The internet should be a public utility • Hacker News Board

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#101

Post by dahart » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

BubRoss wrote: post #48

dahart wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competition does help when it happens. The problem is Comcast and AT&T charge higher prices wherever there is no competition and they actively do whatever they can to prevent competition, they absolutely do not just wait around for other ISPs to compete. A few years ago Comcast’s active anti-competitive bullying of local ISPs in my city pushed me off the ISP I preferred. And there are too many areas in the U.S. where…

That's my point. Instead of having a government regulate a monopoly, if government is going to intervene it should be to allow others to compete first.

Ah, I see. It looks like that is happening in some locales, at least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States#...

Unfortunately competition still doesn’t always work, because crafty companies know how to fix prices without explicitly colluding - witness the insulin market, for example. I don’t particularly believe that my cell phone plan prices are the result of providers competing on price, it often seems more like a silent unspoken agreement among the providers to not lower the prices, which in addition to insulin has happened in lots of other markets.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#102

Post by enraged_camel » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #47

coldpie wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a blatant violation of the 1st amendment. You are at more risk of this from private entities, who are not bound by the 1st amendment.

Perhaps. Competition is a realtime mechanism for stopping this sort of fuckery on a provider level presently. I can switch ISPs immediately (provided that there is more than one around). Remediations for 1A violations are anything but realtime. You could suffer rights abuses for a very long time with no immediate or cost-effective recourse. Also, such a circumstance in which your 1A rights are violated by your govern…

>> I can switch ISPs immediately (provided that there is more than one around).

You may want to look at what percentage of America has this kind of choice (and whether it is a choice between viable and high quality alternatives, as opposed to ones that are equally shitty).

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#103

Post by radicaldreamer » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

miguelmota wrote: post #62

raverbashing wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please show me where private run electric or gas utilities have unlimited usage for a flat fee.

There’s none for obvious reasons. Give me an example of a government making the internet a public utility and making it better and less censored than a privately run company.

Almost every place offering municipal FTTH/FTTN? I guess it’s a wash if you’re comparing it to a top-tier Indy provider like Sonic or Webpass, but compared to AT&T and Comcast, they’re all better.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#104

Post by jcrawfordor » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

bgorman wrote: post #69

The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down. We had nationalized telecommunications for over 70 years and customers could only have one brand of phone, and we're limited in the number of phones available in their houses. In addition, long distance calling was cost-prohibitive. The monopoly only started cracking when MCI introduced mi…

AT&T also provided an extremely high quality of service, not really seen since that time, and operated a corporate R&D arm that I think could fairly be called the global center of innovation for decades, designing as an almost side-effect of telephone switches a large portion of the computer technology we use today from silicon to operating system. One wonders where the state of the industry would be today had Bell Labs and Western Electric been able to continue with the lavish funding and long-term vision that their monopolistic parents afforded them. And the reverse, would T-Mobile invent the transistor?

It's hard to argue that innovation and quality of the telephone system went down under AT&T's monopoly when, during that time period, AT&T played a fundamental role in the invention of the computer and famously took measures as extreme as moving buildings while telephone operators work inside in order to avoid service disruption. It seems that other factors must have been in play as well in the eventual decline of "ma bell".

The story of AT&T's monopoly on telephone service and its subsequent breakup at the hands of both court and MCI/Sprint is a complex one that cannot be so simply used as an argument for or against the arrangement. It was a very particular situation in a very particular time, perhaps most significantly because AT&T created an entire market sector which the government had no coherent strategy to manage. So-called competition has also been quite insufficient to revolutionize the landline telephone market, it remains perhaps as consumer-hostile as it has ever been, something forgotten largely only because the cellular industry has replaced it (which, facing stiff competition but the regulatory wild west of the internet, is consumer-hostile in a whole new way).

