There's a reason Comcast can have some of the worst customer service ever measured, deliver substandard internet service, enjoy little to no competition and yet still rake in premium prices from their jailed customers.
That would be their monopoly in the last mile, no? Enable robust competition there, and the rest is sorted out for you. If some packet shaping happens that people don't like, and they have viable competition, they will move and the problem will be corrected.
The stadium analogy makes no sense. Nobody's talking about public funding for a city-wide internet resource with equal cost to all that benefits some more than others.
You're taking it farther than I am. I'm not talking about public money either, just the concept of a larger group paying a higher price for something that a smaller group uses more, but may have broader benefit to the whole group. Those debates can be contentious, so having a set of rules dictated by the government could be a one size fits all answer.
I like most of what Obama had to say on it. I think the rub is this: "
If the FCC appropriately forbears from the Title II regulations that are not needed to implement the principles above — principles that most ISPs have followed for years — it will help ensure new rules are consistent with incentives for further investment in the infrastructure of the Internet". Adding utility type regulation seems to me like it could have some downsides.
Also, his comments did not address the peering issues, which I was trying to point out in my post. He said no throttling, or blocking, but that was not the issue with Comcast/Netflix. This is what I mean
From
http://consumerist.com/2014/02/23/netflix-agrees-to-pay-comcast-to-end-slowdown/
"Much like Netflix’s ongoing standoff with Verizon FiOS, the drop in speeds wasn’t an issue of the ISP throttling or blocking service to Netflix. Rather, the ISPs were allowing for Netflix traffic to bottleneck at what’s known as “peering ports,” the connection between Netflix’s bandwidth provider and the ISPs.
Until recently, if peering ports became congested with downstream traffic, it was common practice for an ISP to temporarily open up new ports to maintain the flow of data. This was not a business arrangement; just something that had been done as a courtesy. ISPs would expect the bandwidth companies to do the same if there was a spike in upstream traffic. However, there is virtually no upstream traffic with Netflix, so the Comcasts and Verizons of the world claimed they were being taken advantage of."
AT&T has already announced they will hold off on their gigabit rollout until the rules are clarified.