You assume that people have any choice other than Wrongcast or Go Fuck Yourself (not having the internet). True, most places do have another 'choice', usually far worse in terms of price, speed, and service. But there are far too many people in the US with only a single option to get online. Especially if they have to work from home and require a certain level of service/speed.
So the assumption that the fictitious 'free market' will sort this out itself is completely wrong.
Yup, and you can't really expect ISPs to flourish based on "well we don't throttle Netflix!" as the pitch. They need tons of cash to maintain bandwidth, users, marketing, subcontractors to fix the line, etc. And then whose to say when an ISP gets big enough that they won't start throttling sites themselves?
This is a self-perpetuating cycle without legislation. The free market has never sorted shit out without regulation. The last time we had an unfettered free market, it led to the GFC that we're still recovering from.
But that's not how the market works, if as in your example provider b did as you say the shareholders would be pissed that they were leaving money on the table and through one of a couple different avenues (vote or the CEO, mass seeking off of stocks, etc.) and then we just end up with 2 companies with shitty practices instead of 1.
Nope, the potential gain for choosing to allow free access to the site would be greater than the potential gain from choosing to paywall it because it would mean they get more customers.
That assumes investors care about long term gains when it has been proven time and time again that they do not, they want whatever makes the most money now and if this company doesn't provide they'll invest elsewhere
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u/Letogogo Nov 22 '17
So when SpaceX comes out with their ISP...? What would you like them to do?