All this assumes that people cannot vote with their pocket book and use other services. The problem is that there is no ISP monopoly anymore.

@FrankCedeno maybe where you live. Where I live (a decent-sized city in MA) your choices are Comcast or... Comcast. If you really, really hate those choices, you can always switch to... Comcast. So no, that option is not viable nationwide.

@DoktorJ, you have no sky nor cell phones? How about air? Telephone wires?

@FrankCedeno I don't understand the point you're making about cell phones and air... What does that have to do with Internet Service in the Home? Regardless, my situation is the same as Doktor J. I've lived in a number of places, including major cities, and no matter where I go, there is always exactly only one option for ISP. It's usually a different one in each place, but it's only one in that place.

@DoktorJ: Well, the most obvious city in MA is Boston. Which has... 9 residential ISPs. Verizon, Comcast, netBlazr, USAi.net, RCN, Windstream, Verizon Fios are standard. HughesNet, and Exede Internet are other. Yes, if you want CABLE there's only one option you've heard of, but there is another cable provider, and there's also DSL, Fiber, and Wireless options. broadbandnow.com/Massachusetts/Boston

@MooingDuck Cherry picking Boston tells us nothing about the country as a whole, so I can’t understand why you did it. According to this, in 2015 6% of census blocks had one ISP to chose from that offered at least 3 Mbps: arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/… For at least 10 Mbps, 10% had only one choice, and 30% of the country can’t get 25 Mbps or faster at all. Note that satellite service is terrible and for a lot of places, that is the only available ISP.

@FrankCedeno Even in places where there are two or three possible ISPs, (which is at least 25% of the country) all it takes is for a small number of ISPs to all have some kind of limited service in some way and there’s no way to vote against it. Your comment is tantamount to saying, “hey if you don’t like coke, there’s always Pepsi and RC cola”, which doesn’t help at all if you just hate the taste of cola in general. Also what is a “sky phone”?

There is no fiber or even DSL in my city; most cell coverage in my area is little better than 3G (tests at ~2mbps up/400kbps down on a good day), so that leaves satellite, which is absurdly expensive per megabit and still ridiculously slower than cable. So yeah, my only real "choice" is Comcast. @MooingDuck I said "decent-sized city", not "major metropolitan city"; it's naive (at best, misleading at worst) to assume Boston.

@DoktorJ One wonders why this is the case in many places. It's doubtful that providers simply don't want to expand their customer base. Perhaps there is some factor that mitigates entry into the market. Until we know that, attempting to fix the problem via regulation is probably a poor decision. Prices and availability are nearly always reflections of some underlying condition; regulation often seeks to impose specific goals without regard to the causes.

@FrankCedeno ok, let's suppose there's not one, but five providers. And ALL of them block or throttle what you need because without net neutrality they CAN and it is profitable to ALL of them. So, how will you "vote with your pocket" now? Go ahead, tell me.

What ever happened to "The internet routes around errors."? Let the blocks crop up, and let the innovators route around them.

@Chloe You're saying net neutrality is a non-issue if there's enough competition, and most people probably agree with you, but in the USA there is not enough competition.

@Chloe it's not the internet until it's gone from your home through the ISP into the actual web. If you cut the single connection before it can fan out, there's no routing around that.

@FrankCedeno You fell for the tried and true competition lie. If the market prices something at $10 and you make a profit by selling it for $5, you don't sell it for $5 and you don't start a price war by selling it for $9. You sell it for $10 - like everyone else - to make maximum profit. Especially so with a product people can't chose to simply not buy, like internet access.

@Peter, in real life it does work, just watch TV and experience the cell phone unlimited internet price war. How about Xbox which was sold at a loss. There are so many examples. So what you fell for was the ignorance of elastic vs in-elastic prices. As long as there is no monopoly, this part of the market will always self-correct. And by the way, in the example you gave, only the ignorant would think they make more profit selling a $5 item for $10, since you will sell more at the lower price thereby increasing your overall profit. Its the reason why Oil cartels always fall apart

@FrankCedeno You got the gist of it, but for a market to create competing prices doesn't require "no monopoly", it requires far more than that. It requires commodity products, a number of independent sellers, low brand loyality, low barriers to market entry, and low cost for the consumer to change suppliers. Out of these 5, ISPs satisfy 1 (maybe 2), unless you take away net neutrality, in which case they satisfy 0 (maybe 1).

@Peter, NN does the opposite, It increases the value of market entry which is a function of how much red tape the regulation has. this is the essence of NN: It is a regulation. How do you measure fairness? with constant reports. The commodity is air as in wireless hotspots, there's plenty of air and bandwidth. You needs about 20K to start this in your backyard. Fairness will double your cost because now you have to keep records.

@FrankCedeno so, with OPEC having been founded in 1960... how long are we supposed to wait for it to fall apart? Xbox has nothing to do with anything here, consoles have been loss-leaders since at least the SNES days; Sony/MS/Nintendo/etc make up on the ridiculous markup on games which has only gotten more obscene with disc-based media: N64 cartridges cost $20-30 to manufacture, DVD/BD cost less than $10 and yet games still retail for $50-60. Cell phone "unlimited" contracts always come with asterisks, and Sprint sits at the lowest at $60/mo, and I've yet to see other carriers try to compete.

Furthermore, Sprint has a ridiculous amount of fees that make that so-called "lowest" price not so low; source: my Sprint bill (vs my T-Mobile bill).

NN issues are not exclusive to throttling. Only a few years ago there was almost no upgrade to the networks. Fiber optic even now in 2017 is not used at 100% of the major cities. One would think it should cause it allows for more bandwidth. The reason is cause by using throttling, ISPs had the leisure to not to upgrade even if new technology was trending to higher need of bandwidth. NN is not only needed to keep prices competitive but also for forcing ISPs to renew their network infrastructure , something that clearly they don't have interest on doing.