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Excellent summary of the UK situation. It's worth noting that the reason we (arguably) don't need regulation in the form of net neutrality is because we have regulation in a form that promotes competition. So it's a question of where to regulate, not whether.

Slight clarification: We have an open market explicitly because we have tight last-mile regulation. If we didn't we'd all have local monopolies.

I don't know specifically where you are, but it's true in most of Europe.

We do have one local monopoly, KCOM in Hull.

Some of Europe has tighter last mile regulation, but it’s not necessarily better. Take France, for example. France applies unbundling to copper telephone lines and fiber, but not cable. It subsidises fiber backhaul for DSL. Overall, it’s got similar fiber deployment to the US (about 10%) but overall much slower speeds (according to Akamai, 11 Mbps average in France versus 19 Mbps in the US). But there is lots of ISP competition in DSL, like there was in the US in the early 2000s. But most people don’t have access to faster cable alternatives, because subsidization of the DSL network killed competition.

Is this better?

> But most people don’t have access to faster cable alternatives, because subsidization of the DSL network killed competition.

> Is this better?

That's a red herring.

By your own admission this isn't caused by LLUB but by misguided subsidization. It's a deliberate choice of poor example in a pool of much better options.

It’s a direct byproduct of LLU. LLU eliminates market price signals over the most expensive part of the infrastructure.[1] That requires governments to exercise tremendous discipline in setting the wholesale price. It’s politically popular to set the price too low, but that kills investment. France tried to compensate for that through subsidies. But those, predictably, killed the unsubsidized competition.

[1] You obviously can’t let the monopoly that owns the loop freely set the wholesale price of the loop.

> Government rate setting is such a bad idea, that our oligopolies might be better. (The US has faster internet than all the big European countries: the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.)

And it's slower than Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and many others.

You can't blanket claim that LLU and rate setting is bad simply by ignoring examples where they work much better than the alternative.

Edit:

You might also want to include consumer prices with that comparison.

I installed fiber (from the street outside) in my house in Sweden and had a pick of 18 ISPs, of which I chose 100/100 Mbit/s for $38/month.

(Sorry for the intervening edit.)

Here's Akamai's list of countries with the fastest broadband:

1 South Korea 28.6

2 Norway 23.5

3 Sweden 22.5

4 Hong Kong 21.9

5 Switzerland 21.7

6 Finland 20.5

7 Singapore 20.3

8 Japan 20.2

9 Denmark 20.1

10 United States 18.7

Our presence on this list is remarkable. If you were listing countries with the best of some other kind of infrastructure, say subways, we wouldn't even be sniffing the top 10. Nobody would look at the fact that Sweden or Denmark managed to have good subways and say "well, obviously we can do that too!" And we already know we would do a bad job implementing LLU: it was in the 1996 telecom act, and the FCC set rates too low and killed DSL in the process.

Also, it's not clear what LLU has achieved in a place like say Denmark: https://erhvervsstyrelsen.dk/sites/default/files/media/publi....

60% of Danish subscribers are with TDC, the privitized former incumbent. TDC must offer DSL access over LLU, but the two companies that do that are Telenor (the Norwegian incumbent) and Telia (the Swedish incumbent). Those three account for 80% of all subscribers. Is this better than our system?

> I installed fiber (from the street outside) in my house in Sweden and had a pick of 18 ISPs, of which I chose 100/100 Mbit/s for $38/month.

Where I live, I only have two choices for fiber, but 100/100 is $40/month, gigabit is $70-80, and two-gigabit is $150/month. Also: did you or a previous homeowner pay a one-time fee to build the fiber to your house? In the U.S., the ISP usually eats the up-front cost and recovers it in the monthly charge. Finally, U.S. prices include implicit cross subsidies (to build fiber or cable in poorer neighborhoods) that Swedish prices do not.

> Besides, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark either don't impose unbundling of cable/fiber, or set very high prices for wholesale access: http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf.

I'll go with Sweden as it's the one I know closest. It doesn't... anymore, but it did for maybe 10 years from late 90s, and if Telia (the previously state owned and now privatized incumbent) which has a lot of the FTTH market would start being anti-competitive you can bet regulation will return.

> 60% of Danish subscribers are with TDC, the privitized former incumbent. TDC must offer DSL access over LLU, but the two companies that do that are Telenor (the Norwegian incumbent) and Telia (the Swedish incumbent). Those three account for 80% of all subscribers. Is this better than our system?

Yes? As long as all three has access to all customers (in the US the big ISPs have local monopolies so it's deceiving to look at them as many providers), there's at least some market forces available. But I also think DSL is kind of backwards to look at to begin with.

America needs to be able to create "virtual" ISPs with full and equal access to internet. Until then, the NN law is needed.

But that's the problem.

NN laws are barking up the wrong tree, because your ISPs control not only the last mile, planning, backhaul _and_ exchanges, they can easily demand things not possible in the UK.

Take the netflix outage in LA.

Comcast basically said, You're pushing too much stuff, pay up or we'll throttle you, and throttle they did.

Now, in a normal open market, other ISPs would step in and say "look at us, we don't throttle" and customers would switch over, making it financially impossible to throttle popular services. But you can't do that in the US as all but the most dense markets are a one ISP town.

In the UK that sort of action is suicide, the ISP would either arrange for more peering at LINX or LONAP, or better yet arrange some edge caching (open connect in netflix parlance) nearer the customers to cut down on bandwidth sloshing around the backbone (which is expensive)

We don't have NN laws in the UK, which means that mobile providers like 3 (three.co.uk) can say that watching netflix doesn't use your metered bandwidth.

so sctually what the US doesn't need is NN laws, it needs those ISP monopolies broken up and competition injected into the market.

so sctually what the US doesn't need is NN laws, it needs those ISP monopolies broken up and competition injected into the market.

Why not both?

How I dispise this meme. If you have real competition you don't need or want NN regulation. Monopolies are the problem and NN is a sub-optimal solution precisely because it's permanently one pen stroke away from being eradicated. If you switched the UK from a it's current competitive landscape to a monopolistic one you'd be getting greif from customers and all the businesses that would be shut out. In the US, you're only getting greif from customers and since they're not funding your next campaign you can just ignore them.

> precisely because it's permanently one pen stroke away from being eradicated

So NN is not a problem, just a temporary fix. And it doesn't limit competition (it costs nearly zero to comply). The problem are _other_ regulations. So why are some people so obsessed with removing NN?

I'm personally not obsessed with removing NN. I was just pointing out that you don't need to have it if you have proper competition. It's not the kind of thing that simply needs to be everywhere. If you already have it, fine.

Last mile connections are a natural monopoly.

The only realistic suggestion I have ever heard for how to break that monopoly is essentially an even more restrictive version of network neutrality: last mile providers are required to lease network capacity to anyone who wants it at reasonable and non-discriminatory rates.

> Comcast basically said, You're pushing too much stuff, pay up or we'll throttle you, and throttle they did.

It's more complex than that. And in any case Netflix gives CDN boxes to ISPs for free.

I wouldn't mind a similar thing to MVNOs for mobile networks. There are a lot of attractive offerings that run on the big networks but have different plans.

Just for clarification:

>In short, we have a much more open market, but with no net nuetrality.

Do you have no net neutrality (ISPs do un-neutral stuff)

or

Do you have no net neutrality regulation (the Government doesn't stop ISPs from un-neutral stuff), but get nn through competition?