On Entangling and Testing Net Neutrality

P3titPrince writes "In an NYT op-ed today, Timothy B. Lee argues that legislation specifically guaranteeing Net Neutrality would in fact be less effective than just allowing the status quo." From the article: "It's tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage. Economists have dubbed this process 'regulatory capture,' and they can point to plenty of examples. The airline industry was a cozy cartel before being deregulated in the 1970's. Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition." Relatedly, winnabago writes "Computerworld reports on a potential method for testing a net connection for neutrality. Somewhat similar to Traceroute, the software uses spoof packets that appear to be from a potentially throttled source and compares the transmission time to that of neutral traffic."

Comments

NN?

[robpoe]

Why has Google bought all the dark fibre that they can? Easy! When telcos start clamping down on 'Net connections, we'll all be on the GoogleNet.

Net Neutrality problems solved, at least for Google.

Re:NN?

[Trigun]

Google should champion the .web TLD, and create google.web
Rebuild the net the way they think that it should be. Tie in all services to their brand new .web. Create a gmail address, get a site, a gbuy account, adsense tied to the site, a marker on google maps, the works! Think of the datamining that they could do then!

Of course, the last time I told them that, they never answered me. Maybe I shouldn't have sworn so much in the email. Telling them to 'fuckin' bury Microsoft' probably didn't add to my ideas credibility.

Re:NN?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

When telcos start clamping down on 'Net connections, we'll all be on the GoogleNet.

This will never happen. Google bought all that dark fiber so they could ferry all their massive internal dataloads from A to B without paying through the nose for it. They made a long term decision and figured it would be cheaper in the long run to have their own transcontinental (G)LAN rather than keep ponying up to the major telcos. Big companies do this.

Do you think those fibers are still dark? Right now they're probably at full capacity shifting the teraquads of dataload upon dataload upon dataload back and forth between to Google legions of analyists and their analysiers, so they can confirm that, yes indeed, people really do think those ads are search results.

Spoofing and net neutrality

[Rob T Firefly]

Somewhat similar to Traceroute, the software uses spoof packets that appear to be from a potentially throttled source and compares the transmission time to that of neutral traffic.

This brings forth a very serious issue I haven't seen brought up elsewhere.. if net neutrality does get squashed, how much of a serious crime will something like this be? If we move to a tiered Internet, how many huge companies (and their respective purchased government officials) will cry "fraud" every time someone dares to make a packet appear as though it came from a higher tier? The mind boggles.

Re:Spoofing and net neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

None. In fact it will become VERY BIG if net neutrality goes bad, unstoppable and undetectable by any legal or technical means.
We will see new "portals". Not the web portals that you think of now, but point to point gateways between
parts of the globe which are tunnelled through adaptive multi route connections. The adaptive part is the key to this
and the mentioned software is a vital component. Internet proxies will spring up where traffic basically disappears into them
to emerge elsewhere. Sure you will have higher pings / slower delivery times, but the bandwidth / throughput will be immense.

Although superficially similar to TOR these new gateways are not intended to provide security or anonymity, they are designed to obfuscate the traffic from the carrier. No amount of legal mumbo jumbo is going to be able to do jack about this, it is an inevitable future if the carriers start to be selective on traffic. Unless they *physically* disconnect their networks and isolate themselves there is nothing the carriers can do about it. The days of traditional routing are probably numbered.

The internet (in the original ARPA concept) was designed to route around problems. It is by design an adaptive system. If the carriers become a problem they will be routed around. It's that simple. Net neutrality can only ever be a short term problem, until the system adapts to counter it.

Thanks to the greed of the telcos the net will evolve one step further and we will have them to thank for an even more robust and reliable network topology that can detect and adpat to threats to its connections.

Re:Spoofing and net neutrality

[twistedsymphony]

Well someone could setup something along the lines of a SETI@home that does nothing but send random packets and monitor for net throttling...

Ummm... no...

[sterno]

The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.

That's EXACTLY what's already happening. The telecom companies have long been doing this and the whole net neutrality discussion is being prompted by those same telecom companies wanting to loosen the rules (you know, using their lobbyists to get favorable regulation). Further, I would argue that the return on investment from lobbying is so large that any business of sufficient size will invest heavily in lobbyists. They'd be dumb not to.

