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In a lot of cases the companies are, e.g. service provided by telcos, but I'm sure their lawyers have found sufficient wiggle room.
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Christopher Duncan wrote: how sovereign the property of a company is, as well as its business practices (providing it doesn't break any laws).
Christopher Duncan wrote: telling a company how to run its business strikes me as unfair to the company.
And therein lies the paradox.
The government (supposedly) enacts laws to protect the general population. Let's say you and I were the only makers of corn flakes (and let's assume the public needs to eat corn flakes in order to survive). Assuming a box of cereal cost $1.50 to manufacture and ship, we could privately agree to sell a box of cereal for no less than $5.50. This would ensure we rake in a very healthy profit, without incurring the wrath of the public who has no idea it really costs only $1.50 to make a box of the stuff.
The FTC has laws against price fixing and collusion by manufacturers of products to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening, ostensibly to protect the average Joe. For this reason, even though you and I may feel the government shouldn't interfere with the way we do business, we would be breaking the law.
This is obviously an extremely simplistic example.
- Deregulation of services in the 80s was intended to give more freedom (and therefore theoretically increase healthy competition) between providers of services, by reducing the influence of government in overseeing pricing.
- On the flip side (and more recently), Apple has balked at the feds for appointing Mike Bromwich to investigate allegations of the company's alleged violation of anti-trust laws. Apple's management feels Bromwich is interfering with the company's day-to-day operations by requiring that he be permitted to conduct lengthy meetings with their top brass on an ongoing basis.
/ravi
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Collin Jasnoch wrote: Yeah... If you believed that BS I got a bridge for you.
I agree with you.
The abysmal drop of the QOS of the banking, telco and airline industries (in the US) are prime examples of how this (supposedly) well-intentioned deregulation has hindered rather than helped the public.
/ravi
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Ravi Bhavnani wrote: On the flip side (and more recently), Apple has balked at the feds for appointing Mike Bromwich to investigate allegations of the company's alleged violation of anti-trust laws.
Not defending Apple nor commenting on the verdict (I didn't follow the case very closely) but I do find it curious that Apple's e-book market share is TINY compared to Amazon's (who BTW instigated the DOJ investigation). Seems like the monopoly (Amazon) used the US DOJ & anti-trust laws against an upstart (Apple) to protects its own business model. No?
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. ~ George Washington
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That's certainly possible. There's so much that goes on behind the scenes in big business that the public doesn't get to see. 
/ravi
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It's the Golden Rule, man. Whoever has the gold gets to make the rules.
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"Apple's management feels Bromwich is interfering with the company's day-to-day operations by requiring that he be permitted to conduct lengthy meetings with their top brass on an ongoing basis."
This is a red herring. As long as there is due process a company needs to comply. I cant get out of a speeding ticket because it took time for the police officer time to write out a citation can I?
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Your thinking makes sense, but the basic problem here is that wires to your house and the right-of-way granted to lay those wires are severely limited resources, and of those two things the latter belongs to the government, not the companies. It is impossible to have true competition between Internet access providers for the same reason it is impossible to have true competition between telephone, electricity, water, or natural gas providers: such competition requires the absurd and impossible scenario where dozens or hundreds of different companies have, say, their own networks of pipes running natural gas through the city, each one with 100% coverage so that you as a homeowner have the option to turn on whichever one you want to buy from. Can't work. The channels are thereby limited to an extremely low number, making delivery of these things a natural monopoly.
Economic and political theory in practice has for quite some time recognized not only a right, but a need to regulate naturally monopolistic markets and the companies in them, partly because otherwise the lack of a free market would put consumers at the mercy of the providers, and partly because in such cases the resources that are limited here are considered to belong to the people and their government anyway. The government was the one who granted (for instance) Comcast the right to put their wires on poles or underground across everybody's private and public property (including property of people who aren't even subscribers) in order to get their services to their customers. There's no reason to expect that a license to exclusively use a public right-of-way for profit ought to be free from interference or regulation. In other words, the wires may belong to the provider, but not the property they sit on, or the poles they are attached to, or the roads that get dug up when repairs are needed. Those things are being conditionally given to them, with the implicit recognition that this excludes other companies from using them for the same thing. There is no reasonable expectation that you can use up limited public resources without the public having any say in how you do so.
