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veen  ·  2319 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: FCC plans to vote to overturn U.S. net neutrality rules in December

Alright, let's talk plans. I consider them not-bad partly because of my frame of reference. Another thing is that they are far removed from my imagined 'worst nightmare' non-neutrality situation. I'm sure you've encountered this argument before, but I'm gonna bring it up anyway: what if internet is going to go the way of cable tv?

In this imagined world, companies have slowly persuaded people to get bundles for their most popular apps (like the kinda good deals in the Portugal example). Because people don't want to increase their internet fees too much (or at all), they downgrade their base bundle. So most customers then have a few bundles and a small base bundle. Each bundle has a data limit (because fair use).

There's a bunch of things I don't like about that scenario, which I think is likely to happen. Most notably, it is a world that heavily favours incumbents. You're not going to make it with your film streaming site Flatnix if Netflix is already in a popular bundle. The ISPs would probably ask a nice fee from each company that wants to join a bundle, one that will only make it harder for David to beat Goliath. Hubski would never be in a bundle, so that means I can only 'ski with that smaller bundle.

Secondly, with more bundles to keep in check, there will be more overcharge fees, which are probably super lucrative for ISPs. My mom is on social media all the time, and I had to explain to her that she really needs to turn off LTE and turn on wifi whenever she is at home or at work. Her bill almost double her actual plan for multiple months when I found that out.

Neither of those things are better at satisfying customer demand than our current, net neutral world.

    They already provide the very minimum (measured by cost to provide) that they can get away with, before too many customers switch to alternatives.

This is a good point and I don't have a good comeback to it. But as the above kinda shows, if profit is the main motivator (which we both agree on) customer demand is not the driving force. I think that the current local optimum of value per dollar offered to customers is higher than what we would end up with in a world where all ISPs would do a bundle-like thing like I described. I would much prefer ISPs increasing the price for all customers a little, instead of them increasing the price of visiting sites that they don't care about or don't favor.