_You_ _cannot_ _legislate_ _good_ _behavior_ _into_ _monopolies_. So while I appreciate the spirit of Net Neutrality rules, the solution is fundamentally flawed.

Let's say you want to open an ISP in your neighborhood. Based on their history (When Google Fiber moved into my area), Comcast will call their existing customer base and offer them services below cost but at the price of a 3year contract. This delays profitability for you as a new player into the space. Comcast can take money from one market (another state) and move the profits into subsidizing a loss to prevent players from entering the space in another market. By breaking this cash flow, you end the stagnation of consumer choice, driving innovation forward.

I'd love the ability to head to city hall and convince local leaders to switch from Comcast to X.

Before the monopolies were granted, people could pick their own haulers. The monopolies were granted to cut down on truck traffic- the fact that WM took iver my street was evidence enough that one complaint would not dislodge them.

You might actually have more luck with complaining about your internet service. The rural area I moved to only had DSL, and the quality was so bad the town threatened to kick the carrier out if they didnt improve. Instead, they agreed to lay fiber to the entire service area, and it was only about a year after I moved in that we got it. (Way overpriced for full gigabit, of course, but thats rural internet).

An internet connection is not so easy to measure. You could have a very well provisioned and maintained local loop, and poor connectivity from there. I strongly support local loop unbundling --- you can regulate the local loop in simple terms, and let competition manage the messy network interconnection bit.

I'm not going to pretend to know all the pros/cons, but it is reliable and cheaper than average.

That's turnkey tyranny, censorship both ways (what you can send, what you can read). Right now it's just expensive, but you can still use a few different (overpriced and anti-competitive) providers.

If the state decides you're a threat and unplugs you, it could be months or years before you can invoke your legal rights to get reinstated.

I'm happy to look at any evidence you have, but everything I have seen indicates US internet is vastly worse than more public-oriented systems, unless you own internet infrastructure.

Also Comcast is not going to tell the federal government "no" to a data request if it doesn't benifit them.

You've heard of no-fly lists, right? At least there are some protections with governments, in general. With private companies, not only do you get the risk from the government, but whatever censorship the ISP decides to subject you to as well, and you might not have a choice.

Luckily, there are some ways around some of the controls - in no small part, by doing regulation or allowing a hybrid system (government owns/maintains infrastructure, leases it to companies, for example)

This is really just supporting my point that you do NOT want the government involved in the system at all.

You still can’t get off of the no-fly list (even if you haven’t been convicted of a crime!) if the government wants you on it and you weren’t listed by accident, “redress number” program or no.

Let’s not fuck up ISPs this badly.

You can, of course, leave off the return address, and this works fine for letter mail.

Packages, however, require ID to be dropped off. You cannot use the USPS to send packages anonymously.

The analogous version for a state-run ISP would be a blanket filter/ban on Tor/VPN usage.

I don’t think the USPS is a good example of a state-run organization for that reason. The state has already demonstrated their desire to eradicate personal privacy and anonymity.

Others would take the USPS as proof that a strongman president can switch such services on and off at a whim, for political reasons.

When was it done?

I am supportive of municipal telecom infrastructure but this example always gives me pause.

For example, AT&T rolled right over when the government wanted more access to their infrastructure after 9/11, even though it was pretty clearly illegal.

Where I live there are multiple high-quality ISPs at my building, the US should find a way to encourage multiple ISPs to be present in every single neighborhood.

People who complain about "too many ugly wires" should be ignored: it's much better to have ugly cables on poles than slow internet.

But somebody in upstate suburbia cannot, and they are lucky if their only provider is not utterly bad.

Density is key here. Suburbia is not dense enough, and is finicky enough about digging or running wires, to make building a competing network lucrative. And the US has a ton of low-density suburban population, even in formally urban agglomerations like LA or Houston.

One solution is to live in a proper city, but proper cities are not very numerous in US, and living there is more expensive.

As it is, for a household to get a plan that offers download speeds of 700Mbps-900Mbps and no data caps, we're paying NZ$109, or about US$72/mo.

Which is pretty good, relatively speaking. 330Mbps HFC Comcast is USD$74.99/month here in SF.

As for some kind of collusion between providers, if not competing is preferable for companies, why does anyone ever compete? Verbal agreements or not. Common sense says if you undercut someone's price they will cut their price too in response. Just offer the same price, stay out of their neighborhood, etc. Don't need to wink and nod about it. Yet we see fierce competition all over the place because that strategy doesn't work. New entrants always come along and they can't make a profit by playing that game when others already have all the market share. If you only see a single provider it's either a govt-protected monopoly as I mentioned above, or a beneficial monopoly that is holding prices too low for competition to see an opportunity.

Why not? Yes, breaking up monopolies is good but that doesn't mean we can't regulate industries before the point where things get so bad that there is enough political will to break them up.

Look at PG&E. They're badly behaved but also highly regulated.

Natural monopolies need counterbalancing regulation. This isn't even remotely a controversial statement in economics.

Unless your argument is that the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics doesn't actually exist, this is quite wrong, since the Austrian school denies the existence of natural monopoly and argues that harmful monopoly can only exist as a product of government regulation, and the Chicago school likewise holds that absent regulation, monopoly is a transient condition, not a stable one; both favor removing regulations that they see as stabilizing harmful monopolies, rather than regulating to manage naturally-formed-and-self-stabilizing monopolies, which they don't acknowledge the existence of.

Now, I think the Chicago/Austrian positions on monopolies are wrong, but you really can't reasonably deny that this is a fundamental area of controversy.

Austrian overtly so, Chicago less so, but, yes, its another issue that "is economics an empirical science" is also a controversial position in economics.

> but not even remotely so amongst the economists I talk to.

That's a very different claim than your original one. That last qualifier does quite a bit of work.

This sounds prima facie absurd to me. Are they just throwing phrases out of Ayn Rand novels on paper and calling it science?

They similarly deny the existence of externalities- although depending on who you read the justification varies widely.

If their conclusions didn't happen to support those in power and capital in particular, they'd be just another meaningless research group.