The ideal solution to this would, in theory, be that the so-called "information superhighway" is maintained just like actual superhighways, that is, treated as public infrastructure, built and paid for by the public just like roads are. It's actually even occurred to me that this would, in the United States, be a potentially good fit for the future of the mission of the U.S. Postal Service, having as they do the mission to deliver information and also owning physical property in every single town that could provide the basis for network switching centers. But I've become much more hesitant toward the government solution since it has become clear just how eager the government is to use any means at its disposal to monitor all its own citizens' communications and activities.
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Public infrastructure probably makes sense in this case, but there's waaaay too much money for these corporations to give up without a fight.
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I don't agree and the reason is that if not regulated in some way there's a lot of greed involved and the big companies get together and decide how much they want to fix the price at no matter how fair it is to the consumer. You will probably say if you don't want to pay the price don't order the service but if all the companies set the price who are you going to go to for internet service?
To me it's just like the Internet Sales Tax fiasco, it's not about being fair for the "Brick and Mortar" stores it's about more taxes for an already bloated government that instead of balancing the budget has to find a way to bilk more money out of the public.
Another example is, remember when antifreeze used to be ~$1/gal? Someone bought up all the antifreeze which drove the price up and they made a killing and the price has never come down since.
Sorry this turned into a rant didn't it?
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Collin Jasnoch wrote: I really don't think it is about price fixing.
I guess the right words weren't price fixing but what would you call charging for various content. Oh you want to listen to music $5/mo, oh you want to watch YouTube $5/mo, oh you're a student and want to do research $5/mo....
It's just another way to extort more money out of the internet.
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Mike Hankey wrote: Sorry this turned into a rant didn't it?
Sounds like a reality check to me. 
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I believe the issue goes even deeper than what the headlines can tell.
For me it's not only a matter of hardware ownership, the neutrality of the Net should also include the liberty of speech and thought that every citizen of the world should enjoy. As an example, think about China, the hardware belongs to state owned companies, so do the censors that sometimes wipe out entire discussion threads or remove certain keywords deemed "sensible" for the government (tian an men as an example won't be found on the chinese version of google and they can't access the more freer world, except if they use something like TOR).
There need to be some monitoring as in real life however, I d'ont think that should be the taks of the ISP to collect data and give them to any investigating bureau without any court order.
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Fred Flams wrote: the neutrality of the Net should also include the liberty of speech and thought
that every citizen of the world should enjoy
I admire the thinking, but this is a common mistake that a lot of folks in my country also make (your profile says you live in France). I often hear and read things talking about how some local, regional or national issue should be handled in some part of the world outside of America, based on freedom of speech, life, liberty, etc.
I have to remind them that while our country was built on a constitution that codified ideals such as personal freedoms and rights, it was at the time a novel concept and certainly not a globally held set of principles. Even today, when many countries consider human rights and democratic representation to be the right way of doing things, it's most certainly not a globally held set of ideals. Not only do governments vary wildly, this is often a reflection of the fact that cultures and thier views on religion, ethics, individuality versus personal freedom, etc. are very different in other parts of the world.
In other words, when people talk about the fact that someone in, say, China, is having their rights abused, I have to gently remind them that they don't have the same rights that we enjoy. They don't live in America. Or, in your case, France.
The Internet is global. Liberty of speech and thought is not. You can try to make it that way if you like, but I can assure you that you'll need a lot of guns and tanks in order to do so.
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The situation is complex, mainly because so many broadband providers have special privileges under the law. The most obvious such privilege is "monopoly provider" status, which still holds in a large number of localities. However, there are others -- and some of them even affect "dish-based" services that require no hard-link connection to the service provider.
