Government is a disease masquerading as the cure for all society. Robert Lefevre

I invoked Teddy simply because I remembered that he split up a monopoly or two, and was not passing judgement about his success or politics, but I can see how that could have been misconstrued.

I guess to sum it up…. Would conservatism endorse splitting the ISP companies (not something really conservative) to achieve the goal of great competition and no regulation (something conservative). I think that’s what I was getting at, but it was late when I posted. Thanks for the input though. I’ve been a daily reader of this site for quite a while (even longer under a long-forgotten username), and occasionally post.

if you dont want to look deeper… listen to makemyday guy

Seems like that would be a good idea, so it probably would never happen.

Unrelated thought: What is the specific oath that Congresscritters take on assuming office? It seems probable many of them are violating any oath promising fair practices, honesty, and public service to the citizens. Could they be sued for something?

Both realistic options suck.

Regulations are most likely going to be a trojan horse, setting a precedent for government censorship down the road, and god only knows what else. It may stop the telcos from screwing the internet up as we know it, but something gives me a feeling it’s only being done to make naive liberals line up behind it as some kind of… us vs. them Sparta battle.

However, there is not free market right now for internet, so fighting the regulations is barely even a conservative position. Right now, I can’t even get DSL where I live in SAN DIEGO! …And I live in the city. There is a monopoly on cable internet here, so half the city belongs solely to Cox (insert joke here) and half to Time Warner. I can pick all of ONE ISP for broadband, so as far as my person life is concerned, Cox may as well be a government unto itself controlling what I see.

Can I please get a Teddy Roosevelt to get some competition back into this industry? I want a freaking free market solution, but it seems that it’s the least likely outcome here…. Am I way off base on this? I’d really appreciate a conservative’s response regarding what seems to me to be two horrible options on the table.

The government simply won’t let competitors into the market, won’t let any other companies use the lines, supposedly because letting anyone else in would reduce the telecom profits and none of them would be able to expand their services.

The best solution would be to take their government granted monopolies away and break them up so that net neutrality laws wouldn’t be necessary. But of course, no one in either party would be willing to do that. so we’re left either letting these companies abuse their monopoly positions (which again, are created totally by the government), or we regulate the networks with something like the Net Neutrality laws.

Let the investors in the internet infrastructure do whatever the heck they like between each other and with the pieces they invest in.

But, when an end-user connects, no provider or service may restrict or impede any access that user requests. I don’t mind the end-user being charged more for extra bandwidth or usage, as long as that is up front in an agreement.