A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by nostromo » Tue, Nov 03, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #136

nostromo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Democrats will restore the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) clear authority to take strong enforcement action against broadband providers who violate net neutrality principles 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 b…

> 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. 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…

Let's choose a very similar example then.

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.

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

#162

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Nov 03, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #144

kinjba11 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is expensive to wire rural areas up. That is why the [government is paying for it]( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/att-g... ). Why isn't this a utility again? Comcast and Charter essentially have a [duopoly]( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comca... ) over much of the United States. Where is the competition? The actual competition is in lobbying local governments to m…

> Where is the competition? 60 to 90 percent of households have access to two or more options for fixed (wired) broadband[1] depending on how you classify broadband, and that's not even counting the wireless options. That, to me, seems as about as competitive as you're reasonably ever going to get across a medium that is a natural monopoly without putting the government in the same line of business, which quite frank…

Why is it a natural monopoly?

The DSL that is my second option is garbage (slow, expensive).

Redundant connections to homes are a lot cheaper when you are talking about cable vs water or power, and the hardware required to provide ISP presence isn't particularly comparable to things like water or power plants (it's considerably cheaper).

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

#163

Post by inetknght » Tue, Nov 03, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #51

MivLives wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst is the highly one directional connections too. Sure I have a gig down. I have 25mbps up though. The upload is the same for every package from 300mbps down and above. I'd happily have less download for more upload.

That's because they don't actually have capacity. The internet coming via coaxial cables is sharing the road with TV service. TV service earns Comcast/Spectrum/Cox/etc more money than internet service, so they don't necessarily want people to consume via internet yet (at least not until they own the media companies like Comcast). So they probably only have a tiny amount of bandwidth available for an entire neighborho…

20 years ago maybe. Today Comcast has indeed migrated to IPTV and has bought out those media companies. You remember NBC and Universal are now owned by Comcast, right? Do you remember Comcast before it had Xfinity? I do.

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

#164

Post by nobody9999 » Tue, Nov 03, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #116

ogre_codes wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a Dem versus Rep thing. Local corruption issues like this usually end up boiling down to following the money. Many municipal broadband projects end up being scrapped after lobbyists $$ get involved regardless of who is running the show.

It's less that lobbyists are involved but that "why go through the effort of setting up municipal broadband when we (AT&T/Spectrum) are more than happy to work with you and come to an agreement about serving your area." 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 expe…

>It's less that lobbyists are involved but that "why go through the effort of setting up municipal broadband when we (AT&T/Spectrum) are more than happy to work with you and come to an agreement about serving your area."

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...

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

#165

Post by jcims » Tue, Nov 03, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

daniellarusso wrote: post #158

jcims wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious what happens with rural terrestrial broadband. Does it dry up and die or do the telecoms try to compete at a relatively high cost per customer. Many don’t have dial tone and satellite TV bundles aren’t competitive so they will likely lose the customer completely and are left with an asset that makes no money. They might open the local loop back up to at least get rent?

The DSL providers have already neglected their maintenance and upgrades. 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.

Yep, got DSL at my current location in 2008 and they haven't upgraded anything since then. Very minor bump in peak bw they would configure, I'm at 15M/768k and that's as high as it goes. Network is garbage though and lots of time it's saturated upstream. $30K to run fiber to the DSLAM...if it was a fiber fed box I could probably get enough neighbors on board to swing it...but no.

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

#166

Post by WalterBright » Tue, Nov 03, 2020, 9:31 PM UTC

minikites wrote: post #104

WalterBright wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Democratic party platform explicitly talks about removing barriers to municipal broadband as a goal 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.

State governments have a lot of power.

Washington State is also controlled by the Democrats - the Executive and the Legislative.

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

#167

Post by Karunamon » Tue, Nov 03, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #162

Karunamon wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where is the competition? 60 to 90 percent of households have access to two or more options for fixed (wired) broadband[1] depending on how you classify broadband, and that's not even counting the wireless options. That, to me, seems as about as competitive as you're reasonably ever going to get across a medium that is a natural monopoly without putting the government in the same line of business, which quite frank…

Why is it a natural monopoly? The DSL that is my second option is garbage (slow, expensive). Redundant connections to homes are a lot cheaper when you are talking about cable vs water or power, and the hardware required to provide ISP presence isn't particularly comparable to things like water or power plants (it's considerably cheaper).

Because laying cable across a fixed amount of space is incredibly expensive and inherently unfriendly to new entrants. Wireless spectrum is limited by physics.

And your DSL being too slow and expensive for your use case says nothing about the use case of someone else, or even anyone outside of your immediate market area.

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

#168

Post by pb77 » Tue, Nov 03, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

In some of the newer neighborhood around my place, the telecom providers pay a fee to the neighborhood developer to make them the only sole provider. So in these new neighborhoods there is only one option. I don't know if DOJ can do anything about it or how they can fix it.

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

#169

Post by woodruffw » Tue, Nov 03, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #153

woodruffw wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps not a kneecapping, but Planned Parenthood recently lost a sizeable chunk of its federal funding thanks to a domestic variant of the global gag rule[1]. The 2018 omnibus budget contained a variety of funding cuts for social programs. A good example of a dramatic reduction is the 21st CCLC (a funding stream for afterschool programs) being eliminated entirely, to the tune of $1.2 billion USD[2]. That was part of…

Sure, programs get cut or funded based on various political considerations, and there might be cuts some years and growth other years. And there is a deliberate attempt to stymie provision of abortion services. That's a fair point. 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 sc…

Maybe this is a nitpick, but: it can be both true that per-pupil spending goes up and that spending on social programs via the DOEd goes down.

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.

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

#170

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Nov 03, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #167

maxerickson wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a natural monopoly? The DSL that is my second option is garbage (slow, expensive). Redundant connections to homes are a lot cheaper when you are talking about cable vs water or power, and the hardware required to provide ISP presence isn't particularly comparable to things like water or power plants (it's considerably cheaper).

Because laying cable across a fixed amount of space is incredibly expensive and inherently unfriendly to new entrants. Wireless spectrum is limited by physics. And your DSL being too slow and expensive for your use case says nothing about the use case of someone else, or even anyone outside of your immediate market area.

My point is that it is actually only moderately expensive.