Net Neutality needs to happen before we give the telecom companies any more leighway in other areas. The reason is simple. If we do not do this, then if we find that we need to impose it after the fact, they will have already invested billions in business built around the new regulatory structure. At that point, they can legitimately claim it would be expensive and onerous to do it. Today, if we put this regulation in, it doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the network they already have.

Re:Ummm... no...

[Brew Bird]

Hello, the NN law we are talking about also puts a freeze on CLASS OF SERVICE, something my customers are screaming they need for thier IPVPNs. Obviously that is NOT on the public internet, but it would seem to make sense, if a carrier is going to invest the money in thier infrastructure to support that for private networks, it should also be available to public networks.

If you understand how CoS works, you will relize that turning that on a public network will have little or no affect on 99.999% of the hosts connected to that network. This is law for the sake of law, and certainly not going to protect google or vonage from anything. It could concievably make it MORE difficult for them to do business, as the carriers begin to oversubscribe thier infrastructure more, lack of effective CoS will put vonage out of business.

Do you really think Vonage can make a case that the cable company has to buy more Public Internet access because Vonage's application doesnt work right over thier network? Aint gonna happen!

Re:Ummm... no...

[mrxak]

Laws for the sake of laws seems to be all that congress is capable of these days. There are far too many important issues that are being ignored because a few celebrities are making videos and people are listening to FUD on all sides of the issue. I want my government to do something useful, and let the market sort things out.

Re:Ummm... no...

[mrxak]

As my previous posts should indicate, I'm very much in favor of cutting down on the regulation. We need to stop the government-created monopolies first, and everything else will follow. If you have a choice of 6 different MSOs for all your telecom needs, there are some very strong market forces against doing anything the customer won't like.

Obvious

[Kelz]

These people are just stating the obvious. Very rarely will government regulation have any good effect in the long term; it just slows down innovation and takes years to go away.

Do YOU trust your congressman to not just create a huge beauracracy, with new laws being stuck on whenever they want to "protect the children/fight terrorism".

Re:Obvious

[mrxak]

Somebody please think of the tubes!

Seriously, we need to end this madness. I want my congressman to debate real issues, subjects that (hopefully) he knows about. People screaming for net neutrality are completely ignoring the historically proven facts of economics. We do not want people like Ted Stevens running our internet.

Re:Obvious

[gilroy]

Exactly. That's why, 30 years after the Clean Air Act, America's skies are in fact worse while the economy tanked.

Except, oh, wait. That didn't happen. In fact, the skies are vastly cleaner than they've been since the 1950s while the American economy has surged for 24 years with only two minor recessions.

Despite the mantra "Government can't work", the uncomfortable fact for neo-Friedman anarcho-capitalists is that, in fact, it can. Which is why the conservatives have officially seceded from the "reality based community" -- If you don't get the facts you like, change 'em.

Re:Obvious

[Durandal64]

Enron is a poster-child for corporate regulation. Beyond the fact that they cooked the books, they also had the state of California by the balls for quite a while. They'd artificially introduce power outages to squeeze every last dime out of their customers, and they did it while laughing on the phone with each other about how much money they were making off of others' misery. All because the Grand Conservative Experiment gave them a free hand to do so. (Although Gray Davis could've just sent the National Guard into those power plants and taken them over by force, such measures are not part of your standard free market.)

Make no mistake, a completely deregulated market will result in corporations running roughshod over the consumer. The Libertarian ideal of a totally free market where competition cures all ills simply does not account for real-world factors like barrier to entry. If no new players are able to enter a market due to prohibitive cost (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry), competition only exists among established players who can simply collude to fuck the consumer up the ass, since they know that there won't be any hot-shot upstarts with new ideas like "not gouging your customers" entering the market to steal a piece of the pie.

All a corporation has to answer to is its bottom line. They don't care about people's suffering as long as it makes them money. As another example, look at what happened when Saint Reagan removed regulations on radio station ownership. All of a sudden, exactly six corporations started controlling the entirety of American radio.

Congress is involved, remember.

[krell]

The net-neutrality legislation might actually make the problem worse. But at least it bans flag-burning, provides federal funding for Air America, declares Feb. 13 to be "National Nathaniel Hawthorne Awareness Day", and pays for 6 years of new shoes for Sen. Harkin! That's what counts the most.

Easy...

