You are not driving prices down by regulating them, you are driving them down by introducing more choice and competition, something that usa ISP market fundamentally lacks.
> You are not driving prices down by regulating them, you are driving them down by introducing more choice and competition
Deregulation has proven _not_ to work for internet service providers. They're natural monopolies and oligopolies and as such antithetic to free market competition.
There are some relatively good examples around the world of regulated, utility like fiber networks in particular that _do_ work at actually encouraging free market competition between internet service providers.
> Deregulation has proven _not_ to work for internet service providers.
Proved by whom exactly? It works perfectly in the rest of the world. I've got a choice of 5 internet providers. People living closer to the central part of the city have 10 to 15.
My experience from western Europe is that only regulation forces ISPs to play fair with competitors. Even while the law is VERY VERY clear about it, they're still playing deaf and you essentially have to go to court to have the law applied (which smaller providers can't afford). Deregulation means supremacy of the private company, without any legal recourse, which can never be fair to users.
I am genuinely very curious to learn about a deregulated place with 15 competing providers available to a single place to live. I wonder what drives that rare phenomenon.
I am certainly not saying that is not the case. I'd just like to have practical examples of success stories of deregulation in this area. I haven't found any yet myself, and I have plenty of counter examples...
Of course you are. Do you think these evil capitalist vampires who built a monopoly on infrastructure through corruption over the years, are going to share it with their future competitors?
To use a big ISP's infrastructure they'll ask for a check in millions of euros. At least that's the case in France with Orange/Free/etc despite having strong regulations claiming they can't refuse to interop with competitors. For those curious, i'm talking both about collecting and peering agreements.
ISPs, just like any other capitalist business, is a mafia. If you want common people to have decent services, you need to treat it like a mafia.
