Right, I'm not quite how you make the leap that "Net neutrality IS a government assisted monopoly".
It does seem to me that net neutrality makes it effectively impossible for ISPs to differentiate, because they're all compelled to sell the same product - dumb pipes. This will likely make it difficult for two ISPs to exist in the same market, but it doesn't preclude competitors from entering the market at such time as the prevailing ISP becomes abusive. In other words, it's not worse than the status quo.
> It does seem to me that net neutrality makes it effectively impossible for ISPs to differentiate, because they're all compelled to sell the same product - dumb pipes.
If ONLY they viewed themselves as a dumb pipe, I could actually shop on relevant metrics—price, availability, bandwidth, latency—and I would be happy to switch to the best available ISP in the market. As it is, it's actually very difficult to find any numbers on availability, bandwidth, and latency.
Instead, I'm forced to compare prices and offerings. The offerings are actually an UPPER bound on bandwidth, rendering comparison meaningless for comparing ACTUAL bandwidth. The pricing advertised is often not for internet but some "bundle" of varied services, most of which will drastically increase in price after the first year, and only one of which (broadband internet) I actually want. For instance, I see ads for FiOS all over the damn place—successfully suckering me in, I might add—but in spite of living in residential, downtown city for the last eight years of my life I've never actually found a place I can actually get fiber.
ISPs are already impossible to differentiate in terms of actual value. Selling dumb pipes can only improve.
I am a bit surprised to hear the view that NN would make it impossible for ISPs to differentiate. Many companies sell the same product and manage to differentiate themselves. If you took away the customer service aspect of Dell, what reason have they to exist?
Price and customer service is a good starting point for differentiate companies. Latency is an other point, since no ISP can have zero hops to every other ISP in the world, regardless of NN. The Internet is designed with routers in mind, and each router adds to the latency. Sadly there is currently little competition on latency, except of the world of stock trading.
For companies, there is the world of BGP. High reliability, anycast, and so on. Not something I see much competition on either. Providing network solutions for companies is something that ISP's don't tend to do (here in Sweden at least), yet much at the network edge could be provided by an ISP if they wanted to offer it.
Even 'dumb pipes' aren't equivalent. Here it's either IPv4 only (telekom.de), CG NAT IPv4 plus IPv6 (Kabel), or the small ISP I'm with (/28 static IPv4, /48 IPv6).
It does seem to me that net neutrality makes it effectively impossible for ISPs to differentiate, because they're all compelled to sell the same product - dumb pipes. This will likely make it difficult for two ISPs to exist in the same market, but it doesn't preclude competitors from entering the market at such time as the prevailing ISP becomes abusive. In other words, it's not worse than the status quo.