The problem here is that this is a thing that people think they should have at gigabit speed all the time, everywhere, and they don’t care how it gets there.
Who is going to pay to upgrade the infrastructure to faster speeds? Who is going to pay to extend the infrastructure into markets who don’t have as much of it? Who is going to pay to support that infrastructure, the people, the utility trucks, the repair equipment, the office buildings, the 24x7 coverage.
Market forces drive prices down and performance and availability up. The capitalist impulse to create wealth (real wealth, not frikking tax dollars taken from people like you and me) is what will drive that most efficiently and expeditiously.
And the problem is, those forces are largely invisible (especially leftists, who REFUSE to believe in the invisible hand of market forces that control how much of something is available and how much people are willing to pay for it) so the end result is, many people don’t care, even many here on FR. Someone else can pay for it. Who has the big pockets, the money that can be ‘freely’ applied?
What does that sound like? It sounds like the people who think the government can pay for it, and the government can regulate it. And when you look at the people who are lickety-split for this, they are the same people who view everything else in this same manner. People who worship government because they think it will provide this thing for them.
+1
Correct.
NN is the first step to “free broadband everywhere all the time”.
Which means a nationalized internet. Owned and operated by the US taxpayer via some overpaid bureaucracy in DC. With all the attendant costs, inflexibility, inefficiency and...yes...censorship.
My favorite are the ones who like to point out that the “government built the Internet” so it’s for everyone therefore Net Neutrality...and the government should enforce it.
What they don’t know - because they weren’t there - is that the Internet they know and love almost didn’t happen *because* of government. They didn’t like or want the TCP/IP stack because they considered it too cumbersome. It wasn’t until the foundation and idea was turned over to private enterprise that the TCP/IP stack flourished and grew and suddenly the *real* Internet was born - built on the backs, intellect, and *money* of private enterprise.
And at the time, the government had no use for it because they hated it and thought it worthless - so they paid no attention to it. Which allowed private enterprise to expand and grow the technology at amazing rates. All without government lifting a finger.
I’ve used this analogy before: Turning the owners of transport into common carriers would be akin to forcing Kroger to offer shelf space to Kraft and Hellman’s at cost just because Kroger sells their own brand of mayonnaise at a price point lower than the others because they own the shelf space and can take advantage of that. Kroger could - in fact - price their shelf space to the point where Kraft and Hellman’s would refuse to buy it - thus making their product the only one on the shelves. They don’t do it because there are other stores that offer their competitor’s products and if they eliminated their competition that way, their customers would begin leaving for those other stores...
Another thing the NN opponents fail to realize is that the costs for non-bandwidth-heavy content providers could actually go *down* if ISPs are no longer bound by regulation to charge everyone the same. Netflix may end up having to pay 10X the amount because they stream bandwidth-heavy media while a site like FR sees their costs reduced because they are nearly all text-based.