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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

To me the obvious solution is to make it illegal for ISPs to get to get into a conflict of interest. So they should only be allowed to sell Internet access and not do anything else, especially not sell content. Given that they are running some of our countries most important pieces of infrastructure I think that's perfectly reasonable.

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To an extent this happened in 2006 with the UKs physical phone and internet infrastructure.

It had been run by British Telecom, a privatised government department who were originally the only phone provider. They were required to spin off infrastructure into a sister company BT Openreach.

That company is required to give equal access to anyone who wants to provide phone services, including DSL, and its resulted in a fantastic variety of providers across the country. You can get everything including near free 30Mbps services with data caps and an awful router, unlimited 76Mbps service, right up to bonded DSL over multiple backbones. There's also cable if you want a faster connection.

It happened EU wide (actually EEA wide), as part of the EU telecoms deregulation.

While it is in general quite good, it suffers from limitations in how it is regulated that means that BT is milking Openreach for profits and upgrading the network very slowly. The whole thing could do with limits on how much Openreach is allowed to pay out in dividend based on how much they invest in infrastructure upgrades.

It's a matter of perspective though.

BT was ready to roll out fibre to the home back in the early 1990s for the delivery of TV. At the time BT had some of the most advanced fibre tech in the world.

The government of the day, however, decided to ban BT selling TV in favour of opening up the market to foreign owned cable companies, Telewest and NTL.

Without wide scpread Internet use that killed the investment case for fibre (and the U.K. fibre industry).

Today we're at a situation where none of the other players calling for BT's break up want to invest nationwide.

If they do break up BT it'll be great if you're in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds but I don't expect much to improve anywhere else.

I think it's more likely that Vodaphone, Sky, Talk Talk will just try milk the existing infrastructure without further significant investment, as they currently do, and BT would be dis-incentivised from further investment.

Let's say you pass that law. Comcast splits off Xfinity as a separate company to sell just internet service, with low data caps. Comcast and Xfinity enter a deal to exempt Comcast's streaming service from the caps in exchange for some millions per year. Comcast gets some billions per year in subscriptions, because Xfinity customers can binge on all the Comcast "Stream TV" they want. New high-bandwidth services, like a young Netflix competitor, can't afford to pay off the ISPs, so they never get to compete with the incumbents. The situation is no better than if Comcast wasn't split up.

You've identified another target for regulation: ISPs should not be allowed to exempt traffic from data caps. This is part of a larger concept called net neutrality [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

vertical integration!

Laws need to be created so that those who own the pipes can not unfairly compete directly or indirectly(split itself up and make deals with it's old self and or partners) with services offered on the global Internet and or interfere with the greater good the Internet provides society.

What Comcast is doing here is steamrolling the Internet for their greater good and I can't imagine this working out well for them. They are the most hated company.. this surely isn't going to help and I'm glad to see Susan Crawford publicize this.

Hopefully others like John Oliver will jump in too to further publicize this outlandish let's kill the Internet for our greater good anti-competitive move. They need their asses handed to them!!!

As a free market capitalist, I actually completely agree with this. Comcast, etc, actually impede the free market by forcing competitors to go through a monopolistic choke hold. Moving data around is a different thing that actually providing the data. If would be like the airlines actually owning the airspace. Or Ford Motor Company owning the roads and restricting Chevy's access to the roads. Under net neutrality, Chevy must be allowed on the road and be able to travel at the same speed, however under this analogy, Ford would be able to have a quota as to how many Chevys could use the road before paying a toll.

"Moving data around is a different thing that actually providing the data. If would be like the airlines actually owning the airspace. Or Ford Motor Company owning the roads and restricting Chevy's access to the roads."

Almost ... it's as if the airlines built the airspace and then owned it. It's as if Ford built the roads and then owned them.

Get into? Cable ISPs are already in a massive conflict of interest. They are selling everyone their data twice, just like 'voice, texts, and data' from wireless companies.

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