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#105

Post by sneak » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #102

sneak wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. Competition is a realtime mechanism for stopping this sort of fuckery on a provider level presently. I can switch ISPs immediately (provided that there is more than one around). Remediations for 1A violations are anything but realtime. You could suffer rights abuses for a very long time with no immediate or cost-effective recourse. Also, such a circumstance in which your 1A rights are violated by your govern…

>> I can switch ISPs immediately (provided that there is more than one around). You may want to look at what percentage of America has this kind of choice (and whether it is a choice between viable and high quality alternatives, as opposed to ones that are equally shitty).

I understand that the situation is dire. I'm saying we need more options, not fewer.

What we basically have now is a government monopoly network that happens to be Comcast branded. It's bad.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#106

Post by greggman3 » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

Aloha wrote: post #79

heymijo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We had nationalized telecommunications for over 70 years No. Until 1982 AT&T in the United States was a legal monopoly, not a nationalized telecom. The book, The Idea Factory about Bell Labs has most of the history including why the the defense work Bell Labs did during WWII and beyond helped them justify a nationwide monopoly on telecom.

And compared to virtually every nationalized telecom it provided better, cheaper service that was universally available. Internet access should be regulated like it was a utility however, and that's the great failing of public policy in that area.

Cheaper!?!?! I had $1200 one month long distance bill in 1984. That today is effectively free. Only competition made that happen. If AT&T was still in charge we'd be paying by the call and by the byte.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#107

Post by BubRoss » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #101

BubRoss wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my point. Instead of having a government regulate a monopoly, if government is going to intervene it should be to allow others to compete first.

Ah, I see. It looks like that is happening in some locales, at least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States#... Unfortunately competition still doesn’t always work, because crafty companies know how to fix prices without explicitly colluding - witness the insulin market, for example. I don’t particularly believe that my cell phone plan prices are the result of providers competing on…

If there is municipal internet, it should set a price that is sustainable but forces other ISPs to compete. Also competition doesn't only mean two of the same thing. More competition helps in general, even when the number of ISPs seems redundant.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#108

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

bgorman wrote: post #69

The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down. We had nationalized telecommunications for over 70 years and customers could only have one brand of phone, and we're limited in the number of phones available in their houses. In addition, long distance calling was cost-prohibitive. The monopoly only started cracking when MCI introduced mi…

> The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down.

Who needs nationalization? The market for transit is reasonably competitive. Local municipalities could install fiber along the roads they already maintain at a modest incremental cost, then offer the service to residents for a monthly fee to pay off the bonds without even spending any taxpayer money.

All you really need from the federal government is to have them do something about incumbent ISPs actively interfering with municipalities that want to do that.

> 4G/5G are decent options

No they're not. The nature of wireless is that it's cheaper if you have a low population density, because one tower for hundreds of people is much cheaper than installing hundreds of miles of fiber for hundreds of people.

It flips completely the other way in anything resembling a city. To get a fraction of the bandwidth available from fiber, you'd need a tower on every street corner, which isn't dramatically less expensive than installing fiber (especially when you count all the spectrum you have to pay for) and is still slower even then.

And cellular is even less attractive when you have Starlink -- then you don't even need the towers. It's great for rural areas. But it's hardly going to have enough aggregate bandwidth to let all of New York City watch Netflix in 4K.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#109

Post by chrisbennet » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

The local government should own the "pipes" and rent them out.

Some people are down on "socialism" without realizing they love it. We have socialized police, fire, sewage, (usually) water and road repair plus some others I'm forgetting.

Socialism is people getting together to help each other. Businesses have no special right to view citizens as their exclusive feeding ground.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#110

Post by ctdonath » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

marcusverus wrote: post #18

Has the author never heard of the Lifeline Program for Low-Income Consumers (aka Obamaphones)? This program already provides a benefit designed to provide free access to mobile internet. The $10 per month subsidy may not seem like much, but it'll buy you ~1Gb per month via Tracfone, for example. It's important to note that this program includes a requirement that "Obamaphones" be hot-spot enabled so that they can be…

1GB/mo = 385B/s = 3086b/s

Average 3kb/s.

Yes, one tends to use data in bursts. Bracketing helps understand usage.