Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet

Heavier regulations usually favor established players who can engage in regulatory capture, to shape the new rules to prevent future competition from smaller companies and firms that don't even exist yet. Often times they cloak this motivation with justifications that sound uncontroversial and difficult to object to.

I don't know specifically what the real goal is here with Net Neutrality, but that's the sort of thing that happens in other industries all the time. Often in terms of "safety" or "helping the environment."

Maximum throughput and quality of service are not their goals. They want as many people as possible paying for service on a line they paid $X to install. And they get this by being able to throttle their user's traffic in order to allow as many people to use the same line as possible.

What you're saying is basically the same as the "unlimited" argument in terms of internet access or even cell phone plans. You don't have a personal internet connection just for you that you can use in an unlimited way. The internet line run to your neighborhood is essentially zero sum. If you take a huge chunk of the bandwidth, then other paying customers get less. Charging you more doesn't help unless you fund entirely new network lines and installation. They want everyone to have an equal size of the pie. You can't have a dozen households sharing a connection to the internet and all be streaming netflix in 4k. There simply isn't the infrastructure to support that right now, in most places. No matter how much you're willing to pay.

Since then, the provision of connectivity has consolidated among only a few very large companies, which among them have strongly oligopolic power to enforce whatever conditions they please upon their customers, both residential and commercial.

In the late-1990s, early-2000s environment of healthy competition among Internet service providers, utility-style regulation of ISPs, such as that here under consideration of repeal, was not a necessary measure.

However, in the current strongly oligopolic environment, only the regulatory power of the United States Government can continue to provide and enforce sufficient oversight to maintain a semblance of free market behavior.

Internet-powered entrepreneurship greatly benefits the US economy. The small, and occasionally large, businesses thus created have an outsized economic impact in terms of taxes paid and jobs created. Absent a true free market, or even the regulatory semblance of one, for Internet connectivity, these businesses may well find themselves severely hampered in their ability to earn revenue, with concomitant negative effect on their ability to contribute to our economy.

As such, I must strongly urge the new regulatory regime proposed in this filing not be adopted.

I thank you very kindly for your time and your consideration, and trust that you will decide in that fashion which you regard to best serve the interests of your constituents and of the nation which you serve.

(Also, the "Battle for the Net" folks would have done well to hire a UX designer - or perhaps to hire a different one. The lack of any clear confirmation that one's message has been sent fails to inspire confidence. Perhaps there's an email confirmation that has yet to arrive, but...)