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Net neutrality

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Net neutrality

#161

Post by jbooth »

rayiner wrote: post #158
jbooth wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, most of the things you're taking out of the monthly were already factored into the fronted cost in the linked article. Second off, if Verizon does that shitty of a job of cost control compared to foreign government bureaucracies, maybe we should consider nationalizing them. But back to my actual point -- It costs money to deliver the service? Charge more for the service if you can't deliver it profitably.…

> First off, most of the things you're taking out of the monthly were already factored into the fronted cost in the linked article. No they're not. They cover, e.g., marketing to get you to hook up in the first place, but not, e.g., marketing to keep you from switching to Comcast a year later. They account for the cost of hookup, but not, e.g., ongoing maintenance. As to your other point, charging up front is not the…

I must be doing a really bad job of writing, because you're not addressing the point I was trying to make at all.

I'm ok with paying $100 for internet access (well, not really, but still). If $100 cannot get me internet access at the advertised speeds, I'm ok with paying 120, or whatever additional cost per GB.

What I'm not ok with, is if $100 doesn't do it, Verizon goes out and shakes down the companies I do business with on the internet connection that I ostensibly paid for, who then raise their prices (gotta pay the bills) for reasons I don't understand. I'm still going to pay, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And not only does this obscure information about the real cost of my connection and the services I use (and that does matter), not only does it open the door to all kinds of anti-competitive practices around who gets the best deal with comcast/verizon, it's guaranteed to be less efficient than just upgrading the network and charging me for what it costs. Now I'm paying for all the hotel rooms and buffet spreads that went into that deal being struck? In addition to the cost of the fiber? Just build the fiber, and charge the customer (me) for it.

Re: Net neutrality

#162

Post by _archon_ »

ajb wrote: post #142

If you want competition, perhaps the simplest way of doing it might be for municipalities to provide universal service at layer -1: run an underground plastic pipe to each house from the street. That way it suddenly becomes cheap for multiple telcos to run fibre to each house, but the municipalities aren't doing anything with an ongoing technical burden which they might be bad at, or running an ongoing service which…

As I understand it, laying pipe is the fundamentally high cost of expanding or rebuilding a network. The cable itself has a non-negligible cost, but getting zoning and town permissions, securing land for junction cabinets, and digging through existing roads and around existing utilities is hugely expensive.

What I don't understand is why any new neighborhood could be built without such underground conduit in place. If they're going in for water, sewer, power, etc. then it should be trivial to pop in an additional tube for "future connections."

Re: Net neutrality

#163

Post by atlantageek »

How about this. The speed rating that you advertise for your cable modem (or dsl) service should be the slowest download rate on the last mile. In other words if the best I can get is 10mbps from the MSO headend and netflix should be able to prove this then that is what should be advertised. Consumers should get money back when customer service fails.

Re: Net neutrality

#164

Post by kaonashi »

snitko wrote: post #135
kaonashi wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If those activities are financed using tax money, it's called "government". Taxes don't finance US government expenditure; they create demand for the currency. > Then, the question we should ask ourselves, would people still invent awesome things and build roads and educate their children without government funding Government provides the coordination required to accomplish these things. The private sector is notor…

> The private sector is notoriously horrible at coordination between competing actors. This must be why I can never get my luggage handled flying two or more airlines or why I can never use my cellphone in another country connecting to another operator's network. Can you give me some examples where the private sector is actually bad at coordination?

You picked two areas with massive government regulation. So yes, when government acts as the intermediary, the private sector can stop failing at coordination.

Re: Net neutrality

#165

Post by NickWarner775 »

What we should put on priority is city wide wireless internet capabilities. I think there are some early versions of this in some states but it would be very useful if it were more widely used.

