> I would argue that communications are an abstract thing, not subject interstate commerce or federal regulations upon common carriers. I would argue the abstractness, an idea exists at once everywhere, there is no transporting over state lines that needs to be done. There is not even a net flow of electrons and the infrastructure is static. Everything facilitated by the ISP has this nature by default unless it is otherwise sold as some specific product you can buy like a movie.
If there is nothing of material existence crossing state lines then we should be able to just cut the fiber at every state border without causing any trouble, right?
You're arguing that it is inappropriate to regulate interstate couriers because ideas are very abstract. But the thing being regulated isn't the ideas. It's the equivalent of prohibiting interstate electric utilities from charging monopoly prices to any press company that needs electricity to run their printing press, when the electric utility owns their own competing press company. It's not a regulation of words or bits or electrons, it's a regulation of utility companies and anti-competitive business contracts.
> And the point of this argument would be to reduce the legal surface area for lawsuits and executive enforcement by the federal government on ISPs.
The FCC is part of the executive branch. Congress has given it the authority to regulate telecommunications companies. The executive doesn't need any particular rules to put pressure on companies because it has the authority to make new ones at any time.
Moreover, network neutrality rules shouldn't provide any leverage to the executive because there is nothing to punish unless the company is violating network neutrality.
I completely agree that a rule should always either be enforced or repealed, but the solution to that in a case where the rule is meritorious is the first one. If the rules are actually enforced then there won't be everyday violations for the executive to use as a pretext to punish other behavior.
> I am not sure if I understand. ISPs have so many laws governing them and are so big (causal relationship?) that they are bound to be always in violation if the government looks hard enough. It would benefit freedom of speech to reduce both.
If that is your goal then you have to go to the root. The reason ISPs have to be heavily regulated is that they lack vigorous competition, which prevents market forces from doing the work for you. In order to have fewer regulations you need more competition.
This is not a chicken and egg problem. You don't need one before the other because you can do both at the same time. What you can't do is to get rid of the regulations without first having effective competition, or the result will be monopoly abuse.
And we know of effective solutions, such as local loop unbundling. Or even better, municipal-owned last mile fiber leased per-customer to multiple competing ISPs.
> I am not arguing about whether NN would help address some shortcomings of the current setup. I am saying NN would further entrench the current state of affairs and could prevent a better one from ever being built.
The problem with that argument is that NN violations are not a prerequisite to any positive outcome, so prohibiting them causes no harm. In a competitive market they wouldn't even happen because none of the hundreds of competing ISPs would individually have enough market power to extract any such concessions from anyone. In that case NN rules would be unnecessary but still harmless because they would only be redundant with market forces.
What you're after is potentially meritorious, but you have to do things in a sensible order. You can't remove the anti-monopoly rules until after you first remove the monopoly. But you don't have to remove the anti-monopoly rules in order to remove the monopoly -- so start there and then object to NN as an unnecessary redundancy after you've successfully eliminated its justification.