The problem is that you are not actual arguing against austrian economics but a political movement that has hijacked the ideas and presents itself as 'the solution' that proves their political view. This is mostly driven by some conservative finance and the 'The Mises institute', that should actually be called 'The Rothbart Institute'. As they don't really represent Austrian economics as a whole, but rather a narrow minded interpretation of Mises.

If you look at the Austrians generally and those still in academia, they do not actually work that way, and they don't reject empiricism as a whole. The reject pure empiricism and pure positivism, in favor of a individual and institutional approach that is validated by data. In practice and historically Austrian economics was much closer to what we today would consider institutional economics, Law&Economics and Political Economics.

I have years ago stopped fighting since the term has been so discredited by the mob of morons on the internet. Some economists that solidly work within Austrian tradition have stopped using that term because of those bad associations.

But I'm just telling you, your argument really is just like arguing against some Burnie fam who proclaims Keynsian economics implies socialism.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Euclidean_geometry

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_paradox

Praxeology doesn't accept other axioms, and the axioms it accepts are empirically testable. Which is the why math is fine but Austrian economics isn't.

Also, mathematics doesn't make claims on the real world.

The Austrians start with their axioms and do not accept anyone with other axioms. And unlike mathematical axioms, their axioms are actually empirically testable.

A temporary regulation could possibly help, but making it temporary is the hard part. And if it lingers, the inefficiencies it creates let some companies become incumbents, and, with some luck, even monopolies.

Is there any evidence that unregulated free markets actually tend towards competition, rather than consolidation?

Based on recent experience this does appear possible, that some monopolies have gotten savvy enough to become long-running nation-state-like entities if left unregulated.

We know from the science of complex systems that one characteristic non-linear dynamic systems, like markets or national economies, is that the critical resources of the system tend to concentrate and consolidate over time.

We’ve witnessed this over the past several decades with the deregulation of the US banking industry, its subsequent concentration and consolidation.

Libertarians like to believe that such economic problems are self-correcting, that eventually such concentrations of wealth and economic power will either asymptotically collapse, or become ossified and be supplanted by something newer and innovative. Either way there’s a reset.

But I don’t think either is inevitable, in all domains. What we’ve actually observed with the banking system is that:

1) powerful monopolies/oligopolies use their resources to capture the actual government and regulators, and use those entities to shape favorable laws, and to bail out the monopolies when they collapse, preventing the reset, and

2) even if the collapse and reset occurs, it causes far more damage and misery to the rest of the economy and society than to the people responsible for causing it.

All else equal I’d rather live in a society that simply prevents those extreme cycles by making natural monopolies into well-regulated public utilities. Public utilities in the US have worked very well for a century, they’re a far more desirable economic arrangement for 99% of society.

You assume markets are inherently centralizing. Where is this assumption coming from, its actually Marxist economics. If you critic Austrian for being empirical, we should first admit that this base assumption is purely based on a school of thought that is much more un-empirical then any Austrian or other market oriented schools ever where.

This prediction was made 200+ years ago, and we have seen a trend towards ever greater number of companies. The amount of interventions by government, with things like anti-trust act were incredibly few and far between.

If there was any validity to the concept, of inherent centralization, we would have seen government having to near constantly fight monopoly.

Both in illegal and legal market we constantly see disruption of big players. The stability of the farmer own farms, rather then the inherent centralization corporate farming. The distributed production of meth, replacing the centralized supply of other drugs. The restaurant industry has existed with few regulation and no anti-trust cases for 100s of years.

I would argue the argument that all markets are inherently centralizing has been totally dis-proven by evidence. Even in the cases where Anti-Trust cases were launched, usually by the time they came anywhere near breaking up a company, the original problem had basically passed. I'm only 30 and in my lifetime I have already seen like 4 tech companies who were gone dominate the world and if Anti-Trust wasn't invoked society was doomed according to people on Hacker News.

There are natural monopoly, and markets where one player can dominate. These are more complex cases, but they are also limited in scope and unlikely to grow out of that market. In fact in general those companies usually become rather happy with just profiting from their monopoly and quickly lose the drive to go into the competitive markets.

In those cases regulation in the short term can help, but being aware of locking in the system are very real, making any kind of disruption in those markets incredibly difficult.

At the time, a broader evaluation of the concept of monopoly must realize that threw-out history, the majority of monopolies were state created. In fact, one of the kinds prime way of making mponey, was selling monopoly rights and using royal power to suppress competition. Some economists have even modeled the Soviet economy along those lines as well. This is largely still the case, the places where monopoly are most persistent, are places where it is created and sustained by regulation.

More common then strict monopoly is some small to mid sized group, getting regulation that protect them. My fav example are the like 15 families who produce cane suger in the US who have for 50 years profited from a sugar import tax. This is party the reason corn sugar is so much used in the US.

In the end, pragmatically the state should likely be aware of citizens being exploited in some natural monopoly situation, but also be aware that if it is actually a natural monopoly, even regulation can not systematically fix the problem either and can do harm in the long run.

The Chicago argument on this matter is pretty generally rejected.

Treating ISPs as a monopoly is fundamentally wrong.

In the US, Google Fiber has had limited success entering a handful of carefully-picked markets where the incumbent options are rotting copper POTS wires vs coax that can only compete on downstream bandwidth. In some of those markets, the incumbent phone companies have replaced some of their copper with fiber, but a third residential fiber option is still unheard-of. That may not fit the strictest definition of natural monopoly, but it's pretty close: in areas where both Google Fiber and eg. AT&T fiber are competing against coax, it would not be surprising to see one of the two fiber ISPs give up. We've already seen Google give up on bundling TV service, and both Google and AT&T are very reserved about further expansions.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

But Markdown doesn't work here.

A good example of how Comcast will be disrupted is Starlink. Though I'll concede that US Internet infrastructure seems outdated compared to the EU. So perhaps this aging infrastructure suggest monopolistic practices as does any phenomena characterized by stagnation.

Big tech is accused of being monopolistic, but there is a constant flow of new players in the field, all gaining market shares and building the Next Big Thing, while telecom providers are pretty stagnant.

