Maggie's Farm

Please. American internet is a disgrace. American consumers have the slowest and most expensive internet (at home and on their mobile devices) of any civilized nation. Partly it's geography, but mostly it's local political corruption that limits consumer internet choice to one or two companies that provide rotten service at sky high prices.

Where we live and where we plan to retire, we can't get a reliable high speed connection unless we want to waste money on worthless cable (we don't watch TV and our cable company often is out of service for a week at a time, so we don't consider it a reliable option, especially not for the money). We are limited (in two places) to glacially slow and often throttled DSL that is worse than dialup at times. We live near the hedge fund capital of the world. But our provider claims it would be unduly burdensome to upgrade the service for a clientele that would certainly pay for it if it were available. The reason we don't have good service is NOT because we are over-regulated, but because we have too little competition. In Europe and Asia, by contrast,providers have to leave space in their systems to their competitors, so all vie with one another to provide better, cheaper service to the consumer

Our cellphone providers also charge FAR more than European ones do. Europeans and Asians can't believe that American consumers continue to believe the lies that lobbyists for the cable and phone industries promote on this issue. It would be as if people listened to the garbage infommercials on TV by Big Pharma instead of the advice of their faithful family doctor...oh. Some dummies do that too....

If one followed your logic, rural farms would never have had telephone service extended to them. In fact, government had to force the phone company to do so without charging rural Americans more, by defining phone service as a utility. Read this heartening story about some persistent farmers in South Texas lobbied their government to help them get phone service when stingy phone company types whined that it was "too expensive". http://www.vtx1.net/corporate/ Go Texans! Government is not always the enemy, especially when responding to the will of the people over greedy corporate types.

I would be the first to agree that one doesn't want the government involved in vetting content (tho perhaps it isn't always so dreadful--BBC content is on average better than a lot that private American TV company produces. Would you rather watch the Kardashians or Downton Abbey? That icky Donald Trump show or the Brit thriller "MI5"?). But net neutrality is actually one of the few issues where places like Maggies ought to agree with the big 0.