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veen  ·  2317 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: FCC plans to vote to overturn U.S. net neutrality rules in December

    Cable TV greatly improved access to television content compared to over-the-air broadcast, with more and more channels and packages available year after year.

More and more packages - for more and more money, with the good ones of course spread over multiple packages. Check out that graph! It rises 3 times faster than inflation since 1998.

My argument is that the same cost hiking is bound to happen with internet if the FCC is gonna do this. The airline industry might serve as a good corollary to this. Airline seat pricing is time-dependent and, if the airlines had their way, customer-dependent. Do you know the concept of willingness to pay? It's the bread and butter of airline pricing: each person has a dollar value in their head that represents what they are willing to pay for a service: anything above and they won't buy a ticket. The only goal that shareholders want an airline to pursue is to get every person in every single seat to pay as close to that price as possible.

The most lucrative passengers are people who fly for business reasons, since the cost/benefit calculation is nearly always positive. If airlines could charge you more for traveling as a business-passenger they would, but they're not allowed to directly discriminate like that. But pretty much all business passengers want to be home on Friday or Saturday, so one of the best ways for airlines to figure out if you are a tourist or a businessman is to offer a cheap ticket that has your outbound flight before Saturday night and the inbound after. This is called the saturday-night stay, and while good competition can destroy it, the airline industry in the US has consolidated so much that it is pretty much standard now.

My "nightmare" scenario is that price-practices like this will also be adopted by ISPs. They have your internet history anyways, so they can totally figure out how rich you approximately are. Net neutrality also prevents discrimination between customers, if I understand it correctly.

Infrastructure costs are important, but it's not like cable companies aren't making plenty of money - the problem is that they let the customer pay for that kind of stuff, because capitalism. Also, wouldn't it be an argument for net neutrality if internet penetration is larger than TV cable penetration?