I posit that government regulations allowed monopolies to flourish in the first place, and further deregulation would allow competitors to best these monopolies.
I’m not sure what monopolies your referring to for internet service, perhaps you mean for phone service?
In the early days of electricity there were not enough people in rural areas to justify the capital investment to provide power. The voters decided that the country would be better off if everyone had access to electricity at reasonable rates. The government provided grants, loans, and a guaranteed rate of return to electric utilities. This same approach was later applied to voice phone service, the citizenry recognizing that the societal benefits would be far greater if everyone had access to phone service at reasonable rates. In both cases the government correctly determined that trying to have both rate-of-return regulation and competition would be a financial disaster, and since there simply was no economic basis for a competitive market they implemented monopolies that were highly regulated.
We could have a very long discussion about how the companies are smarter, and more motivated, than the regulators and found ways to earn excess profits and delay competitive entry to the markets, but let’s save that for another day.
Switching to the internet. Network access was originally facilitated by fixed lines and dialup modems, all run over the phone network. The telephone companies were monopolies, and acted like monopolies when they rolled out ISDN. The quality of cable service at the time was quite poor, and nobody liked the cable companies, but the cable companies jumped into internet access with both feet and unexpectedly won huge market share.
My point is that the government didn’t create monopolies for internet service and ISPs are only very lightly regulated. Even the regulation under net neutrality was hardly burdensome and in many ways it prevented the ISPs from picking winners and losers on the application and content side.
Respectfully, please educate me why net neutrality is no longer needed. Not that long ago Comcast throttled Netflix. I like it that my modest website has until now been guaranteed equal treatment with the big guys.
The vast majority of the population has access to several potential ISPs, so in theory competition will prevent the ISPs from acting unreasonably. Now we both know that this is optimistic. For example, let’s say that you develop a new video streaming app. A few years ago you’d set up your site, folks would start using it, and if it was good you’d be in business. Today there might be deals between Netflix and Amazon and the major ISPs that require all streaming video providers to pay the ISP $10MM per month plus $2 per subscriber per month. Obviously a new video streaming provider won’t be able to afford that cost and so the only business model for a new video provider would be to sell the software to one of the big guys that have the market locked up. In this example the lack of neutrality will stifle innovation and investment.
I would not have been upset if some parts of the net neutrality regulation had been retained, but at this point we’ll just have to wait and see if the ISPs will behave themselves.