[GillBates0]

Google is buying all the fiber because of it's well known benefits. Fiber absorbs several times their weight in water, resulting in softer, bulkier stools, which makes it easier for traffic to pass through the colon.

Anybody who's experiencing problems due to clogged Tubes is well-advised to deploy as much Fiber as possible.

The question I have.

[The Living Fractal]

Net neutrality. The idea that all content is created (and thusly allowed to traverse the internet) equally. Ok, so I have a couple questions really.

The first, what happens if encryption makes it impossible to really tell what anything is? How does a non-net-neutral ISP then determine tiered prices for the content? Does encryption effectively enforce Net Neutrality?

And second, if an ISP wants to charge a customer more because they are simply using the bandwidth or transfer limits which the ISP already sold to the customer, what is this telling us? I mean, if I buy 50 gigs of transfer a month and I use it all, that's ok right? Until all of the suddend everyone is using it all. And then the ISP is saying "wait wait wait, yea we sold you this, but uhm, if you are all going to use it then this isn't going to work". In effect the same as the cell companies when they sell you minutes. If everyone is using their cell phones, your phone is pretty much useless "network busy".

I mean, what the hell?

TLF

Re:The question I have.

[jfengel]

For Question 1, the problem isn't so much discriminating based on the content as discriminating based on the sender. That is, if amazon.com has paid the fee and bn.com hasn't, you get faster access to amazon's web site than bn. (Especially if "slower" means "nothing at all".)

Which could lead to discrimination against content you don't like (e.g. fast access to nra.org, shutting aclu.org to a trickle), but it's site-based, not something you can fix with encryption unless you start talking about fancy stuff like onion routing. Even that doesn't really help, because they could throttle everything except packets directly to their paid providers.

What guarantees network neutrality is your ability to switch to a neutral ISP if you don't get the access you want. That only works if you have competition among ISPs, which too many people don't.

For your second question, there's also a notion of using special protocols (quality of service, QoS) to guarantee certain bandwidth between two sites on a site-by-site basis. So if you want to watch a movie in real time, and you want to guarantee that there's at least 1 Mbps available between the sites, the ISPs want to be able to charge you for that guarantee.

Most ISPs make very little in the way of guarantees to individual users. (High-level providers like the one amazon uses are a different story). Guaranteeing 1 Mbps constantly requires a lot more hardware than they have now, and most of the time that's just fine, because most Internet traffic comes in short burts. It becomes not-fine only when you have a specific requirement, like watching a movie or a VOIP conversation, or a web site that you absolutely must keep running 99.999% of the time or you'll scare away the customers.

Re:The question I have.

[Wesley Felter]

The first, what happens if encryption makes it impossible to really tell what anything is? How does a non-net-neutral ISP then determine tiered prices for the content? Does encryption effectively enforce Net Neutrality?

Encryption just shoots yourself in the foot, since an ISP can just put all encrypted traffic into the lowest-speed or highest-cost tier. So instead of the ISP penalizing VoIP, now they will penalize all your traffic.

Tangentially related...

[jdaly]

There has also been some confusion over authorship. Mr. Lee is not to be
confused with Tim Berners-Lee, Web inventor and NetNeutrality proponent.

Re:That last bit.

[mrxak]

Market pressure will keep the MSOs honest, like in any free market. The problem is that with over-regulation being what it is already, we don't have a free market. How many cable providers are in your area? It's not enough to just throw out these net neutrality efforts, but we also need less restrictions on competition. We'd all have a lot more/cheaper bandwidth if it wasn't for franchising laws.

Strange...

[sterno]

I have zero objection to the notion of the carriers tiering their network to expedite services provided that it's provider neutral. That means, if you are going to offer changes that make a VOIP call work better, you have to make it available to everybody, not just your own internal services. What the telecom companies want to do is create a competitive advantage in the IPTV space. If they can force their competition to pay higher rates to provide similar quality of service, then they have an innate advantage just because they control the pipes. That's anti-competitive and harmful to the consumer.

So long as they as it costs as much for them to provide a given service as a competitior, I have no problem with them creating tiered services.

Re:Strange...

[mrxak]

I can see the tv ads now "our ISP doesn't slow down VoIP provider X, so switch to our internet tubes today!"

Provided there are options, things will be just fine. The trick is to make sure the consumer has options. Right now the government has all kinds of barriers to make sure that the only option you have is the one they have given monopoly rights to. That's your problem.

