The sticking point for me is that the market is already regulated such that it makes it very difficult for a competitor to challenge companies who engage in exploitative practices (and for similar reasons, the incentive to collude is extremely high). In a free market, net neutrality wouldn't need to be regulated because companies who attempted to enact business plans like the AT&T plan described in the article would rapidly find themselves losing marketshare to competitors.
I'm not really okay with the idea of regulating net neutrality from an ideological perspective, but from a practical one, we're kind of stuck with the market we have - effective regional monopolies are granted to a very small number of companies, and there is very little space for counterbalance from competition (which is why Google Fiber is such a Huge Frickin' Deal!). Left unfettered, the end result would likely be that the AT&Ts and Comcasts end up leeching their customers dry on both ends of the pipe, because those customers don't have any alternative.
In my ideal world, there would be no need to regulate net neutrality because I could penalize bad companies by refusing to do business with them, and getting my friends and family to do the same, but we don't have those options - choosing an ISP is a lot like choosing which knee you want to be hit in. In a market where companies have been granted regulatory monopolies, the invisible hand is rather ineffective.
Why would a free market guarantee net neutrality? All the big players could still prefer to offer products that curtail it. There's no logical step ensuring net neutrality.
An example - in Australia, there is an ISP called Internode, which used to be run by a techie called Hackett. They were very much for user's rights and net neutrality, and were always at the forefront of lobbying the government for users. Their support centers are in-country, and the web tools they offer make techies happy.
But they only have a sliver of the ISP pie, despite the very high quality product - because that shit does not come cheap. They're 50-100% more expensive. Instead the public run towards big brands like Optus - who actively engage in tactics like obscuring the structure of your bill to make it harder to understand, or engage in openly deceptive marketing, and see users as cattle to manipulate. Or they'll go to bargain-basement ISPs with woeful service, then complain about that service and give you a hateful stare when you suggest they pay a little more for good service.
I can see zero evidence to suggest that 'net neutrality' is a killer feature that would be automatically enabled by a free market.
Internode are amazing in every aspect and everyone I've switched to them continue to use them and continue to thank me to this day. The customer service is second to none: http://xkcd.com/806/
IIRC they were bought out by Adam internet. They were also among the first (the first?) to introduce naked DSL, which you still can't get here in the UK apparently.
The telcos are competing over very limited resources (easements necessary to build fiber, etc.). In the absence of a regulatory system you'd have cartels instead.
They may have been monopolies once, but they're not anymore. At least in the US. Most people already have two broadband subscriptions: home cable broadband and HSPA+ or LTE. The home cable broadband is in competition with ADSL throughout much of the nation, and the HSPA+/LTE providers are in fierce competition everywhere.
Furthermore, what makes you say this:
>In a free market, net neutrality wouldn't need to be regulated because companies who attempted to enact business plans like the AT&T plan described in the article would rapidly find themselves losing marketshare to competitors.
I certainly would not expect them to lose market share.
I'm not really sure that you can call mobile data networks competitors to home broadband, if for no other reason than that their usage is aggressively capped, and is device-specific. I've never heard of someone cancelling their cable broadband because they can just tether their phone for all their household's internet needs instead.
ADSL vs cable is certainly the big battlefield right now, but even then, you're dealing with one telco and one cable provider. Time-Warner and Comcast are so reviled that it's practically a joke now, but people still subscribe to their services by the millions, because they don't have any actual alternative.
> Furthermore, what makes you say this...I certainly would not expect them to lose market share.
If I had my choice of several competing, technologically-equivalent ISPs, and mine decided to start charging extra for full-speed access to Netflix (or Netflix started charging me extra because I was an EvilISP subscriber, meaning that sending me those bytes costs them extra), I'd jump ship to a competitor who didn't in a heartbeat.
The home cable broadband is in competition with ADSL throughout much of the nation...
Except the only cable company and the only phone company often collude to convince the state legislature to outlaw anything that could actually compete with them, like municipal fiber projects.
Why wouldn't you expect them to lose market share? They're actively hindering customers from their desired actions. Doesn't that typically mean customers will look for alternatives?
I don't think they'd always be given the choice to. Especially something like Netflix, which directly competes with cable companies and their online offerings.
The population didn't elect Bush II the first time [1]. The electoral college did, making it the fourth time a candidate winning the popular vote didn't win the electorate vote.
Would the alternatives of McCain or Romney have resulted in the current NSA scandal not happening? No, it's silly to think that way, especially because it was happening (on a slightly smaller scale) when Bush was president. How it's being handled now might not be the best way to handle it, but would it have been handled differently with McCain or Romney in the Oval Office?
And making a grand statement about how a vastly large group of people doing something you perceive as not being in their best interest doesn't mean they didn't believe it to be in their best interest.
1) Yes, the population did elect Bush II. According to the rules of the game, the population picked him. If you want to get all picky over it, you can note that XX% of the population didn't even vote - so technically the population didn't pick any of them! Har har.
2) The alternatives of McCain, Romney, and Gore were also chosen to be the alternatives by the population.
3) I'm not sure what this all has to do with the NSA.
4) You seem to think that net neutrality would be in their interest. Yet they seem to have selected politicians which oppose it. So that would be one (possible) example of the population acting against their own interests (as you see it).
I'm not really okay with the idea of regulating net neutrality from an ideological perspective, but from a practical one, we're kind of stuck with the market we have - effective regional monopolies are granted to a very small number of companies, and there is very little space for counterbalance from competition (which is why Google Fiber is such a Huge Frickin' Deal!). Left unfettered, the end result would likely be that the AT&Ts and Comcasts end up leeching their customers dry on both ends of the pipe, because those customers don't have any alternative.
In my ideal world, there would be no need to regulate net neutrality because I could penalize bad companies by refusing to do business with them, and getting my friends and family to do the same, but we don't have those options - choosing an ISP is a lot like choosing which knee you want to be hit in. In a market where companies have been granted regulatory monopolies, the invisible hand is rather ineffective.