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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

#201

Post by zdragnar »

jandrese wrote: post #198
exabrial wrote: post #177

The problem is the proposed solutions really just entrench existing providers, specifically net neutrality policies: They legalize monopolies as long as they're "following the rules!" _You_ _cannot_ _legislate_ _good_ _behavior_ _into_ _monopolies_. So while I appreciate the spirit of Net Neutrality rules, the solution is fundamentally flawed. Let's say you want to open an ISP in your neighborhood. Based on their his…

My water company is pretty well behaved. Sewer too. Trash pickup is without headaches although I don't know the cost. Even my power company is ok now. They had a bad part in the early 2000s when they were trying to semi-privatize and Enron was trying to horn in on the management, but once they went back to being an ordinary utility the bad behavior stopped.

I have had horrendous experienced with Waste Management on three occasions. Moving out of the neighborhood they had a city-enforced monopoly on was the only solution (granted, i moved for other reasons, but getting someone else was a delight all its own).

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

#202

Post by vagrantJin »

908B64B197 wrote: post #34
ineedasername wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct except, Microsoft should have won search. They had all the tools to execute and were pretty much at the right place at the right time. Google should have won social networking and messaging. They had the userbase and the network. Yet it's Facebook that did. Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market.

> Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market.

Samsung and Huawei captured the market Apple created.

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

#203

Post by edgyquant »

exabrial wrote: post #189
bosswipe wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> _You_ _cannot_ _legislate_ _good_ _behavior_ _into_ _monopolies_ Why not? Yes, breaking up monopolies is good but that doesn't mean we can't regulate industries before the point where things get so bad that there is enough political will to break them up.

I mean, feel free to provide an example where we successfully regulated a monopoly to encourage competition and consumer choice...

The Microsoft case seemed to work out well

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

#206

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

exabrial wrote: post #189
bosswipe wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> _You_ _cannot_ _legislate_ _good_ _behavior_ _into_ _monopolies_ Why not? Yes, breaking up monopolies is good but that doesn't mean we can't regulate industries before the point where things get so bad that there is enough political will to break them up.

I mean, feel free to provide an example where we successfully regulated a monopoly to encourage competition and consumer choice...

Basically anything that historically falls under common carrier regs. None of this debate is new. We saw it with railroads.

Natural monopolies need counterbalancing regulation. This isn't even remotely a controversial statement in economics.

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

#207

Post by Armisael16 »

vagrantJin wrote: post #202
908B64B197 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct except, Microsoft should have won search. They had all the tools to execute and were pretty much at the right place at the right time. Google should have won social networking and messaging. They had the userbase and the network. Yet it's Facebook that did. Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market.

> Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market. Samsung and Huawei captured the market Apple created.

Samsung and Huawei each ship about 50% more phones than Apple. Apple makes more than 3x the profit on phones that either does.

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

#208

Post by dragonwriter »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #206
exabrial wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, feel free to provide an example where we successfully regulated a monopoly to encourage competition and consumer choice...

Basically anything that historically falls under common carrier regs. None of this debate is new. We saw it with railroads. Natural monopolies need counterbalancing regulation. This isn't even remotely a controversial statement in economics.

> Natural monopolies need counterbalancing regulation. This isn't even remotely a controversial statement in economics.

Unless your argument is that the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics doesn't actually exist, this is quite wrong, since the Austrian school denies the existence of natural monopoly and argues that harmful monopoly can only exist as a product of government regulation, and the Chicago school likewise holds that absent regulation, monopoly is a transient condition, not a stable one; both favor removing regulations that they see as stabilizing harmful monopolies, rather than regulating to manage naturally-formed-and-self-stabilizing monopolies, which they don't acknowledge the existence of.

Now, I think the Chicago/Austrian positions on monopolies are wrong, but you really can't reasonably deny that this is a fundamental area of controversy.

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

#209

Post by magicalist »

Karunamon wrote: post #144
kinjba11 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is expensive to wire rural areas up. That is why the [government is paying for it]( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/att-g... ). Why isn't this a utility again? Comcast and Charter essentially have a [duopoly]( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comca... ) over much of the United States. Where is the competition? The actual competition is in lobbying local governments to m…

> Where is the competition? 60 to 90 percent of households have access to two or more options for fixed (wired) broadband[1] depending on how you classify broadband, and that's not even counting the wireless options. That, to me, seems as about as competitive as you're reasonably ever going to get across a medium that is a natural monopoly without putting the government in the same line of business, which quite frank…

> 60 to 90 percent of households have access to two or more options for fixed (wired) broadband[1] depending on how you classify broadband, and that's not even counting the wireless options.

That chart says 52 to 80% if you're looking at wired internet, the upper end relies on classifying "3Mbps+" as broadband, and the "or more" part of "two or more" is doing a whole lot of work when it turns out 80% of those have two options. That means 48% of US households had a single or no choice if they wanted download speeds over 25Mbps.

...and we don't actually know what the real numbers are because the FCC doesn't require household level reporting, it's census block level reporting, and it's not even if a single household in that census block has service, it's if a single household in that census block could have service "without an extraordinary commitment of resources" by the ISP.

See [1]. Spoiler: the updated maps still aren't in.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/the-fccs-horribl...

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

#210

Post by arminiusreturns »

rayiner wrote: post #105
thotsBgone wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

From Bruce Kushnick, himself:

"I've been tracking the telco deployments of fiber optics since 1991 when they were announced as something called the Information Superhighway. The plan was to have America be the first fiber optic country -- and each phone company went to their state commissions and legislatures and got tax breaks and rate increases to fund these 'utility' network upgrades that were supposed to replace the existing copper wires with fiber optics -- starting in 1992. And it was all a con. As a former senior telecom analyst (and the telcos my clients) i realized that they had submitted fraudulent cost models, and fabricated the deployment plans. The first book, 1998, laid out some of the history "The Unauthorized Bio" with foreword by Dr. Bob Metcalfe (co-inventor of Ethernet networking). I then released "$200 Billion Broadband Scandal" in 2005, which gave the details as by then more than 1/2 of America should have been completed -- but wasn't. And the mergers to make the companies larger were also supposed to bring broadband-- but didn't. I updated the book in 2015 "The Book of Broken Promises $400 Billion broadband Scandal and Free the Net", but realized that there were other scams along side this -- like manipulating the accounting."

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