You need to read this:
There are at least a dozen places in the developed world where you can get 100 Mbps Internet access to the Internet at a reasonable something. It’s interesting to look at some of these places. Amsterdam is fairly new. It has a lot of talk about it, but it’s rather expensive and there is only about 3,000 people connected, so far. We ought to go back and look at that five years from now and see what’s happening.
If you look at Tokyo, they’ve had fiber connectivity for quite a few years now. If you look at the fine print, there are actually deals where, at least for the first year, you can get down to $44. Hong Kong is about $35. Seoul, Korea are about $24. Stockholm is $11 a month for 100 Mbps connectivity. These are just a few of more than a dozen major cities in the developed world who have “real broadband” by my definition. New York City is of course equally dense. There is no such thing at all. In fact, if you look at the major cities in the U.S., none of them have anything like that.
What’s the issue here? It’s worth looking at some of these cities, particularly ones where the service has been available widely for more than five years to see how things have settled out. If you compare Stockholm and Tokyo, it’s interesting that Stockholm has a very, very vibrant market. Tokyo has something that we in the U.S. would consider a vibrant market, also, but it’s a lot less than what you see in Stockholm. I think that’s partly because of the layers at which things are operating. That appears to be the pattern across a lot of cities around the world.
Of course, in the U.S., we’re operating up at complete managed service Internet access from a vertically integrated monopoly or a duopoly, or if you’re super lucky, there is a third pipe. We’re stuck arguing about net neutrality. I claim if you’re arguing about net neutrality, you’re wasting your time because you’ve already lost. You’re in a world that is completely wrong. You want to be in one of these other worlds, at which point, you don’t have to argue about net neutrality…
