[Rpm] [Starlink] [LibreQoS] net neutrality back in the news

[Livingood, Jason]

> dan <dandenson at gmail.com> wrote: 

> "(I assume most ISPs want happy customers)."
made me laugh a little.  'Most' by quantity of businesses maybe, but 'most' in terms of customers being served by puts the Spectrums and Comcasts in the mix (in the US) and they don't care about happy customers they care about defacto monopolies in markets so that they don't have to care about happy customers.  

Corporations are motivated to generate returns for investors. In that context, happy customers stay longer (less churn) and spend more (upgrades, multiple services). And unhappy customers generate costs via disconnects (loss of revenue, costs to replace them with a new customer to just stay at the same subscriber levels), and costs via customer contacts (call center staff). So, IMO on a purely financial basis, public companies have significant motivation to retain customers and keep them happy. This typically follows through to staff members having part of their variable compensation based on things like NPS scores, contact rates, etc. And specifically in relation to Comcast, the company recently has 4 new wireless competitors: three 5G FWA and one LEO (more coming) - and those are posing significant competitive risks (and taking customers). 

> For the last mile, I'm actually less concerned with pure NN and more concerned with no-blocking or 'brand' prioritization and required/label transparency...

The two thoughts your comments (thanks for the response BTW!) trigger are:
1 - Often regulation looks to the past - in this case maybe an era of bandwidth scarcity where prioritization may have mattered. I think we're in the midst of a shift into bandwidth abundance where priority does not matter. What will is latency/responsiveness, content/compute localization, reliability, consistency, security, etc. 
2 - If an ISP blocked YouTube or Netflix, they'd incur huge customer care (contact) costs and would see people start to immediately shift to competitors (5G FWA, FTTP or DOCSIS, WISP, Starlink/LEO, etc.). It just does not seem like something that could realistically happen any longer in the US.

JL