And this won't change for at least the next 4 years. Regulatory capture is a bitch.
These are state laws, the Presidential election has nothing to do with this.
Yes, the 50 state solution is inefficient. Your point?
Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks
101–110 of 170 posts
Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks
#102A hundred years ago on irc someone from Russia was describing their internet connection, which was ethernet, while I had only ever heard of dial up outside of large companies. It was just people had set up their own hubs and switches in their appartment buildings and strung cables between buildings. This blew my mind. They just ran themselves ethernet and everyone got a drop from a switch in their building. It wasn't…
That's how I learned the limits of hub cascades ;) Add collision domains on top and you are in not-funny-land.
Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks
#103A hundred years ago on irc someone from Russia was describing their internet connection, which was ethernet, while I had only ever heard of dial up outside of large companies. It was just people had set up their own hubs and switches in their appartment buildings and strung cables between buildings. This blew my mind. They just ran themselves ethernet and everyone got a drop from a switch in their building. It wasn't…
You're describing the sort of daydreams I had about running a cable between my home and my friend's home when I was 14 years old. We were too far apart. But playing Descent matches would have been awesome. We got by on dialup, but a kid can dream. I also dreamt of ISDN. Looking back, it seems such a paltry offering, but that tells you what an old man I've become.
My neighbour and I did this when we were about that age, and it was just as good as you imagined it to be! I think we managed to talk our parents into it because it would mean we were no longer tying up the phone line and racking up bills to play Doom.
Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks
#104Community-owned _ broadband networks _ I'm not sure about. Community-owned _ physical infrastructure _ (especially last-mile — fiber & copper going to everybody's house) … that needs to be the default. And if it's not community-owned, it needs to be regulated with open access requirements. Yes you can theoretically build a second fiber network and hook up people's houses. Yes it has happened in actual practice. But i…
Communities own the roads, trucking companies are commercial.
It's almost like someone read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations!
Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Running an LEO satellite constellation is very expensive. But installing and maintaining a wire to everyone's house is also very expensive. IMHO, it's a question of capacity and acceptable service levels. Starlink monthly pricing is higher than my DSL and nearby cable as well as my local muni fiber. But it's not so much higher as to rule it out. And the install fee is a lot lower than muni fiber. It's going to take a…
Security in LEO will eclipse the cost of everything else. Right now it’s free. When it becomes critical infrastructure, it has to be protected.
Security in outside plant isn't free either. We're a long way away from widespread outages because someone thought they could get high with the proceeds of a stolen satellite, but there are lots of disruptions when people take down pole mounted fiber because they thought it would be worth something.
Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks
#106Community-owned _ broadband networks _ I'm not sure about. Community-owned _ physical infrastructure _ (especially last-mile — fiber & copper going to everybody's house) … that needs to be the default. And if it's not community-owned, it needs to be regulated with open access requirements. Yes you can theoretically build a second fiber network and hook up people's houses. Yes it has happened in actual practice. But i…
What you're talking about is called local loop unbundling - the government owns the last-mile infrastructure, then leases access on FRAND terms to ISPs. It's a perfect alignment of incentives and a huge win for customers, so naturally ISPs fiercely oppose it and look to immediately crush any move in that direction whenever they can.
Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
UK building codes (we call them building regulations) should also have prevented Grenfell. A large issue was that the companies involved were using materials which weren't up to code.
Specifically, they stuck to the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law. (made an 'equivalent' fireproof product, which legally didn't need retesting, but in fact performed far worse) Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world) The pattern is that complex regulations always have loopholes, when far better would be to wipe out all the regulations and simply pu…
> The pattern is that complex regulations always have loopholes
I think the pattern is that regulations that prevent people who have money from making more money will always have loopholes lobbied into them, and thereby become complex. But the complexity is an effect, not a cause or really the problem. The problem is that they are going to make sure that a particular unsafe product or unsafe use of a product, that is known to be unsafe in other jurisdictions and banned, will not be stopped if subverting the legislation costs less than doing the unsafe thing will benefit.
I think specifically for Grenfell that the fact that the material was banned for that usage elsewhere created the pressure to lobby to maintain that unsafe usage in Britain. If they hadn't been able to sell it as cladding, they probably would have had to shut down production of it altogether.
And iirc it still would probably have been safe enough if it hadn't had a horrible corner cut installation that resulted in leaving flammable trash behind the cladding, and gaps.
This was not a design failure for difficult to devise regulation, this was a government failure, fueled by multiple layers of corruption. Putting it on the wording of the regulations, and implying that the problem is that regulations are inherently hard to write is just an apology for the guilty.
If anything, the difficulty of writing a lot of legislation is the difficulty of making it ineffective for the thing that it is purporting to regulate, but can't, because you've been bribed in some way. It's like the difficulty of writing RFPs that will only apply to a particular company that you've already agreed to award a contract to. It leads to complexity.
There's a reason why political jobs where you get to award contracts or write legislation cost more to get than they pay.
> Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world)
But this wasn't just a testing failure, this was people intentionally cheating on the test.
> wipe out all the regulations and simply put in prison people who don't take sufficient care of the environment or other peoples lives. Let courts decide what is insufficient care on a case by case basis.
The result of this would be extremely wealthy judges, prosecutors and judges and prosecutors families, you going to prison when you do something that was totally allowed, and rich men never even being indicted.
Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything with a blockchain turns into a pump and dump grift. The only exception is things that started out as a pump and dump grift.
Everything is quite a claim. Can you prove that? Is that a reasonable thing to ask, or are we supposed to simply nod along and say “yes, your dogma is correct in 100% of cases”? For example tell us how these are a grift: FileCoin. UniSwap. Aave. DID and Sidetree protocol (used by bluesky sky). And decentralized systems go way past blockchains. Email. Heck even the Web itself. If anything I’d say they tend to centrali…
I dunno, blockchains have been around for over a decade or more, and the stuff you listed might be cool. I don't know, because blockchain itself is such a toxic brand that I automatically disregard anyone and anything related to it.
It's like there's a swimming pool full of sewage, and sure there might be a new PS5 Pro floating in there, but I'm sure as hell not wading in to find out.
Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks
#109A hundred years ago on irc someone from Russia was describing their internet connection, which was ethernet, while I had only ever heard of dial up outside of large companies. It was just people had set up their own hubs and switches in their appartment buildings and strung cables between buildings. This blew my mind. They just ran themselves ethernet and everyone got a drop from a switch in their building. It wasn't…
Lots of co-workers in Serbia do this today. Someone gets a fast fiber connection and they run an Ethernet cable to their friend in the building across the way. They both split the costs.
Re: Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks
#110I am on a small fiber ISP in one of these states. I don't think it is community owned, but the distinction doesn't seem that important from a customer experience standpoint. The scale and locality of the business is what makes it great. They can care a lot about the network quality because there isn't so much of it that they need to outsource everything. All elements of their infrastructure are not only on battery ba…
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