This is a really terrible explanation of the problem - it ignores middlemen like Cogent in the Netflix situation, and doesnât ever bother to explain that the reason Comcast has a monopoly in their areas is their good friends in government. Capitalism canât be applied to the situation because the government doesnât permit it. Why on earth would you want to hand the keys to the chicken coop over to the wolf and his friends?
Isnât the monopoly situation more a result of the sort of business that cable companies are in rather than government deals? Much like local roads, etc, it isnât practical to have many different competitors with a physical presence to your house.
Of course, such natural monopolies do require regulation, a situation that seems to have failed here.
The only thing I havenât figured out is how to provide incentive for the cable companies to upgrade their lines. In the absence of competition, why bother spending billions to improve bandwidth? Iâd argue a government provided service, but Iâve yet to see a government ISP monopoly that residents were happy with. The only solution I see is phone vs. cable to introduce some competition.
This is a huge sleeper issue; many people not in the tech world have no idea why this is so important. Thatâs likely because Network Neutrality means absolutely nothing to them.
Itâs important we call this something else that gets peopleâs attention -maybe the The Great Internet Giveaway or Corporate Takeover of the Internet.
As a left handed person it gives me a headache watching her use her right hand to draw stuff. Plus the Sharpie fumes must be pretty strong.
No. Once upon a time, most big cities had many ISPâs, and even competing cable companies. But the big fish ate the little fish, and grew even bigger, and bought some politicians and strangled the competition completely.
The City of Philadelphia had a plan to bring free wifi to the entire city. It was a sensible, cost-effective plan, and so Comcast purchased the Mayor, who vetoed the plan.
This is not a ânatural monopoly.â In fact, nearly every so-called ânatural monopolyâ is an example of one corporation buying political power to force the competitors out of business, or to allow them to break enough rules to make competition impossible.
Well, all these âlocal ISPsâ were really just resellers of existing fiber â it wasnât as if competing companies actually wired up their own networks. The analogy of a utility like water or electricity really is applicable. Of course utilities donât have to be run by a company â many utilities are run by the community even today.
Indeed, but they make you draw and talk so much faster and faster and fasterandfaster!!
Actually, the multiple local ISPs I remember are from the modem-age. They died with the modems.
One could regulate the cable industry to basically provide a dumb-pipe which could then attach to any number of ISPs, but once again weâre then stuck with the fact that the cable companies then have no incentive to spend large amounts of cash upgrading our facilities. Took 40 years for the water utility to upgrade the pipes to our house as well :-).
As far as cable companies go, Iâm not familiar with any case where they didnât have a monopoly in a given area. The merging of cable companies allowed them cover larger areas, but they were never competitors with each other in the first place.
Again, the only way out of the mess (that I see) it to have a viable competitor, and the propensity of North Americans to live in spread out suburbs (unlike South Korea, etc.) makes competition a lot less attractive. Google has got municipalities lined up begging for it to come and bending over backwards to help it, and even so itâs not particularly economically viable (which is why theyâre so slow to expand). I wouldnât bet my business on Google still being an ISP in 5 years.
Nationalise the lot of them.
Competition applied to the provision of utilities via physical infrastructure? I canât imagine a more absurd confection. Neo-liberal jive turkeys have to bend over backwards defending it.
Why should private interests control anything that is intended to serve not just anyone but everyone in society, ie anything fundamentally public?
Oh right, I forgot, the plutocracy. Because fuck you, thatâs why.
I completely agree. I misunderstood the point @tlwest was making; I thought he was arguing that it was completely ânaturalâ for Comcast to rule the world.
On the good side, promoting such a thing to Congress would make the heads of nearly the whole GOP caucus (and some Dems as well) explode in a prismatic shower of blood, brain, and bone. The downside of such a proposal is that it would be laughed out of Congress by the remaining (headed) politicians.
âMerica canât prop up a huge corporation for a limited time, even with repeated assurances that it will be returned to the stockholders (or whoever), without many Congresscrittersâ heads becoming nearly overpressurized. The likelihood that theyâd nationalize anything today isâŚwell, at the same odds that the pigs that fly out of my ass will then, in public, be shot, butchered, and eaten raw by the board of PETA.
