> dan <danden...@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




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