5 ms·

"In short, the regulation is needed to protect against ISPs prioritizing their profits over their consumers" It's not encouraging to see that your broad, summa

• losteric 9y ago
  Business prioritizes profit over people. Regulations exist to rule out profit-seeking behavior that is ultimately detrimental to society
• kelnos 9y ago
  It's part of the bargain: we recognize that these sorts of companies form monopolies[0], and in exchange for those monopolies, we impose regulation to keep them from engaging in the negative, anti-consumer practices often associated with running a monopoly. We expect that if there were a competitive landscape, the companies that succeed would find a balance between profit and providing the services and quality that customers demand, but we don't have a competitive landscape, so we need to ensure that happens by other means. [0] My take on why this is ok, and why we don't really want the proliferation of these sorts of companies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858078
• thomastjeffery 9y ago
  Internet is a utility, and it is controlled predominantly by 6 companies. There is simply not enough competition to rely on the free market to keep net neutrality as a fiscal priority. Until the oligopoly is broken up, and everyone has competitive access to the internet, we need some way to ensure that net neutrality happens. Without net neutrality, businesses using the internet itself , and even free nonprofit services will be unable to compete with large corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. because they won't be able to afford to pay ISPs for the right to reach customers without unreasonable bandwidth constraints.
  • rsync 9y ago
    "There is simply not enough competition to rely on the free market to keep net neutrality as a fiscal priority." You're answering a question I didn't pose. I wasn't even specifically speaking about net neutrality - something I am sympathetic to. I was lamenting the fact that the level of discourse is lower than I'd hope it to be. Knee jerk "that guys not on my team" responses aren't helping to encourage me.
    • thomastjeffery 9y ago
      > You're answering a question I didn't pose. I am clearing up some points you seem to have misunderstood or glossed over. > > > "In short, the regulation is needed to protect against ISPs prioritizing their profits over their consumers" > > It's not encouraging to see that your broad, summary statement is nonsensical. > > A for-profit business firm prioritizes their profits over their consumers by definition. Since, as you pointed out, a business prioritizes profits over customers, there needs to be an incentive for these businesses to prioritize their customers. That incentive is either competition or regulation. The first choice is not currently workable, since competition between ISPs is impractical. This is the same problem that net neutrality exists to prevent, just in a different problem space: Without a free market, competition is unfeasible. > Knee jerk "that guys not on my team" responses aren't helping to encourage me. Could you elaborate on what you see as a "knee jerk response"? I am not seeing any here.
      • waterhouse 9y ago
        > The first choice is not currently workable, since competition between ISPs is impractical. Could you explain why that is?
        • thomasfortes 9y ago
          Would you like to have 30 different companies digging your street to lay cables? Or 10 energy cables over your street because energy competition would be great? Even in a perfect world, infrastructure is a natural monopoly. The government could handle all the big scale infrastructure and let small players handle the last mile, but that's not the case and even if it was, people would still complain.
• robertpateii 9y ago
  It's not nonsensical, but it does imply some assumptions about a free market and the social contract. Governments exist to benefit their citzens. A free market is a great benefit thanks to competition forcing out businesses that don't prioritize their consumers. This assumes perfect competition though and it assumes a lot of things that are not realistic such as there being no barriers to entering a market. Clearly there are massive barriers to becoming a new ISPs so some non-zero amount of regulation is reasonable. tl;dr: It's reasonable for a captialist government to intervene when the free market fails to incentivize businesses to benefit citizens.
  • tripzilch 9y ago
    > a free market and the social contract you have to pick one!