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Is Net Neutrality Really Needed?
darrad writes "An opinion piece over at the Wall Street Journal lays out an alternate theory on why we have new regulations from the FCC on Net Neutrality. There is a lot of talk about this subject, particularly among the tech sector. Most of the talk centers around preventing companies from charging more for traffic or black holing other traffic. However, the question should be asked, is granting control over the Internet to political appointees the way to go? Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
We all know what we want: We want Comcast to be unable to charge Google extra for the service of letting customers access Youtube. But it's really hard to phrase this well enough and clearly enough that it lets network admins do the kinds of QoS and traffic shaping things they need to do in order to provide good service, or for that matter, block unwanted traffic entirely.
I am not at all convinced that getting the government involved will improve my life.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
It's not a choice: one is not "handing it over control to political appointees". It is simply saying not packet dicrimination. So yes there will be regulators but they do not have fiat control, just enforcement responsibilities.
Thus this discussion is starting out on a false premise.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
Yes.
Should ISPs be free from regulation?
No.
Do you trust someone with a profit motive to screw with your connection, or someone with a political motive?
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
Yes, very much so, which is why we dont want companies regulating it. Content or availability.
To assume that a lack of government regulation is the same as no regulation is to completely overlook the corporate regulation that those who want net neutrality oppose. I would always rather have the government regulating instead of the profit driven anti-competitive private sector.
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so- Zaphod beeblebrox
In an environment of "the customer is always right," the market can be trusted to deliver exactly what is in the customers' best interests without any form of outside interference.
In an environment of telco monopolies, multi-year contracts, terms which the provider can change at will, and more; it becomes necessary to restrict what providers can and cannot do because the customers are left powerless other than as voters who tell the government what they want.
Net neutrality is a misnomer. What is needed is are regulations to stop ISPs from doing any or all of the following:
Discrimating by site. Non-DDoS traffic to site "A" should not cost more than going to site "B".
Add/modifying/deleting in flight traffic. Throttling/QoS is one thing, adding adds via Phorm, or changing people's postings to Web boards in flight is another.
Blocking/slowing down one site, just to make another site seem faster.
Unneeded snooping on connections. Traffic should be considered PII, stored only a few days to check for security breaches, then binned. It is not to be sold to any ad companies who want router logs.
Expanding infrastructure. We never see Japanese ISPs wringing their hands in front of the Diet and saying how they are being driven into the ground by people in Tokyo watching TV on their phones. Nor do we see this in Korea or Singapore. ISPs build infrastructure, not just whine about people actually using their services.
We need to address issues exactly, not bundle them under the hazy "net neutrality" topic.
How cute. The WSJ has dug up somebody who thinks that only governments are capable of "regulation".
States generally reserve the most dramatic flavor of regulation for themselves "Don't do X, or men with guns will put you in a cage"; but corporations, particularly monopolists and oligopolists, are easily capable of exerting influence on par with fines, taxation, censorship and almost any other flavor of regulation short of that promising imprisonment or death....
In what way is a large, powerful institution that can control the flow of information NOT a government? In what way is showing preference for certain packets over others NOT regulation?
Anarchism is feudalism. There is no such thing as total deregulation--the choice is about who gets to regulate and how much say you and I get in it.
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
I look at the link and I think, "Gosh, is the Wall Street Journal capable of delivering an objective opinion on this? They do, after all, have a stake in the issue."
So I click through, and there's the sub-head: "The campaign to regulate the Internet was funded by a who's who of left-liberal foundations."
Technically, I have to actually read the article to come up with an opinion. But I had a chili dog for lunch, and I don't need to be nauseated any further. I might even agree with the article's conclusion, but I doubt I'll find the reasoning sound.
An opinion piece over at the Wall Street Journal
Since being taken over by NewsCorp, I'm not sure you could describe any of their articles as anything else. They're just GOP/big business shills now, RIP the news organization that used to make a meaningful contribution to our society.
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
You might as well ask, "Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the privately owned bridges be free from regulation?" or how about "Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the banks remain free from regulation?" or maybe "Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the electric company remain free from regulation?"
