Yeah, re-reading my post, it could be summed up as, "Most small businesses fail. And you are trying to set up a small business that has the reliability and low cost of a Utility, so you will most likely fail."

People don't stick around if your internet service goes down for a few minutes.

To fix any internet outage in a few minutes would require on-site tech staff 24/7/365, and duplicate hardware, at a minimum. That alone triples your human resources budget, and doubles your hardware budget, and you haven't even transferred your first bit yet.

And what if a construction company down the block cuts your underground fiber cable that provides your connection? You have a duplicate fiber connection going south, to another network interchange, that you can instantly switch all traffic over to, right?

Or when the couple renovating their apartment on the 3rd floor bust the water pipe and knock out power to the building? You do have a backup diesel generator that can run for 24 hours while the water and electric companies work in the building to restore services, right?

blah. blah. blah.

I used to have an ISP as a marketing client.

Part of what I did is walk through their entire operation, end to end, to see all the systems and backup systems they had in place just to provide basic internet services. These guys are REALLY good, and have been doing it for a LONG time.

They have two internet pipes which run north and south out of their building to two different internet exchanges run by two different companies. That protects against an idiot with a backhoe, but...

... they still buy their connection/bandwidth from CenturyLink and Verizon.

Their have their own building, security, HVAC and power redundancy, etc, etc, etc., and they STILL can't get/don't warrant a direct connection to the backbone. They have to buy their north connection from CenturyLink (at the Westin), and their southern connection from Comcast or Verizon. (Don't remember which one.)

So even this robust, decades-old, reliable data center is still beholden to their internet provider actually providing net neutral internet traffic. If CenturyLink or Comcast decide to throttle Netflix again, there ain't dick the downstream ISPs can do about it.

So there are two problems which need to be solved to move around non-NN ISPs:

1. You need to be an ISP with enough traffic, money, clout, to warrant being connected directly to the internet backbone.

2. Your connection to the backbone needs to be approved by the companies you are competing against - the six Tier 1 providers - who are exactly who you think they are: Comcast, Verizon, NTT, AT&T, etc. They have to agree to interchange traffic with you, or else you get your traffic onto the backbone, and they simply ignore it.

In every regard, the Internet looks exactly like every other Utility in America: a small number of providers, providing an essential service, to homes and businesses, across a proprietary channel (electrical lines, water pipes, internet fiber, etc.), and providing a service that is interchangeable and indistinguishable from a service provided by the government.

It needs Title II protections. Homebrewing solutions just are not going to cut it.