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Comment by bigdubs | Hacker News Reader

The taxi/airport analogy is almost there but needs one extra tweak for correctness. In that analogy the ISPs would be the state / local government that built the roads. They would be trying to extract additional money out of the increased traffic, because one the roads are built it's harder to set up toll booths because of stringent regulation.

The issue is, and this going to be a huge tug of war for a long time to come, is the role of ISPs; either as 'content providers' or as merely a utility provider. One provides huge profits, one is a low margin business.

In the real world, tolls on highways are run typically by the local governments, or in the case of around where I live (nyc) 'public benefit corporations'.

Publicly traded corporations, obviously, don't want to be turned into government run utilities, even though this would probably be in everyone's best interest eventually.

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Well then the answer is clear, the market has spoken: they are utilities. That's how they were setup, that's the bargain they made with We the People, and quite frankly, they don't offer content anyone wants (they aren't Netflix).

"Ooh, I want pay per view and Mediacom/Cox/Comcast digital movies", said no one ever. If they want to provide content, they should not be allowed to anti-competitively discriminate against other content providers. This is exactly what Network Neutrality is about.

But how do you force a publicly traded company to become a utility when it's in their best interests not to?

The stick is regulation, and the carrot is money.

Unfortunately, it's really hard to do once the govt. money is spent. I'm familiar with AU/NZ. Both are pumping significant public money into broadband infrastructure, and they took different approaches to enforcing fair network access.

In AU, they created a new company (NBN co) to run the "utility" part. See: http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn

The government is paying the monopoly incumbent to switch users onto the new network.

In NZ, our privately owned largest telco (Telecom NZ) semi-voluntarily split itself into two parts - a retail and a wholesale branch. The shareholders agreed to do this, because that meant the wholesale part (Chorus) would get a big govt. contract to lay fiber to the door.

In theory, the split is "arms length", so other network providers can access the infrastructure on fair terms.

Reference: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/5858284/Telecom-s...

It remains to be seen whether this is the right way to go about things, but both approaches do seem plausible.

The ISP's received lots of money from the government to build the "roads", except they didn't. They didn't invest in the required infrastructure and instead created monopolies and provided poor service and are now complaining they dont have the infrastructure. So now you have a country who invented internet and should be at the forefront of every aspect of it, lagging behind a lot of other countries in terms of infrastructure.

I take exception to your implication that the US lags behind other countries in terms of Infrastructure.

There are two classes of Internet access in the US: Residential/SMB and Enterprise.

We have a second world Residential/SMB bandwidth economy, but I would argue that the US has the only true first world Enterprise Bandwidth Economy. If you think of laid capacity in terms of terabits, the US is the clear winner.

The ISPs built massive highways but they didn't build the community roads necessary for normal people to tap into all this capacity. The bottlenecks for residential bandwidth are at the DSLAMs at the bottom of your street and not in the core routing systems for the biggest carriers.

It's tragic, but the US has a super stratified system. Enterprise users get amazing cheap bandwidth and everyone else is second class.

Operators in all countries are worried about reduced profits due to expensive data traffic, and all operators have paid large amount of money to governments for their licenses. So yes, they did build the roads.

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