Con democracy argument: the first democracy is at most 2500 years old. For hundreds of thousands of years the human race blossomed without democracy.
The reason the internet was pretty good without any rules for the first 20 years is because big commercial interests didn't understand it until relatively recently, they didn't see the opportunities to exploit the exclusive access to the subscriber's home. They understand it now.
Only in the past 10 years or so have we come to need reasonably-priced and stable internet almost as much as we need electricity or water.
The issue, I think is not about net neutrality laws. It is the lack of competition between ISPs. And this is what the government should enforce, for example by requiring established ISPs to rent their lines at a reasonable price and make access to utility poles easier.
In countries where there is competition, there is no need for net neutrality laws, because people don't want arbitrary restrictions, and they will naturally vote for net neutrality with their wallets.
Furthermore, net neutrality rules don't solve every problem, because it doesn't deal with peering. For example if an ISP is also a content provider, they can connect their servers directly to their backbone, it will be fast. But their competitor isn't, which mean traffic will have to go through the global internet, which can result in congestion. Effectively having a fast lane without explicitly violating net neutrality: they don't discriminate traffic, they just deploy their network following their best interests.
I'm not saying that it is a bad idea to enforce net neutrality, but IMHO, the priority should be to restore competition.
I roughly agree, but I'm guessing the big ISPs will like that even less. Like most big problems in the US, the best solutions seem completely impossible, because big changes are too hard to get enough people to agree on.
So you'll often see the biggest support for fighting a "bad" change, "holding the line" at the current compromise.
The reason the internet was pretty good without any rules for the first 20 years is because big commercial interests didn't understand it...only in the past 10 years...
You realize your analysis completely ignore the 2001 tech bubble?
Big corporations have known and invested heavily in the internet for a lot longer than the last 10 years (since 2007?!?)
They were interested/excited by it, but didn't fully get it. The internet was just then replacing walled gardens like aol and prodigy.
Most people used dial-up for many years, and that sort of piggy-backed on the common-carrier status of the landline phone companies. So there was plenty of competition there. Cable internet providers were new around that time, and competing with cheap and good-enough dial-up and roughly-equivalent DSL (which could deliver service from a third party, somewhat like dial-up, e.g. earthlink). So the idea of only having one fast-enough option for internet in your town was novel.
Further, there were far fewer paid online services. So there wasn't an ecosystem to support partnership/promotions/schemes like today.
> Con democracy argument: the first democracy is at most 2500 years old. For hundreds of thousands of years the human race blossomed without democracy.
It survived, blossoming depends on your definition. In that regard the human race has only blossomed in the last hundred year or so, quadrupling in size.
I would call the scientific revolution a blossoming, and although democracies (notably the Dutch Republic) participated, most of it happened in monarchies and principalities.
The reason the internet was pretty good without any rules for the first 20 years is because big commercial interests didn't understand it until relatively recently, they didn't see the opportunities to exploit the exclusive access to the subscriber's home. They understand it now.
Only in the past 10 years or so have we come to need reasonably-priced and stable internet almost as much as we need electricity or water.