Which one of the 2 is trying to restrict access?

If an ISP is a privately owned company, they have the right to restrict whatever the hell they want. That's what you don't get. The Internet is not a right. Yeah, we all use it, but it's not a given right at a fair price.

I don’t understand this either. No different than cell phone data or BBQ sandwiches. Use more, pay more. It’s so easy.

Sbs
Why keep chiming in when grown folks is talking. You feel like them guys ain't capable of answering it themselves. You only started buying internet in the last year or so. Not only are you gonna give them folks more money, they made you like it, you sound happy as hell about it.

My point to him was. He's talking about big government regulations and chearleading for the people that's fixing to regulate him and charge him more,lol.

Wow just wow.

Things get worse/more expensive the more government gets involved. The problem is, government is too big to be responsive to changes in tech. Plain and simple. I don’t know why any free market thinking person would want to create more barriers to entry. Look, Google was a fan of net neutrality. They were a fan of it because they know without those barriers to entry some geek in a garage can create something better.

Either that or Google is smart enough to play both sides.

Happy birthday, Jared. Well, they actually did play both sides. They were for net neutrality but then were against it when it came to Google Fiber…something the government conveniently left out of the regs. Any time you have something like this where unelected bureaucrats are writing regs you ALWAYS have companies with the most on the table in collusion with those bureaucrats. It’s crony capitalism which is really no different than socialism.

If you want a good example of what can happen when government cements these monopolies, look at Uber. There is no telling what they have spent tied up in court because they are busting up a government protected industry: taxis. They do 2 things:

They knock down the artificial barriers to entry created by government/taxi business and adjust prices to increase the supply of drivers so they can just meet demand. I mean, they are the pinnacle of what free markets look like. They do this without having to pay the astronomical prices for an artificially limited number of taxi medallions.

That’s not what we want with the internet. That’s what we got with taxi services and their artificial markets and that’s what we got with Obamacare. At some point, we have to learn our lesson, right?

Let me ask all of you free market guys one question. Why isn't it OK for a station to charge 5 times the normal rate for gasoline if they are the only ones who happen to have any available at the time?

No one would buy it and it would be considered gouging. Laws are already in place to keep gouging at bay.

Now what I really want to know is how that cat became my avatar.

It is OK with me. It may be against local price gouging laws and there may even be some federal regulations but if left alone the market would sort it out. Taking advantage of people is not good business and the market sorts that out in most cases.

It is ok for them to do that. It’s unappealing to most everybody but it serves a purpose and does benefit everybody in the long run. When gas station xyz sets prices as high as the market will bear they’re sending a message to market actors that a product is scarce and profits are available to producers of that product. Setting prices as high as the market will bear is something that happens every day in a capitalistic economy and most of the time we don’t even think about it. Without those price “messages,” our economy would look like Venezuela or Cuba.

People might buy it if that was all that was available and they needed it bad enough. Yes,there are laws in place to keep gouging at bay for those very reasons.

I'm not so sure that removing the Net Neutrality law isn't exactly like removing all gouging rules.

Under title II the internet was subject to regulations like ISPs having to submit proposals for new tech to the FCC. So basically, to innovate, company xyz has to get permission to use their new tech from the government. Once determinations are made, they can’t be appealed and can only be reversed by them. They can also partially regulate capital investments of existing companies and decide which of those companies can enter the ISP market. Basically, they took almost a trillion $ of GDP and put it under new regulations and entrenched monopolies.

I hope the decision will wind up to be a good thing. I would not mind some limited pricing protection in cases where ISP's have monopolies.Something to the effect that pricing must not be greater than a certain percentage where a monopoly doesn't exist would serve to protect consumers without restricting ISP's. As always government seeks to control much more than is ever necessary and complicate things beyond comprehension.

But if internet was $1000/ month, me or someone like me would invest in a startup to deliver services at a fraction of that cost, and there would be plenty of money to be made. Capitalism really is great.