Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Obama calls for municipal broadband

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 289 posts

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#121

Post by bduerst »

meesterdude wrote: post #64

I think its simple. Municipalities should at this point feel responsible for ensuring their residents have good internet access. Its also good for the tax payers, because its money going back into the government, and not into the coffers of some mega-corp who's just going to hoard it. I think there is a balance to be had between too much government and not enough. I think its easy to sway too far one way or another a…

It's almost better to think of power as static. For some areas, if you have a smaller government, it's not a loss of power so much as a void of power, which will be filled by corporations or other large organizations.

A lot of people look at a smaller government as increasing their personal liberty, which is true for some issues, but for other areas it only means swapping out one organization for another (which may not be aligned with your interests).

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#122

Post by CamperBob2 »

djrogers wrote: post #68
jfb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can do this now. Municipal ownership of some of the pipes isn't going to stop what is essentially an orthogonal fight from happening at a higher level.

Yeah - I think the point was that if the pipes are owned by the same government that's already in the pocket of hollywood, then the laws (more likely regulations written by bureaucrats, not laws passed by elected officials, but..) against torrenting/pirating/distributing would be easier to get written and enforced.

That might not actually be the case. You can't bring a First Amendment complaint against Verizon, but you can certainly bring one against your state-run or municipal ISP.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#123

Post by ScottBurson »

mholt wrote: post #101

I live in Provo, which has Google Fiber. As the article says, Google took over their failed public fiber project. (Google purchased the infrastructure for $1.) Provo is a very unique city. It's a big city, but most of its residents are college students or young, newly married recent graduates. It's also a technology hotspot. Comparing the success of its fiber project to predict the success in other cities is hardly f…

So with Provo having so many young people and being a technology hotspot, why do you think the public fiber project failed? (In general I'm in favor of municipal broadband, so I'm curious why it didn't work as well as hoped in this case.)

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#124

Post by CamperBob2 »

cubano wrote: post #58
metaphorm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you serious? you can't be serious. i usually assume that hacker news has a bit more sophistication than this. i would actively celebrate a legitimate socialized health care system in the U.S. but that's not what we got. ACA is basically a huge middle class tax with the proceeds paid almost entirely to health insurance companies. its a massive expansion of a deeply entrenched private industry.

I, personally, would not celebrate that outcome. I believe in the power in markets and price signaling, ala Hayek, and there is nothing unsophisticated about that. We agree on more then you may be aware...the HI industry is a giant problem, and must be fundamentally altered for the market-based solutions I prefer to do their magic.

It's not a market if you're forced to participate... and for that, you have to blame your $DEITY of choice or Nature as a whole, not Obama. We're all going to need expensive health care at some point.

That also means that insurance is the wrong model.

So what's left?

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#125

Post by zaroth »

Crito wrote: post #104
WillNotDownvote wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thought that occurs to me is that if the government is providing internet access, various pressure groups will leverage that for various kinds of censorship. Why is my government providing access to porn? To religious sites? To sites that violate copyright? To sites that contain many sorts of 'unsavory' content? Allowing children uncensored access to many things? I don't know how those complaints would fare, but I'…

Why is my government delivering porno mags and religious pamphlets to my mailbox? The government being in the delivery business is nothing new. Historically, it has worked out for the better more often than not.

So the premise is then any government infra to provide broadband must come with equally stringent protections on monitoring the content, similar to how government infra to provide deliveries has warrant requirements to inspect those deliveries.

However, we know that government policy is to record all meta-data, forever, without a warrant. HTTP/2 can't come fast enough, but even that doesn't really hide enough meta-data to trust the government with the pipe. E.g. You can tell fairly well what static pages on a domain someone is visiting by simply correlating the size of the response packets.

