I'd like to believe that consumers could always get what they wanted, but unfortunately the "market" these people are talking about is nothing like an actual free market. Competition in the internet provider business is virtually nonexistent; therefore what we have is actually much more like a heavily controlled market. Competition could be provided if someone were able and willing to start up a new service provider, but it would require massive amounts of money to do so, and where is anyone going to come up with that kind of money? It's simply not going to happen. However, from my understanding of things, even if someone went to the expense of building a new service provider, the connections that already exist in the Internet wouldn't transfer data from "the wrong" sources any faster. In other words, the only way to ensure fair data transfer rates would be to build an entirely new Internet.
The phrase "government-regulated monopoly" is an oxymoron. The monopoly regulates the government, not the other way around. It's a retarded idea, but that's what we get when we live in a country with a government comprised of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations. It just sucks that our country has to burden everyone else's by virtue of its control of the Internet.
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