Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#51

Post by maxharris » Wed, Jun 29, 2011, 5:48 PM UTC

Here's why: population density is much higher in Europe. The price per mile to put cables into the ground has a lower bound that cannot be breached. The same length of cable will connect far more customers in high-population areas than it will in rural Wyoming. It is not valid to compare Europe with the USA in this regard because they truly are apples and oranges geographically.

I assert that broadband would be faster and cheaper anywhere given true capitalism (that is, a system where people trade honestly, at a profit, with the only government involvement being the courts [no regulation to give corrupt businesses and activists the upper hand].)

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#52

Post by masklinn » Wed, Jun 29, 2011, 5:50 PM UTC

Perceval wrote: post #49

masklinn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After establishing it as a federal monopoly in 1934. (And in TFA, we're talking even worse entities.) In order to regulate it (putting it under jurisdiction of the FCC) as Bell was already a natural monopoly by this point, even after the Kingsbury Commitment.

At the top of this thread, ojbyrne says we need to have government regulation in order to create competition. Here you say that we needed regulation to make AT&T a de jure national monopoly so that we could further regulate AT&T. So, regulation grants monopolies, then regulates those monopolies, then also regulates more competition into the monopoly market it had previously granted? This is good governance?

Regulation did not create AT&T's monopoly. AT&T did that, the government later sanctioned it in order to try and better regulate the monopolistic company (it failed).

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#53

Post by Apocryphon » Wed, Jun 29, 2011, 5:54 PM UTC

theBobMcCormick wrote: post #50

hammock wrote: post #8

It blows my mind that anyone in a startup community, which is all about creating value and making good investments, would suggest that the government tax him (!) and invest in broadband infrastructure instead of that person investing in it himself.

It blows my mind that anyone in the startup community would automatically assume taxes = bad. Startups benefit immensely from tax funded services. As an example, you can complain all you want about specific laws and their enforcement,but nothing remotely resembling Silicon Valley could exist without the stable legal environment provided by the tax payer funded court system and law enforcement system. Not to mention t…

Also, having an environment where taxes are the norm gives people incentives to pursue new endeavors that lead to tax write-offs!

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#54

Post by arecibodrake » Wed, Jun 29, 2011, 5:54 PM UTC

The only reason we don't have most metropolitan areas with gigabit fiber to the door is almost entirely teleco/cable easements.

The day you stop government from mandating one company per area or delimiting it to a small few monopolistic entities and allow a free market is the day we stop dealing with the hell that is becoming us.

The answer is quite simply LESS government, dammit.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#55

Post by Apocryphon » Wed, Jun 29, 2011, 5:55 PM UTC

maxharris wrote: post #51

Here's why: population density is much higher in Europe. The price per mile to put cables into the ground has a lower bound that cannot be breached. The same length of cable will connect far more customers in high-population areas than it will in rural Wyoming. It is not valid to compare Europe with the USA in this regard because they truly are apples and oranges geographically. I assert that broadband would be faste…

The article actually mentions that point:

Meanwhile, the size of the U.S. may be a red herring. Most of the region between Boston and Washington is as densely populated as most of Europe and the UK. So is the California coast between San Francisco and San Diego. And so is the region of the Midwest centered on Chicago. Those areas are home to about a quarter of all Americans. In other words, we live in a big country, but a lot of it is relatively empty space.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#56

Post by tobylane » Wed, Jun 29, 2011, 5:55 PM UTC

1. Foreign call centers. My parents are now too scared to move because they (foolishly) assume everyone uses them. Talktalk and BT do, low quality lines to South Africa and India. 2. I practically live on the dividing line between two exchanges. The one I'm not on is really advanced, lots of choice, but not the one I am on.

