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And yet the temptation to extract rents from content providers is higher than it has ever been. Just look at the market capitalization of Netflix today, which is about 20x compared to 2010.

I just can't imagine that ISPs won't make a grab for revenues, otherwise why spend money to lobby against NN? They're probably just waiting for the current furor to die down and sneak it in without people noticing.

That already happened, in 2014. Netflix made agreements with Comcast/Time Warner/AT&T/Verizon.

I think it will be interesting to see what happens now. I imagine the ISPs already feel they're very near the peak price:demand curve for consumers. Their monopoly is such that customers can't really say no unless they're willing to go with no access. So I'd agree that if there was going to be a squeeze it'd be on other large companies. But that also opens up the door to a far more motivated Google Fiber. And the lack of net neutrality opens up some interesting things - for instance a Netflix arrangement with an upstart ISP could offer free access at ultra-premium speeds to Netflix. That is something that the current monopolists could not necessarily match.

Should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Non-negligible competition in the form of building out new fibre is basically never going to happen because of how inefficient it is in real economic terms.

Forget about all the political and business aspects -- the actual effort required to lay out new wiring, then run it to the home, is from an economic standpoint just pure deadweight loss.

1 cable is necessary. 2 cables is redundant.

Unfortunately, the ISPs have a point here that 'competition' in the form of multiple companies laying wiring to the same home is sheer folly.

Now what's the value proposition to an investor to fund direct competition?

If you shake someone down, there's more than one way to get paid off. It can come in the form of protection money, or you can just get them to buy you out. I'd imagine that Comcast et al will want to keep the tolls just low enough that it's in nobody's best interest to actually run more wiring.

Plus the ISPs can always buy off cash-starved local and regional governments, like they have been doing to Google Fiber, and delay the laying of new fibre indefinitely. There's no need to outlaw competition, just leverage the legal and administrative process to indefinitely fight over details like utility pole access.

It's definitely not weird to feel uncomfortable about all of this. In case I think the 'mob' was pointed in the right direction, but this sort of mass emotional hysteria is how very bad things also happen. How many people, actively involved in this issue, could accurately explain both sides' views? Both sides views of the future with/without net neutrality? I'm not sure of the answer, but it is going to be extremely low. And that is terrifying. It means that people are involved, often aggressively, primarily on an emotional level.

This hysteria is undoubtedly the reason you have things like bomb threats being called in on the FCC. Did the person who did that actually have any degree of understanding on the issue for which he probably was fantasizing about hurting or even killing people over? The safe guess there is probably not.

Great point, and I think the question we should all be asking ourselves is how do we know we're not the ones pointing at rocks and shouting wolf at a myriad of issues we don't really understand - but believe we do.

As soon as it comes to anything political, we're all suddenly experts predicting gloom, doom or salvation over every single policy issue. Logic says every person is probably wrong on average half of the time, yet every person believes they are correct in their political team playing 100% of the time. That can't be healthy.

>It really made me question just how many people who happen to share my political positions, do so because they genuinely understand and agree with the policies, and not because it's just what you're supposed to do when you have a certain identity (liberal etc).

Its worth thinking about how well reasoned and deeply researched justifications of positions make headway in a democracy. Expert opinion is expensive to acquire and not accessible to the majority. In a hierarchy of coalitions information is potential compressed at every level. If it gets compressed enough it might just end up as a left versus right or up versus down issue, with the justification for this reasoning only accessible by traversing up and down the hierarchy. I am not sure that this is a bad thing, butI can appreciate your concern about causes of an individuals motivation, especially in light of the potential for a propaganda apparatus to insert itself into my aforedescribed idealization.