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One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

washingtonpost.com

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Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#101

Post by Shivetya »

imgabe wrote: post #47
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, cable is more like the railroad than it is like Standard Oil. Petroleum isn't at all like a natural monopoly. It took a lot of corruption and bribery for Standard Oil to keep competition at bay. But nobody is really stepping forward to lay residential fiber. Google is the exception and it's because they're one of the only companies with enough money to survive a war of attrition with the incumbents, and…

True. I recall reading somewhere that Japan has a law requiring the owner of the physical wires to lease them to anyone as long as they pay some set fee - sort of like mechanical royalties that we have for music. This is part of the reason why Japan has some of the fastest and cheapest Internet in the world.

well when the state of Georgia deregulated natural gas sales that is effectively what happened. A management company became the owners of the gas lines, responsible for maintenance and expansion. That fee appears on every gas bill

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#102

Post by eli_gottlieb »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #48
dogma1138 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The largest 10 cities are home to 16M Americans, the 10 largest cities in the UK are host to 12M Brits. The 100 largest cities in the US are home to 59M Americans, the 100 largest cities in the UK are home to 34M Brits. The US is 5 times as populous but there is only 30% difference between the top 10 cities in the US vs UK and 50% in top 100. Most people in the US live in cities under The rest of Europe isn't that mu…

Many small/medium American "cities" are municipalities that are directly attached to (or even surrounded by) a larger urban area. It's basically a quirk of how local government is structured rather than anything that has to do with population or infrastructure density. For example, it's unlikely that many residents of Beverly Hills (<50K residents) think of themselves as living in a small town outside of Los Angeles.

Similarly, the municipalities of Boston and Cambridge remain separated by the natural border of the Charles River, even if by nothing else at all. Cambridge and Somerville don't even have that much justification for existing as separate municipalities: you can accidentally walk across the municipal border and back again without noticing it in some places.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#103

Post by dredmorbius »

Afforess wrote: post #5

At this point, Cable companies are all members of a single large shadow monopoly not unlike Standard Oil was in the early 20th century. The rational the justice system used to break up Standard Oil is shockingly similar to the situation we now face with cable: Rates have been made low to let the Standard into markets, or they have been made high to keep its competitors out of markets. Trifling differences in distance…

Cable has a significant difference from oil.

Cable is a network technology with value defined somewhere between Sarnof's, Metcalfe's, or Tilly-Odlyzko's laws. Scale, and dominating local coverage, matter.

Oil is an extractive mineral resource with very low direct costs vs. use value. Absent some form of central contrl, the price has tended to fall far too low. In the aftermath of the East Texas oilfield discovery of 1930 (the biggest on the mainland lower 48), prices fell fist to $0.13/bbl, then to $0.02/bbl. That's barrels, not gallons.

The governors of Texas and Oklahoma called out their state national guards, and the Rangers in Texas, and seized wellheads at gunpoint to cut supply. The quota system imposed, run by the highly innaccurately named Texas Railraod Commission, lasted until 1972. Daniel Yergin's book The Prize covers this in detail.

A similar control program applied to strategic minerals was created after WWII, originally called the Hobard list, and remains in effect as part of the Defense National Stockpile Center.

Raw material and networking economics differ.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#104

Post by Spooky23 »

ikeboy wrote: post #57
Spooky23 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix is the canonical example. A few years ago YouTube got similar treatment on Time Warner -- they funneled everything to a YouTube point of presence on the TWC network that was over saturated. You could modify DNS and use and alternate URL and watch 1080p video with no lag. Verizon also started limiting aggregate Netflix traffic. Through conincidence, it happened to start happening when they launched a video ser…

What happened with netflix wasn't covered under net neutrality anyway (as the links above point out), and they weren't being charged for prioritization, nor were they discriminated against.

This isn't a net neutrality discussion. It's about monopolistic behavior.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#105

Post by stormbuilder »

dredmorbius wrote: post #103
Afforess wrote: post #5

At this point, Cable companies are all members of a single large shadow monopoly not unlike Standard Oil was in the early 20th century. The rational the justice system used to break up Standard Oil is shockingly similar to the situation we now face with cable: Rates have been made low to let the Standard into markets, or they have been made high to keep its competitors out of markets. Trifling differences in distance…

Cable has a significant difference from oil. Cable is a network technology with value defined somewhere between Sarnof's, Metcalfe's, or Tilly-Odlyzko's laws. Scale, and dominating local coverage, matter. Oil is an extractive mineral resource with very low direct costs vs. use value. Absent some form of central contrl, the price has tended to fall far too low . In the aftermath of the East Texas oilfield discovery of…

Great info thanks.

It is entertaining how the stalwart protectors of free markets oppose them when it becomes too inconvenient.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#106

Post by rue »

en4bz wrote: post #15

Cable companies don't compete because the market has reached a Nash equilibrium. This is Game Theory 101. If one company lowers their prices or increase their services then as soon as others start seeing attrition they simply lower their prices in response until attrition stops. At the end of the day no one gains any customers and they've all lowered their prices. No one wins. Similar things happen with turf wars. If…

> No one wins.

This assumes that all costs stay proportionately the same, _and_ that there is no other competitive advantage than price.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#107

Post by freen »

wtbob wrote: post #62
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we still have some cultural inertia such that things like high-speed internet and cell service are seen as luxuries and not basic infrastructure (plus some who believe that the poor ought to be excluded from using basic infrastructure anyway). I'm also not convinced that Capitol Hill has fully realized that Comcast isn't competing with rabbit ears anymore.

> high-speed internet and cell service are seen as luxuries and not basic infrastructure I would never want to live without high-speed mobile Internet (which can provide the equivalent of cell service), but is it really a necessity to live? I was a boy before cell phones even existed, and anyone outside academia and a few tech companies had the Internet, and life was fine. It's certainly extremely convenient, but I d…

From 2011: 80% of fortune 500 jobs accept only online applications.

http://2010-2014.commerce.gov/blog/2011/12/30/look-ahead-201...

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#108

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

ryao wrote: post #45
luckydata wrote: post #38

I think this article is the best proof we need to show that basic connectivity infrastructure should be paid with tax dollars and licensed to operators by the federal government since there's no incentive whatsoever to create a real market around it.

Having the federal government own the infrastructure would simplify the process of doing the more common forms of wiretaps.

They seem to be pretty handy at that anyway

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#109

Post by zanny »

mahyarm wrote: post #87
zanny wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a town that got municipal broadband at the turn of the millennia. Since about 1999 they have offered 10/2 up to 10/10 speeds for $25-$50 a month over coax. Except... that is all they have. All they have ever had. And as the population has risen, they have no budget to deploy more servers to meet demand, so every night the speeds crash and you have intermittent outages. Especially on weekends. They are runni…

So why do you still get enough clean water and electricity? Not have brown/black outs and so on?

The water actually has a lead warning in east PA, and we do have near weekly evening power outages. But the septic is county based and the electric is at the state level, and in PA you can buy from any electric provider in the state and the lines are maintained near us by Harrisburg.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#110

Post by warfangle »

harryh wrote: post #81
warfangle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope.

Not counting city states and small islands, South Korea has the 2nd highest population density in the world.

On average.

But unlike NYC, there's actually, well, rural areas.

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