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Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast
231–240 of 284 posts
Re: Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast
#232Another strategy to this (not exclusive of other strategies) is to encourage municipal ISPs, or even go further and roll out federal ISP infrastructure ala the federal highway system. I've always thought that this would be well within the rubric of the USPS. The constitutional mandate for a postal service was drafted at a time when the internet could not have been conceived of. I would argue that the intent of the co…
The next step beyond the mail was the telegraph and then the telephone. Those were built out by private companies, but operated under a regulatory regime called "common carrier," which protected the network owner from liability so long as it charged and carried traffic from all parties equally. These days, that concept is called "net neutrality" in the context of the Internet, and I suppose you may have heard it ment…
I think a combination of the 2 is warranted. I'd hate to see it entirely controlled by the government because they tend to be more likely to install backdoors while private companies would push back to protect their users.
With 5G networks I would think there is a lot less digging up streets so municipal plans are more feasible.
Re: Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
On what grounds do they sue? Clearly local governments have the ability to build/own things like buses, metros, recycling centers, etc. Do you have any citations?
It's not that they're suing directly, but getting laws passed which block municipal internet. You don't have to sue if you can write the laws. This has happened in 20+ states already. There are lots of citations: http://fortune.com/2016/08/10/municipal-internet/ "An appeals court on Wednesday sided with the telecom industry, and with North Carolina and Tennessee, in a major decision that upheld the ability of states…
Note that the majority of states have no such laws, including the largest. Additionally, only a fraction of the state laws impose more the perfunctory barriers to municipal broadband: https://www.google.com/amp/s/motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/.... For example, Washington is on that list of 20. But the only requirement there is that municipalities have to be “code cities” (basically, be big enough to use its own municipal laws and codes). Pennsylvania is also included, and there a city only needs to prepare a proposal to its incumbent, which the incumbent has 60 days to accept or reject (in which case the city can go build its own). The Utah law implements exactly the system folks on HN espouse, where the government builds the system but a private company must be the one to sell service directly to consumers.
Putting up these laws as a reason for the limited deployment of municipal broadband is misleading. Most stages have no legal barriers, and for most of the states that do, the barriers aren’t really significant. They don’t explain why New York, LA, San Francisco, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle, etc., don’t build their own municipal systems.
Re: Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast
#234Interesting that wireless services was left out of the conversation. Given it's massive growth in urban areas, and the fact, there are many options for most populations. Video is hardly a high bandwidth use case. Cultivation of victims.
Re: Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's decades of precedent on how to do utility regulation, and that is one of the models. (It's called the rate-of-return model.) It was used for telecom for a long time, but has lots of problems. On one hand, it can encourage gold plating (spending money on infrastructure that isn't helpful because there is a guaranteed return on capital investment). On the other hand, political pressure can drive the return rate…
Your pipe examples are a failure of the market to correctly capture externalities. I'm not sure how not having cheap fibre to ge doorstep is an externality.
There is no market for sewer service—most everywhere, the government runs the service and sets rates in response to voter pressure. My point is that the same voters who vote to keep lead water pipes and overflowing sewers, because they want to minimize their water and sewer bills, will not vote to deploy cheap fiber everywhere (or not set rates high enough to continue to maintain and upgrade it). For most people, especially the older people who disproportionately vote, a 25 mbps connection is fast enough, and they’d rather have cheaper service than better service.
Re: Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast
#236This the end of innovation in online videos: "When companies like Netflix, which today closed with a market cap of almost $158 billion, can’t necessarily get enough negotiating power to ensure that consumers have direct access to them, no startup can ever hope to compete. America may believe in its entrepreneurs, but its competition laws have done nothing to keep the terrain open for them. Those implications are just…
Is there any chance that Comcast will stop carrying Google ads? That has to be some quantity of traffic - a few dozen kb on every page load in every browser and app on every network connection. For a 100 kb ad to show 100 times on 5 devices at 100 houses is 500 gb
Re: Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast
#237Another strategy to this (not exclusive of other strategies) is to encourage municipal ISPs, or even go further and roll out federal ISP infrastructure ala the federal highway system. I've always thought that this would be well within the rubric of the USPS. The constitutional mandate for a postal service was drafted at a time when the internet could not have been conceived of. I would argue that the intent of the co…
A better approach might be a government managed last mile (i.e. cable from a central data center to your home/business), but not the ISP itself. That way ISPs can continue to compete for your business, but the market would be significantly less restrictive because the ISP only needs physical equipment at the data center and upstream of it. The biggest thing stopping ISP competition today is that local markets don't w…
New Zealand does this. It works well. There is plenty of ISP competition - I can choose between at least 20 providers, probably a lot more.
Edit: A colleague just mentioned to me that New Zealand doesn't have net neutrality and doesn't need it for this very reason.
Re: Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Lobbying the government to restore net neutrality is far cheaper than building out an ISP. Also, I suspect that state-level legislative initiatives are going to be much easier to win than trying to sue executive agencies.
Just wondering. Would it matter if they win on state level if the traffic is slowed down on its route in another state? Also do the states even have the authority if the federal government wants to enforce the states to get rid of NN?
Last mile is really the only thing in question here.
1. Because that's where there's a real lack of competition
2. Because traffic going long range is already "slowed down" even with net neutrality. If you are paying a CDN, they likely have paid for higher priority "leased lines" between their data centers, while the rest of the traffic goes over the "regular internet" (keep in mind that the "leased line" and the "regular internet" here are probably the same fiber, the distinction is legal, because under net neutrality carriers are still allowed to charge differently for "leased lines")
Re: Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the government, I suppose. And your criteria for comparison. Broadband in particular is very infrastructure-ish. It's much more like a water utility or traffic lights than a service business like on-demand personal drivers. Many governments run infrastructure quite well.
What infrastructure is broadband most like? The water utility that's poisoning people with lead: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dcs-decade-old-problem-... . The sewer utility that's dumping raw sewage into the local river: https://wtop.com/dc/2017/07/heavy-rain-raw-sewage-potomac-an... . Or the subway infrastructure that constantly catches fire? https://www.arlnow.com/2018/01/22/developing-track-fire-at-p... .…
Ok. I've lived in Grand Rapids, Chicago, Sydney, London, and San Francisco. I'd trust all of them except maybe Chicago. People have different opinions and different experiences.
Turning toward actual data, in general, the US's water quality is good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water_quality_in_the_...
In the US most water systems are run by local governments, and generally it works out fine.
Re: Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that they're suing directly, but getting laws passed which block municipal internet. You don't have to sue if you can write the laws. This has happened in 20+ states already. There are lots of citations: http://fortune.com/2016/08/10/municipal-internet/ "An appeals court on Wednesday sided with the telecom industry, and with North Carolina and Tennessee, in a major decision that upheld the ability of states…
Note that the majority of states have no such laws, including the largest. Additionally, only a fraction of the state laws impose more the perfunctory barriers to municipal broadband: https://www.google.com/amp/s/motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/... . For example, Washington is on that list of 20. But the only requirement there is that municipalities have to be “code cities” (basically, be big enough to use its own mun…
Aren't those places already some of the best-served in the country? I don't live there, but it was my impression that the biggest cities already had good options, and it was smaller cities and towns that had more trouble with private ISPs. That seemed to be what the earlier commenter was suggesting too.