US cable giants calls on FCC to block cities' expansion of high-speed internet

> “The success of public broadband is a mixed record, with numerous examples of failures,” USTelecom said in a blog post. “With state taxpayers on the financial hook when a municipal broadband network goes under, it is entirely reasonable for state legislatures to be cautious in limiting or even prohibiting that activity.”

That's the cable companies for you - always looking out for the consumer. It's almost as if they see themselves as a public utility.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8065207 ?

    everyone except the lucky few who can get
    rent controlled apartments

No, that's not the problem. As you say, rent control can't be both pervasive and rare at the same time. The real problems with rent control are:

* It's hard to move. Say you change jobs and now work in a different part of the city, or your kids move out, or you'd like to move in with a partner. Normally one of the benefits of renting is that you can move, but with rent control that means switching to a place that's much more expensive.

* Landlords benefit from having their long-time tenants leave. Without rent control landlords love long term tenants because they're reliable and they mean less work finding people for the apartment. Rent control reverses this, and the landlord loses the incentive to upgrade the apartment and otherwise keep the tenant happy. Yes, the landlord is being a jerk when they do it, but sometimes the best fix for widespread jerk-ness is changing the incentives.

* It keeps out outsiders. People who want to live in your city enough that they're willing to give up their existing local connections and start over in your city are really valuable, and rent control means they pay a lot more than people who've lived in the city longer.

* It depresses new construction. Yes, I know new buildings aren't subject to rent control, but in a place where everything is already built out you can't put up a new building without taking down an old one. Rent control means you either have legal restrictions saying you can't replace buildings, or you have protests against people doing this and displacing existing tenants. But in a growing city, without new construction housing is going to get more and more expensive.

* Rent control puts off dealing with the problem of housing costs. If everyone in SF rented, and everyone had to pay market rates, then there would be the political backing for changes that would make housing more affordable. Rent control means that the long-time community members who would be best at this political change don't really feel much urgency because they have nice cheap places with rents set a decade or two ago. (But to be fair, homeownership is also a problem here, because rents and property values move together and homeowners want their property to become more valuable.)

    RE investors here, where a rent controlled 2br apartment
    will set you back at least $3k a month in the city, are
    doing quite alright. They don't seem too desperately in
    need of expanded protections under the law.

Rent control hurts renters. I don't care about real estate investors. That $3k isn't why we need rent control, it's because we have rent control.

You conveniently left out the words "high speed." Everything you talk about can be done just fine even on the mediocre broadband speeds that people in this thread are complaining about.

Without contesting the rest of your argument, I'd argue that these rates are not unreasonable or artificially low.

I pay $42 for 100 Mbit (symmetric, fiber), from a large Swedish ISP (without any government/taxpayer funding).

I think the issue in the US is that there is too much monopoly (and oligopoly), with ISPs lobbying [i.e. corruption] instead of competition.