I'm curious why cities don't directly lay down the infrastructure work for broadband access. In some cases that might raise property value enough that the town could make it's money back in very little time.

The other thing that would be worthwhile is local loop unbundling, which is basically open access but with existing providers having to open their infrastructure.

I highly recommend muninetworks.org and their podcast if you want to learn more about municipal broadband.

Can you give us an example?

Wondering the same thing here (Switzerland), but I might not understand the context: decoupling the "cable" from the "provider" is not common in the US, or there are some other complexities that I don't understand?

In my case the company "Swisscom" opened half of the sidewalk, connected my apartment building to their FTTH infrastructure, then sent me a ton of flyers etc.. to advertise their Internet, but I still decided to use a tiny provider located 100km away (being small, high customer focus etc...) => works since 7 months perfectly, latency is good (e.g. 2-8ms to ping 8.8.8.8), etc... .

My parents had basically nothing (half-broken copper wire), then on a random day the city's electricity&water&gas company team suddenly turned up, installed the FTTH cable (old house => turned out to be super-complicated to push that tiny cable through the house's structure => took them 4hrs), then they left, that's it => me and my parents then had multiple discussions about providers and they finally chose "Sunrise" (one of the major ones in Switzerland) and everything so far has been perfect.

As far as I understand how things work here, the company that provides the cable earns money paid by the providers that use that cable, which in turn earn money paid by their customers => everybody earns money, everybody is happy.

For very small communities (e.g. the one where my parents live - ~800 inhabitants), the town/village might have to directly finance a part of the costs needed to lay down the cables (which in turn are covered by common taxes), but that in turn makes the small community more desirable by whoever takes it into consideration when moving.

So the cable company owned the only copper capable of broadband internet, and also the underground channels to lay fiber in. They naturally upgraded their hub spots to allow Internet traffic, and laying the last mile all over again is prohibitively expensive, or even administratively prohibited, in a lot of places.

There is, of course, phone infrastructure! But Bell was a textbook monopoly, and pieces if it retained the infrastructure after its split. So in some places they can profitably reuse the copper they have to also provide Internet service, and sometimes you can even get fiber from them in newer houses which were wired with fiber backbone for the phone service anyway. In some areas the fixed-line copper is not good enough, and running fiber is too expensive because of low housing density.

In large proper cities, of course, the situation is much better, because infrastructure cost per reached customer is much lower.

So the US context in a nutshell; in most places, the provider of the cable is the provider of the service.

In a bit more detail. Up until 1982, almost all telephone service was provided by AT&T (also known as the Bell System or just "The Phone Company"); at that point, it was split up through anti-trust into regional local phone companies (the baby Bells, ex Pacific Bell in California, Bell South in the south), and a long distance phone company (AT&T), and it became possible to choose a long distance carrier, if you wanted to make long distance calls. The local phone companies were not permitted to provide this service, although AT&T may have been allowed to be a default choice. This unleashed real competition in long distance service, it was now fairly easy to switch, and as easy to dial, and there were several companies ready to go, because they had been offering less usable services already (dial a local number, get a second dial tone and dial the actual destination, etc); prices dropped, quality improved, etc, etc.

In 1996, we got a Telecommunications Act which among other things, required the incumbent local telephone services to lease access to their lines at cost based rates. Under these terms, if there was sufficient space in the central office, a competitive local carrier could install equipment and provide local (and long distance) calling and DSL.

However, the regulator (FCC) said this only applied to telephone service and not to "new" services like phone and internet via cable TV lines.

Additionally, DSL length restrictions meant many customers weren't close enough to the Central Offices to get good service, and phone companies began building out remote terminals to house the equipment closer to the customers. But there's no space in a remote terminal for competitive carrier equipment, so that wasn't necessarily required to be available either.

Finally, courts ruled that it wasn't fair to impose leased access requirements on telephone companies but not cable companies, and the regulator declared the market competitive because consumers could chose from their telephone company, their cable company, internet over power lines (which I don't think every actually happened!), or wireless, so line sharing wasn't important.

An additional wrinkle is that although the leased access prices were regulated, and supposed to be based on cost, incumbent carriers would regularly price retail accounts below the leased access prices, making competition unfair.

There are a few open access networks that were explicitly built out for this, but it's pretty rare, or it comes with big caveats: I can get on my municipal fiber network where I live, but I'd have to pay all the construction costs to get the network extended; if I organize a group, we can split the costs, but interest is low, I'd rather be able to do it, but get partially reimbursed if someone else connects up on the line I extended (within a reasonable time).

TL;DR: we almost had it, but it was a bit broken, and then it was taken away.

In a lot of states there is legislation banning them from doing just that.

Plus-- where are all the videos demoing what it's like having a fiber connection, to rouse all the people who live in internet deserts? For fuck's sake, the article references kids lurking around Taco Bell "scrounging for internet."

If you are a technologist with a fiber connection, please take five minutes away from overclocking your company's attention-sucking machine to see what it's like working toward a goal that is 100% non-creepy.

Edit: clarification

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24410506

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1403795

Is there a good place to look for similar success stories on customer-initiated extensions at the edge of rural broadband networks?

Microsoft should have won search. They had all the tools to execute and were pretty much at the right place at the right time.

Google should have won social networking and messaging. They had the userbase and the network. Yet it's Facebook that did.

Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market.

Samsung and Huawei captured the market Apple created.

Would YouTube, Instagram, or dozens of other companies have been able to get where they are w/o the support of their acquirers? Just think of the burn alone and the required investment is a scary figure.

Comcast and the other big incumbents have one very clear overt objective: own the customer base for the foreseeable future. If you're a small independent ISP and try to go up against them, as soon as you're on their radar you can expect a pretty ruthless attack. The most mild form of this is Comcast's sales team is willing to offer something closer to fair pricing to condo properties if it involves ~5 years lockin vs a new competitor. A friend owns a business in this space and has watched a couple competitors that were growing fast locally suddenly find their entire customer base gone within weeks via this. Less fortunate people find themselves facing a legal challenge at the city or state level.

