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I’m going to tread lightly here because I’m not intimately familiar with the full details of NN, but assuming that big bad ISP starts making life difficult for large tech companies by charging them premiums (and please correct me if this isn’t the way it works), wouldn’t that spur the giants to compete?

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> wouldn’t that spur the giants to compete?

It does give Google incentive to try creating Google Fiber. But the incumbent ISPs already have existing infrastructure deployed that constitutes a natural monopoly. The free market is not enough to overcome the uphill battle any initiative like Google Fiber faces, and digging multiple trenches along every residential road and driveway is not the kind of competition anyone wants.

Or perhaps a more realistic scenario, when ISP customers aren’t able to access their paid services reliably and start dropping off en mass because they refuse to be held under the gun, how would the “big guns” react?

edit: spelled “held” as “elf”... autocorrect

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