", shows how little you understand of this entire thing. This tells me you don't even understand the current stress on p2p agreements and traffic trends in the past few years. This was a problem that was looming over the internet like the sword of damacles, we just got here faster than the big boys thought, and the 2015 ruling made people realize they couldn't just sweep it under the rug. You understand 2015 was a preventative measure, not a corrective one yea? Cmon, do some reading.
I tried extremely hard to be polite so that I could eke some value out of your vague assertions. You seemed to take this as a license to be a total asshole. That's tremendously unpleasant. Fuck off.