And that's not even getting into what happens if your small ISP competitor gets going well enough to start talking to the city about renting space on utility poles or doing some trenching.

These mega ISPs aren't interested in acquiring competition for the last mile. They want to pre-empt competition existing entirely, and they can and will use every single tool available to them in doing so.

Yes if they got access to capital, which they could have gotten easily. You forget that Google bought Youtube because google video wasn't gaining traction and youtube had the "network effect". The same goes for instagram and facebook. It's all "whatif" but youtube and instagram most definitely would have been major independent players by themselves.

Facebook, Netflix, Google, Amazon, etc were able to grow without being acquired. Remember that page/brin even tried to sell Google to Yahoo. Google did alright even though they weren't bought out.

Youtube and Instagram had no real peers like google did ( altavista, excite, etc ) and they both were able to create the network effect before they got bought out. I think google and facebook really got lucky snapping up these companies. Not just in financial benefits but look at the cultural impact these companies have on the world.

Yeah but the users didn't want them to get acquired, end their "incredible journey" and delete the users' data.

If there is some startup providing some ridiculously awesome service and strangly isnt charging:

1. It will charge in the future, and even that charge may not be sufficient to cover costs (see: Quantopian recently, apparently could not find a price point which kept users and also kept the service)

2. It may get acquired, to finance long-term profitability (see: YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram)

3. You may be giving up more than you thought you were (e.g., privacy) (see: like half the social media startups)

4. It may get acquihired, and often the product is sunset (see: Slide, Parse)

5. It may shut down (see: like 95% of your friends startups)

As a former founder, I can say most startups are just one funding round away from case 5 (bankruptcy) -- see MapR. In which case, sometimes you accept case 4 (acquihire) as a consolation prize. Many of us want to be the next FAANG, but reality strikes that obviously not all 100,000 startups out there will become a fang. Often, you teeter in case 1 (barely making it), and if that happens too long, you might go with option 2 (strategic acquisition.)

There are a lot of problems as a founder. Not all of them are actually about tech. I'll list some problems:

1. You are constantly questioning yourself -- is life just about eating ramen noodles and working? Did I really study and get top grades for 20yrs only to barely life? Mabye I can sell out. This should not be a problem post Series A, but is def an early stage issue.

2. You have liabilities - student loans, healthcare, rent, etc. Sure, you can couch surf, but should that be expected of people?

3. After marketing and ads especially, you often dont make as much as you think.

Sometimes you make a limited time bet, and if things dont catch, you move on.

When a local authority run by people with little understanding of the technology is presented with a local infrastructure bid from a not so well known group vs a glossy Comcast/AT&T/<big telco> bid etc...

I absolutely agree though. It's an antitrust problem that has caused me genuine huge cost increases in reality (Comcast mandatory 1TB data cap in Comcast only neighborhoods. not sure if this nonsense still going on), not just hypothetically.

There are ways to expose the existing networks to competition too. There are examples out there of using careful legislation to force a big monopoly player to share cable space and so on, allowing other vendors to compete on price.

Competitors don't enter the industry because there's little money to be made. The only way you make money by starting an independent ISP right now is by serving some niche clientele e.g. serving wireless internet to events at locations without enough broadband access.

Not independent variables. The large wired broadband ISPs already enjoy economies of scale (access to capital, army of lawyers, etc.) and operate at slim margins. An independent ISP would need to reach the same size just to get the same near-zero margins.

That being said, there is a market for independent ISPs, but they tend to serve specialty customers where margins are much higher.

As long as they break-even then it's a success.

Brazil tried it, we had a state company that had a monopoly of telecom, we broke it up intentionally in many tiny parts and sold them.

Results were basically this:

1. A bunch ended eventually merging, often with help of blatant corruption (for example one such merger was first denied, then approved again after the son of the president "sold" to a telecom company, his game company for 30 million, a game company that never made any games, and the son of the president before that was a zoo caretaker and didn't knew how to code).

2. Some are going bankrupt, with parts they bought being unprofitable, and will eventually get merged into the others.

3. A LOT of international 007-style spy shit happened because of this... We had our version of CIA spying on our own president, owner of a bank spied upon (seemly with good reason), Italy and Brazil spying on each other, agents getting arrested, agents disappearing, people bending backwards to release criminals and suspected criminals to avoid diplomatic incidents, people that disappeared or died, etc...

To be honest Telecom looks like the sort of thing that even touching with a mile-long pole you will still get shit splattered on you, and if you try a shorter pole it will be nuclear shit.

For communications I think the way to do it might be to create 3-4 levels of responsibilities and say that no single player can operate in more than a few levels at once and must offer their services via live public auction or standard public wholesale pricing.

For wireless the way I'd split is is: 1. Location/site management, aka who owns/manages the poles. 2. Operating the actual Networking/Peering equipment, networking to the site with permission of #1. 3. Consumer/retail such as MVNO; direct-use in the case of large businesses, or value-add aggregation/resale for intermediates.

For wired the way I'd split is is: 1. Global networking/peering. 2. Regional networking/peering. 2. Last-mile equipment/rights, servicing. 3. Consumer/retail, value-add etc.

The goal here being to reduce the barrier to entry for small players via horizontalization which increases competition but not draw too many hard lines so that players have some flexibility in organization and so that players in one level have the opportunity of punching through to an adjacent or skip level if it is being overpriced.

https://write.as/ccgaoox9alf3hbv4.md

I think the key is to not necessarily have state-run ISPs completely OR private-run ISPs completely. Something like the courier/delivery market where there's access to multiple providers is key.

Any kind of local monopoly is bad.

The other elephant in the room is the right-of-way that's granted to these telecom companies over private and public land. In exchange for what?

Lots of room here for lots of progress.

In Cambodia, 120Gb (per week) of download cost me US$1 (per week) over good-quality 4G connections anywhere in the city (but almost nothing outside the cities). In Berlin, it's 40 euros a month for 5Gb, and coverage is a bit patchy, and very patchy if I go a few Km's out of the city.

