Snippet: The Real Net Neutrality Battle ☇

Michael Tsai provided quite a bit of coverage of others writing about the net neutrality battle, but there is one point that really struck me in his commentary:

I don’t find this very convincing, either. I don’t see how the repeal would incentivize Comcast to upgrade my local infrastructure or make it possible for another ISP to compete with them. Frankly, I don’t think the fight is about helping those of us in rural areas with little competition. It’s primarily a struggle between two different groups of large companies, the ISPs and carriers vs. the tech giants who fill their bandwidth.

And that’s the bigger issue at hand—there’s plenty of rural places where the only option is some sort of terrible DSL connection and companies like CenturyLink or AT&T aren’t going to go out of their way to improve that. Furthermore, even if you have multiple choices, it’s often between some sort of large telephone company operating some flavor of DSL product and a cable company operating their service. To a company like Comcast, AT&T maxing out at 12-18Mbps in some places doesn’t even register as competition.

I’m fortunate (?) to have 25Mbps AT&T or however fast I want to pay from Comcast, but there are days when it’s really who’s less terrible. I think that’s the sadder aspect of our ISP situation, there may not be a particularly great choice and there are only rare instances where people will talk about how much they love their ISP. That needs to change.