Quote Originally Posted by Dreadnaught View Post
When you think about it, Khend, this is actually not the best analogy at all. What private corporation spends truckloads of money to build a highway that has no usage-based component? Most highways charge both per-use and also based on the size of your vehicle. If you use the highway a lot, you pay more. Trucks are usually charged on a per-axle basis for the very sensible reason that trucks cause more wear on the road because of their weight and increased axle-count. But roads are usually built by the government, which is sort of the key distinction here: private companies are spending billions to build infrastructure to sell in a manner that makes sense for them.
A better road analogy: a company owns a toll road. however, that company also owns UPS. Now they decide to charge FedEx higher rates, give them a way lower speed limit, because it's a competitor. And the road is the only road connecting your town to the rest of the world. I'm pretty sure you would oppose that, or at least I hope you would. Plus it shows how this actually hinders innovation and competition, since it's going to be harder to start a new viable delivery company. Oh, and to make it more accurate, you already pay the owner of the road. for x deliveries per year, and suddenly without mentioning to you they start these measures, while you might prefer FedEx but can't use them properly anymore. And like I said, it's the only road available.

Oh, and some of your other claims are not valid either, about the complexity of regulation for example - we have it in our law, it's less than one page. And those regulations still allow, to keep using the road analogy, to charge more for trucks than cars, or to have a lower speed limit for trucks, or to ban trucks completely, as long as they a) treat all trucks equally (I.e. You can block/throttle all video streams, but you can't just restrict YouTube), b) inform their customers clearly, c) and only if it's because the road can't handle that many trucks (e.g. The Wi-Fi in trains here block all music and video streaming because they don't have enough bandwidth for all passengers to allow that). Next to that there are only exceptions for security, spam, and when ordered by a judge (like the former block of the pirate bay). That's it. not very complex, it allows almost anything you complain about (edge caching is perfectly legal).