In Bali, a $5 SIM card got me a month of effectively-unlimited download over decent connections. Nepal, Malaysia, all good. Phillipines was tricky to get decent coverage, but when it was there it was cheap.

Cafes in SE Asia offer free wifi with a coffee. Berlin nope.

I get the price differences are a function of relative GDP. But the performance differences should be the other way around. Tech should work better in developed countries, not worse.

I think what's happened is in many or some European countries there was a rush to increase Broadband adoption and speeds, where being the first mover left them with now outdated backbone infrastructure. Those who moved later, more gradually, or chose a more future proof backbone network benefited. The sunk cost and possibly inflexibility of the network to upgrades holds back the push for better speeds. If the service is good enough, the push from consumers for more is lessened.

If you are referring to the copper network built in the 80s under Kohl, that is not what happened. Some call it "conflict of interest", some blatant corruption.

Here in the Netherlands, you've got national coverage with unlimited data for €25 per month (practically unlimited, not theoretically unlimited, of couse, because fair use policies exist everywhere).

One country to the south is Belgium, where even the landlines have data caps, something that would be unthinkable here.

There's some connection between GDP/purchasing power and the price of data, but there's much more going on. Things like nationalised internet connections, government investment in public internet infrastructure and geography are more important than how much money someone in a certain country makes on average.

I mean, that's what everyone in the US has.

I've heard enough stories of people in SE Asia having to pay by the megabyte to know that it's not the same everywhere.

But I still expect that the tech would work better in a developed country.

Maybe all those NIMBYs objecting to mobile towers near schools are the problem.

What network? I pay 12 euros for 5gb (aldi talk, running off o2, so i can still use my phone in the u-bahn)

There's also lidl connect runnning off telekom if you like that network

1. No place would dare to serve you tap water - it is basically considered a health hazard, and many guests would be offended by being offered it.

2. Bottled water is an item on the menu and will cost you money.

It adds another competitor to the mix.

Could it become the monopoly if the tech were to make current ISP tech obsolete or to expensive for most areas?

If it became the better method, does that mean our skies will soon be even more polluted with satellites by exponential factors?

And thankfully, competitors exist. OneWeb has exited bankruptcy and is starting to launch again. Project Kuiper also shows promise.

I think people are still sleeping on just how big of a deal Starlink (etc) is going to be.

So if starlink can cover the rurals for less costs can hopefully come down for everyone

Are you talking about the Universal Service Fund?

It requires aligning many stakeholders who often have conflicting interests e.g. all the building owners on the same block.

By the time Starlink goes wide it probably won't be any cheaper than I'm currently paying, but what I am paying is quite absurd given that it's not a network of satellites. It's just a fiber optic cable that was long since amortized to zero.

They might open the local loop back up to at least get rent?

I was the last one in my neighborhood to be allowed 12Mbps download. All new accounts are maximum of 6Mbps.

I would like to see reform in the CATV franchise laws.

1.5Mb/688Kb. No change in ten years. Also, I get dropped and reconnected every couple of days to a DSLAM channel running at 20Kb (!) down and have to reboot the modem to get back to 1.5Mb.

But if it does, how do we stop it becoming a monopoly? We don't need and can't have multiple rival fleets of satellites up there. But if it's just Starlink then how do we stop it charging more and more for less and less because no-one else is threatening it?

If it works, should the UN step in and take over the network as a service to all of humanity?

The technical aspects of it seem to be:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/space...

EDIT:OneWeb operates at higher altitudes where if there's a failure, the satellite will stay there for hundreds of years, but to try to mitigate that a bit, they added a grappling fixture/fiducial to try to make it easier for a robotic deorbiting craft to capture it.

The Oneweb stuff not so much, but at least they're thinking about it.

You claim to be against monopolies but are unwilling to tolerate even the slight inconvenience of seeing scooters parked around? I personally love them for their amazing convenience and they're also incredibly compact relative to cars or even bikes.

> If the business plan doesn't work out, who cleans up the satellites?

Cleaning up is essentially free as long as the satellites are still operational: just command them to deorbit. Orbits are low enough that the fuel required to deorbit is comparable to a few months of station-keeping.

They were a great novelty for a while. But I got over them.

So if a satellite stops responding to commands, they're going to go get it? To make sure it doesn't hit anything else and cause more problems?

If I were to pick a second place it would be IEEE. I don't think it would be a good idea to hand it to W3C, as this is at a layer+ lower than they would typically operate.

https://www.fcc.gov/document/exclusive-service-contracts-pro...

Commercial buildings similar but usually one preferred and pre-wired, but if you are negotiating for a floor etc you can get what you want.

HOA's etc generally don't like new holes in walls especially common walls. So generally one preferred.

I won't even get to mobile plans since at least there it's somewhat plausible that I must subside the rural cellphone towers since it's a huge (in area) network.

So they probably only have a tiny amount of bandwidth available for an entire neighborhood, and then they sell you 100s of Mb in download, except that if you read the fine print, it's only burst speeds, so it's not like you get 300Mbps sustained download bandwidth. It's just a temporary boost while they take it from others in the neighborhood. And the upload, who knows how little is allocated for that, they don't even bother advertising upload bandwidth.

There isn't sufficient voter interest to force politicians to go after the existing cable company monopolies and overturn laws preventing government owned fiber networks. And there isn't sufficient voter interest in spending taxpayer funds to build out government owned fiber networks.

And CenturyLink does not offer fiber-to-the-home, or fiber-to-the-node-with-gigabit (and FTTN upload is limited to a paltry 10Mbps) in about 35% of the city, including places like Ballard, most of the Central District, Hillman City, or Crown Hill.

One of the remarkable things about our political system is how little money (relatively) it takes to lock in a multi-billion dollar advantage. In terms of benefits per dollar spent, lobbying is one of the most profitable investments an established company can make.

Want to shut out new competition? $100k Prevent municipal broadband? $10m Get affordable access to a low-cost corridor for your facilities/ network? $20m

etc etc.

It seems like such a cut-and-dried political issue: they're utilities and they overcharge you whether you're a Republican or Democrat. And taking action doesn't require new antitrust concepts, because it's just your garden-variety utility. It's the same established principles as electric or natural gas.

