A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

I'm a bit of a weirdo but at the current time, my gigabit is provided by a company whose name histortically was associated with a monopolistic company (AT&T) but really was cobbled out of the bones of several large dead telecom companies and is now a monopoly again. It costs $100/month, is delivered by fiber straight to my house from a pole, works as described (in terms of latency and speed tests), and I don't want it to change at all for the next decade. I don't feel overcharged and the service is excellent compared to every broadband I've had before.

The counterargument is that I happen to live in an area where it makes economic sense for AT&T to do this (high density homes, high level of internet use).

Here's a success story with photos of a customer running conduit and fiber to enable Comcast service.

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?

I think telecom is like power, the only way it can be split is by creating horizontal markets, emphasis on plural, and preferably along some natural lines to the fictional overhead such as generation/distribution in the case of electrical markets.

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.

Masnick appears to have little interest in honestly representing any position he claims to address, nor does he actually successfully address them.

For example, in whether or not Section 230 removes the incentive to moderate, he claims that before 230, there was an incentive to not moderate, which Section 230 removes. He fails to address reality here though: That the primary force behind moderation and not moderation comes from ad revenue, and Section 230 simply makes tech companies not liable for those very financially-motivated decisions.

He also buys into the "regulations actually harm the little guy" narrative big tech is known for using to defend a law that solely serves to enable mass-scale algorithmic moderation, while doing nothing meaningful to protect human-curated decisions. Intent is very important in law, and small human moderators doing their best effort are perfectly fine pre-230, but large companies using algorithms to maximize engagement and revenue at the cost of human society really needs 230 to survive.

Large companies that need to be regulated generally claim regulation won't really hurt them, but hurts small businesses. This is, of course, a completely ridiculous claim: If it helped them more than their competitors, they'd be all for it. Regulations can (and generally are) careful to include proper methods of handling businesses from small to large, and we've seen this bad claim from Google when trying to discourage privacy legislation like GDPR.

He also addresses the conversation largely as someone who doesn't recognize the vast disparity between the large companies Section 230 protects, and the smaller parties it harms. For instance, while recognizing the first amendment is a largely suitable way to handle legitimate cases that Section 230 would apply to, he dismisses it by saying that Section 230 helps avoid nuisance or "frivolous" suits. Of course, if "nuisance suits" is the problem, perhaps we should admit that the three most valuable companies on the planet can more than afford to handle nuisance suits without additional legal protection.

I'd love to find a good write up by an "opposite shill", but honestly, that's pretty hard: Google has invested more money into political lobbying than literally anyone else at this point. They've bought everyone who can be bought.

And, while we're talking about not doxxing... how much work for Google have you done? A lot of your HN history seems to be largely defensive of them, and I found at least one comment clearly denoting you at least did work for them. I can confidently say I've never been paid by anyone working for or against Google... can you? So perhaps we should leave scouring each other's profiles out of it? The HN moderators would almost certainly prefer it.

The majority Americans have a choice in ISPs, so do you think they should be able to block any websites they like - just like Twitter?

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?