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Yeah... it's sort of a lose-lose honestly, I think the model used in Canada and the UK is quite good - the government forced the big ISPs to lease last-mile lin
by problems 10y ago
Yeah... it's sort of a lose-lose honestly, I think the model used in Canada and the UK is quite good - the government forced the big ISPs to lease last-mile lines. Keeps a working free market with competition, many people started switching to smaller ISPs with lower rates and unlimited bandwidth caps, a few years later the big guys increased their speeds, increased their caps and made it relatively cheap to go to unlimited.
It fixes more than just the net neutrality problem, it also fixes the lack of infrastructure improvement by making big ISPs have a monopoly on last mile improvements for the first year or two - they're greatly incentivized to keep improving infrastructure and speeds or lose customers to the smaller guys who can run leaner. It's a pretty clever regulatory model that manipulates incentives quite well.
I'm sure there are flaws, regulatory models are rarely perfect, but from what I've seen over the last 10 years going from 5mbit DSL to gigabit fibre for only about 1.5x the cost, I'd say it's doing a pretty good job, without any net neutrality enforcement or any complicated legislation - just by giving the regulatory authority the ability to compel ISPs to lease lines.