Nobody's owed anything "at a reasonable price to the user". The right to free speech isn't conditional on books/newspapers/pamphlets being cheap. The kind of me

Nobody's owed anything "at a reasonable price to the user". The right to free speech isn't conditional on books/newspapers/pamphlets being cheap. The kind of meddling that's most dangerous is government meddling. Simply keeping FCC rules out of the Internet delivers that "no meddling" benefit, for free. And if things are a little expensive, a little limited by private contracts, a little abused by current providers? The march of consumer demand and technology will fix that in a few years. I've been a Time-Warner customer, and Comcast, and AT&T, and RCN, and Sonic.net. I've hit throttling -- typically for peak total usage, rather than specific applications. But so what? A regulation from the FCC can't make more bandwidth. It can't keep up with even a year or two's needs in flexible new policies to handle changing traffic/application mixes. A competitive market with differentiated services, new technology, and new entrants can keep up. Way too much defeatism is inherent in the idea that the cable-DSL duopoly is all we'll ever have. That defeatism can be a self-fulfilling prophesy: encumber the industry with national pricing & transit regulations, tell everyone "we've made it so these two safe government-approved choices are all you'll ever need", and you might make that so -- just as the FCC stagnated things for decades with its power-concentrating telephony and broadcast industry regulations. Twenty years ago, we didn't have a broadband duopoly. We had a zero-opoly. So even a duopoly is an improvement. And it won't last. It's too easy to incrementally string more wires or deploy new wireless technologies, to precisely those customers who chafe under any current limits. The same competition that got us this far is still working, and doesn't require a bossy Washington DC agency staffed by censors and political-party hack lawyers to save us from ourselves.