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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

#241

Post by nostromo »

ceejayoz wrote: post #222
nostromo wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a monopoly when you're narrowly focused not on internet access, but on fiber specifically. My goodness you folks will bend over backwards to defend the world's largest corporations censoring journalists. It shows just how illiberal the Democratic Party has become. It's very lonely right now for those of us that believe in freedom of speech as an ideal worth standing up for.

> It's only a monopoly when you're narrowly focused not on internet access, but on fiber specifically. That's not actually what the highlighted quotes say.

Check out the FCC's data. Most people have multiple choices for an ISP, except for gigabit speeds.

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

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

#242

Post by austincheney »

When ever ISPs come up people are so quick to ignore the obvious to entertain some absurd entrenched political opinion.

The reality is that service is generally pretty good when the cost of advancing infrastructure is lowest and horrid where it is most expensive. That generally means that suburbs have it best due to high population densities and physically segmented real estate. Rural areas have it worst where the most material is required between the population and the service provider. An additional factor is that service providers are more willing to provide new infrastructure at their own expense when the path to profit is shortest, which also appears to preference the suburbs.

While a lack of competition might be a problem it is insignificant compared to the more obvious problem: a lack of incentive. In some areas service providers are eager to compete while in other areas they aren’t, which isn’t a monopoly problem.

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

#243

Post by sudosysgen »

dragonwriter wrote: post #208
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

Given the fact that the Austrian school literally rejects the scientific method, I think that it indeed barely qualifies as economics.

The Chicago argument on this matter is pretty generally rejected.

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

#244

Post by sudosysgen »

ip26 wrote: post #223
p1necone wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the Austrian school denies the existence of natural monopoly and argues that harmful monopoly can only exist as a product of government regulation" This sounds prima facie absurd to me. Are they just throwing phrases out of Ayn Rand novels on paper and calling it science?

I say this only half-sarcastically, the Austrian school seems to start at their desired solution & worked backwards from there. They similarly deny the existence of externalities- although depending on who you read the justification varies widely.

It's not even sarcastic. The Austrian school literally starts with assumptions that basically imply their solutions, that people always act in their best interest and so on, and reject any kind of empirical test of their theory. At all. The Austrian school assumes that these bases are absolutely and completely true, and then posit that all economic truths can be derived thereof and cannot be impacted negatively or positively by empirical evidence.

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

#245

Post by mushbino »

andromeduck wrote: post #240
mushbino wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competition is great for consumers. The government should be allowed to compete along with the private sector. The winners of this scenario are the citizens and the people who work for these companies. I've seen exactly this scenario play out in Santa Cruz. Comcast had a virtual monopoly. Even as recently as about 5 years ago one of the best internet packages was up to 20mbps (4mbps in reality) for $40/month. The cit…

I generally agree at a local/municipal scale but that generally doesn't scale well and is often relatively unstable if it is not operated as an mostly isolated entity given the strong conflict of interest of officials involved easily and often leads to regulating private industry out of existence.

Where do you see that being the case with broadband? There are many examples of private sector monopolies, but I've never heard of private sector broadband being regulated out of existence.

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

#246

Post by nimish »

kanox wrote: post #236
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…

I don't think this is a monopoly problem as much as a collusion problem: multiple providers exist but many regions each have a single provider. If this is a deliberate agreement then it's extremely illegal. Where I live there are multiple high-quality ISPs at my building, the US should find a way to encourage multiple ISPs to be present in every single neighborhood. People who complain about "too many ugly wires" sho…

Most good theories of monopoly power encompass the abuse of natural monopolies via collusion

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

#247

Post by nimish »

ip26 wrote: post #223
p1necone wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the Austrian school denies the existence of natural monopoly and argues that harmful monopoly can only exist as a product of government regulation" This sounds prima facie absurd to me. Are they just throwing phrases out of Ayn Rand novels on paper and calling it science?

I say this only half-sarcastically, the Austrian school seems to start at their desired solution & worked backwards from there. They similarly deny the existence of externalities- although depending on who you read the justification varies widely.

The Austrian school is pretty famous for rejecting empiricism and basically saying it's their way or nothing; it may come to valid conclusions but because they reject any evidentiary evaluation of their assumptions its unfalsifiable (and therefore not a scientific way of approaching the world)

If their conclusions didn't happen to support those in power and capital in particular, they'd be just another meaningless research group.

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

#248

Post by exabrial »

dredmorbius wrote: post #186
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…

> If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry :( I come from planet markdown

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

#249

Post by pottertheotter »

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 are a lot of municipalities doing exactly what you say and making the money back fast. But a lot of states have blocked doing this, and the incumbents fight like crazy to turn people against the idea. My favorite way of implementing it is open access. The city installs and owns the infrastructure and anyone can come be an ISP on it. You get great competition. It's basically the same as how it works with the community owning the roads and you pick who you want to service your house (FedEx, UPS, yourself, DoorDash, the local roofing guy, etc.)

The other thing that would be worthwhile is local loop unbundling, which is basically open access but with existing providers having to open their infrastructure.

I highly recommend muninetworks.org and their podcast if you want to learn more about municipal broadband.

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

#250

Post by rojoca »

andromeduck wrote: post #145
speeder wrote: post #18

Telecom is... too nasty to touch to be honest. Brazil tried it, we had a state company that had a monopoly of telecom, we broke it up intentionally in many tiny parts and sold them. Results were basically this: 1. A bunch ended eventually merging, often with help of blatant corruption (for example one such merger was first denied, then approved again after the son of the president "sold" to a telecom company, his gam…

I think telecom is like power, the only way it can be split is by creating horizontal markets, emphasis on plural, and preferably along some natural lines to the fictional overhead such as generation/distribution in the case of electrical markets. For communications I think the way to do it might be to create 3-4 levels of responsibilities and say that no single player can operate in more than a few levels at once an…

In NZ we have 2 levels, wholesale and retail providers. By law you cannot be both. The price paid by retail providers to wholesale providers is currently set by the commerce commission because the infrastructure being built and managed by the wholesale providers was heavily subsidised by the govt. The (4) wholesale providers are effectively regional monopolies but importantly cannot set their prices, and the retail providers compete on value-add services and price for which there is fairly healthy competition.
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