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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This rosey view of the public-funded Internet ignores the reality of the network at the time. As recently as the mid-1990s, the entire Internet could netsplit, like a badly-run IRC network; there was a run of a couple days where commercial sites (like Ripco, my first ISP) couldn't reach any .EDU sites.

Telecom companies like Comcast and Verizon "own" the backbone because they built it. Not just the backhaul connections they install at enormous expense, not just the hundreds of millions of dollars of switches and routers, but the very peering centers and agreements that allow different networks to interoperate. Had UUNet been forbidden from building "private" backbones, they'd have simply built a new IP network, and we'd all be using that instead.

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> Telecom companies like Comcast and Verizon "own" the backbone because they built it.

In Europe most of the backbone has been built by state-run public companies with public money. Only with the wave of privatization in the 90s the EU backbone has become privately owned (for various weird definitions of "privately owned").

However. When the backbone was publicly owned the "broadband" of the time (ISDN) was available to most of the population, including those living outside the big cities and in rural zones. 20 years later the current broadband (fiber) is available only in selected metropolies. The rest is delegate to "market failure" (official term of the trade).

Seeing networks are public infrastructures puts things under a different light. Water, gas, phones and electricity are available everywhere, even where it makes no economic sense, because it makes _human_ sense. Why can't we treat computers networks (access to information) the same? We have been doing it for 40 or so years before the privatizations. After 20 years, why can't we call this privatization experiment failed and go back to the previous state of affairs?

If you want your Internet service to be as responsive to customers as your gas and electric service is today, I supposed you could declare the experiment "failed". As I pointed out, I'm happier with an Internet I can watch movies and make phone calls on than I am with the one that repeatedly netsplit in the 90s.

Incidentally: ISDN was widely available everywhere where there were modern phone-switching networks, because they required very minimal upstream equipment to handle. Essentially, if you had already 5 years ago run copper to a Northern Telecom head unit, you'd basically already deployed ISDN. Every local ISP in the US was able to jam a couple PRIs into some Ascend boxes to provide ISDN just as soon as those boxes were available.

I don't think it's reasonable to compare ISDN to last-mile technologies that require new cables and new block-by-block termination equipment to install.

Comparing the internet you have in 2016 to the internet that existed in the 1990's is a bit unfair, don't you think? The idea that only markets are capable of delivering innovations or necessary services to the public is debatable.

For example, the U.S. government, through DARPA, created countless valuable networking innovations that private companies, such as AT&T, didn't want to touch even when given the opportunity.

I think if you read the comment carefully you'll see I'm not simply saying "the 'public' EU backbone provided rural ISDN", but rather that I'm making a more subtle point than that, about the nature of ISDN.

There's a reason an ISDN BRI provides the rate it does, and a reason why each of its B-channels is 64k: the digital phone network was already channelized that way.

Actually I was replying to your original comment before you edited. The idea that a publicly run internet would not have been able to produce the innovations necessary for Netflix is debatable and betrays a certain political persuasion on your part.

No, it doesn't. You've fallen victim to the fundamental attribution fallacy, and it's led you to generate a rude remark.

He's saying the task to deploy ISDN in the 1990's was minuscule compared to what is required to roll out fiber to everyone today. It's like comparing government oranges to private Teslas.

Government has been responsible for the largest undertakings in human history. Space flight, nuclear weaponry and energy, particle colliders, etc.

That's mostly true. It's just that the modern Internet isn't one of those things, unless you're talking about the academic research funding that generated Raj Jain papers.

You're right, it's not. But it could have been.

There is very little evidence to suggest it would be. A space program is a monumentally impressive achievement, but it's one that was generated by fiat. The Internet is the result of countless different responses to market pressures.

Our telecom networks used to be effectively nationalized. You couldn't even choose your own telephone. Back when the government had a role in running the actual backbone, there were restrictions on commerce on the Internet!

Many of the largest undertakings. (Here's one counter-example - the world's first transatlantic cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York,_Newfoundland_and_Lon...).

The mistake many libertarians make is to argue that government is inherently incompetent. This viewpoint contradicts reality. Government agencies which attract smart people can be as successful as any private company. Large private companies can be as bureaucratic as any government agency.

The fundamental difference is that there's no way to get rid of bloated and ineffective government organisations. NASA is a good example: in the 1960s it was the place where every bright young engineer and scientist wanted to work, but over the decades it stagnated into another bureaucracy dominated by non-technical folk chasing pork-barrel funding.

> The fundamental difference is that there's no way to get rid of bloated and ineffective government organisations.

It may be practically difficult to do so, but there is definitely a way to do so, and its usually quite obvious from the manner in which those government organizations are structured and chartered in the first place.