Re:Strange...

[sterno]

However, If ATT wants to compete with vonage by putting a VoIP service on it's own expensive infrastructure, with the added bonus that it WILL work better because they have access to low latency QoS on the ATT network, how is that anti-competative? Vonage still has access to the same infrastructure, if they chose to.


They have that infrastructure because they have control over the pipe into my home. In most locations the competition for that pipe is, at most, two companies (one for phone and one for cable). There is a natural monopoly in this because it's incredibly expensive and legally complicated to wire up individual homes. This was acknowledged long ago and government regulation helped make wiring up all those homes feasible. It is more efficient to have one or two companies have exclusive access, but because it's limited, it's also important for those companies to be regulated.

Claiming this as a 'reason' for needed net neutrality is like saying people who choose to shell out for a high rise apartment need to wall up thier windows because they have an unfair advanatge over a bum living in an alley!

More accurately it'd be like the people who are GIVEN a high rise apartment getting cranky when the people who gave it to them want to come over for a visit and check out their great view.

Re:Strange...

[sterno]

Provided their options, then yes. The trouble is that with the average house getting service from one or two providers, and those providers controlling so much of the access throughout the country, competition is unrealistic. Odds are in this country you have Comcast cable, and AT&T phone service. Now you might get your internet service from some other company (SpeakEasy, AOL, etc), but in the end, all of it comes over the same set of wires that are owned by one of those two companies.

So long as that is the case, competition can only exist in a regime of government regulation that forces it to exist.

Re:Strange...

[Qzukk]

However, If ATT wants to compete with vonage by putting a VoIP service on it's own expensive infrastructure, with the added bonus that it WILL work better because they have access to low latency QoS on the ATT network, how is that anti-competative?

So do you have a problem with accessing google right now? Vonage? Amazon? If there is no problem, then why would Google, Vonage or Amazon pay for "better" access? You're missing out the strongly implied threat that if Google, Vonage, and Amazon do NOT pay up, then "something will happen" to make them wish they had. It wasn't a legal or ethical business practice when the Mafia did it, and it's still not ethical today.

Vonage still has access to the same infrastructure, if they chose to.

No, they have access to their ISP's infrastructure, with the assumption that their ISP is supposed to manage their connection to the other networks.

If I traceroute the path from here to Google, I go through Covad (our ISP), BBnPlanet, L3, and finally Google's network. So according to you, in addition to Covad charging me as a customer, BBnPlanet, L3 and Google's own network have the right to charge me as well? If I go to a Kinko's and pay them to ship a box via FedEx, I should expect to get a bill from FedEx in the mail?

Bandwidth commodity trading

[fahrbot-bot]

This may be the rational against neutrality:

From: Rude Awakening
Bandwidth commodity trading--or the trading of financial instruments that allow carriers to hedge against future dips or upswings in the price of bandwidth through forward-selling and forward-buying--is indeed stalled, according to Tony Craig, executive chairman of Arbinet-thexchange. "There's no underlying physical delivery model with integrity upon which contracts can be based," Craig said. "That doesn't exist in the bandwidth world."

Ditching the neutrality model will allow the telcos to make more money based on trading bandwidth and futures. Even more scary:

From: Making bandwidth a commodity: Reality or just a good idea?
One company in the bandwidth exchange arena is Enron Communications, which is trying to recruit support for the model from service providers. Following the lead of its parent company Enron Corp., which helped transform the natural gas and electricity industry into a commodity, Enron Communications is planning to revolutionize the way bandwidth is exchanged.

While Enron may be out of the picture, an idea they wanted foster must be met with some suspicion...

Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation

[mrxak]

The "big corpos" can also afford to sue the ISPs into the ground if they try to extort them, and customers getting degraded service can jump to another ISP. That is, if deregulation happens, allowing actual competition.

It's really quite simple. If you let congress get involved in the internet, then everybody is going to be lobbying congress 100x more than they are now. Things will turn against the public's interest pretty quickly. And quite frankly, I don't trust the government to get it right to begin with. Any net neutrality legislation will be poorly-worded, include all kinds of pork, and ultimately takes attention away from more important issues.

Net neutrality, rah, rah, bah, humbug

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I'm for net neutrality, the way I'm for world peace, ending world hunger, and all that stuff -- in the abstract.

