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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

It really is shockingly similar and a lot of the arguments against net neutrality try to dismiss it as applying "laws made for railroads" to the Internet.

Back when oil was getting to be useful, lots of people discovered it. Usually, it was in a remote area. The only way to make money off it was to get it to a refinery and then the market. Standard Oil bullied and bribed the railroads into giving them preferential rates and charging high rates for competitors. It's exactly like what cable companies would like to do by subverting net neutrality, give preferential treatment to the traffic that profits them most. It's just information instead of oil, which is even more insidious since it can control the public discourse.

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The thing is, cable is more like the railroad than it is like Standard Oil. Petroleum isn't at all like a natural monopoly. It took a lot of corruption and bribery for Standard Oil to keep competition at bay.

But nobody is really stepping forward to lay residential fiber. Google is the exception and it's because they're one of the only companies with enough money to survive a war of attrition with the incumbents, and even then it's only in a handful of places.

It's prohibitively expensive to have twelve companies each run a different strand of fiber to every house. And you only need one. The key is to a) get one instead of zero and then b) put competition on the other end of the fiber. Have one company (or municipality) be the regulated monopoly that provides only the physical layer, and then let all willing providers compete to terminate the fiber and provide internet/TV/phone service.

Separating the natural monopoly (the physical layer) from over the top services is the key to preventing monopoly abuse. The entity that does that should do only that.

There _are_ places where small companies are stepping up to place residential fiber.

http://fiber.usinternet.com/

Sure, on a few dozen streets in the city center in a place without build out requirements. But what do we do about the suburbs?

Those are exceptions that prove the rule.

In Rochester, NY we are fortunate to have a local company competing with Time Warner by offering gigabit fiber to the home[1]. The local company is hugely popular, and based on their rate of expansion, very successful.

When my house was built in 1890 it did not have electricity, and all rooms were illuminated by gas lights. As of last year, it has gigabit fiber. Infrastructure can change. It helps to have locals take action, and citizens have to be vocal.

1. https://greenlightnetworks.com/

True. I recall reading somewhere that Japan has a law requiring the owner of the physical wires to lease them to anyone as long as they pay some set fee - sort of like mechanical royalties that we have for music. This is part of the reason why Japan has some of the fastest and cheapest Internet in the world.

That's called last mile unbundling, and is one thing the FCC has refused to consider.

aDSL used to be unbundled, too. And while it was unbundled, speeds were increasing.

aDSL speeds have been pretty flat since they removed the requirement, even though newer DSL technologies are available.

Yep, local loop unbundling was a thing in the US, it was basically a provision in the 1996 Telecommunications Act to promote competition. It largely worked too, you used to have your choice of 10 or 12 DSL providers in the US. You could do that with things like copper local loops, I would love to see it with Cable but I suppose theres not a good way to share the local loops in cable plant as they are mostly fiber now. It too bad EEOC(ethernet over copper) never took off.

> I suppose theres not a good way to share the local loops in cable plant as they are mostly fiber now

Well, here in Canada they're mostly fiber also -- but it still works. See, for example, https://www.teksavvy.com/ and https://www.start.ca/ ... "TPIA" is what they're called.

In looking them up, I stumbled on mailing lists for TPIAs hosted by Torix. Realised at that point that TPIAs have a lot in common with Canadian IXPs -- both put pressure on prices from Canadian ISPs, TIPAs by consumers and IXPs from businesses/services aghast at how much certain folks charge. See https://cira.ca/sites/default/files/cira-ixp-overview-web.pd... for more on IXPs. I wonder if there's a book on this somewhere, or what ISPs think. Rogers Cable peers with Torix, so it's not exclusively smaller players, in fact I'd say it's the everybody-but-telcos club but I'm sure telcos and US players are welcome if they cared to... (let's pretend they simply are unaware of the ahem, savings...)

Local loop unbundling works very well in the UK.

> aDSL speeds have been pretty flat since they removed the requirement, even though newer DSL technologies are available.

Playing devil's advocate here.

How would they increase adsl speed if it's very much distance-related? It tops out at 24Mbps and even then in ideal conditions.

Those newer DSL technologies require laying fiber closer to the customer and that's a nontrivial investment.

Huh? Here in EU the DSL speeds have been steadily growing up to 50Mbit without users doing much (ISPs deploy either modern ADSL2+ or versions of VDSL). A copper wire that could only carry 8Mbit before now carries full triple-play at 30+Mbits.

Most of that has come from legislation that forced the monopolistic owner of copper wires to let competition use them.

To get full DSL speed you need to be within X feet of a junction box, which many people are not.

Parent was referring to the fact that VDSL/VDSL2 is more sensitive to loop attenuation that ADSLx. Yes, you can get 100MB symmetric over a copper pair, but only for 300M or so.

Hence VDSLx is usually rolled out only as part of an FTTC deployment, where the ISP needs to roll out new fibre (rather than copper) to the caninet/junction box, and in most cases install DSLAM units in those cabinets also.

well when the state of Georgia deregulated natural gas sales that is effectively what happened. A management company became the owners of the gas lines, responsible for maintenance and expansion. That fee appears on every gas bill

See Eben Moglen's "Invisible Barbeque".

http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/barbecue.html

The people making those statements know that. Any "captain of industry" worth his salt wants to be like a Rockeffeler or a railroad baron.

Hell, 5-6 generations on, Rockeffelers are still filthy rich.

(My own views align closely with http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/we-dont-need-net-... and http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-13/forget-net...)

Do you have any evidence that cable companies wanted to charge for preferential treatment for traffic? I've seen that claim repeated a lot but never with evidence.

Netflix is the canonical example.

A few years ago YouTube got similar treatment on Time Warner -- they funneled everything to a YouTube point of presence on the TWC network that was over saturated. You could modify DNS and use and alternate URL and watch 1080p video with no lag.

Verizon also started limiting aggregate Netflix traffic. Through conincidence, it happened to start happening when they launched a video service.

What happened with netflix wasn't covered under net neutrality anyway (as the links above point out), and they weren't being charged for prioritization, nor were they discriminated against.

This isn't a net neutrality discussion. It's about monopolistic behavior.

I responded to a comment saying "It's exactly like what cable companies would like to do by subverting net neutrality, give preferential treatment to the traffic that profits them most."

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