In any case the answer is "NO!" Vital resources should be regulated by the government because the government, for all its flaws, is ultimately answerable to the people and private companies have shown again and again they put their profits first and do great harm to society in pursuit of that, whether it be by dumping poison in our nation's rivers, gouging individuals using monopolies, Misusing money put into banks with risky investments, or leveraging resources to influence politics for profit.
A better question isn't if the government should regulate things, but "Why are we still letting private companies and foreign nations" influence our politics through campaign contributions, lobbying, and political adverts when the vast majority of individuals thing it should be illegal?"
If they were willing to either A) deliver all of us the kind of bandwidth promised in their Unlimited*** plans, or B) charge by the megabyte instead of by the month, this should be moot. I paid for that bandwidth, and I'll use it as I see fit. If I need to prioritize my own traffic, I'll do so with my router. That way my streaming video doesn't interfere with my VOIP calls.
But they're not talking about that, are they? They don't want my streaming video to interfere with their other customers' VOIP calls... which would seem to suggest that they don't actually have the capacity to deliver their Unlimited****** (up to) 10Mbps** that they sold to everyone in my neighborhood.
We have this fundamental problem where these companies have oversold the bandwidth, and the only solution they're willing to consider is to invent rules that will give you less of what you paid for. Because any other solution would force them to abandon an already-misleading marketing gimmick.
The Internet is not going to remain free, regardless of what happens. Either Telcos and content providers integrate to add value to their commoditized dumb pipes and control where users go through caps and channel pricing, or the government regulates what Telcos and ISPs can and cannot do to users. One is the guaranteed effect of a capitalistic system in a market with very high barriers to entry, the other is the result of a population wanting some input on how a market prone to the creation of monopolies.
This means that the argument that a lack of regulation is the same as a free system is a flat-out lie. It necessarily implies that corporations will never engage in monopolistic rent-seeking, which is clearly false.
The only question then is: who gets to control the Internet? A corporation, or a bureaucrat? Furthermore, will control be left to an entity that is guaranteed to create a system that is designed to maximize its profit, or to an entity where the common citizens has even a chance of providing input?
This doesn't mean that any regulation is good. Some regulation will lead to the same result as no regulation. Some will lead to worse results. But there is at least the chance that it will lead to a better result. What's more, other countries have already shown what kind of regulatory environment is more beneficial to users than the one that currently exists in the US. So it's not that it's hard - it just requires some politicians to be afraid of their constituents.
Finally, I'd like to point something out that Americans seem to have a hard time understanding: a corporation is not a person. Furthermore, a corporation behaves like a sociopath. This means that things that benefit a corporation are not the same that benefit society as a whole. Remember that next time a corporate lobbyists argues that what's good for them is good for the country.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The FCC doesn't "control" the internet. It is merely prohibiting ISPs from controlling their customers' access to the internet. The electric company sells you electricity, they don't get to tell you how you can and can't use it - that's the nature of net neutrality.
The crux of John Fund's ENTIRE article is, to paraphrase, "Net Neutrality is bad because it was created by SOCIALISTS! AND MARXISTS! AND THEY DON'T DENY IT!"
That is, of course, the problem with a lot of the commentary about Net Neutrality (although more on the side against Net Neutrality than for, I've noticed, although maybe that's just my own biases showing). None of the commentary actually address the issues of why Net Neutrality is or isn't necessary. Rather, it devolves into arguments about collateral issues like crying socialism like John Fund does here. He thinks Net Neutrality is bad because a "socialist" came up with it. As if a person's political views will render a person's idea per se invalid.
There are always those who thinks the way to score political points is to try to fit the word "socialism" as many times as they can into an article and call it an argument.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
FTA:
"The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility."
How will the consumers be losers? We're treating the companies that maintain the conduits of the Internet like a public utility and we should keep it that way. Do we have the water and power utilities telling us how to use our water and power? Should the water company prevent us from buying bottled water or buy it only from them? What if there are new start-ups with good ideas - I doubt these regulations will "stifle" these newcomers.
Of course we don't want bad regulations. But to say we shouldn't have any regulations is a bad idea (see Wall Street as a guide).
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
A WSJ blogger? Are you kidding me? Has Slashdot fallen so far that now you're promoting for-profit hacks like this guy?
