Recently companies such as Time Warner have decided that in addition to charging me for access to their lines to receive internet content, that they will start charging companies such as Netflix to deliver their content to me. There is no other situation where this would be acceptable unless some party did not have choice in the matter. This would be as if I took a taxi to a restaurant and in addition to charging a fare from me my cabbie demanded that the restaurant I chose to eat at pay him as well for delivering them a patron.
This is rather socialistic or collectivist thinking. If he pays the tax driver to perform a service, then why should he care if the taxi performs some other related business? Heck, taxi's carry advertising, so I suppose he's against this advertising as well.
What he's implying here is that he's not receiving his full contracted rate from the ISP, since they're slowing down half of his connections. The answer is to change ISPs.
am stuck because there is no other ISP I can use, and Time Warner knows this.
This is a lie. Everyone has a second option for dial-up at the very minimum. So what proponents of government regulation are arguing is that they not only want competition, but they want a minimum quality of competition. So they don't merely want McDonalds competing against my neighbors restaurant in his garage, but they want a Burger King.
I view this as spoiled consumerism. They don't seem to realize that companies like McDonalds or Time Warner started out small and grew large . They expect competition to magically appear out of nowhere, fully sized and ready to rumble. They're clueless about where the US and society was 100 years ago and they have a sense of entitlement now.
The market cannot fix problems with my local internet because THERE IS NO LOCAL MARKET.
If there is demand, then there is a market. If he feels there is demand, then he's leaving money on the table by not entering the market as a provider himself. This goes back to my comment above, in that he thinks little old him working out of his garage is an impossibility to start a business. He went to college to be employed by a company, not create one, so he can comprehend the idea.
it is in-fact one of the most anti-competitive and anti-consumer environments in America today.
fueled by lazy, entitled consumers like himself. If there is a demand, then he should get off his butt to meet the demand. Gimme, gimme, gimme mentality.
We need to explain to people that competition and markets are the solution to this problem. Our response should be to challenge and eliminate existing regulations that create such a barrier to market entry.
He's right about this, but I think what he really means is that the subsidies that were originally offered to ISPs in the past should be given to new startups as well. So I don't believe him when he says eliminating regulations, so much as he means restructuring regulations.