Theoretically. It's not as uncommon as one would hope with cartels and lowest common denominators. And if it's cheaper/more profitable to screw the end-user (I deliberately chose not to say customer) then why wouldn't they, unregulated?
Competition. If we take lobbying out of the picture, and therefore prevent ISPs from drafting legislation to suppress competition, it would allow for small, local ISPs to spring up.
A lot of customers will pay more to get decent service. (Otherwise, McDonald's would have driven sit-down restaurants out of business entirely.) If you're running a local ISP, whose business is based on providing good service, screwing over your customers would seriously hurt your business.
> Competition. If we take lobbying out of the picture, and therefore prevent ISPs from drafting legislation to suppress competition, it would allow for small, local ISPs to spring up.
You are assuming capital needed to set up an ISP is non-prevantably low. This can only be the case if the state, county or city owns the last mile and allows any business to rent it.
> A lot of customers will pay more to get decent service. (Otherwise, McDonald's would have driven sit-down restaurants out of business entirely.) If you're running a local ISP, whose business is based on providing good service, screwing over your customers would seriously hurt your business.
Your restaurant comparison doesn't work, because you don't have McDonalds customers or TGIF customers, you have people who eat at both at varying frequencies.
And as for your second point, I said screwing over you end-user for a reason. If it's more profitable to undercut prices to get the cheapest users, while selling data and deals to other market actors based on your users data, ISPs will compete for that instead of speeds, privacy concerns and other. And your choice becomes between varyingly shitty deals.
The "market" can't then make a choice until:
1) Someone wants to start an ISP with users as primary customer.
>This can only be the case if the state, county or city owns the last mile and allows any business to rent it.
Telephone companies are a public utility, and are, in most jurisdictions, legally required to lease space on utility poles to ISPs.
Laying lines is the largest cost of setting up an ISP; by using telephone poles, the cost would become manageable for a small business. Small business loans would be sufficient to cover the cost of setting up a small ISP.
As far as profitability goes, end-users could come together to set up a co-op, if they wanted better service.
>And as for your second point, I said screwing over you end-user for a reason. If it's more profitable to undercut prices to get the cheapest users, while selling data and deals to other market actors based on your users data, ISPs will compete for that instead of speeds, privacy concerns and other. And your choice becomes between varyingly shitty deals.
ISPs can undercut prices for the cheapest users, but the cheapest users aren't everybody. As I said, a lot of people will pay more for decent service. If you want a better analogy, consider a user choosing an iPhone 7 over a no-name Android phone. If price were the only consideration, Apple would not be one of the largest businesses in the world.
> Laying lines is the largest cost of setting up an ISP; by using telephone poles, the cost would become manageable for a small business. Small business loans would be sufficient to cover the cost of setting up a small ISP.
So you're arguing for tier 2/public utility/net neutrality? Then we agree. Otherwise you have to realize that DSL is already available as an alternative to cable or fiber. The problem is that the speeds are too low to even be called broadband.
> ISPs can undercut prices for the cheapest users, but the cheapest users aren't everybody. As I said, a lot of people will pay more for decent service. If you want a better analogy, consider a user choosing an iPhone 7 over a no-name Android phone. If price were the only consideration, Apple would not be one of the largest businesses in the world.
Alright, let's take your phone analogy. What we've heard is that Apple is somewhat protective of your privacy, at least that's what they're posturing publicly. We know fairly certainly that neither MS or Google (and all licensed phones) care for your privacy at all.
Now assume that Apple doesn't care either (we really don't know). You have a huge catalogue of phone options, but if you want something for privacy you might be able to get some fringe Finnish phone or a failed Ubuntu kickstarter. We've come to accept this for phones because we haven't known anything else, but we're not there with ISPs... yet.
This is what an unregulated market looks like. They all end up selling you the product, and then selling you on the backend making (more than) twice the money. And you're stuck with the illusion of choice.
Why would we want this for ISPs when we can make them a utility and both cheaper and faster? (see Japan, Korea, Nordics, Germany, etc)