Of course, they are already doing all of this already, so maybe the ship has sailed... I think the best model is that the government provides the fiber, the L2 and above service is provided by a private entity. It certainly doesn't do much to prevent mass-collection or censorship, but it's marginally better than the Fed actually providing Layer 2.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#126

Post by lnkmails »

I am from India and one of the major broadband providers is BSNL. It used to be core part of the government (Department of Telecom) but was made a corporate in 2000 (but still owned by Govt. of India which is confusing). Anyways, BSNL is the reason a lot of remote villages in India get mobile & broadband connections. If it were left to private companies, they would never expand the infrastructure beyond urban centers where they could cover a lot of people per square area. BSNL also has a lot of fiber optic deployments that private companies rent in suburban areas to provide service. They get it at a cheaper price and don't have the problem of maintaining them. So I can see how municipal internet can help people. OTOH, there is a huge cost load on the government and people in remote villages don't use Internet much. I wonder if private companies were regulated to mandatorily have presence in all areas and are allowed to borrow government/municipal owned infrastructure at competitive rates, would the situation be better? This way there is both competition and better connectivity.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#127

Post by enraged_camel »

ksk wrote: post #45
jfb wrote: post #6

Really, he's calling for the FCC to prevent rent-seeking by local ISP monopolies by allowing the option of municipal networks. It's a really good idea; you can tell because of how stridently Comcast/Verizon/AT&T oppose it.

> you can tell because of how stridently Comcast/Verizon/AT&T oppose it. How so? Whether its good or bad, ISPs would be against it. Most companies do not want competition. (regardless of what they say) >by allowing the option of municipal networks. I personally think its rather unfair to ask a for-profit company to compete against a tax funded service. >Really, he's calling for the FCC to prevent rent-seeking You can…

>>I personally think its rather unfair to ask a for-profit company to compete against a tax funded service.

But much of the technology and infrastructure the ISPs use today was once built by tax-payer money.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#128

Post by zaroth »

Alupis wrote: post #23
ayuvar wrote: post #5

Municipal broadband is a great idea. A town near me, Olds, just rolled out gigabit fiber to the curb for $57/mo. Considering most of the other nearby municipalities have to live with dialup or (agonizingly slow) satellite internet, it's been a big draw to the area. I think it absolutely makes a ton of sense for rural areas; if I had a remote job it would be very tempting to head out there and get an acreage. I feel l…

> Municipal broadband is a great idea. A town near me, Olds, just rolled out gigabit fiber to the curb for $57/mo. I do wonder if Olds is just covering their costs (likely) or are turning a profit (unlikely) (most municipal initiatives I've seen aimed to provide bandwidth at cost)? The infrastructure is new and shiny now, and works well, but in 15 years what will it look like? Most state highways systems are in atroc…

The cost of maintaining a fixed number of lanes of asphalt roadway is fairly constant over time. Impacted by the cost or labor and the price of oil, etc.

The cost of maintaining a fixed amount of network bandwidth however, doesn't that decrease more-or-less with Moore's law? Especially if the lines are fiber, the cable can break and need to be replaced, but it never needs to be "upgraded" and the devices at either end will become exponentially more powerful over time for the same cost per port.

And to your point, if you the muni is responsible for little more than the fiber line itself, it really is a simple matter to maintain them, i.e. completely predictable cost structure.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#129

Post by gnaritas »

kstrauser wrote: post #57
anigbrowl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

small towns can develop the network that's right for them What does that even mean? Do people in Smallville use the internet differently or not like to their video to buffer too fast? A mishmash of half-assed local standards was how the road network used to be, until Dwight Eisenhower came to power and argued that the US deserved something better than the miserably inefficient network it had, and championed the devel…

A big difference between roads and network links is that I don't have to send packets through Mayberry on their way from SF to DC. Interstate highways were amazing because they specified a minimum level of quality that you could then expect everywhere, in every state, as you were transporting goods through them. While it would suck for Mayberry's residence if their digital "road" is two tin cans and a string, your da…

> The Internet isn't a special snowflake here.

That's where the majority of the world disagrees with you; [1] the Internet is a special snowflake to the point of most agreeing it should be a basic human right.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#130

Post by aembleton »

bainsfather wrote: post #94
davidgerard wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This works really well in the UK. OpenReach, the bit of BT that operates the infrastructure, is part of a private company, but operates like part of the civil service. They are completely impartial. It is so illegal for OpenReach to offer BT anything they don't offer anyone else, that both BT Broadband and OpenReach staff cringe at the very concept. tl;dr public wires that many ISPs can supply service over.

I've read that twice, and I'm still not sure if you are being sarcastic. For me, those 'public wires' are old and slow - all 3 places I have lived recently. The government have gifted lots of money to BT to roll out fiber, and BT have taken the cash and sat on their hands. It is an awful situation - allowing BT to sabotage our nation's competitiveness whilst stealing taxpayer money [0]. So having competition on the c…

By the use of italics, I think he was being sarcastic.
Post reply on HN