Over 13,000 comments on the FCC site so far⌠I added my 2c 
Of course.
It seems to be the case that the direness of need for any given policy is inversely proportional to the likelihood of it being given any credence by the supposedly serious adults running the showâŚ
I agree with Aetius. The delivery truck metaphor is flat-out wrong.
I quite trust the government to run all sorts of things, and if this was a matter of guaranteeing a low level of service to everyone, Iâd quite agree. But I have to say that Iâm not confident about its ability to constantly spend the billions necessary to continuously upgrade the cable system to the speeds I consider worthwhile.
The reality is that fast Internet is not considered a necessity by the vast majority, and the idea of the government spending billions just so I can have my âluxuryâ is going to fly like a lead balloon.
(My analogy would be âHow much would I support the government spending money to smooth highways so that sports cars can travel 200 mph?â If Iâm not okay with that (and Iâm not), I doubt the majority are going to be okay with spending so that I can get 25+MB/s. In fact, I could easily see a philosophical argument for the government to offer only one speed that fits the lowest needs. After all, it doesnât allow me (nor should it) to pay more money for different schooling.)
On the other hand, guarantee that everybody can get 10MB/s? Sure. If the infrastructure only has to be upgraded every 5-20 years? Sure. Areas where progress and innovation could have a catastrophic effect (banking?). Sure.
If Iâm pessimistic, itâs perhaps because I pitied my friends in Britian and Australia that essentially did have a government monopoly at the beginning of the Internet (dial-in) era. They were a very unhappy lot.
I think your statement is inscribed on the pamphlet, âSo youâre new member of Congressâwhat happens next?â
Your analogy falls down because speed limits on the roads donât increase exponentially with time.
First off, my modem I bought is still exactly the same speed as when I bought it. Bandwidth and speed donât increase automatically, they increase when large amounts of money are spent to upgrade old equipment. Whatâs wonderful about technology is that the amount one has to spend to get an increase might not go up, and might even go down. But thereâs still spending.
The cable companies arenât withholding bandwidth. Itâs that theyâre not making big new investments to take advantage of technological advancements.
Second, technological advancement makes the government option even more difficult. I want something close to the current technological limits. However, while 90% of the population might have wanted something close to that limit 10 years ago, with each passing year, the average user needs (and more importantly, what theyâre willing to pay for in their taxes) only goes up a little bit. This means that meeting my demands becomes more of the technological elite such as myself demanding that the average tax payer pay for increased bandwidth they donât want.
Also, Iâm not sure that government could withstand the pressure when inevitably bad things are done using the Internet. Suddenly it becomes âbad things are being facilitated by the governmentâ. Thereâs already pressure on governments to âdo somethingâ whenever the Internet is a conduit for bad (not necessarily illegal) activities. How much worse does that get when the government is seen as an active agent in the perpetration of those activities. I can already here the demands that government âget out of the porn businessâ or âstop paying for piratesâ with mandatory controls, or at the very least less bandwidth (since according to the news, what would people use all that bandwidth for except piracy and pornâŚ)
Iâm just not certain Iâm happier with my Internet controlled by the median voter than I am with it controlled by a corporation.
Who gives a shit what the average taxpayer wants? If they donât want to pay for stuff like universal healthcare, fuck 'em. They have to pay for that sort of thing because itâs a net benefit to society at large.
Much like allowing technological elites to do their thing unfettered. Surely I donât need to waste any breath pointing out that more bandwidth is better for society, whether everybody uses it or not - the mere fact that some will use it, and do so in newly-productive ways, justifies the investment entirely. To do otherwise puts the brakes on innovation, which is obviously retarded in every sense of the word. Youâll be left behind by nations like South Korea, who consider the internet in its proper light, rather than a series of bridges to accommodate trollies.
And if you leave such heavy lifting up to the private sector, it just wonât happen, at least without extortionate gatekeeping that will rule out contributions from all but the biggest players, perhaps even anyone not belonging to the same conglomerate. As long as itâs governed by consideration of shareholder profit and nothing else, the private sector is a malevolent stain.
