Who would want to be negative about it except monopolists' shills who are paid to do it?
That's exactly my point. No mainstream (even partisan) view is supporting monopoly. Such views are normally expressed by corrupted politicians and paid shills. Or you are suggesting that supporting corruption is now mainstream or that some party now is officially against free market even without being corrupted?
Supporting companies against excessive regulations in general and supporting monopolies (i.e. preventing antitrust restrictions and supporting aticompetitive market capture) is not the same thing. The first should serve freeing the market. The second serves only reducing its freedom, nothing else.
Also, consider that exactly the same companies who are against enforcing Net neutrality are perfectly fine with the politicians which write for them state laws which ban competition. I.e. blatant excessive regulation, and very unhealthy one with that. Those are the same companies and politicians which at the same time scream about how bad regulation will be if Net neutrality will be enforced. Hypocrisy much? Or may be they simply are against regulation which weakens their monopoly and pro regulation which strengthens it?
As you can see it has nothing to do with partisan or "mainstream" views on regulation in general. It's about greedy monopolists and their bought corrupted bureaucrats. Who in their normal mind would voluntarily support such a thing?
Without which, by the way, there would not be the startup culture we have now. (prior to the internet it was all semiconductors.)
YC people here are advocating literally killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Do I sound like a shill for comcast? If so, you're not really listening.
Really? I didn't notice any freedom in places where the only choice are some colluded monopolistic ISPs which in addition write state laws which ban competition. It's not called a free market. It's the opposite of it. All that talk about the magic "invisible hand of the market" is a pile of trash when monopoly is in place and turns that hand into a suffocating iron grip.
Really? ARPANET and NSFNET were big free market bastions, were they?
You may have noticed the 'start' bit. The reason it was 'starting' is because prior to that, corporations did NOT want you to have computers that could talk to each other. That would weaken their grip on the market and ability to lock you in; when no computers can talk to each other, and your business depends on computers from Corp X, this is good for them: you can't go to anyone else. Printers, sockets, none of these are interoperable - you rely on them for everything.
As far as I understand, this is exactly what companies like GE did in those days. ARPANET was completely against everything they wanted, because it meant consumers were freed from their lock in. You could mix and match computers (perhaps cheaper, not-GE ones) with your GE machines, and you weren't beholden to their whims (oh, you need a better mainframe? Gotta upgrade all your machines so they can talk to each other!) And it's unlikely the 'free market' would have ever bore out the same result, and if it did, it probably would have only happened decades later.
Of course, good luck explaining this shit to a libertarian-infested hellhole like HN: they all believe they're on the cusp of Gettin' Big Bucks, so they don't want a market that allows competition, or a government that regulates anything they do. They want one that allows them to strangle competition with no repercussions or limits - they're just about to make it big after all as Uber Millionaires, and why do you want to steal their money!???!!
Like said elsewhere, Americans believe themselves to be impovershed millionaires, so they don't want to limit their future greatness. And of course, to build on what Carlin said: this is a part of the 'American Dream' because you have to be asleep (or braindead) to believe in it.
I'm not sure where you get this idea. Libertarians are pro competition, not anti. So they are actually quite negative towards monopolies and support their prevention.
Oh, but Libertarians don't like that (allegedly). Well then, their answer is simple: But if you don't like that, just move! Don't support that company! Bootstrap harder! Externalities don't real! That'll show those big mean old companies (nevermind the fact you don't have the money or ability to move or go without services like the internet, making the point moot).
At the end of the day, having dealt with many of them here in Texas, most libertarians are just dumbass 20 something white male Republicans who want to smoke weed and end the Fed. They're a joke, but they're a joke that exist on this site in quite a plentiful manner, as you can see. They don't care about the monopolistic control most ISPs have over their customers in plenty of places in the US. They only care that Obama doesn't get all up in their internet; everything else be damned.
No, libertarians are against excessive control over society, not necessarily corporations. I.e. if corporation is a monopoly, it itself gets excessive control over society, so as such libertarians support preventing monopolies. That's the logic behind it. I've never seen a libertarian who is supporting monopoly. It simply sounds like an oxymoron to me.
Now things are different. Comcast is a content company propped up by a cable monopoly. Title II? Hell yeah. But no price controls. Whatever it takes to get us to have the residential bandwidth of, say, Estonia.