One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
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One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
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Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#2There's a nice analysis in this week's Economist on cellular competition in Europe. There's been a conclusion by some European antitrust regulators that it takes at least four competing cellular carriers before prices come down. Three isn't enough.
The US acts as if one unregulated carrier is enough in cable.
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#3Can someone explain to me what innovation cable companies provide that they deserve their anti-competitive monopolies? If we were to replace them all with municipal broadband what would the short and long term consequences be?
I'd wager that the short term (~10 years) consequences would be vastly superior service for every day citizens. In the long term, not certain but I suspect it would be much of the same as long as the municipal provider had ever-increasing speeds as one of their primary purposes/guiding principals.
I'm not a communist but I think evidence shows that municipal broadband outperforms both telecom and cable operators in all terms of performance from costs to speeds to reliability.
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#4Can someone explain to me what innovation cable companies provide that they deserve their anti-competitive monopolies? If we were to replace them all with municipal broadband what would the short and long term consequences be? I'd wager that the short term (~10 years) consequences would be vastly superior service for every day citizens. In the long term, not certain but I suspect it would be much of the same as long…
My understanding was it's seen as an incentive for the massive upfront infrastructure costs needed to run cable to every house. Much like power or other utilities. But of course cable companies don't want to accept the regulation that is the flip side of being treated like a utility (e.g. net neutrality).
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#5At this point, Cable companies are all members of a single large shadow monopoly not unlike Standard Oil was in the early 20th century. The rational the justice system used to break up Standard Oil is shockingly similar to the situation we now face with cable:
Rates have been made low to let the Standard into markets, or they have been made high to keep its competitors out of markets. Trifling differences in distances are made an excuse for large differences in rates favorable to the Standard Oil Co., while large differences in distances are ignored where they are against the Standard. Sometimes connecting roads prorate on oil—that is, make through rates which are lower than the combination of local rates; sometimes they refuse to prorate; but in either case the result of their policy is to favor the Standard Oil Co. Different methods are used in different places and under different conditions, but the net result is that from Maine to California the general arrangement of open rates on petroleum oil is such as to give the Standard an unreasonable advantage over its competitors" [1]
Cable companies regularly adjust prices based on the entrance of competitors (Google Fiber), or when a cable company enters a new market, prices are initially low to prevent competition and then slowly raised to a much higher level. The excuses for vast differences in rates in metropolitan cities are usually paper thin, but accepted by the media and government at face value. Cable companies also operate secondary businesses with a conflicting interest to their cable operations (Cable TV packages now directly competes with Broadband Internet, also see: NBC/Comcast), not unlike Standard Oil's purchase of many railways and control of shipping lanes. This arrangement vastly stacks the deck in favor of cable companies, and further cable company "cooperation" with state and national officials have created new restrictions on municipal competition.
Cable companies are our 21st century Standard Oil.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Monopoly_charges_...
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#6There's a nice analysis in this week's Economist on cellular competition in Europe. There's been a conclusion by some European antitrust regulators that it takes at least four competing cellular carriers before prices come down. Three isn't enough. The US acts as if one unregulated carrier is enough in cable.
I think we still have some cultural inertia such that things like high-speed internet and cell service are seen as luxuries and not basic infrastructure (plus some who believe that the poor ought to be excluded from using basic infrastructure anyway). I'm also not convinced that Capitol Hill has fully realized that Comcast isn't competing with rabbit ears anymore.
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#7Can someone explain to me what innovation cable companies provide that they deserve their anti-competitive monopolies? If we were to replace them all with municipal broadband what would the short and long term consequences be? I'd wager that the short term (~10 years) consequences would be vastly superior service for every day citizens. In the long term, not certain but I suspect it would be much of the same as long…
What evidence is that. The evidence in my town is that the city can't walk and chew gum at the same time. I have zero confidence they could operate a broadband utility with anything approaching competence.
Municipal broadband just replaces one monopoly with another -- one that doesn't even have profit as a requirement, since it is also a taxing authority.
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#8There's a nice analysis in this week's Economist on cellular competition in Europe. There's been a conclusion by some European antitrust regulators that it takes at least four competing cellular carriers before prices come down. Three isn't enough. The US acts as if one unregulated carrier is enough in cable.
The EU telecom market is just as horrible, most countries have only 1-2 "true" ISP's with actual infrastructure to their subscribers and 2-3 cell providers the rest are ISP's that rent fibers/coax access and MVNOs.
Setting up infrastructure is extremely expensive especially in cities where allot of the European population lives. The US has a different problem where only 4% of the population lives in a major cities so ISP's have to lay allot of infrastructure and historically the more or less remain around their original starting zones and creep out very slowly.
Fiber/Coax infrastructure in the US should be done on a state and municipal levels and then offered to ISP's at a fixed price to recoup the costs via a tender based on the cost to the end consumer
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#9> I can’t overbuild another cable company, because then I could never buy it, because you always block those
I'll buy that. For a dollar.
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#10This also takes a stab at explaining why cable companies do not compete with one another: