321–330 of 354 posts
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> For example: the government paid ISPs $400 billion dollars (!) to create a nationwide fiber network False: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556
Weren't you an attorney for a telco lobbying organization? Seems like that's a relevant disclosure, no?
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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…
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There's a republican version, too: Step 1: kneecap a social progrm Step 2: argue that because the social program isn't working, it should be canceled outright.
The difference is that Democrats keep succeeding in enacting strangling regulation, and Republicans keep failing to "kneecap" social programs. What major social program has seen funding cut since the 1970s? The percentage of the economy that goes to means-tested welfare has almost doubled from 1970 to today: https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/inline-images/B... . The only blip was right after the 2008 reces…
Goverment funding has been chopped for state schools, housing projects, the list goes on. The right kills social programs on a practically daily basis. Not to mention shifting the tax burden away from the upper class and towards the middle class. If your taxes have been going up over the last 30 years, it's because you aren't upper class.
And yeah, social spending has increased ever since we shipped all the jobs to China. Democrats rationalized it by promising to use the new revenue on social programs; Republicans put a stop to that straight away. The American middle class got double-teamed. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses!
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There used to be something similar around telephone lines in the US, where bell had to let competitors use the lines at cost or something similar, but that way tends to lie madness because of fights over what the actual cost of maintenance of the infra is and how much of that cost should be borne by the actual owner and how much they can charge middlemen carriers (for lack of better term). It's extra sad because it d…
I don't think it necessarily has to be madness, but you do need a competent and appropriately-separate regulating body overseeing the system and setting prices/rules that are fair to all the participants. In Canada, that body is the CRTC. I think they largely do a good job, though some of it ends up in the courts, and TekSavvy happily engages customers by bumping monthly rates up or down in response to the rule chang…
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I extremely do not want the situation where the state owns and operates the communications infrastructure of the general population. That's turnkey tyranny, censorship both ways (what you can send, what you can read). Right now it's just expensive, but you can still use a few different (overpriced and anti-competitive) providers. If the state decides you're a threat and unplugs you, it could be months or years before…
The State owns USPS and it's not so bad. Before phones were introduced, it was the main channel of communication.
You can, of course, leave off the return address, and this works fine for letter mail.
Packages, however, require ID to be dropped off. You cannot use the USPS to send packages anonymously.
The analogous version for a state-run ISP would be a blanket filter/ban on Tor/VPN usage.
I don’t think the USPS is a good example of a state-run organization for that reason. The state has already demonstrated their desire to eradicate personal privacy and anonymity.
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> I'm curious why cities don't directly lay down the infrastructure work for broadband access. Wondering the same thing here (Switzerland), but I might not understand the context: decoupling the "cable" from the "provider" is not common in the US, or there are some other complexities that I don't understand? In my case the company "Swisscom" opened half of the sidewalk, connected my apartment building to their FTTH i…
> I might not understand the context: decoupling the "cable" from the "provider" is not common in the US, or there are some other complexities that I don't understand? So the US context in a nutshell; in most places, the provider of the cable is the provider of the service. In a bit more detail. Up until 1982, almost all telephone service was provided by AT&T (also known as the Bell System or just "The Phone Company"…
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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…
If anything it says, natural monopolies exists, but some of the regulation designed to fight it, can be more harmful.
Austrians also try to not narrow down market so much, that monopolies are everywhere. Is Tom Hanks a monopoly on Tom Hanks, sure but does that matter. Is the market acting? Entertainment?
Just saying 'its a natural monopoly, therefore government need to come in with some strong handed specific regulation' is often a bad approach that can stop other mechanism from functioning. For example, locking in natural monopolies forever, even when future technologies means that monopoly would have been broken.
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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 po…
The problem is that you are not actual arguing against austrian economics but a political movement that has hijacked the ideas and presents itself as 'the solution' that proves their political view. This is mostly driven by some conservative finance and the 'The Mises institute', that should actually be called 'The Rothbart Institute'. As they don't really represent Austrian economics as a whole, but rather a narrow minded interpretation of Mises.