Were all such privileges to be withdrawn, the market in Internet service would be truly free, and I'd be utterly against net neutrality. It would be a "camel's nose under the tent" which would endanger the freedom of this way to communicate. As matters stand, it's harder to argue against net neutrality, though there are still strong arguments against it as an innovation-suppressant.
As a rule, when a government decrees that it will provide, compel, regulate, restrict, or prohibit something "for the common good," I'm automatically against it. At least, that's been my immediate reaction, most of my life. I've been trying to think these things through at greater length in these latter years, because...well, just because.
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
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Smells a lot like the political argument from the (US) 2012 election where the republicans were whining about Obama's "build it" comment. Taken completely out of context, yes, it would be fair to hand the net over to the big players. Kept within context, no, it's not. Is your plumbing system owned/controlled by the big players? No, because society can't function that way. We have a shared system and we all get equal access to the supply and return (waste) water ... provided ya chip in a fair share of the costs.
If you aren't familiar with the "build it" thing, here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/an-unoriginal-obama-quote-taken-out-of-context/2012/07/20/gJQAdG7hyW_blog.html[^]
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I'm not sure how this wont work itself out in the end.
If someone is having trouble getting health insurance, doing their taxes, running their business, or paying their bills online, a lack of neutrality won't look so good even if it's not truly to blame.
There is a complexity in managing favoritism and lists and lists of who's who. What happens when a critical internet benefit lands on the wrong list? What if you can't get on the list you want? What if a natural disaster occurs and a website pops up to help victims. Will it be nonfunctional, slow as Christmas, or streamlined onto the fast track? If you are visiting the site, how will you know if it's a badly designed site or a non-neutral site? Will it be fixable? Which ISP would you need to contact? All of them?
It seems to me that any company offering Net Neutrality as a foundational feature would win out over those that don't in the long run. (Can't use the internet, find what you want, it costs too much, or it's taking to long = ISP's fault)
-Mikhael
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I think trying to make slippery slope arguments or huge assumptions about this or that are premature. Will they try to squeeze more money out? Probably. So what?
Only having one choice for broadband is an ephemeral factor. This can and will change if the demand is there. Remember basic economics, supply is a factor of price and demand. If the government holds down prices (net neutrality) your supply will be limited implicitly.
I personally would enjoy watching the likes of Google/Amazon/Netflix/etc. take on the ISP corps. I strongly believe the tech companies would absolutely dominate them, probably to the point of bankrupting them. Most of the ISP's are horrible companies (in my opinion). I go out of my way to avoid Time Warner. Luckily in my area I have U-Verse which is a decent service, but I will take DSL over Time Warner service all day long as well.
Where we get into trouble way way down the road, is if the tech companies start colluding with the ISP companies. At that point we need the government to step in and regulate things a bit. But they got to be forced to compete first.
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I see ISPs as merely a physical connection from my house to the internet, they are akin to a router or a switch.
For some reason they want to be considered "content providers" ... that idea is laughable.
They are more like network operators. I think most would agree, they don't want anyone doing deep packet inspections and getting between their machine and the web servers or other peers they are trying to access.
This is an endpoint to endpoint issue with the least amount of interference between the bits from one end getting to the other end, and nothing more.
Treat all bits equally, provide them the fastest transport possible, AND AT THE LOWEST COST (without raping anyone).
David
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Christopher Duncan wrote: Unless the government decides to take over an industry and seize the companies' assets, does it really have the right to tell a given company what it can do with the wires that it owns?
What happens if you want to create your own search engine. And google has contracted with every single provider in the country to allow cheaper access to google. So for anyone to use your search engine they will have to pay a fee every time they use it.
Is that fair to the start up? Is that fair to the consumer?
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No, it's not fair to the startup. It's also a violation of antitrust laws; we don't need more laws to prevent a situation like this.
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Patrick Fox wrote: It's also a violation of antitrust laws
Perhaps. But that would only be decided by the Justice Department and would be meaningless to a small start up since it would post their demise.
It would also be decided on a case by case basis. And wouldn't apply to the providers.
Net neutrality would prevent the possibility in the first place.
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