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The internet should be a public utility

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Re: The internet should be a public utility

#91

Post by pdonis »

kekeblom wrote: post #64
zbrozek wrote: post #4

I talked with the mayor of Los Altos Hills, CA yesterday where I advocated for a municipal fiber ISP. It seems crazy to me that in Silicon Valley, and specifically in one of its richest towns, that broadband is not available to every residence. She makes a good point: the residents don't care. Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population. And further - that for those who find that inade…

The city of Zurich has what to my understanding is public fiber which is available to most buildings. (I assume there are some exceptions). It is managed by the electricity company run by the city. https://zuerinet.ch Setting up routers, billing etc. has been delegated to any third party ISP willing to do the job. I think they can charge what they want, as there are some very small differences in price. I pay ~44CHF/…

This is the sort of model that many US municipalities have tried to implement. Unfortunately, many of them have been blocked from doing so by ISP lawsuits.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#92

Post by zbrozek »

miguelmota wrote: post #62
raverbashing wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please show me where private run electric or gas utilities have unlimited usage for a flat fee.

There’s none for obvious reasons. Give me an example of a government making the internet a public utility and making it better and less censored than a privately run company.

https://muninetworks.org/content/owensboro-kentucky-headed-s...

https://tech.co/news/chattanooga-fastest-internet-usa-2018-0...

Those places are offering connections way better than I can get from AT&T.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#93

Post by pdonis »

cactus2093 wrote: post #14
legitster wrote: post #9

Walk me through this argument - my local utilities are a nightmare! Their pricing is atrocious and regressive (huge flat fixed fees to connect, tiny marginal costs), they constantly have to borrow money from the city to make ends meet. Combined, we pay $350 a month for gas, water & drainage, electricity (over 50% of the bills are fixed costs, unaffected by our consumption). Customer service is awful. In comparison, o…

I don’t even understand what the distinction is. For instance PG&E in California is a private company but regulated by the government. I pay for service and if I stop paying they cut me off. Isn’t Comcast internet service the same thing? A private company but regulated by the FCC. The only difference I can think of is there are still multiple providers for internet service available in most places. Would making inter…

> Would making internet a public utility just mean giving a government granted monopoly to one provider per region and forbidding anyone else from selling internet service?

If that's what "public utility" means then Internet is already a public utility in many parts of the US, since this is exactly the arrangement in existence today.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#94

Post by pdonis »

amelius wrote: post #58

For much of the same reasons, the postal service and Amazon should be public utilities too.

The postal service in the US is a public utility: the US Post Office is required by law to deliver to any US address. The fact that there are private companies delivering something called "mail" does not change that: none of them are permitted to deliver first class mail, that is a USPS monopoly, and none of them are required to deliver to all US addresses, but the USPS is.

I don't know why you would want Amazon to be a public utility.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#95

Post by cbhl »

zbrozek wrote: post #4

I talked with the mayor of Los Altos Hills, CA yesterday where I advocated for a municipal fiber ISP. It seems crazy to me that in Silicon Valley, and specifically in one of its richest towns, that broadband is not available to every residence. She makes a good point: the residents don't care. Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population. And further - that for those who find that inade…

I daresay, it's even worse than that. Your neighbors are actively fighting against the installation of infrastructure that would enable faster internet speeds.

AT&T tried to bring FTTN to San Francisco years ago, but neighbors decried the "ugly" green boxes that would run down the street. Boxes that are standard in literally any suburb with fast internet.

There are limited parts of the bay area with gigabit fiber, including some large apartment buildings. The rent is higher in those places, of course.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#96

Post by jt2190 »

bgorman wrote: post #69

The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down. We had nationalized telecommunications for over 70 years and customers could only have one brand of phone, and we're limited in the number of phones available in their houses. In addition, long distance calling was cost-prohibitive. The monopoly only started cracking when MCI introduced mi…

> ... government nationalizing telecommunications networks...

Is that extreme the only other option we can imagine? In Texas, for example, the power transmission lines are managed by the Electric Reliability Council [1], and treated as kind of a "electricity market".

[1] http://www.ercot.com/

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#97

Post by jcrawfordor »

_carl_jung wrote: post #66

Here's a question I have about these types of frustrating monopolies, and I'd love a point towards a book or something that can explain. Let's say I have a bunch of money (or funding) for a big new internet provider that could easily outperform the existing provider. What makes it so hard to do it? I hear complaints (and complain myself) about seemingly unfair pricing and slow speeds. The tech is there to make > 100m…

1) laying fiber (either trenched or on utility poles) will likely be your biggest expense, it requires a huge, huge investment to be able to put infrastructure through a significant area. Think about feet of conduit a several-person crew can drive per day whether by trenching/trenchless methods - it's not that many. Microtrenching promised to significantly reduce this cost but Google Fiber's experiment with it went famously poorly.

2) ROWs to run cable will need to be negotiated either with the municipality (if laying underground) which can come with a lot of difficult restrictions on work quality, traffic disruption, etc, or with the electrical utility in the case of utility poles in an area with a typical franchise agreement, in which case the utilities are often uninterested in the project and will just generally make your life difficult through slow consideration of engineering proposals, requiring extensive up-front engineering work, etc. In a small town I had some involvement in the electric utility demanded over $1mm up front for engineering surveys on pole attachment - this for a market of ~8k people, and before any actual attachment fees. Completely blew the budget of the potential broadband provider which had planned a total of $3-4mm in up-front.

