NCTA Agrees Title II Virtuous Cycle Is Working
I&#x27;ve always felt the real problem is the monopolies. Net Neutrality doesn&#x27;t fix that--it&#x27;s up to local governments to fix it.<p>In the early 2000&#x27;s when my home town still had dial-up only, Comcast came into the town and offered to build out cable broadband. They would even throw in a $300k grant to the school district for new laptops. The only catch? They needed to be granted a monopoly on all the telephone poles in the town. The town agreed.<p>As circulated on HN recently, the town of Chattanooga, TN is another interesting example[0]. Chattanooga made the smart decision many years ago not to grant a monopoly in exchange for a fiber build-out. Instead they built their own fiber network. Years later they offered to expand their ISP to the surrounding towns, which only had dial-up and satellite. It would cost zero taxpayer dollars. Instead the state decided to give $45 million to Comcast&#x2F;AT&amp;T to build out--get this--DSL!<p>As the parent article points out: despite cost-per-bit plummeting over the years, the cost to consumers isn&#x27;t going down. The problem is monopolies naively being granted by local governments. In a world where that didn&#x27;t happen, Pai would be right: ISPs would be forced to compete on features and quality, and so nobody would be talking about bundling websites like they do with cable channels, or whatever other nonsense Net Neutrality is designed to prevent.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;tennessee-could-give-taxpayers-americas-fastest-internet-for-free-but-it-will-give-comcast-and-atandt-dollar45-million-instead" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;tennessee-could-g...</a>