re: So a few questions on net neutrality

quote:

---

quote:

---

But if we rely on the free market with no regulation, the majority of us will be left with limited choices of ISP, and those ISPs will be free to control what we do and how we use what is now and will forever be an essential part of our lives.

---

Can you name any industry which is relatively free of government regulation where this is the case?

---

No, because countries/societies/economies the world over have long since realized that industries that walk and talk like utilities operate best when regulated. There are simply no economic advantages to building duplicate (or quadruplicate, or more) infrastructure. Contrary to the beliefs of free market purists, free and unregulated markets do not solve all problems.

Look at Texas' "deregulated" energy industry. There is lots of competition among energy providers, but they all share the infrastructure. There is simply no way around having to regulate that part of utility markets.

The only argument against this comes from the wildly inaccurate assumption that wireless ISPs actually compete with landline ISPs. Once someone (maybe SpaceX) launches an LEO satellite ISP, or once 5G comes to fruition and beats 4G by 10X on speed while simultaneously cuts service prices by 10X, or once WISPs become more economically viable and reliable, then I will entertain this argument. Until then, absolutely no wireless tech even comes close to running wires/fiber to the premises. I predict that it will take a decade for wireless tech to match today's wired solutions on price/speed/reliability, but by then our internet use will demand more. And there will be fiber, always advancing to remain a factor of 10 above wireless tech.

And it still will be nonsensical from a business or consumer perspective to build out redundant infrastructure, as has always and will always be the case.

quote:

---

That's what I thought. Take your fear mongering and false rhetoric back to Reddit.

---

Can you even name a single industry that is relatively regulation-free?

quote:

---

seawolf06

---

Btw, it's quite telling that you ignored my completely rational explanation for how we as a species have come to learn how to manage capitalism to best serve societies and economies, and chose to instead quote a single word bite-sized answer that you were looking for. It's willful ignorance, but expected from your type.

quote:

---

Can you even name a single industry that is relatively regulation-free?

---

No, and that is a huge reason why our economy has stagnated in so many ways (stock market is not an economy). The only free market left in America is the black market and the US government has spent vast amounts of money to shut it down, with only utter failure as a result.

Forbes

Fortune

The Hill

quote:

---

The AT&T monopoly was never actually found to be fixing prices before it was broken up. It was government supported and in fact, after it was broken up by Reagan, most customers actually experienced a reduction in quality while some even saw a sharp increase in prices.

---

Prices for local service rose because they were no longer subsidized by long-distance fees. Meanwhile, long-distance fees dropped due to competition from Sprint and MCI. The rising prices for local service in some areas just reflected the true cost.

quote:

---

In a free market, when any business or group of businesses earn higher than reasonable profits, competitors will enter the market to provide the product or service at lower cost.

---

Only until the inevitable consolidation. There is no economic benefit to redundant infrastructure. Redundant infrastructure is redundant costs that are ultimately borne by consumers.

quote:

---

To the contrary, one of the few systematic investigations into the effects of price-fixing conspiracies showed that prices generally rose after a successful government prosecution of a conspiracy

---

One of the few? What did the other investigations show?

quote:

---

Standard Oil (1911)

---

Entirely too complex to come to the conclusion that prices simply didn't fall. Standard was basically its own economy. What happened to rail shipping rates? How did that impact the broader economy?

quote:

---

We have found no evidence that successful prosecutions of Standard Oil (1911), American Tobacco (1911), Alcoa (1945), the movie companies (1948) and United Shoe Machinery (1954) have led to lower prices or greater output in the industries in which they operated.

---

You and the researchers you have found seem to be under the mistaken impression that abuses of monopoly power only manifest in higher prices for their customers. This should be obviously incorrect to anyone with even a basic understanding of economics.

In fact, the most profitable price may be nearly the same whether a market has 1 or 100 providers. Actually, prices can very well be LOWER under a monopoly than in cases with plentiful competition. Take the simple example of a monopolized market that requires a particular input. If the suppliers of that input have only one potential customer, well, that customer holds all the cards. The monopoly can get the input for very cheap (which supplier will ask the lowest to make the sale?), and that reduced cost shifts the profit curve down so that profits are maximized at a lower price to consumers (lower price = more customers = higher profits). On the other hand, if the monopoly is no longer a monopoly, now the SUPPLIERS of the required input hold the upper hand (which provider will bid the highest?). Input costs rise, so the profit curves for the newly competitive companies shift upward so that profits are maximized at higher prices to the end consumers. The higher prices mean fewer customers, but the profit margin per customer makes up for it.

That is the way pricing works. Efficient pricing maximizes profits. Prices do not inevitably rise in monopolized markets, nor do they inevitably fall in competitive markets. At least not in the market defined by the monopoly and its customers. The larger impact may very well be felt by the adjacent markets and the economy as a whole. Such is the case in the ISP market.

quote:

---

Try again.

---

Your turn.

quote:

---

In a free market, when any business or group of businesses earn higher than reasonable profits, competitors will enter the market to provide the product or service at lower cost.

---

But broadband/cable/wired telephone has never been a free market.

quote:

---

NN will die.

Quit listening to the George Soros internet propaganda.

Your life is not going to spiral out of control when this Obama-government takeover scheme dies.

---

This isn't propoganda, this isn't a conspiracy. What this does is allow bigger companies to smush out there competitors by either buying into the high-speed package, while their competitors are too slow to use properly, and/or allow ISP's to control subsidiaries that need the service.

Let's get a proper example. Let's say you like Skype, well an ISP can block Skype in order to promote another service. This means that instead of the better, consumer-liked service winning, the one that the ISP liked becomes the only service available. You know what that is? It's a monopoly. That's not free market.

Any company that competes with any service these ISP's decide to roll out can be blocked. COMPLETELY if NN is repealed. ISP's have already been caught doing things like forcing people to use their service through redirecting google searches, taking tax payer dollars and not using them to build fiber optic cables for every household, blocking services that compete with their own.

I'd also like to point out how many possible service providers that most households can actually use. How many are you able to use? Most can only get 1 provider. ONE.

Again, I reiterate, this is not free-market. THIS IS A MONOPOLY.

This is 100% only in the best interest of shareholders and CEO's. They're already making money hand over fist with the worst internet speeds of any first-world country, priced the highest of any first-world country.