3) After running infrastructure, providing drops to each house is a fairly costly and disruptive up-front operation per customer (may even be trenching their front yard), which discourages customers signing up with your service when the incumbent providers already have house drops in place. You will also either have to eat this cost or pass it to the customer as an install fee or a term agreement, all of those options are bad in different ways.

4) IPv4 exhaustion has hit new ISPs hard and you are going to have to do CG-NAT. ISPs like to think customers don't care but in practice this is indeed a headache.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#98

Post by greedo »

tarde wrote: post #7
zbrozek wrote: post #4

I talked with the mayor of Los Altos Hills, CA yesterday where I advocated for a municipal fiber ISP. It seems crazy to me that in Silicon Valley, and specifically in one of its richest towns, that broadband is not available to every residence. She makes a good point: the residents don't care. Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population. And further - that for those who find that inade…

> Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough that is insane. How having no internet is fine because 20mbps is enough? That could be a good argument against fiber (which i also think is overkill, decent cooper is lower maintenance and with enough repeaters as good as) but it is hardly an argument against it being available to all as a public utility. > And, by the way, the FCC thinks I have a dozen options for b…

I'm not sure why you think "decent cooper" is as good as fiber. Unless you can deliver me 1Gbps symmetrically like my current fiber, you're inadequate. I currently have two kids doing remote learning, a wife who's starting to VPN at times, and I myself work remotely at least 9 hours a day for the last 20 days.

My podunk town has FTH through a municipal partnership. It works great. If my town can do it, I expect every other town above a population of 300K to do it as well. It's not rocket science.

The problem is with people saying crap like "good enough." The Network Director at my company said that a wireless (GSM) connection of 1Mbps was "good enough." I laughed and said that explains why our LAN and WAN speeds are so bad. WiFi in a conference room with an access point directly overhead fails half the time.

Good enough...

Times are changing. 20 years ago I worked at a distance learning company creating H.S. courseware. Cutting edge stuff that was lost in a market that didn't care. Too many competing interests. But I bet all those education administrators wish they had invested in more than Chromebooks that don't have courseware.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#99

Post by dahart »

_carl_jung wrote: post #68
topkai22 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is how utilities evolved in many places- local monopolies arose, so local governments either built their own system, took over service delivery or created laws on top of the service delivery.

I don't understand this part. As far as I can tell, utility monopolies can only form with government assistance (i.e. lobbying).

What is making you think that monopolies can only occur with government action? The first utility to service a region is a de-facto monopoly. I also gave two examples already of ways monopolies have occurred without government intervention: anti-competitive behavior and barriers to entry. Monopolies without government intervention are common enough that there’s a term for it: Natural Monopoly https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/natural_monopoly.asp

That article gives more examples of ways monopolies occur without government intervention, such as mergers and takeovers, and collusion and price fixing. All of these things have happened multiple times in the past, so history provides all the proof we need that lobbying or other government assistance is not required for monopolies to form.

Re: The internet should be a public utility

#100

Post by jcrawfordor »

cactus2093 wrote: post #14
legitster wrote: post #9

Walk me through this argument - my local utilities are a nightmare! Their pricing is atrocious and regressive (huge flat fixed fees to connect, tiny marginal costs), they constantly have to borrow money from the city to make ends meet. Combined, we pay $350 a month for gas, water & drainage, electricity (over 50% of the bills are fixed costs, unaffected by our consumption). Customer service is awful. In comparison, o…

I don’t even understand what the distinction is. For instance PG&E in California is a private company but regulated by the government. I pay for service and if I stop paying they cut me off. Isn’t Comcast internet service the same thing? A private company but regulated by the FCC. The only difference I can think of is there are still multiple providers for internet service available in most places. Would making inter…

The details vary substantially by type of utility and jurisdiction, but generally a public utility is subject to far stricter regulation than internet service providers which are regarded as a competitive industry.

A key example would be requirements for tariff approvals: public utilities are generally not permitted to make their own pricing decisions, instead they need to publish a tariff and they are not permitted to modify the tariff without petitioning the regulator for permission. The regulatory authority generally has broad authority to order utilities to do whatever it believes should be done, and has to approve almost all changes to the service, which the utility must justify as beneficial to customers.

Take a look at your electric bill, for example. Generally there's an interconnection fee and base rate, both of which come directly from the published tariff approved by the regulator. Due to real changes in the energy market there will also be a "fuel cost surcharge," this fee is calculated based on generation costs according to a formula included in the published tariff. If you have any dispute about the pricing or quality of the service you can take that complaint to the regulator, many regulators require that the utilities provide you that phone number as part of your bill.

Then look at your internet bill. The rate on it is whatever the ISP wants, and they have no requirement to explain it to you, except for a few mandated taxes. They can raise and lower it more or less at will, subject to your contractual protections, which are usually minimal. With most incumbent ISPs it is standard for the rate to increase significantly after 12 or 24 months. If you have complaints, there is a small chance you can take them to the FCC under certain regulatory authorities the FCC has exercised, but for the most part your only option is to find another provider.

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