There are various ideas floating around, which I've never heard of since, such as iPlayer and Steam caches at every exchange. I wish they'd stop caring so much about speed (I get 5.5mb/s in speedtests, over 1.2 (directly, the line isn't) miles of copper) and move onto ping and caches.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#57

Post by masklinn » Wed, Jun 29, 2011, 5:56 PM UTC

w1ntermute wrote: post #44

masklinn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the US, if I'm not mistaken, most of the phone companies were and are at least somewhat private entities that invested private money in putting in the lines Most of the phone companies were Ma Bell, which had a government-sanctioned natural monopoly from 1936 to its breakup in 1984.

> Most of the phone companies were Ma Bell, which had a government-sanctioned natural monopoly from 1936 to its breakup in 1984. If it was natural, why was a government sanction necessary?

In order to try and regulate it, the federal sanction put Bell under purview of the FCC, so the FCC could handle Bell directly instead of having to go through the Justice Department every time.

While it ultimately failed, there was a method to the madness.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#58

Post by russell » Wed, Jun 29, 2011, 5:59 PM UTC

logjam wrote: post #39

VMG wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... after creating monopolies in the first place

>... after creating monopolies in the first place If you are really trying to advance the theory that "the market", left to itself, won't generate monopoly after monopoly, perhaps you could point us to actual examples of those golden times when the absence of regulation served consumers more than they served business oligarchy.

Are you trying to say that unregulated monopolies like US Steel, Standard Oil, the railroads, AT&T, American Tobacco didnt have the best interests of the public in mind? After all Carnegie gave us lots of libraries and without Rockefeller we would not have had the Rockettes.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#59

Post by jerf » Wed, Jun 29, 2011, 5:59 PM UTC

jbooth wrote: post #45

jerf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sarbanes-Oxley seems to be a pretty solid example of a regulation whose costs exceed its benefits by quite a bit.

Want to put a dollar figure on the Enron/Worldcom implosions? How about if we threw a couple of those into the 2008 disaster, same time as Lehman collapsed? What's the cost there? People are really, really bad at pricing catastrophic events. Not to say that the bill couldn't be cleaned up, probably. But the conservative half of the aisle seems to be more interested in talkshow ideological invective than sucker's game…

First, you assume without proof that Sarbanes-Oxley will actually prevent the next Enron. Goals aren't results. I do not accept this as unarguably obvious. The rule of thumb is that it is easier to undetectably game complex systems than simple ones.

Second, you've not mentioned the fact that Sarbanes-Oxley has real costs, not just in terms of direct compliance but also the business that they've simply shut out in advance because the businesses knew they couldn't afford compliance.

Finally, the really relevant metric is not merely "How can we as a society purchase assurance against another Enron at any cost?", but "How can we as a society purchase assurance against Enron in the most cost-effective manner?" I am deeply skeptical that SOX is the correct answer to this question, or even within spitting distance.

You've also implicitly bought into the political duality and assumed that if I'm not for it I must be in the "conservative half", even after I just said I'm libertarian quite nearby. I don't particularly care about whether it's "liberal" or "conservative" solutions, I care about working in the most cost-effective manner. SOX is almost certainly not it.

People are bad about accounting for disasters, people are really really bad at accounting for regulations. The twin specters of mistaking goals for results and counting only benefits without the costs loom over pretty much every discussion.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#60

Post by maxharris » Wed, Jun 29, 2011, 5:59 PM UTC

logjam wrote: post #39

VMG wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... after creating monopolies in the first place

>... after creating monopolies in the first place If you are really trying to advance the theory that "the market", left to itself, won't generate monopoly after monopoly, perhaps you could point us to actual examples of those golden times when the absence of regulation served consumers more than they served business oligarchy.

Properly speaking, the concept "monopoly" properly pertains only to situations where the government enforces the monopoly. This is the original meaning of the word (before it was altered in the 19th and 20th centuries).

There is no proper political right for a "consumer" to have a choice between multiple brands of a product. If there were such a right, it would be violated the moment they walked into a remote store that didn't happen to carry every single product currently sold on the market. Remember, rights are contextually absolute. Their purpose is to subjugate society to moral law. And the purpose of moral law is to make individual flourishing possible.