It just means municipalities shouldn’t be granting monopolies for cable service.

The first urge should be not to regulate legislative faux-equality but deregulate market inequalities: allow competition to kick in so Comcast customers actually can punish Comcast for its behavior. Right now the options are kinda zero.

The Internet was designed based upon net neutrality, back when Senator Gore pushed the funding bills through.

Qwest won't serve my Madison Park apartment, so Speakeasy is out too. It's Comcast or nothing.

So, if Comcast's short-term choice is to throw some wrenches into P2P (pissing of a fairly small subset of users) or letting the P2P dorks drag things down for everyone, I don't blame them for going with the former.

It's the same reason you don't have 7 water pipes and 3 different power lines coming into your house. It just doesn't make sense.

The ideal solution would be some sort of public utility that controls the physical wires, and individual companies selling the service. Unfortunately we've already passed the time when that was feasible to implement.

Wireless technology is still just a pipe dream and will always be slower and less efficient than wires (or fiber optic), so we can discount that.

Since we are effectively granting pseudo monopolies on service, we should enforce net neutrality. It's not the best solution there is, but it's the only one that can actually be implemented fairly.

As and aside. I haven't noticed my bit torrent messed up at all and I have Comcast. I've downloaded over 3GB is the last few weeks and have uploaded at least 2GB.

The ideal solution would be some sort of public utility that controls the physical wires, and individual companies selling the service. Unfortunately we've already passed the time when that was feasible to implement.

How have we "...already passed the time when that was feasible to implement"? Tacoma did something similar 10 years ago when they were having problems with TCI and the folks I know in Tacoma love it. Seattle City Light could do something similar, and it was bought up in the City Council but the Seattle City Council, the most useless group of shits and fucks on the planet Earth decided to accept the mealy-mouthed guarantees from Comcast and the other cable companies that lease their right of way from City Light that they would keep prices down and improve service. I mean really, God forbid that the Seattle City Council actually do anything with City Light other than neglect it or try to use it as a cash cow for various projects and God forbid they actually do something to make Seattle a better place to live. Nope, couldn't have that.

America - dead last in tech, drowning in debt, and policeman to the world even when noone wants us to do it.

The ideal time to do it was when we broke up AT&T. We should have allowed them to keep the pipes, and forced them to sell the service.

It does no good if the city of Seattle took over the pipes in the city. Who runs the pipes outside of the city?

The time to implement it effectively was when there was still only one pipe coming into each home. And the solution was to make all the pipes a utility. It just doesn't work now. If the city tried which pipe would they use? The phone copper of the cable copper? It's already too much of a mess.

The simple solution is to grant them their monopoly on their pipes, but force them to play by the rules we set. If they don't, they have to open the pipe to anyone who wants them.

2. If we are going to allow a company monopoly on a geographic area, we can at least ensure that they arent fucking with our steeze so to speak.

As for Speakeasy, yeah, they used to be great, and we still have them, but now they're owned by Best Buy and are more interested in business service than residential these days. That and I'm pretty sure they outsourced their tech support to script-readers.

The easiest way to break up the new communications monopolies is to head them off at the pass. The Comcast situation is a fine example of what we can expect if we don't enact meaningful regulation now.

I'm generally in agreement with your attack on Comcast, but this analogy just doesn't work at all.

(1) First of all, what we're talking about is supplier differentiation, so the true analogy is if big water companies delivered water to you in higher volumes than little water companies due to the policies of the company that owned the pipes.

(2) Quickly flowing water is not quite as powerful of a good as internet speed. I care more that I get water than how fast it is, within reason.

(3) Rich customers paying more for faster access is indeed exactly what we have now, and why is that a bad thing? Broadband is a luxury, and higher data rates cost more to provide.