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Comment by stinky613 | Hacker News Reader

I recall the days of dial-up & DSL internet, where I had multiple national ISPs to choose from, as well as several local ISPs... all of which operated over phone lines... which meant they were covered by Title II.

This notion that everything was unregulated until two years ago is counterfactual.

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Right! And the ISPs were subject to NN regulations that the courts deemed unenforceable in 2014. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._...

>which operated over phone lines... which meant they were covered by Title II.

Do you have a source on this??

I've seen this claim made a few times in this thread and have been unable to find anything to back it up. I was under the impression that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 dictated that all ISP's were information services and exempted them from common-carrier and the like.

The phone services themselves were of course under title II but I've not found anything that indicates the ISP's that created a network on top of the phone network were.

In 1996, "ISP" usually meant a third-party information service that used the phone company's lines. In the mid-2000s, the FCC reclassified DSL and cable lines as information services. That probably wasn't what Congress intended in 1996, but the Supreme Court ruled that the law was ambiguous.[1] That all but eliminated competition, so now "ISP" usually means a company that operates its own last-mile infrastructure, and talking about how things used to be gets confusing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Cable_%26_Telecommuni...

If we could actually get back to that model, having last-mile networking be a regulated title 2 neutral telecommunications entity (even municipal fiber, just maybe) and "ISP" be whatever service we connected to reach the wider internet, that'd be amazing.

ISPs could go back to being "information services", zero-rate, throttle, fast-lane, and generally do whatever they want, new ISPs could easily compete by popping up and connecting to the neutral backbone, and customers would have the ability to easily switch providers (just not the backbone).

IIUC, this is pretty much how the electrical utilities in Texas work, one local monopoly "distribution company" and a plethora of generating companies that consumers are free to choose from.

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