If you look at the Austrians generally and those still in academia, they do not actually work that way, and they don't reject empiricism as a whole. The reject pure empiricism and pure positivism, in favor of a individual and institutional approach that is validated by data. In practice and historically Austrian economics was much closer to what we today would consider institutional economics, Law&Economics and Political Economics.
I have years ago stopped fighting since the term has been so discredited by the mob of morons on the internet. Some economists that solidly work within Austrian tradition have stopped using that term because of those bad associations.
But I'm just telling you, your argument really is just like arguing against some Burnie fam who proclaims Keynsian economics implies socialism.
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The problem is that a monopoly may naturally be disrupted in decades, while people want an improvement during their precious only lifetimes. A temporary regulation could possibly help, but making it temporary is the hard part. And if it lingers, the inefficiencies it creates let some companies become incumbents, and, with some luck, even monopolies.
I'm more inclined to think that under a completely unregulated free market a monopoly today would instead be more likely to turn into a de-facto nation state over the course of decades. But this is purely speculation (not entirely unprompted by reading speculative fiction). Is there any evidence that unregulated free markets actually tend towards competition, rather than consolidation?
You assume markets are inherently centralizing. Where is this assumption coming from, its actually Marxist economics. If you critic Austrian for being empirical, we should first admit that this base assumption is purely based on a school of thought that is much more un-empirical then any Austrian or other market oriented schools ever where.
This prediction was made 200+ years ago, and we have seen a trend towards ever greater number of companies. The amount of interventions by government, with things like anti-trust act were incredibly few and far between.
If there was any validity to the concept, of inherent centralization, we would have seen government having to near constantly fight monopoly.
Both in illegal and legal market we constantly see disruption of big players. The stability of the farmer own farms, rather then the inherent centralization corporate farming. The distributed production of meth, replacing the centralized supply of other drugs. The restaurant industry has existed with few regulation and no anti-trust cases for 100s of years.
I would argue the argument that all markets are inherently centralizing has been totally dis-proven by evidence. Even in the cases where Anti-Trust cases were launched, usually by the time they came anywhere near breaking up a company, the original problem had basically passed. I'm only 30 and in my lifetime I have already seen like 4 tech companies who were gone dominate the world and if Anti-Trust wasn't invoked society was doomed according to people on Hacker News.
There are natural monopoly, and markets where one player can dominate. These are more complex cases, but they are also limited in scope and unlikely to grow out of that market. In fact in general those companies usually become rather happy with just profiting from their monopoly and quickly lose the drive to go into the competitive markets.
In those cases regulation in the short term can help, but being aware of locking in the system are very real, making any kind of disruption in those markets incredibly difficult.
At the time, a broader evaluation of the concept of monopoly must realize that threw-out history, the majority of monopolies were state created. In fact, one of the kinds prime way of making mponey, was selling monopoly rights and using royal power to suppress competition. Some economists have even modeled the Soviet economy along those lines as well. This is largely still the case, the places where monopoly are most persistent, are places where it is created and sustained by regulation.
More common then strict monopoly is some small to mid sized group, getting regulation that protect them. My fav example are the like 15 families who produce cane suger in the US who have for 50 years profited from a sugar import tax. This is party the reason corn sugar is so much used in the US.
In the end, pragmatically the state should likely be aware of citizens being exploited in some natural monopoly situation, but also be aware that if it is actually a natural monopoly, even regulation can not systematically fix the problem either and can do harm in the long run.
This is such a weird thing. After spending time in SE Asia, where bandwidth is cheap and plentiful (in the cities), it's painful coming back to Europe (and Australia). I'm in Berlin atm, and the wifi is shit, bandwidth is expensive and unreliable. And the phone plans suck. I was in Perth (Australia) before that, and access there is terrible. In Cambodia, 120Gb (per week) of download cost me US$1 (per week) over good-…
> In Berlin, it's 40 euros a month for 5Gb, What network? I pay 12 euros for 5gb (aldi talk, running off o2, so i can still use my phone in the u-bahn) There's also lidl connect runnning off telekom if you like that network