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I'm sure Osama Bin Laden is for world peace, too -- but I doubt when I speak of world peace I envision the same thing. Or rather, if everyone could agree on a common vision of world peace, we'd have achieved it, we do not have world peace precisely because while everyone might claim to be for world peace, everyone has different views on what that means.

So of course everyone is for net neutrality -- people running around going "Oh noez, big companies are going to take away our freedoms! You're not against freedom, are you?" People running around going "Equality! Neutrality! Freedom!" etc. Of course no one is going to say they're against those things.

But... how do you expect to legistlate or regulate such things if you can't get a concrete definition?

Does net neutrality mean that ATM and frame-relay QoS services go away? (I know of some ISPs who bought frame relay circuits with lots of CIR, and of ISPs who bought frame circuits with virtually 0 CIR -- I know whose traffic has priority on the network (to those who think the net today is neutral -- HAH!))

What about equal access to colocation facilities? Who gets to go in and play with the wires? Be kind of annoying to find out some no-name company registered in another country has 'accidently' attached something to your physical connection... I know of colocations where you can't go without a union guy around, and facilities where techs would refuse to go at night without an armed escort. Someone going to pay for those things for the little guys so everyone is 'equal' and 'neutral'?

Equal opportunities to build network gear? I mean, should that start up being able to stick in custom gear into a colocation whenever they want, or do we want to have some testing first to make sure it's not going to catch fire?

Handicap access? Should we treat everyone's network connection the exact same in terms of QoS, or lack of QoS? Should we have 'equal treatment' in a technical sense, or make sure everyone has 'equal access' to services?

We could just shutdown the Internet completely -- that would be 'equal' and 'net neutral' to everyone. Sort of like Armeggedon would result in world peace after everyone is dead. Certainly satisfies the requirements... right?

Sure, it benefits folks in more affluent urban areas to suggest opening up the 'last mile' (sic), because perhaps the local governments could afford to maintain the last mile (or half mile, or wireless, etc.) Of course, if someone is living in a rural area (like, say, in the Appalachia, where mountains and valleys make wireless a bit iffy) where the 'last mile' might be more like the last five miles... Well! I suspect in those areas there are phone companies that would be thrilled to dump non-profitable infrastructure maintainenance on small rural governments.

Let's hash out some *real* policy details -- starting from the hardware, physical network deployments, physical network operations and maintenance, and working our way up. Let's see how long 'everyone' (sic) is for 'net neutrality' (sic). What is it? How will one test for it? How will one measure it? How will one enforce it?

But, be assured, I am quite for net neutrality, net freedom, and all that stuff. Like world peace. Of course, if I could implement net neutrality the way *I* want it... a lot of you might start the massive whining. For those reasons, I an quite against any legistlation for net neutrality until someone offers a real policy plan -- realistically, the network will never be perfectly neutral. The question is where can we get agreements on what will have to be compromised on (security/reliability of facilities/infrastructure vs. ability to innovate and deploy, emergency services vs. every day use, handicap access vs. 'normal' access, rural low density connectivity vs. urban high density areas vs. access costs vs. maintenance/opex, etc.)

I don't see much policy, mostly I see whining.

Bring on the test!

[Valley Redneck]

Talk about being able to punish bad actors. If this research leads to a little GUI desktop app that tells what packets your ISP is throttling and how much, bad actors will have nowhere to hide. Geeks everywhere will blog the offenders into submission, and "Cable Modems w/no throttling!" suddenly becomes a very nice selling point. Wish I could have made it to Black Hat...

Just my view

[Anon-Admin]

If Microsoft is the answer to the problem, you did not understand the problem!

%s/Microsoft/The Goverment/g

Drug war.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Doesn't make it right, but I'd like to see them jail every internet user on the planet when they all do the same thing.

Back in the '60s a lot of people thought the solution to the drug laws was civil disobedience - lots of people buying and using drugs clogging the legal system, forcing the government to throw in the towel.

You can see how well THAT worked.

Bad Analogy

[Nom du Keyboard]

The airline industry was a cozy cartel before being deregulated in the 1970's.

This is a truly bad comparison. After deregulation new airlines (e.g. People's Express) could get started while previously single-state restricted airlines (e.g. PSA and SouthWest) could expand outside of their state. In fact it took big states like California and Texas just to support a state restricted airline before.

Afterwards all airlines got relatively equally access to the necessary resources (e.g. airports), and I could choose among a large selection of air carriers for my trip.