For shame. This article is 100% unrecyclable trash.
Except it isn't.
To paraphrase the old management joke: big, fast, cheap - pick two.
And not everybody is going to pick the same two. Especially politicians who don't care about your data.
Is your driving need...
Streaming/bulk data? a per-packet charge is going to cost you a LOT. The data difference between a Netflix-streaming couch potato and email-checking grandma is several orders of magnitude. Will your bill be four-five digits? or will her bill be pennies? Remember: "all traffic is equal" so you're going to pay per packet, and grandma's 'net bill isn't going to approach zero.
Time-sensitive data? you want low-latency pings for your multiplayer games, you'll have to pay for prioritization - or, well, you can't because "all traffic is equal". Get your packets in line behind a buffered movie.
Cheap data? since nobody can pay for prioritization even if they want to, you all get cheap data - and cheap does not necessarily mean inexpensive.
Careful what you ask for. You might get it.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
> maybe that's because there isn't much difference between the two.
Especially in the Internet biz. For 99% of customers the choice is between a huge bloated government granted and regulated monopoly telco and the almost as bloated government grated and regulated cable company. Then there is a couple of wireless options here and there most of which are owned and operated by the monopoly telco and will never deliver enough bandwidth to matter.
But the bigger problem with the FCC is the newspeak. Whenever progs open their piehole words come out but they don't mean what normal people assume they mean. "Freedom is Slavery" "Ignorance is Power" "Ministry of Truth" "Network Neutrality" You can bet your last dollar that the absolute last thing the FCC has in mind is "Neutrality".
Hopefully the courts will knock this one down as fast as the last attempts by the FCC to exceed their mandate.
Democrat delenda est
I think he's probably referring to his wireless internet plan, and you're thinking strictly in terms of wires.
The entire article just talks about what leftist-liberal-marxist-socialist groups are supporting network neutrality. There is no evidence that this guy even knows what the issue is. You could replace "Network Neutrality" with "Lowering Taxes" or "Abortion" and not even notice. There's only one single attempt to even talk about the legislation:
There's little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic.
That's the only "fact" he stated, and it is completely wrong.
There are no "natural monopolies". The idea of "natural monopolies" was one that was popularized to justify the government interfering in the telephone market to create the original AT&T monopoly.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Q: Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?
/. article earlier this week about how Comcast lets it's ISP peering points slam to 100% and congest, because it is in their interest to create poor response for streaming competition and force those companies to pay to locate services within their networks for fees.
As somebody who has already been modded to 5 said, Internet yes - ISPs no. And what is the internet other than a collection of Tier 1,2 and 3 providers. And the Tier 1s, the AT&Ts and Level 3 and such, they have a oligopoly partially caused by de-regulation. Regional competition in the DSL space, like Rhythms and Covad, was shoved aside because of fair use considerations to the central offices for equipment. They were shut out. Cable - same thing. The Comcasts were never mandated to allow their cable infrastructures to be shared. So they didn't. Which is why only now the Telecom's, using the old phone infrastructure, can complete against cable. Celestial like DirectPC never had a chance in hell to be anything other than a last resort technology.
So de-regulation caused this oligopoly. There was already a
If the FCC doesn't stop this via regulation, the Tier 1 providers will simply force the upstream peering points to differentiate classes of service. Tier 2 providers can only send so much Skype into AT&T's network and any more than 10% of the pipe will get congested using QoS. Because it's not in AT&T's interest to support the flow of voice when they themselves are in the business of carrying long distance and supporting the PSTN. Why should they? Who will stop them if they band with Global Crossing and Level 3 and Qwest and say "why the fuck should we cut our own revenue carrying Skype when we don't want to?" And if the Tier 2 provider buys a bigger pipe to the Tier 1 carrier, the Tier 1 carrier can say "I don't give a shit if you have a 10Meg or 10Gig pipe, you can only send us 1Mb/s of Skype traffic and that's all."
Who can insure that their isn't collusion? Only the Federal government can.
