When I moved to New York from London in January, hooking up my internet access was frustrating. I’d come to expect everything in England to be expensive, but every option for getting internet access at home in New York was far pricier than the service I’d had in London. What’s worse, access was absurdly slower – 5 Mbps was standard in England, but speeds even a tenth that fast were now considered premium. Adding to my bafflement, I could only find two providers – my phone company and my cable company – whereas in London, at least a dozen companies provided fast and inexpensive service.

So when I hear net neutrality advocates talk about the ‘risk’ of Americans being subjected to slow access to some websites if multi-tiered broadband pricing becomes reality, I have to wonder whether they realize what bad shape they’re already in. And when I hear net neutrality opponents warn of a ‘socialized internet’, I wonder whether they appreciate how ill-served they are by the duopoly that currently exists.

Net neutrality advocates worry about sites being ‘blackmailed’, with access slowed to a crawl unless those sites pay up. Their fears may be exaggerated, but they’re not completely unfounded. In a real market, they wouldn’t have to worry – if most providers adopted this sort of tactic, odds are that at least one would break ranks, attracting those customers turned off by the slow access (or willing to pay a bit more for faster access). But with the current duopoly, it’s possible that both players in each market would adopt and maintain the sort of tactics that net neutrality advocates fear.

Net neutrality, though, doesn’t strike me as the ultimate solution – competition does. In the only article about regulatory policy that I have ever described (and probably will ever describe) as ‘riveting’, Thomas Bleha, writing in the May/June 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, explains how anti-competitive regulatory policy for broadband (and for cellular) service in the United States has left it with access that pales in comparison to that in Europe and Japan.

Imagine that typical American internet access became as fast as typical access in England. Now imagine that, were multi-tiered internet pricing allowed, a pernicious broadband provider cut speeds for some websites tenfold. Typical American access to those sites would still be faster than it is today!

So where should we be heading? If we’re not going to introduce full and real competition into broadband service, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that partial competition – the multi-tiered pricing that net neutrality advocates oppose – could be dangerous. But the best solution isn’t the status quo that net neutrality advocates support. The United States needs to steal a page from Japan and Europe, introducing much broader competition in broadband provision that might produce a multi-tiered internet, but that would lead to faster access for everyone, to everywhere. The dirty secret of the folks opposing net neutrality – primarily American broadband providers – is that while they deride a ‘socialized internet’, that’s exactly what they’re benefiting from now.