There is STILL a more competitive market even in those areas because of the availability of cable internet, phone company broadband internet, and wireless broadband internet. And as such, competitive forces provide consumers with more choice and more freedom than your federal government regulations will. But maybe you're right and federal restrictions to discourage investment by ISP's will help ensure that innovation continues to flourish. It has NEVER worked before, but maybe the internet is the exception that will finally prove that a federal government solution to a non-existent problem is what we really need.
Many localities throughout the country only have one option. Even with the competition that exists in most areas, it would take only about five companies in the US to implement this policy to cover probably 90% of users in the country.
The major ISPs shouldn't complain about this. They were more than happy in the 90s to take billions in tax breaks and other considerations on the promise of 40 Mb/s to the curb. They haven't delivered, and now they want to siphon more money off of existing commerce.
internet is the exception that will finally prove that a federal government solution to a non-existent problem is what we really need.
This issue really has two parts.
The first is on the back-end. A few years ago the ISPs started talking about how Google and other content providers were "freeloading" on their networks, and started making plans to degrade the services of those who don't pay them.
The "freeloading" argument was of course total BS. The content providers pay their ISPs millions each (Google over a million a day), and consumers together pay tens of billions of dollars a year to their ISPs. The ISPs just want to get paid twice, and they're willing to destroy the basic premise of the Internet -- the free flow of data -- in order to do it.
This will also create a higher barrier to entry in Internet markets, discouraging investment and innovation. One thing that drove all those Internet billions is that anybody can start up, yet have the same presence as a billion-dollar company. Non-neutrality kills that -- the billion-dollar company can afford the ISP's extortion fee, but the startup can't.
Yes, extortion. They'll degrade your traffic, and thus your ability to do business, if you don't pay.
The other end of this was sparked by P2P throttling, but P2P itself isn't the point. ISPs of course have the right to control traffic from users that is disrupting their networks. For example, they've cut off users whose computers had been turned into members of DDOS botnets.
But ISPs that advertised a large fixed bandwidth with no maximum transfer started throttling user's P2P traffic to reduce the load on the network. IMHO, that was a violation of contract, or at least false advertising. You advertise 7 Mb/s 24/7, you damn well better be able to provide that to all of your customers. Instead the ISPs built their networks to handle only a fraction of that load, then complained when some people actually used what they had paid for.
The net neutrality aspect of this is the very concept that an ISP would limit the consumer's use of legitimate applications (yes, P2P in itself is legit). The consumer protection aspect is offering a service, then penalizing those who use the service as advertised.
The basic rules of the FCC are meant to keep the status quo from before the ISPs got greedy and decided they didn't like people using the whole service offered.
One day there may be real ISP competition. But until then millions of people have no real choice for broadband, and are at the mercy of the ISPs.