> Imagine that some major player did begin to act badly.
And it was easily detectable and your average consumer can figure out who to attribute it to. Remember when Comcast was finally caught injecting poison packets to sabotage Bittorrent connections?
There are far subtler ways to be evil and maintain some plausible deniability against the average consumer, you don't need to sabotage every operation, just enough. Government lawsuits are partly about giving weight to the concept that something screwy is going on.
> This would enable a competitor
Like that competitor to Comcast, who rapidly -- oh, wait, that didn't pan out. Don't ignore barriers-to-entry, which are hugely significant in the ISP market.
P.S.: In addition to the "direct intervention" side, there's also cases of spying and misusing privileged information. While that's on the decline due to increased HTTPS, the legal front is just as important as the technological one.
> Remember when Comcast was finally caught injecting poison packets to sabotage Bittorrent connections?
Probably easier to pull that style of thing in under existing fraud legislation than tie it to anything net-specific.
Even if there is no objective test, it is reasonably easy to make that sort of lie illegal. Free markets rely on companies being honest about what they sell, and I expect there would be pretty broad support for a law that says companies can't lie about what their products are (if there isn't such a law already).
If Comcast wasn't making it clear that they were sabotaging BitTorrent, that should be illigal by virtue of them willfully accepting money while not providing the service.
And it was easily detectable and your average consumer can figure out who to attribute it to. Remember when Comcast was finally caught injecting poison packets to sabotage Bittorrent connections?
There are far subtler ways to be evil and maintain some plausible deniability against the average consumer, you don't need to sabotage every operation, just enough. Government lawsuits are partly about giving weight to the concept that something screwy is going on.
> This would enable a competitor
Like that competitor to Comcast, who rapidly -- oh, wait, that didn't pan out. Don't ignore barriers-to-entry, which are hugely significant in the ISP market.
P.S.: In addition to the "direct intervention" side, there's also cases of spying and misusing privileged information. While that's on the decline due to increased HTTPS, the legal front is just as important as the technological one.