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

arstechnica.com

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

#101

Post by ocdtrekkie »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #94
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #44

Actually, everyone is talking about this: Big Tech has been beating this drum for years, and paying everyone else to talk about it. The source of this article, Conde Nast, has an incredibly close partnership with Google, and this whataboutism has no real place here. This entire article is tech companies' public policy teams screaming "please look somewhere else!" Meanwhile, Big Tech is vastly larger, vastly more prof…

> (Section 230) https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

TechDirt (via the "Copia Institute") is paid by Google's Public Policy team, as disclosed at Google's Public Policy Transparency page: https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency/ in https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/4b9e2caa400b9cd5... (pdf)

Mike Masnick is, as disclosed, a Google shill on payroll. If you didn't realize this, Google's public policy team is doing their job well.

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

#102

Post by afrojack123 »

Infrastructure is naturally monopoly. Every so often the companies will have a bunch of customer facing shill companies that customers buy. The shill companies then send purchase the infrastructure from the main provider. Examples are MVNO's, natural gas, etc.

The real antitrust problem is DuckDuckGo.

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

#103

Post by wstrange »

908B64B197 wrote: post #38
donmcronald wrote: post #2

Canada has the same problem. I don’t have definitive data, but the promo pricing for internet plans has seemed pretty weak since COVID hit. We call our ISP every (fucking) year to ask them to give us the current promo pricing for the next year and this year everything is a solid $20-$40 per month higher than it’s been in the last 3-4 years. They’re totally price gouging IMO.

They are pretty hostile to international players setting shops. In such a non-competitive environment, it's no wonder rent seeking is the norm. Edit: I see the downvotes but no explanations.

The explanation is largely the same as in the US: It's very expensive to run cable / fibre to the house. It's a natural monopoly.

Having a US incumbent enter the Canadian market isn't going to change that.

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

#104

Post by minikites »

WalterBright wrote: post #84
muststopmyths wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only baffling if you didn't bother to read the party platforms. The Democratic party platform explicitly talks about removing barriers to municipal broadband as a goal, which is the only way you are going to get competition where ISPs have a monopoly. At least in the current landscape where it's cost-prohibitive for a competitor to enter a region. Also (emphasis mine), > Democrats will restore the Federal Commun…

> 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.

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

#105

Post by rayiner »

thotsBgone wrote: post #88
rayiner wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example: the government paid ISPs $400 billion dollars (!) to create a nationwide fiber network False: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556

It wasn't in taxes or tax breaks, but the ISPs were given exemption to regulation on prices in exchange for deploying a fiber network they never deployed. This basically happened twice, which is why I talk about 400 billion when the link you gave only talks about the first 200. https://www.natoa.org/events/BrokenPromisesGarcia.pdf BTW the logic in your link doesn't make sense. The $200 billion number is "based on tak…

Is there a way to have a discussion where we use words according to their ordinary meaning? You said "the government paid ISPs $400 billion dollars." As you acknowledge, money didn't change hands. So nothing was "paid" right?

The government deregulated prices in 1996 for the same reason we deregulated airline fares, truck tariffs, etc. The government wanted to get out of the business of price control. And it didn't just happen in the U.S., it happened all over the world.

Fiber was presented as a benefit that would result from increased capital investment following deregulation. And that happened to an extent--wireline capital expenditure almost doubled from 1996-2001. But after 2000, capital started moving to the fast-growing industry of cellular wireless, where the returns were better. So yeah, we didn't get as much investment in fiber as we expected. But we got huge investments in cellular. That's how free markets work--the government can't predict or direct where capital goes.

The 1996 telecom deregulation wasn't a bargain, where ISPs were allowed to raise prices in exchange for a "promise" to build fiber. It was a deregulation of the industry. It's fair to complain that maybe the benefits of deregulation were oversold. (I can also claim that projections about premiums reductions under Obamacare have been oversold!) I think the 1996 deregulation should have been paired with a preemption of state-and-local broadband construction regulation. (American municipalities regulate in a way that makes it expensive to build infrastructure, whether you're talking about broadband or subway tunnels.) In particular, the nearly universal requirement to agree to service an entire city in exchange for permission to service any part of a city vastly limits the competition that could have been enabled by deregulation.

Its fair to have a debate about the ultimate outcomes of the 1996 deregulation. But its deceitful to act like it was a planned government fiber-construction project where ISPs just "pocketed the money" and didn't build the infrastructure.

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

#106

Post by InitialLastName »

nostromo wrote: post #64
rayiner wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Democratic party platform explicitly talks about removing barriers to municipal broadband as a goal, which is the only way you are going to get competition where ISPs have a monopoly. At least in the current landscape where it's cost-prohibitive for a competitor to enter a region. It's only "cost-prohibitive for a competitor to enter a region" because of build-out requirements which are broadly supported by Dem…

We see this so often now I'm starting to think it's an intentional strategy. Step 1: create conditions that prevent capitalism from solving a problem. Step 2: declare that capitalism has failed and call for government solutions.

This is a strategy we see from both sides. From the other perspective:

Step 1: Create conditions that prevent the government from solving a problem. Step 2: Declare that the public sector has failed and call for privatization.

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

#107

Post by bob1029 »

x87678r wrote: post #74

I'm not convinced Comcast is ripping off everyone as much as everyone says. USA is a big country and its expensive to wire everyone up. Lots of companies around have tried including Google who basically decided its easier to do make money from ads and self driving cars rather than wiring up neighborhoods and dealing with local regulations. The ISPs and cell networks actually do the hard and expensive work of installi…

I know its a rhetorical question but I very much prefer having shares of CMCSA/VZ/T over the alternatives.

I've always viewed Google, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. as very "soft" companies in terms of their competitive advantage. AT&T literally owns parts of the electromagnetic spectrum for their exclusive use. This is a completely different dimension of advantage.

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

#108

Post by TuringNYC »

ineedasername wrote: post #7
908B64B197 wrote: post #4

I'm always surprised this isn't discussed more. Big tech is accused of being monopolistic, but there is a constant flow of new players in the field, all gaining market shares and building the Next Big Thing, while telecom providers are pretty stagnant. I'm curious why cities don't directly lay down the infrastructure work for broadband access. In some cases that might raise property value enough that the town could m…

There may be a constant flow of new players, but much of the time when they start to show a certain amount of success then one of the big players simply buys them up.

You phrase it as if these are hostile takeovers. Having been a founder, I can state that most of my peers wanted acquisitions. It was a way to finance the vision and growth.

Would YouTube, Instagram, or dozens of other companies have been able to get where they are w/o the support of their acquirers? Just think of the burn alone and the required investment is a scary figure.

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

#109

Post by treis »

gnopgnip wrote: post #82
treis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Census blocks aren't equivalent to households. Most of those census blocks are going to be rural with few people living there.

That is true, and you can look at the data in different ways. But still most households don't have at least two different high speed internet providers.

That's just not true. Depending on what you count as broadband 60-90% of households have two or more fixed options:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...

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

#110

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

WalterBright wrote: post #84
muststopmyths wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only baffling if you didn't bother to read the party platforms. The Democratic party platform explicitly talks about removing barriers to municipal broadband as a goal, which is the only way you are going to get competition where ISPs have a monopoly. At least in the current landscape where it's cost-prohibitive for a competitor to enter a region. Also (emphasis mine), > Democrats will restore the Federal Commun…

> 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.

A bunch of state governments have either outright banned municipal ISPs or have introduced regulatory barriers to "protect" incumbents from "unfair" competition.
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