As others have pointed out, it is in the Tier 1 providers INTERESTS to create artificial scarcity of bandwidth. A Tier 3 provider buying upstream pipe from a Tier 2 should be federally mandated to buy at least 50% of the bandwidth he is selling in aggregate to end customers. There is PLENTY of dark fiber and equipment to handle that, even if we are talking about a company like Comcast that sells an entire medium size city all 100Mb pipes using new DOCSIS specs. Add up all the bandwidth sold, and federally MANDATE that they purchase upstream capacity to support all that.
But that is the future of electric service, or haven't you heard of the smart grid? They want to charge different rates based on their costs, in the case of electricity they want to charge by time of day. ISPs are talking about charging based on their costs, which vary by time, destination and QoS.
Democrat delenda est
Should users be regulated on how they use the Internet? No.
Should providers be regulated on how they restrict users of the Internet? Yes.
Do you really want a Microsoft funded provider slowing down you Google searches to the extent that Google is unusable?
Do you want a provider owned by one media conglomerate slowing down streaming video from everywhere else so that they are the only option?
Do you want a provider black holeing requests for web sites they do not agree with?
Do you want all your search requests re-directed to Bing?
Without regulation providers can make decisions on how customers interact with the Internet that are better for their bottom line and not necessarily for the customer's benefit.
There is a major flaw in the article's argument. They state that most people are fine with the way the Internet works now. That part is true as net neutrality is the norm right now. The flaw is what do we do when net neutrality is not the norm and people fell issues of providers restricting traffic? Do we regulate then? Isn't that a bit late? There is no problem with what providers are doing now; the problem is what they could, and some companies are trying to, do in the future.
There is very little problem with the Internet. This is a solution looking for a problem. All this is going to do is legalize companies discriminating against other sites online. They are going to say it is legal for me to make sure my network runs well, since I can't control the big bad Internet out there. So they will QoS the local traffic to give everything local better traffic rates. Then they will basically lackmail companies like Yahoo, Netflix, and other CDNs (Content Distribution Networks) like Akamai, one of the first. You want great web performance to your web site you should put your content servers in our network for huge monthly fee. Thus those sites will work great because they are part of the local network. Backbone providers will do the same thing by offering large websites direct connections, now they are part of the network, so they can QoS that traffic. The entire time every company will be saying, Hey you said we could manage traffic to make our networks run the best possible, it's not my fault that I don't/can't control traffic out there on the big bad Internet. This is how these companies will grab as much money off the table as they possibly can. Then they will say heavy bandwidth users are a problem for making our network run like crap. So we are going to go to a measured service since we can manage traffic to make sure our network runs fine. Then consumers will still pay $40-$60 a month for Internet but have limits like 30gig and each extra gig is $5. All this does is legalize what they have wanted to do for years, but haven't because they were afraid of market forces in response to this type of plan.
All this has done is screw the consumer, and screw innovation.
You want real Internet competition. Stop letting the telcos and the cable companies have monopolies on the last mile. Stop letting them use their historic monopoly status to trample and destroy anyone who tries to compete at the local last mile level. Telcos and cable companies have had monopolies on the last mile for 40-100 years. The cities and the states are then bought off by these companies to make it impossible to even run your own lines to compete against them. These companies have used their monopoly status to run all the other ISPs out of business. They have propped up the Internet side using the other side of the house (phone & TV) to drop prices so low that others can't compete, and attacked other ISPs by lying about them, then once they are gone they start jacking up prices. All you have to do is look at how many independent ISPs there were 15 years versus now. Now about 90% of the US uses one of 10 ISPs. That isn't free market competition, that is monopoly leveraging and market collusion. I have seen telcos and cable companies tell the state and cities that independent ISPs have no business trying to compete with them for the Internet. That it is their domain, they know best and if you don't want huge problems you shouldn't allow these guys to exist. The telcos and cable companies were very pissed that the independent ISPs existed years ago. They saw them as taking food out of their mouths, they were an affront, and should not be allowed to exist. They waged a campaign against independent ISPs and were very successful, using lobbying and fake grassroots groups.
All of this just allowed the consumer to get screwed again. Only the state forcing cities to open up is going to help. I doubt the feds have the authority to do anything about the local level.
