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> Though the idea that any ISP that actually tried this in a competitive market would still have any customers left by the end of the week seems mighty suspicio

> Though the idea that any ISP that actually tried this in a competitive market would still have any customers left by the end of the week seems mighty suspicious. I'm fine with letting them try because meaningful competition means consumers can go elsewhere. I hope there are some interesting business models to discover such as ISP side security filtering, ISP prioritisation of traffic, cheaper prices for consumer concessions, allowing content providers to pay for priority etc.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago
Two things. First, I'm as up for a theoretical discussion as the next guy, but if we're going to have a serious conversation about what would happen if the regional market for internet service was highly competitive, shouldn't we have some kind of at least theoretical non-ridiculous mechanism of actually achieving that? Because "run twelve or more redundant sets of wires to every home" fails the non-ridiculousness bar, and "continue to have only one or two wires" fails the "highly competitive" test, so where does that leave us? Second, you're still not solving the problem of ISPs having monopolies over their own customers. We don't want ISPs with customer block monopolies charging content providers for prioritization -- they'll charge monopoly prices and suck every ounce of margin they can out of the already-struggling content production business. Even if we had competition between ISPs at the regional level, they would each still have a monopoly over their customers from the perspective of content distributors.