This isn't the same as when there's one coax cable and one copper twisted pair coming to my house. I don't have a good choice of competition in this monopoly market.

I'll tell you who I am willing to choose however. It will be the first company who brings fiber to my curb at non-extortionaire prices.

Re:Bad Analogy

[pe1chl]

On the other side of the street here, they get fiber to the home for 50 euro per month (= like 60 USD).
This includes 10 Mbps up/down Internet access, telephony, and a basic cable TV package (about 30 channels).
Upgrade to 100 Mbps Internet is also available.

Would you call that reasonable?

Re:Ah! I See!

[NickFortune]

A business simply "doing what they like" is constrained by competition and other market pressures.

Call me a communist, but I never really bought into this concept of a Holy Sacred Market with all these mystical powers or self regulation. It seems to me that a cartel can raise as effective a barrier to competition as a regulator.

Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation

[Abcd1234]

Simple, companies lay down their own copper or fiber. Verizon already did it a few towns away from me, as they've been doing around the country.

Okay. Now *you* set up a company and start doing the same. What? You can't afford it? You don't have the *massive* resources at your disposal that a company like Verizon does? Oh. Hmm... so much for competition, then.

See, competition ain't competition if it's among, say, 2 or 3 big players who can choose to collude to fuck you up the ass. Welcome to the telecom industry.

Technical Corrections

[billstewart]

Sterno's article and Brew Bird's parent article both have significant technical misunderstandings. First of all, even if there are only two companies providing wire into your house (one telco, one cable), that doesn't mean you only have two ISPs available. The copper wire from the telco may be rented to a DSL provider like Covad or New Edge, who run DSLAMs on it to provide Layer 2 ATM service, or the telco can provide the Layer 2 ATM service, and the layer 2 provider can rent the ATM connectivity to a Layer 3 ISP or aggregator or provide IP services themselves, and the IP provider can either provide Internet connectivity or provide PPPoE or similar tunneling service to another ISP. It's that last ISP who decides what order to put the packets on ATM or PPPoE and set policies about what you can or can't do with your broadband connection, and you've got hundreds of choices of ISPs who sell that kind of service. I use Sonic.net, who get ATM DSL from the former PacBell, who provide that on their copper; many years ago I had business DSL service from AT&T, who got ATM DSL from Covad, who used copper from PacBell.

The big impacts on latency are how far you're going (speed of light is about 100,000 miles/sec in fiber or copper), which isn't affected by what provider you use unless you get backhauled to the other coast or something, how long it takes to put a packet on a wire (depends on the packet size and wire size), and how many packets you have to wait for (at the DSL layer, it mainly depends on how oversold your ISP's regional ATM connections are, and at the IP layer, it depends on what order the packets get put on the wire - do your VOIP packets go first, or do they get stuck waiting for a bunch of BitTorrent or FTP packets?

The newer proposals from the telcos propose splitting ADSL or FTTH bandwidth into two parts - one used to carry Internet and one used to carry television. The pricing models I've seen in the press are mainly clueless about people who'd _want_ to buy a whole 25 Mbps of internet and 0 Mbps of TV; TV needs about 15 Mbps, and they're assuming they'll get to sell you 1.5, 3, or 6 Mbps of internet at prices similar to the current services, and we'll see how long that lasts :-) One channel of HDTV needs about 9 Mbps, and the most cut-throat pricing I've seen for Internet transit bandwidth is about $10/Mbps/month, so don't expect to get unicast any-source Internet access to watch HDTV at prime-time as part of the $19.95 loss-leader special; the ISPs will need to use multicast feeds from the content providers to your telco office.

As far as natural monopolies go, the economics and technology were much different back when Theodore Vail and the other robber barons got government monopolies on local telephone service and on radio broadcasting, and the argument was pretty dubious mercantilism back then (and the unnatural monopolies on wireline and radio services prevented them from competing with each other.) They're much more bogus today, but the regulatory bureaucracies are bigger than ever. I may be an official old geezer by now, but that was still way before my time. However, I _was_ around to see cable TV networks installed in much of the country, and the big issues weren't the real cost of deployment - they were the rent-seeking by towns and counties who were much less concerned about the future of telecommunications competition than they were about whose brother-in-law got the street-paving contracts, and about how much free air time the city council and public-access videos got.