Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

Say you have two ISP options at your home. Firm A forces Netflix to pay $1/month for access to enough bandwidth to stream movies in HD to your house, because they want you to use janky-streams.com, which they own. Firm B keeps their peering infrastructure up-to-date without charging Netflix. Where does this leave you as a consumer?

All else equal, you'll switch over to Firm B. Why? Because Netflix works there even without paying a ransom for their data. It costs Netflix more money to provide their service to you on Firm A. They could pass that cost along to you directly (increase Netflix bill $1/month) or reduce the stream quality and blame the ISP. The end result is that you're paying more or getting worse service because of the Net Neutrality violation.

However, Firm A understands this logic. They know that charging Netflix would push consumers to Firm B. Thus they decide to play nice and pass along the data you already pay them for.

starts by saying incumbents deny access even to city cabling and explaining the duopoly on most cities and ends by saying that allowing netflix to pass the fee to comcast subscribers is good because people will move companies and a free market is the answer.

is this april 1st or something? also extra moronic points for not understanding the first thing about isp to isp agreements and peer pricing.

I don't disagree with your comment, but your argument would seem to apply to the rest of the world, whereas in fact the US is in a fairly unique situation among developed countries.

Most of the current situation can be explained by the fact that broadband is currently the only unregulated public utility.

In NYC, I don't really pay much attention to electricity, gas, and water. ConEd kind of sucks, and I wish they were better, but really, they work well enough most of the time, and I'm not sure that I could name anybody else who would do it better.

The problem is that we sold off monopoly rights to broadband without attaching any strings of regulation, etc. Why should they bother to upgrade their infrastructure? Heck, we literally paid the cable companies billions of dollars of government money to do exactly that, and because we failed to enforce that with any real teeth, they just took the money and ran. Of course they're not going to listen when consumers say they "want gigabit". It would make no business sense to do otherwise, especially when 80% of your customers are unable to vote with their wallet and use a competing service[0].

There's a case to be made for either a free-market approach to broadband, or a more "socialized", regulated monopoly. Unfortunately, what we currently have is a hybrid of both, and it happens to hit upon the worst of both worlds.

[0] There's a South Park clip that does a great job of describing this relationship. I won't link to it here, because it's rather crude and possibly (?) a bit NSFW, but searching "south park cable" on Youtube should lead you to it if you want to laugh, sigh, and cry all at the same time.

'Your margin is my opportunity' -Jeff Bezos

I guess that only holds true when there aren't artificial barriers to entry into a market.