Yet bizarrely this doesn't show up as an issue on Republican or Democrat platforms. Going after Google and Amazon and Facebook's free products is the sexy new issue, but the fact that we're all overpaying hundreds of dollars a year for broadband is just massively ignored.

And I'm not talking about politicians being bought. It baffles me why voters aren't writing letters to their city councils, their mayors, their state reps, their governors. If voters actually care, politicians do respond.

It would seriously be so easy to change if the voting population actually did care about it. But, inexplicably, we just pay the fees and deal with the crappy customer service and complain, but it never seems to occur to anybody to actually organize local political action against it.

It's utterly baffling.

Also (emphasis mine),

> Democrats will restore the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) clear authority to take strong enforcement action against broadband providers who violate net neutrality principles through blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, or other measures that create artificial scarcity and raise consumer prices for this vital service.

Regardless of anyone's feelings broadband is not categorized as a utility. You may want it classified as such. Then ask yourself which party is likely to move in that direction.

https://www.demconvention.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/202...

It's only "cost-prohibitive for a competitor to enter a region" because of build-out requirements which are broadly supported by Democrats. I used to live in Baltimore, where Verizon wanted to come in and compete with Comcast. The city refused to let Verizon come in and compete. Then they put out an RFP that basically sought bids for ISPs to come in and provide universal service for free. Nobody took Baltimore up on the offer.

Step 1: create conditions that prevent capitalism from solving a problem. Step 2: declare that capitalism has failed and call for government solutions.

Step 1: Create conditions that prevent the government from solving a problem. Step 2: Declare that the public sector has failed and call for privatization.

Businesses in a free market aren't writing laws and regulations that can put people in jail. With government's great power should come an acknowledgement that it must solve the problems it claims it can, in the way it claims it can, or back the hell off.

This is particularly the case when our electoral choices at many a level boil down to binary options that may not project well for individuals with values/views that are largely orthogonal to the options practically available. For example if I were pro ABCDEFG, and one candidate is Anti ABC, and the other anti EFG; Which one should I choose when taken together the value of one set over the other is subjective and not even ordinal?

One mustn't forget that the power to do great good is inherently also the power to do great harm intentionally or not.

I've seen exactly this scenario play out in Santa Cruz. Comcast had a virtual monopoly. Even as recently as about 5 years ago one of the best internet packages was up to 20mbps (4mbps in reality) for $40/month.

The city announced a partnership with Cruzio for municipal broadband and virtually overnight Comcast started offering 200mbps for $50/month. Today you can get around 400mbps for $55/month.

We should do the exact same thing with healthcare (public option).

Step 1: kneecap a social progrm Step 2: argue that because the social program isn't working, it should be canceled outright.

What major social program has seen funding cut since the 1970s? The percentage of the economy that goes to means-tested welfare has almost doubled from 1970 to today: https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/inline-images/B.... The only blip was right after the 2008 recession, but spending has mostly recovered since that time.

Now, I support welfare spending. (I'd like it better if we focused more on cash transfers to the poor, though.) But the notion that any major social program has ever been "kneecapped" is a myth.

But overall, education spending consistently goes up over time: https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html#ch...

> On a per-pupil basis and adjusted for inflation, public school funding increased: 24 percent from 1991-92 through 2001-02 (the last year for which such data are available); 19 percent from 1996-97 through 2001-02; and 10 percent from 1998-99 through 2001-02.

A concrete example: the current DOEd has increased funding of both charter and private schools. We can go back and forth on whether elements of that constitute social programs, but I think the point about it not being tied to the larger funding trend stands.

Similar stories about in other areas. In Europe it is common for private companies to operate transit systems. (Stockholm’s subway is operated by the same company that operates Hong Kong’s.) In the US, nearly every large transit system is operated by government workers on the government payroll.

Goverment funding has been chopped for state schools, housing projects, the list goes on. The right kills social programs on a practically daily basis. Not to mention shifting the tax burden away from the upper class and towards the middle class. If your taxes have been going up over the last 30 years, it's because you aren't upper class.

And yeah, social spending has increased ever since we shipped all the jobs to China. Democrats rationalized it by promising to use the new revenue on social programs; Republicans put a stop to that straight away. The American middle class got double-teamed. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses!

I'm not a hard-right libertarian--I think healthcare probably has some examples of market failures and maybe we need something like universal catastrophic insurance. But yeah, some of these problems, like housing costs, really are self-inflicted.

I think the other approach is to shift blame or sweep under the rug problems with services that are entirely publicly run. If you have a problem with the schools or police in your blue city/state, 90% of your energy should be directed to your own state and local officials! (Instead of railing against Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump.)

The Bay Area has a number of little-known unincorporated enclaves that are often located within incorporated cities. Places like Devonshire (San Carlos), Emerald Hills (Redwood City), the unincorporated strip of San Carlos Ave (San Jose), Ladera or Los Trancos Woods (Portola Valley), Castro Valley and San Lorenzo (Hayward/Oakland). I've noticed that in today's hot market, houses in those areas consistently go for anything for $0-150K under asking, while houses in the nearby cities go for $150-500K over asking. A typical swing in purchase price for equivalent homes in nearly equivalent locations is about $300K (on prices of about $1.8-2.2M).

The usual real-estate confounders don't apply here because the geographic locations are so similar. The fire danger is roughly equivalent (but high): places like Devonshire and Emerald Hills are inside of 280, and right next door to equally flammable but more expensive houses in Belmont, San Carlos, and Redwood City. Commute times are basically identical, if anything a little shorter. There's less regulation for building, but not much more additional supply of land since these are constrained enclaves.

It seems like buyers are willing to pay a premium specifically to get city services and city regulation. Instead of the free market being impeded, this is the free market speaking: buyers are paying a premium to live in areas where there are more services and more regulation.

I can think of another difference: loads of people want to live where they do, pushing up prices, while few people want to live where you do, keeping prices reasonable.

