Some of your points are well-taken, and I don’t want to divert this too far into discussing healthy eating, its impact on our healthcare costs, etc.
As far as your points on Internet service, let’s just take a step back here and define the problem. There’s several possible criticisms of the way things are today that are not actually being discussed in this thread. For example, poor rural access to broadband; poor people not being able to afford broadband; and people who have broadband but dislike their ISP/how much they charge/etc.
Each one of those issues has totally different solutions. The first, I hope technology can address, but otherwise I think government spending on infrastructure is a decent backup plan. The second I think can be addressed through better local regulation, like basically mandating a barebones service at low prices that are affordable to all, while raising prices on plans that have faster access for people who just have to have streaming 4k video or whatever. The third, for the most part I dismiss as first world problems.
I think you have this backwards. The current market standard for bundling is cable TV, conveniently by the same companies who provide the vast majority of broadband services. This poll suggests that the clear majority (77%) of Americans would rather get cable TV a la carte than bundled.
This doesn’t surprise me because bundles suck. You always pay for things you don’t want and don’t get things you do want, unless you buy yet another bundle filled with things you don’t want.
A la carte is simple, and a dumb pipe is simpler still. I just buy the service I want, when I want it, from whoever sells it.
You know what you get when the cable company controls your access to content? You get me missing an entire year of Yankees baseball because Cablevision was pissed of at YES network for taking the games away from their MSG network. You don’t even have to stretch the analogy for this to turn into Comcast telling their customers that they can’t have Netflix anymore because they are in a contract dispute.
I believe that is mostly because they mistakenly think that instead of buying a bundle of 200 channels for $100 a month, they’ll just get the 10 channels they watch for $5. But that’s not how pricing works.
When you give people the actual chance to buy television a la carte, say by buying individual episodes of television shows on iTunes, they mostly don’t like it at all, because the prices are way higher than the bundle.
A few other bundles that people seem to really like: Netflix, which is like the biggest cable bundle ever, and people mostly love it.
Amazon Prime, which is a crazy multi-industry bundle of shipping, streaming video, music, file storage, grocery discounts (check back later this week to add more things to this list).
It’s not bundles that people don’t like, it’s overpriced bundles. People are “cutting the cord” because $100/mo cable is a very bad value proposition compared to $15 for Netflix.
I’m generally in favor of socializing internet infrastructure and more regulations on ISPs. I do disagree that net neutrality (forcing all ISPs to be only dumb pipes) is necessary, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t lots of useful regulations that can be made. The other way that you can see that our internet is a real problem is by comparing it to what’s available in other similar countries. We’ve fallen way behind.
And while it’s easy to say that streaming 4K video is a luxury that isn’t important to subsidize, if you can’t stream 4K video, you probably also can’t be a remote knowledge worker.
Increasingly, if a location doesn’t have good high-bandwidth internet, it’s going to be left in the dust as knowledge workers disperse. When I’m considering where to live, being able to get 100Mbps internet is an absolute necessity. Not because I want to watch HD video on Netflix (although I do want that and will do it), but because I can’t do my job without it.
Imagine that the government invested in high speed internet backbones to rural areas, with the caveat that entertainment would be second-class users of it. Sure, if you want to watch Netflix and there’s spare bandwidth, 4K full ahead. But if someone is working over that connection, they get priority. That’s obviously not a dumb pipe, but it strikes me as a reasonable tradeoff to make. It might be hard to implement for practical reasons, but that’s not the same as saying a dumb pipe is actually a better solution.
“All bits are equal” is a nice rallying cry, but it’s just not true, societally. Some bits are more valuable than others! If you’re a rural area that’s losing population to nearby cities and you want to entice some industry back, even in the form of remote employee outposts, you’d be much better served by investment that lets you get necessary fast internet to people working than one that requires maybe 5x as much investment so that the network is sufficiently provisioned that everyone can watch 4K video streams.