In a truly "free market", private companies would have to own the telephone poles on which they run their lines, and to own the telephone poles, they'd probably have to own the sidewalks. So then they'd snap up sidewalks in walled-off shapes that keep anyone else from putting up poles or running wires into their fiefdom.
Or the government would have to lease the right to run data lines on public property to anyone who asked. But then that government would have to set a price, which means the government is now in the internet business whether they like it or not.
I guess what I'm getting at is that a "free market" for broadband cannot and will never exist.
The article says, I quote:
The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."
Wow. Just Wow. So is the real goal is to turn an ISP into a public utility? Ok, so the author implies that the net neutrality has been perpetrated by the same groups as those who funded the "Fairness doctrine" attempt. Bad thing in my opinion, I was designed and would have put conservative side of the American public spectrum in disadvantage. But my question is this: Theoretically, how and how could the ability to deny ISPs ability to provide "tierred" Internet put any one of these political wings in a disadvantage?
Consumers buy business class service is just dumb. That is like suggesting if you're not happy with your flight options then buy your own plane.
The US government is refusing to regulate the internet correctly and big business is just waiting to turn it into cable tv. Unfortunately people seem to uninterested both sides will end up fucking it up completely.
I have a lot of problems with how the FCC regulates the air waves.
The Fairness Doctrine is being leveraged to ensure that there are only two viable political parties.
The Fairness Doctrine was adopted in 1949 and repealed by the FCC in 1987. Its not being leveraged to do anything. So you've got problems, but they don't seem to be with the FCC.
The two-party duopoly is a product of the electoral system, and has been pretty much a consistent feature of the US since the adoption of the Constitution, which long predates the Fairness Doctrine -- and has unsurprisingly outlived the Fairness Doctrine.
The Mississippi river flows through Louisiana. You ain't getting to the gulf from Iowa without going through Louisiana.
There are three power grids in the USA. East, West, and Texas. You want to sell power over the grid, you have to hook up to the one in your area. They don't overlap. No body is stopping you from laying down your own transmission lines. Go for it... Oh look, it's ludicrously expensive.
There is only so much space in the RF spectrum. If two signals get sent out on the same frequency, neither will be received. Now, that's not a monopoly, but it's a limited resource.
And in case you weren't aware, those are three examples where there is heavy regulation. Not because the government goes around regulating things willy nilly, but because without fair rules to play by, boats would crash into each other, we'd have constant blackouts, and radio would be garbled. Are they perfectly fair? No. But they do try. The resource is limited, the position unchangeable, or the bar to entry is way too high, and so they're natural monopolies.
Either you trust the government : no choice of provider (that much, history should prove)
Or you trust business : you can choose (for a little more money probably, yes, deal with it) a better provider, additionally you can build something yourself
Talk about false dichotomies. I don't trust either one and neither should you. I trust restrictions on each and a balance of power. We have separate branches of government because concentrating too much power in any one branch inevitably leads to abuse of power. We have government oversight of business to curb the inevitable excesses of corporate behavior. We allow corporations AND individuals to have a voice so that government does not abuse its power. We also have freedom of the press to keep both government and corporations (more) honest.
Both government and corporations can be a powerful force for good as well as evil in society. Laws and careful checks and balances are how we ensure that they both remain more on the good side than the bad.
Additionally your notion that there is always a choice with corporations simply isn't the case. I have precisely one choice of corporation when buying electricity, garbage disposal, natural gas, and mail delivery. I have precisely two choices for landline telecom services (a recent development from one) only one of which provides internet service to my address. Some businesses simply are natural monopolies and the only realistic way to keep them in check is through government oversight and regulation.
I challenge you to name one current unregulated market, or one company with a complete monopoly that isn't created by government regulation.
I'll take the second one first. Microsoft. They have been convicted of abusing monopoly power in a court of law and Microsoft did not achieve its monopoly with help from government regulation.
If you want unregulated markets that's easy too. Illegal drugs. In fact any black market - counterfeits, prostitution, etc. Oh, there are laws but that doesn't make them regulated markets. There are plenty of small scale monopolies on local markets for the distribution of illegal narcotics. Try competing with drug traffickers and you are very likely to wind up dead. That sounds an awful lot like an unregulated market to me.
