Reddit reviews Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age

Since we're talking about Lawrence Lessig, people might be interested in Susan Crawford, was was TA for Lessig while at Stanford. I got to know Susan, when she was a Law Professor at the University of Michigan and I was on the Cable Commission as an elected member of Ann Arbor City Council. Anyone concerned about the Internet and Net Neutrality should read Susan's book: Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age https://www.amazon.com/Captive-Audience-Telecom-Industry-Monopoly/dp/1491528745

Spot on. They shouldn't have it both ways. Unfortunately, America has a history of insufficient legislation, regulation, and consumer protections when it comes to major industries.

I see so many parallels between the new frontier of internet companies and the railroad / telephone / cable industries of past and present. They want to define themselves as "common carriers" (beholden to different rules as a platform where commerce takes place, supposedly agnostic, and often receiving subsidies their contributions to the public). Invariably, of course, they are never truly neutral because there's a lot more money to be made when companies start showing favoritism to who's goods they carry and charging exuberant rates to others. And then you close the loop because money equals influence over legislation, which in the form of deregulation, erodes enforcement and gives companies more favorable conditions to make money.

Hooray.

Edit: Recommended reading: Captive Audience by Susan Crawford

I was foolishly mistaken before that dsl necessarily meant some kind of upgrade over dial up, I guess that it doesn't tie up your phone line is supposed to count... but that is all it has got going for it where I live. After hearing about this being discussed, I have to agree that a lot of local ISPs are done laying out/improving networks and just want to sit back and farm what is already there.

That's part of it...which they're really only able to do because of their economic power and localized monopoly status. (See Susan Crawford's book on this.) Anti-trust law is so unenforced in this space that Comcast and TWC volunteered that they had agreements not to compete anyway as a reason why their merger should have been allowed.

But fundamentally, NN is about non-discrimination. Hence, "neutrality." What you're saying would not have had Al Franken calling it the "First Amendment issue of our time." What you're discussing is a standard price gouging concern that is a collateral consequence of lacking NN, but I don't think it's at the core.