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Secretive Funding Fuels Ongoing Net Neutrality Astroturfing Controversy
alphadogg writes: The contentious debate about net neutrality in the U.S. has sparked controversy over a lack of funding transparency for advocacy groups and think tanks, which critics say subverts the political process. News stories from a handful of publications in recent months have accused some think tanks and advocacy groups of "astroturfing" — quietly shilling for large broadband carriers. In a handful of cases, those criticisms appear to have some merit, although the term is so overused by people looking to discredit political opponents that it has nearly lost its original meaning. An IDG News Service investigation found that major groups opposing U.S. Federal Communications Commission reclassification and regulation of broadband as a public utility tend to be less transparent about their funding than the other side. Still, some big-name advocates of strong net neutrality rules also have limited transparency mechanisms in place.
Joking aside, the issue here that stands in the way of free market forces prevailing is the overwhelming cost of building the infrastructure required to compete on the same footing as established companies. If we had reasonable alternative ISP's we could vote with our dollars.
The reason telco's managing landlines were regulated so heavily is because they each get a slice of the infrastructure pie to provide their services on. Essentially a government mandated local monopoly, and thus the government dictates how much the telco can charge so that the telco cannot abuse their monopoly. This of course doesn't eliminate abuse nor guarantee that the rates are fair, but instead or the rates that the telco can convince the local officials are fair.
The benefits of this questionable arrangement are clear when you consider that the alternative is each company build its own duplicate infrastructure, which would result in poor under utilization of that infrastructure and result in higher costs passed on to consumers. Essentially this is why some want ISP's treated like utilities.
There are a handful of companies like Google who have the capital to build such infrastructures and bring competition to the table. Even in the presence of a true free market, companies often do not battle by providing competitive pricing, but instead find it more profitable to put money into advertising. If there are only two choices in an area, each will have a fair amount of people who are convinced by the advertising the X is better than Y, and then a fair amount of people who had a bad experience with X and so switched to Y. X and Y both charge way more than what it really costs to provide the service. They don't really have to coordinate price fixing, they simply come to the same conclusion after doing market research of what people are most likely to pay for service. Even if one has a slightly higher price than the other, the large profit margin will make up for the lost customers.