NET NEUTRALITY: Who Do You Trust More?  Government or Free Markets?

Do you trust “The Government” or “The Market” more?
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I have no doubt that Comcast and other large Internet Service Providers do not have MY personal best interests in mind. Not exactly.

They have this thing called ‘profit motive’.

But in a Free Market, if they continue to screw someone over or charge too high of prices, people will stop using their services and it’s an opportunity for another business to undercut them. They go out of business if they can’t offer the best product at the cheapest prices, because someone else will. Because “Profit Motive”.
There are entire YELP-like industries designed around measuring how well companies
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Do you trust “The Government” or “The Market” more?
This is the only question you need ask yourself.

Let’s discuss all these atrocities they are saying ‘could occur’…. Why haven’t we seen them from 1994-2014, twenty years with NO NET NEUTRALITY at all, and none of these horrors occurred.
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Sure some companies had some fights and guess what they all solved it and moved on. It never affected you for a moment, you didn’t even know it happened until the TV or the great Facebook told you about it.

More than two decades to evolve free of regulation, that is why.
Some are too young, you don’t remember how regulation has always been the problem and never once been the solution. When phones were highly regulated, great screams poured out when deregulation was proposed. They said it would be ‘suicide for our communication networks and capabilities’.
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“The corporations will charge you for every feature”, “Long distance will triple!”, “They will shut your phone off if you say something they don’t like!”, “they will tap your phone”, on and on it went….any of this sound familiar?
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I’m talking about back in the good old days when it was highly regulated?
Here are some facts about that time…
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1. You could not own a phone you had to rent it!
2. You could not unplug a phone and move it, they said you could damage the system or kill yourself because you were untrained (YES REALLY, similar to why ‘trained attendants’ have to pump my gas for me when I drive through New Jersey). They would plug your phone in and staple the jack in. If you wanted to move your phone you had to pay to have a tech come move it to a new jack.
3. If you wanted a second phone in your house again you had to pay a phone tech to come install it. Over $100 (in 1980 dollars) to plug in a phone! Yes, seriously!
4. Long distance was over 1 dollar a minute; “in-state long distance” was higher.

But “oh please, please almighty government that has screwed up EVERYTHING else it has ever touched, come regulate the internet just a little bit.”
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It actually amounts to one thing “government regulation of the internet”, every time you hear or read the term “net neutrality”, translate it in your head to read”government regulation of the internet” and see how much support you have for it in a week or two.
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First research this: Why aren’t there competing ISPs where you live? Does your local ISP have a monopoly that was granted to them from government regulation? Or does the cost of internet infrastructure truly outweigh the population in an area?
If there is no incentive to bring a second company into such a small population, chock that up to your ‘cost of living in the boonies.”

​The argument that “Cheap Abundant Internet is a Right because everything we do is online” will be withheld for another time (it’s not).

There are never really any true monopolies, even Standard Oil would see competitors the moment they increased prices.

The ‘out in the boonies’ problem you have can probably only be fixed with a US Postal Service-style monopoly. But then you’d be getting USPS Government quality Internet.

The problem we have in this case (geographically, only one provider) is the kind of problem that the market corrects for, over time, though. It spurs the next innovation that will reduce the cost of DSL/Satellite solutions which will free us of the old physical fiber lines.

Just think, the ‘telephone poles’ we are so accustomed to seeing in our neighborhoods are 99% obsolete for telephone connectivity these days. Who has telephones in their house anymore?

Let the market innovate out of your problem. Yes, I know that means it sucks in the meantime.
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If the internet would be SO AWFUL without net neutrality why was it awesome from 1994-2014 when we had nothing even approaching “net neutrality” for those 20 years?

If it’s meant to help ‘the little guy’ compete with large media, then why is large media lobbying to get it passed?

Could it possibly be that large media LOVES legislation that they can lobby for that helps them and hurts others?

Could it be that large media firms can afford the teams of lawyers needed to comply with large regulation, knowing that the startup “little guy” can’t?
Most people who hate big business these days don’t even understand that these big businesses have politicians in their pockets in order to protect their market share and protect them from the ‘little guy’ who can innovate to make things better and cheaper for us.

Just think, if government started regulating the net in 1994, you’d still hear modem noises followed by “YOU’VE GOT MAIL” every time you logged on 23 years later!
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Thanks Free Market!
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