Since the cities are generally under solid Democratic control (there's not a single Republican in elective office in Seattle, for example), there's something else going on.

I'm not confident that municipal broadband will ever really take off in the US but I think local loop unbundling might have a chance since I'm sure companies are more than happy to unload all the expensive construction work to the local gov't.

Company X: "We'd like to meet with you to discuss how we can service your community better than municipal broadband. Our representative is going to be in Hawaii for the next 3 weeks and we'd be more than willing to fly you and your family out to meet with him. Of course it's inconvenient for you to travel so we'd provide for hotel and airfare."

Actually, It's all about the lobbyists and industry groups, often with model legislation from ALEC[0][1][2] that have blocked municipal broadband in 22 states[3] (down from 25 a few years ago):

"Over the past year, several promising developments have been made on the municipal broadband front.

Two states were successful in repealing their municipal broadband bans, bringing our tally down to 22 states from 25 states identified in our 2019 report. Those law changes are significant, and may portend similar measures being considered across states in the coming years.

This report is the latest in our annual series looking into the state of municipal broadband in America, and provides a state-by-state breakdown of the various roadblocks and restrictions used to prevent their establishment. This year, we’ve also compared access to low-price broadband in states that have no municipal restrictions versus those that do, and we’ve found that the former have lower internet prices on average.

State legislatures around the country considered a wave of broadband-focused bills in 2019. That signals not only the importance of addressing broadband access gaps for state lawmakers, but also a growing acknowledgment among state and local governments that they have a larger role to play in ensuring all residents have access to the high-speed internet."

>I'm not confident that municipal broadband will ever really take off in the US but I think local loop unbundling might have a chance since I'm sure companies are more than happy to unload all the expensive construction work to the local gov't.

I'd tend to agree, as long as state and local government officials continue to be bought (and critically, stay bought) by industry groups.

That's not to say that municipal broadband is the solution for every county/city/town. Rather, it's a solution that, under the right circumstances, can improve the livability, access to commercial opportunities, higher-paid residents and a raft of other positive outcomes.

These are local and state issues that aren't well suited to regulation/lawmaking from the Federal government, and should be addressed in that fashion. A good place to start would be to reverse the anti-competitive laws in place in 22 states that limit the ability of local governments to implement municipal broadband.

I'd say that if the big ISP's don't want it, it's probably a good thing to do.

[0] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/ALEC_Communications_an...

[1] https://www.govtech.com/network/Lawmakers-Mount-Federal-Effo...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/anti-municipal-b...

[3] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

Would it not be possible to make it illegal to provide internet access and to own the infrastructure at the same time?

Where I'm from, there are two national phone networks, owned by the two biggest phone plan providers. They also rent out their network infrastructure to smaller companies, which effectively means they control the price of phone plans. As a result, phone plans are comparatively very expensive where I'm from. It seems like separating the infrastructure from the phone plan providing would make the market more competitive, leading to lower prices.

Municipal broadband is the only way you’ll get competition? A “public option” seems to invite the very opposite of competition. Less regulation is how you increase competition — by allowing more new entrants into a market, you necessarily increase competition.

Municipalities should own the wire, not the service flowing through the wire. Making capital expenditures less expensive would encourage more service providers.

How would another option decrease competition? In what world does that make sense? This isn't without precedent. In markets where there are municipal broadband or increased competition in general, companies like AT&T immediately up their speeds, cut their prices, cut their contract lengths, etc.

This seems antithetical to their newfound views on how corporations like Twitter should be able to block political news on their platforms. I don't see how it's dramatically different for Twitter (or Facebook or Google) deciding to block the New York Post than it is for Comcast to do so.

It's not obvious to me right now which is the party for a free and open internet.

If Comcast decides to block the New York Post, you can't see it at all until you change your Internet provider. That may involve breaking a contract, and will certainly cost you time and money. And that's if you have a choice at all - large swathes of the country have only one ISP. Many apartment buildings only have hookups for one provider.

If TwitFaceGoog don't show NYP links you're free to type in their domain name in your web browser and go to the site directly.

Suggesting there's no difference between the two is dishonest.

If you use a Comcast email address -- is it ok for them to scan emails you send to your friends, and quietly delete them if they contain links to newspapers they don't approve of?

This would be illegal under net neutrality, and is identical to what Twitter and Facebook are doing regularly.

They're probably already doing this, at the very least to scan for viruses and filter scammy emails.

> quietly delete them if they contain links...they don't approve of?

That's what a spam filter does.

> This would be illegal under net neutrality

a) ISPs aren't subject to net neutrality. They were, but now they aren't. Guess who voted to make it that way?

b) It would be a dick move and would cost the ISP a lot of business. Email is 1:1 and you (presumably) consented to receive email from your friends. But it isn't illegal afaik. Can you cite the relevant law you think makes this action illegal?

> is identical to what Twitter and Facebook are doing regularly.

Maybe, maybe not. It's not illegal. Considering that an ISP operates at the network layer and social networks operate at the application layer, such comparisons are meaningless. ISPs perform plenty of network-layer moderation that you never see and might never find out about.

Nah.

> I’d like to hear why you think it is terrible when Comcast bans a website but fine when Google/Facebook/Twitter do it.

In many areas of the country, there is only one ISP available. In my area, there's two, but one only offers very slow DSL; there is a de facto monopoly on meaningful internet service.

This is not the case for social media.

> Both groups have monopolistic power.

That you had to say "Google/Facebook/Twitter" and not just one of them clearly indicates that they do not.

Hey, it’s their platform... don’t like it, go somewhere else.

And every American has a choice in cellphone service providers - so they can block journalist they don’t favor too. What could possibly go wrong?

Not really, no.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/new-fcc-data-indicates...

> The major takeaway of this report, which provides policymakers in D.C. and the states a wide-ranging view of available data to see trends in the Internet, is that competition for broadband only looks good at slow speeds while a vast majority of Americans (EFF estimates at least 68 million) are facing monopoly or no access to high-speed broadband.

