It can't? I don't know about you, but my Comcast performance, both promised and real, has been growing steadily for over a decade, at a much higher rate than the price has increased.
That's not a natural law, that's investment in technology and infrastructure. As that investment looks to be worth less, it'll slow down or cease. Look at Verizon's dramatic reduction in FiOS deployment, for example.
I had better (in terms of both cost and quality) internet living in rural southeast Asia five years ago than I do now, living in a million+ metropolitan area in the US. From my perspective, it realistically can't get worse.
You're one person, there are 300,000,000 others that matter as well, and it's an established fact that Comcast, as a whole, is a horrible company. Their customer service is atrocious, and something I myself have had to deal with.
John Oliver had it right, it is literally "preventing Cable Co. Fuckery"
That's only half the equation, though. The other half is whether Comcast allows you full use of the line in terms of what services can push to you.
As far as whether your bandwidth will continue to go up and prices go down (comparatively), it almost certainly will if more competitors are allowed to deliver to your house.
What's trickier there is new deployment, but that's what the utility model is all about: protect new deployment of infrastructure for long enough to make rollout worth it, in exchange for a guarantee that it will be usable by the public at large without preference.
That gives you, in essence, the telephone model: copper lines protected until (probably subsidized) costs to the provider are recouped, they're a commodity and no further enhancement will occur, then alternate providers let in on them for competition. Tech changes, protect that tech rollout, repeat.
Sure it's worth less, that's why Google is deploying Google fiber...
It's worth "less" (and essentially from their market perception today) which doesn't mean it's worth little or worthless, but of course in a monopoly/oligopoly your profits are bigger and you control the market.
Sure it's worth less, that's why Google is deploying Google fiber...
If Google really believed in the potential profitability of fiber, they could spend $20 or $30 billion over the next few years to get it in every major metro area. But they won't, because it wouldn't be.
If you're considering a multi-year nationwide build-out, what's the harm in another year or two delay to allow the regulatory situation to change to make the expansion drastically easier? If it were the actual digging of trenches that were expensive, Google Fiber would have never happened at any scale in the first place. Google's words and actions make it clear that the deciding factor is the costs of the permits and other local regulatory overhead, not the physical installation.
Google fiber is plain an simple a serious enough competitor to the major telcos that they'll continue to invest in fast internet tech such as infra upgrades and fiber optics.
Google stands to make money from more people using the internet and being able to send more content to users. If they can spend enough money to force the incumbents to improve performance, they still win.
Pretty sure the point of google fiber was to break even, but not really to ever be profitable. It is more of an insurance policy. They could light up all of the dark fiber they own and be a real problem with the major ISPs if they so chose.
The existence and decline of FiOS is the perfect example of unintended regulatory consequences. FiOS never would have happened if fibre hadn't been excluded from unbundled access requirements. Line-sharing was eliminated around the same time, bringing on the decline of alternative DSL providers. So Verizon spends a few years doing FiOS build outs instead of improving their copper networks, the DSL competition dies off, and now they've stopped investing in their whole wireline business in favor of wireless.
I don't know what Title II means for ISPs. I see nothing wrong with companies paying for a "fast lane", if we define the fast lane as paying for a level of service to my devices in excess of what I'm buying (ie: If I'm paying for 6Mbps of service, Netflix can buy me an extra 10Mbps to guarantee a better streaming experience). I do have a problem with ISPs purposefully allowing their peering connections to become overloaded in order to extract payment from content companies. I'm not paying Comcast for 100Mbps of bandwidth to their speedtest servers; I'm paying for 100Mbps of bandwidth to the content companies' networks!
I don't think a fast lane means what you're saying. It means packet prioritization, so that a saturated network delivers the "fast" packets sooner and/or more reliably. Companies that push data to consumers (Netflix, etc.) would pay for this prioritization. Think QoS rules, but with companies that have paid for preferential treatment at the top.
Fast lane is a made up political gobbledygook. I think it's fine for an ISP to sell whatever kind of preferential treatment they like to any company which freely chooses to purchase it, with the caveat that they service I'm paying for isn't being degraded.
If Microsoft wants to pay so that streaming stuff to my Xbox doesn't affect my data cap, that's goovy.
If Netflix wants to pay to guarantee they can stream 10Mbps to my devices while my other devices are using the whole 100Mbps that I'm paying for, that's cool too.
If Hulu wants to pay for QoS that prioritizes their traffic to me above my other traffic, that's not cool. Bandwidth management within my home is my domain and I've got my own QoS rules, thank you very much.
When Comcast lets their peering links get saturated in order to force Netflix to pay them, that's absolutely bad. I'm paying for access to the Internet and purposefully withholding the necessary peering to the content I'm interested in means that I'm being ripped off.
TLDR; I believe that ISPs should peer on a settlement-free basis with anyone who can deliver a commercially reasonable level of traffic to any of their peering points, without regard to ratios. And I believe they should be able to sell any kind of paid prioritization they like that does not degrade my other traffic.
I'm not as worried about paying for cap subsidies, which is basically what your 1 and 2 is about.
Keep in mind that still damages the free market for new services, though, because now they don't just have a technological barrier to entry, they have a purely financial/administrative one. I prefer the T-Mobile (music) model where they allow a whole class of services priority, but not on a corp-by-corp basis.
Your Hulu/#3 example is what I'm pretty sure Wheeler's alternative (call it fast lane or whatever) amounted to, before it was shouted down. We both agree that's a pretty horrible thing.
Because if Rdio and Spotify don't count against my data cap because of a paid agreement, a new entrant into music is probably not going to get much of my attention.
They'd have to be -so- much better than the existing leaders that I'm willing to pay for a higher cap or sacrifice part of my current cap to use them.
That effectively means that to be taken seriously, a new entrant has to pay the ISPs for exemption from the cap. Further, if the ISPs can choose not to make agreements with companies, they become the gatekeepers of who will be successful. Piss them off, and you lose your agreement.
This is anticompetitive, for sure, but the FTC has no jurisdiction over common carriers. AT&T is currently flogging this argument based on cc status on phone to escape reprisal from the FTC about lying about "unlimited" plan vs. their throttling policy that effectively caps such a plan to 5 GB. The say that because they're a phone CC, the FTC has to be hands-off period on all their business concerns.
I suspect that'll be found to be BS. However, if broadband is Title II, but we add an exemption to allow anti-competitive agreements around caps, there's literally zero remedy. It's specifically not under jurisdiction of the FTC unless Congress changes that particular law.
So, not a huge worry of mine as long as it's a "exempt all music, anyone can apply," but big worry if it's "exempt Spotify only." There are plenty of streaming markets that aren't sufficiently mature to be commodities yet (PPV on-demand movies like VUDU, iTunes, CinemaNow, Flixter; remote gaming like OnLive, Sony; etc.) and even the ones that are shouldn't be immune from shakeups.
That's not a natural law, that's investment in technology and infrastructure. As that investment looks to be worth less, it'll slow down or cease. Look at Verizon's dramatic reduction in FiOS deployment, for example.