Exactly.. its always been regulated. And it wouldn't need additional regulation if the CORPORATIONS (telcos) continued play fairly well as has been done up through around 2000. What has changed is not the "cry for Net Neutrality", what has changed is the big ISPs committing felonies (man-in-the-middle-attacks), lying about service, and now trying to DOUBLE-charge for packet transfer (since sources and sinks both ALREADY pay for their internet connections). The WSJ piece is exactly that -- a sound-bite clustered piece of shit written by a shill for those would balkanize the Internet and return us to the days of AOL's prison-wall gardens.
> This was pretty much the case during the dial-up era, but the capital
> demands for high-speed service makes it difficult to get a true
> competitive marketplace.
As someone who was there, yes the capital demands ramped up with the move to 56K and DSL (Go lookup the price of a fully loaded Portmaster 3 in 1996/7 vs a Portmaster 2 and a sack of modems) but that wasn't what changed. In that era the telcos were mostly out of the picture, selling (raping) the ISPs for dialup lines on a even basis. Then they realized the Internet wasn't just a passing fad and got in bigtime at prices nobody could hope to compete with. The head of AT&T was on the tube saying things like "Yea we expect to lose money for five plus years but we can afford it." Small 'Mom & Pop' operations started dying left and right about then as the price for 'unlimited' dialup fell through the $19.95/month level and started toward $9.99/month. Those prices were lower than the cost of telco service to handle a customer and that wasn't even taking into account the leased circuit upstream, normal business costs, etc.
But there were still big players capitalized well enough to stay in the game and the laws were on their side. Then Rep Tauzin (R-BellSouth) spearheaded the effort to gut the CLECs, the markets panicked, the equipment makers were left with worthless paper for the equipment they had been self financing to the CLECs and before anyone realized what was happening it had spread throughout the Internet and the .bomb was in full swing.
> Maybe the solution is for a municipal utility to provide a
> fiber optic line from the residence to a C.O.
That is one way. A better way would be to revisit the AT&T breakup and this time do it right. A regulated monopoly with the part that is a natural monopoly, the physical plant comprising the CO and the wires/fibers/right of ways and the rest a totally unregulated entity who buys access to an equal footing with as many additional players wish to enter the market.
Democrat delenda est
Let me quote from the preamble to the GNU General Public License:
To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights.
That principle applies to so many different situations. People often discuss freedom under the false assumption that you have freedom unless the government takes it away from you. That view is way too simplistic. There are many threats to freedom from many sources. The fact is, lots of people will try to restrict your freedom unless they are prevented from doing so. That is what government regulation is about (when it's done properly, which certainly is not always the case): protecting your freedom by denying others the right to restrict it.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
NO, the Woodrow Wilson Administration wanted to be able to control this new technology and made a deal with AT&T to do so. The Woodrow Wilson Administration believed (probably correctly) that it was easier to control one large company than a bunch of small ones.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Note:Anti-Net Neutrality arguments are automatically marked down as "troll."
That's because almost all of them are.
The vast majority of shrill comments and ad hominem I've seen are on the pro-side. Yours is a blessed cool breeze, and I appreciate that.
I just can't imagine a good reason to let Comcast restrict the data I pass to other Internet hosts over data lines I built with my tax dollars.
The government has its hands in so many things, it's nearly impossible to find something that your tax dollars didn't help fund. Or, better yet, both fund and restrict, like tobacco.
To stick with a close analogy, roads and rail have been largely built by government dollars. However, UPS, FedEx, and USPS can charge different rates to different customers who ship large and small, and heavy and light packages.
With an Internet "utility" it's about impossible to provide different rates on speed of delivery, such as you can with a physical shipment. (Heck, higher latency traffic is generally more expensive, like satellite based providers.) Bandwidth and uptime are what they have that they can use for pricing.
The FCC has shown over its decades that it is not geek-friendly. It restricts speech (the seven word you can't say on television, the fairness doctrine), and it restricts technology (cell phones weren't allowed for about 20 years after the technology was developed).
I think what's most likely is that the FCC starts relying on an RFC/ANSI/W3C-like system -- slow, behind, though partially useful.