> Instead, in a handful of markets we have reviewed, we find that the average price consumers pay ranges from 200% to 400% above competitive rates and that cable prices are established surgical precision in order to extract monopoly rents. For example, I myself would have to pay $159.95 for a gigabit service whereas my coworkers would pay $40 for a superior product.

That's not actually what the highlighted quotes say.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...

Title: "50 million US homes have only one 25Mbps Internet provider or none at all"

Article:

> The household analysis found a slightly better, but still troubling, situation, with nearly half of the 118 million US households lacking any wired Internet choice at the FCC's broadband standard of 25Mbps.

What actually bothers me the most is the rules that (in most places) prohibit cities and towns from offering new municipal broadband service as a competitive offering. This used to be more common in smaller towns that had not been able to get good commercial service, and it adds valuable options and competition, but my understanding is that it's extremely hard for cities who don't already have municipal broadband to start offering it now.

These are private companies. But since they're considered natural monopolies, they are more highly regulated than a typical company.

0 - Yes, I know, it wasn't perfect or even "great" most of the time but that was largely because the incumbent carriers dragging their feet on doing literally anything and the FCC not enforcing the competition rules. And when, largely out of spite, the copper-based incumbents simply didn't do anything to upgrade their networks while the not-at-all-regulated cable companies blew past them in speed and reliability, people switched in droves which gave the incumbent phone companies even more reason to throw up their hands and say "not worth it."

When telephones were first installed, competing telephone companies stringing wires sprang up everywhere. Regulation put a stop to that.

But ISPs are not, generally speaking, a monopoly. There's usually at least two wired options and they compete with cellular and satellite options. Profit margins generally reflect this. The large ISPs are around the average for the S&P 500.

Per https://www.fcc.gov/internet-access-services-reports approximately only about 25% of census blocks have two or more providers for wired internet. Often within a census block most households will only have one option.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...

For my home, 2.5mi from the Capital Building in Washington State, I'm offered four wired broadband providers: 1. Comcast, "advertised 100mbps to 1gbps" (true enough, although you can only get 150mbps, so I'm not sure if that's bracketing) 2. CenturyLink, "25-50mbps" (CenturyLink's own website says "Our systems indicate that our High Speed Internet is not currently available at your service address." I tried several other streets in the area that indicated that none of them had availability either.) 3. Platinum Equity LLC, "10-25mbps" (err, Platinum Equity is an investment firm - oh, one of their portfolio offers "T1 and Bonded T1" lines to businesses and after further investigation would offer me 192K SDSL as a residential offering) 4. Integra Telecom Holdings, "3-6mbps" (a Vancouver telco that does business fiber). So there's one - Olympia, WA.

Everyone else has a subpar coaxial connection from Comcast/Cox/Spectrum.

The issue is that fiber internet itself is a much better product than non fiber internet. And tell the people who have kids and are also working from home that they can't stream video because an HD video stream is 3Mbps+ and 4 people in a house streaming at the same time at high quality is basically impossible.

Some people also have security cameras streaming upload too. The applications for increased bandwidth are numerous. Remote doctor visits can use high quality video, you can stream things from your home NAS, backups are quicker.

(side rant: in the following ten years, the tech giants sweeped in, competed, provided a better service, with better cross-platform support, for zero dollar immediate cost to the end customer -- gained a massive following (think whatsapp), and are now vilified for their "monopoly" and the "harm" it has caused.)

My read of this situation is:

- Real monopolies (esp Telco) have entrenched lobbying bases

- Tech has done a poor job at lobbying, possibly due to idealism that logic wins even though thats now how things work in the US

- Tech has disrupted so much that they now have multiple industries as enemies

- Tech is concentrated enough geographically that there is some jealousy against this sector "over there" raking in too much money, even if they have provided an amazing service

Net neutrality was a good example of this - still good despite not being the most important issue du jour. Received attention because it's coincidentally in the interests of Google et al.

Why voters don't know/care is another issue, but it might have something to do with the fact that the news media has also been bought.

Take Ron Wyden (D-OR) for example. He’s been talking about the problems of “Big Tech,”[a] the NSA, etc. for years, but no one outside tech or his state have even heard of him.

[a]: Those aren’t “scare quotes.” They’re because there isn’t really a good word for it. FAANG seems too restrictive compared to how many companies are actually part of the problem.

I'd guess because the media is controlled by some of the same people who want us to remain unaware. They block information from reaching the media, and flood media with sensationalist stories to prevent attention from settling on issues that matter.

False: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556

https://www.natoa.org/events/BrokenPromisesGarcia.pdf

BTW the logic in your link doesn't make sense. The $200 billion number is "based on taking what ISP profits would have been had they been regulated as a utility", yes, but the only reason we didn't regulate them as a utility is they promised us the fiber networks!

The government deregulated prices in 1996 for the same reason we deregulated airline fares, truck tariffs, etc. The government wanted to get out of the business of price control. And it didn't just happen in the U.S., it happened all over the world.

Fiber was presented as a benefit that would result from increased capital investment following deregulation. And that happened to an extent--wireline capital expenditure almost doubled from 1996-2001. But after 2000, capital started moving to the fast-growing industry of cellular wireless, where the returns were better. So yeah, we didn't get as much investment in fiber as we expected. But we got huge investments in cellular. That's how free markets work--the government can't predict or direct where capital goes.

The 1996 telecom deregulation wasn't a bargain, where ISPs were allowed to raise prices in exchange for a "promise" to build fiber. It was a deregulation of the industry. It's fair to complain that maybe the benefits of deregulation were oversold. (I can also claim that projections about premiums reductions under Obamacare have been oversold!) I think the 1996 deregulation should have been paired with a preemption of state-and-local broadband construction regulation. (American municipalities regulate in a way that makes it expensive to build infrastructure, whether you're talking about broadband or subway tunnels.) In particular, the nearly universal requirement to agree to service an entire city in exchange for permission to service any part of a city vastly limits the competition that could have been enabled by deregulation.

Its fair to have a debate about the ultimate outcomes of the 1996 deregulation. But its deceitful to act like it was a planned government fiber-construction project where ISPs just "pocketed the money" and didn't build the infrastructure.