Re: Net neutrality

#166

Post by harryh »

jbooth wrote: post #161
rayiner wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First off, most of the things you're taking out of the monthly were already factored into the fronted cost in the linked article. No they're not. They cover, e.g., marketing to get you to hook up in the first place, but not, e.g., marketing to keep you from switching to Comcast a year later. They account for the cost of hookup, but not, e.g., ongoing maintenance. As to your other point, charging up front is not the…

I must be doing a really bad job of writing, because you're not addressing the point I was trying to make at all. I'm ok with paying $100 for internet access (well, not really, but still). If $100 cannot get me internet access at the advertised speeds, I'm ok with paying 120, or whatever additional cost per GB. What I'm not ok with, is if $100 doesn't do it, Verizon goes out and shakes down the companies I do busines…

What you are ok with paying and what the median Verizon customer is ok with are probably not the same thing.

Re: Net neutrality

#167

Post by jbooth »

harryh wrote: post #166
jbooth wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must be doing a really bad job of writing, because you're not addressing the point I was trying to make at all. I'm ok with paying $100 for internet access (well, not really, but still). If $100 cannot get me internet access at the advertised speeds, I'm ok with paying 120, or whatever additional cost per GB. What I'm not ok with, is if $100 doesn't do it, Verizon goes out and shakes down the companies I do busines…

What you are ok with paying and what the median Verizon customer is ok with are probably not the same thing.

I'm about as ok with paying $100 for internet as I am with paying $4/gallon for gas during the summer. Read: not very.

But that's what it costs. Make it clear to the consumer what things cost and they'll either curtail their usage or cough up the money. Maybe they should have a charge per GB of transfer over some monthly limit. I don't know. But obscuring it through a bunch of additional business deals on the back-end isn't going to make those costs go away, it's just a way to hide them and delay the day when ISPs compete with each other on actual cost per GB delivered.

Re: Net neutrality

#168

Post by atmosx »

snitko wrote: post #74

I wonder. I wonder. I live in Russia and I have 2-3 very good providers on the block constantly competing with each other and offering better connection and prices. They would show up on time and connect you very fast. They fix things quickly (in my government maintained house, the basement once became filled with water after the rain, and the wires were damaged. Even though it wasn't their fault, the ISP came and fi…

> And yet, you claim free market fails.

Seriously? You have a cheaper/better internet access in Russia compared to the USA and suddenly the Russian (extremely corrupted) political and social model (a modern monarchy of sorts) became a model economy over the US?

PS. I can't find the source, but I've read that in the last Russian elections more than 35% of the population wanted to return back to communism.

Re: Net neutrality

#169

Post by larrys »

jbooth wrote: post #136
rayiner wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But don't telcos face the same issue: enormous capital costs with limited prospects for attractive returns? E.g. FiOS is profitable, but the margins have been quite disappointing to shareholders. Indeed, observers have been skeptical about the value proposition of FiOS since the beginning: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/a-bear-speaks-why-v... . Note that this article was written in 2008. As of 2014, Verizon…

Nobody's asking them to build this stuff out for free. I'm cutting a check north of $100 to Verizon every month, last I checked. And that IS them capturing some of the money generated by services running on their infrastructure. If they're not getting enough money to continue building, first off, I find that hard to believe, second off, they should just charge more to consumers, either additional $/month or an additi…

"If they're not getting enough money to continue building, first off, I find that hard to believe"

Entirely possible that they are getting enough money to continue but they want to take a break to inhale some excess profits not hindered by more expansion. Get something in the bank. (Kind of opposite of what Amazon is doing I guess.)

Re: Net neutrality

#170

Post by mtrimpe »

ef4 wrote: post #121
Retric wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how internet is any less a natural monopoly than electricity. Picture a residential street with 100 completely separate fiber optic networks vs 10 vs 1, now which seems more efficient. It's not like everyone connects to a different Hacker News.

It's not obvious whether it's really a bad idea to have several independent fiber networks in the same geographic area. Choice is good. And it would also necessarily imply more total capacity, which is also good. So deciding the "right" number of network operators in one place is subjective, and comes down to what consumers are willing to pay for. Or at least it would, if competition weren't illegal. There's nothing…

In the Netherlands we force the physical network part of the infrastructure to be separate from the services that run on top of it.

It can be implemented fairly easily by separating a company into two and forbidding them from giving special deals to their former counterpart.

That seems to have a very good effect on competition in practice...

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