And people complain they’re being screwed by all of those, too. When they can buy a coast to coast airline ticket for $200. Or have a freaking pocket computer with 100 Mb/s fed to it wirelessly anywhere in a major metro for $100/Mo.
The loudest complainers are the ones who want life to be “fair”. They’re quite entertaining, really. If life were “fair” they could go climb the tower in a blizzard and re-point the microwave dish after the wind ripped half of the bracket off of the antenna feeding their local cell site.
Any carrier stupid enough to really mess with the bits of their competitors eventually gets their butt handed to them economically. One way or another. The business model is still to transport the most bits from point A to point B, or profit margins suffer and the next iteration of the network can’t be funded. So the company craps out or limps along until they get back in the game.
He who dies with the most Erlangs wins!
Having seen the way many in industry think, there a very large school of thought that messing with the competitor in a limited-competition market will eventually either 1) drive customers to you, or 2) drive the profitability of a competitor down so far that you can buy them cheap. It has worked enough that it's become a viable business model. The ILEC vs CLEC situation is not identical, but close - there are virtually no CLECs around any more. The decision path for management is "can we do it his ourselves and capture enough of the pie to make it worthwhile" and "can we use our distribution status to impede others enough to drive them to our platform" and "if we do that, can we drive them to sell out to us".
Carriers, particularly the cable guys, want to preserve the old business model because it's usually cheaper than building a new model tha might compete. Cable companies want to limit streaming for several reasons ranging from "we want the revenue from carriage fees" to "it consumes more bandwidth" to "it will disrupt our model" to they are competing with us". Content providers try the same thing - the music industry has learned that the hard way, and video companies have managed to avoid some of that (both sought and got federal legal protection). Heck, some of the sports leagues (looking at you, MLB) still black-out local markets from streaming unless you subscribe to a local cable/satellite provider - and some teams (looking at you O's and Nats) don't allow streaming at all except to out-of-market subscribers to the MLB package. That's all about preserving the business model.
We can look at cost, too. Locally, "business" internet is about 3x, maybe more, than consumer, for a lower speed. What it buys you is no data cap, open ports, the ability to run a server (static IP) and a few freebies. It uses the same pipes and POP, so reliability is on-par. That can give us an idea of the cost structure that providers may impose.
even the airlines worked hard to drive out competitors. One drove smaller low-cost competitors out of their fortress hub by adding widebodies, slashing fares, and limiting access to gates. When AA owned Sabre, they were sued for anti-competitive behavior by altering the order that results were given to AA's preference.
Life's not fair, but a certain amount of regulation is necessary to ensure a well-functioning competitive market. Even if that regulation seeks to keep out competitors. He who has the gold rules.
