Democrats Will Introduce Bill To Bring Back Net Neutrality (thehill.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Monday that Democrats will introduce a net neutrality bill to replace the open internet rules that were repealed in 2017. In a letter to her Democratic colleagues, Pelosi said a bill called the "Save the Internet Act" will be unveiled Wednesday and will be introduced in the Senate as well. The text of the legislation has not been released, and it's unclear what will be included in the bill. Democrats have railed against the Trump administration's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) vote to repeal the net neutrality rules, which happened more than a year ago. The 2015 regulations prohibited internet service providers from blocking or throttling websites or creating internet fast lanes.

Comments

Re:Doesn't solve the problem

[dgatwood]

The ISPs do not have natural monopolies. They have government-granted monopolies.

For the majority of the country, the monopoly is, indeed, a natural monopoly. The average lifespan of a second cable company in most of America is measured in single-digit years. We've seen it time and time again. A new company comes in because the old cable company is charging extortionate prices. The existing company drops their prices, undercutting the new company and preventing them from getting enough subscribers to pay off the interest on their physical plant (all those cable lines). After three to five years, the newcomer gives up and sells off its assets to the incumbent, who gets a new (often government-subsidized) network infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of building it themselves.

A local government can "require" two cable companies all it wants to, but in practice, the only way that is ever going to happen is if that government steps in and pays for the cost of running the cable lines. Otherwise, there is way too much first-mover advantage for a second company to ever succeed. And this is true very nearly everywhere, with the possible exception of major cities.

And if the government is building out the infrastructure anyway, then doing it for a for-profit company is just corporate welfare. Why not instead create competition the right way — by leasing the use of that infrastructure non-preferentially to any competitor that wants to do business in your community? This approach, unlike competing wire providers, actually works in practice.