Plenty of government organizations that have been viewed as "bloated", "inefficient", or otherwise undesirable have, in fact, been gotten rid of.

> Comparing the internet you have in 2016 to the internet that existed in the 1990's is a bit unfair, don't you think?

I certainly do! It astonishes me that the article here under discussion treats them so.

How so?

Via the same implicit counterfactual on which you rely - that is, that had the Internet remained a publicly funded, primarily academic project over the last two decades, it would nonetheless be substantially similar to the Internet we have today.

That's not my argument. Publicly funded does not necessarily mean primarily academic. The market is not the only driver of public demand for goods and services. Streaming video is a fairly obvious innovation that benefits the general public.

That's certainly your argument. But you're doing a better job of losing it to 'tptacek than to me. Please don't let me distract you any further.

He's just better at dodging my questions than you are :). But please, keep erecting your straw man.

The entire point of this is that the internet would be fundamentally different if it were democratically controlled. That does not mean we would miss out on innovations like streaming video. It does mean that average users would have faster speeds and more control over their data. This of course assumes a political environment geared towards the average citizen. Sadly, in the United States, that is not currently the case. But it is achievable, and we used to be much closer to that ideal.

This isn't complicated. To believe the USG could have created an equivalent or better Internet as a regulated public utility, you have to believe that none of the major attributes of the modern Internet were produced through competition, because that is what you lose when you nationalize and regulate an industry.

Electricity, gas, and water work as utilities because to a first approximation, the only competitive access is price. One thing regulation can do is drive prices to an acceptable place (often not the lowest price, but a satisficing price).

But that is not the only axis of competition for Internet service. Nobody knows or cares what the quality of their gas service is, but most people can tell you how fast their Internet connection is, and not everyone wants the same service.

As I pointed out downthread, when telecom was a regulated utility, we didn't even have competition in telephone handsets.

Yeah, they'll tell you their internet connection speed is shitty. Unless you live in Chattanooga, where the evil Department of Fiber Optics is busy oppressing them.

Go look up EPB's ASN and see which public utility companies they're peering with to get Chattanooga customers in touch with Google.

But this is entirely silly. EPB is great. More cities should run their own last-mile networks. What they do instead is impose regulatory frameworks that forbid companies that could run gig fiber networks from doing so unless they also serve markets where they would hemorrhage money.

But the success of public utilities in places like Chattanooga is not an argument that a public utility could have built the modern Internet. To see just one reason why, try to host Youtube or Netflix on EPB's network.

You're right. They're prioritizing access over the financial concerns of the providers. That's what public utilities do. That's what we did when we electrified the South. That's why I keep pointing to your fundamental political assumptions. It's not that we can't do it, it's that certain people don't think it's valuable.

Please stop attacking me personally. You have no idea what my fundamental political assumptions are. If you're frustrated about how unpersuasive I find your argument, perhaps stop arguing; you aren't entitled to persuade me, but you're starting to write as if you feel you are.

I'm actually enjoying this conversation. That's why I've stuck around this long. To quote your last comment:

"What they do instead is impose regulatory frameworks that forbid companies that could run gig fiber networks from doing so unless they also serve markets where they would hemorrhage money."

Who cares if they're hemorrhaging money? The Public Works Administration hemorrhaged money electrifying the South. The Post Office hemorrhages money delivering to far flung rural areas. Society however has made the judgement that these costs are worth it because they promote inclusiveness and equality. You are making the opposite judgement. That judgement is inherently political.

You don't even seem to be reading my comments anymore. You've invented a disagreement that we don't even have, so you could reintroduce politics. I'm not interested in having a political argument with you.

Incidentally, you may be chuckling at the tenor of this conversation and where it's going, but as I've told you repeatedly, I am taking offense. I am not enjoying it, and I wish you'd stop.

Welp, maybe you shouldn't have commented on a political article then? I'm really not trolling you here. I'm reading everything you're writing.

I suspect others will notice that it is you who have been ignoring me.

This is my biggest problem with people in the tech industry. You can't divorce the systems you build, or the tradeoffs made by companies and policymakers, from the underlying political ideologies that inform those decisions.

You might be surprised and deeply dissatisfied what others will notice.

The article in question is a political article, and the solutions it posits are, by definition, political. Just because you don't feel that you're in any way having a political conversation does not necessarily make it so.

I'm not objecting to politics in general. I'm objecting to continually being asked to pass a political purity test in this particular branch of the discussion. I shouldn't have to explain to the other commenter why they're wrong about my politics. It was bogus and rude for them to invent a political straw man and attribute to me.

I'm prickly about this, because, as you might know, this happens all the time here.

fwiw I do know that it happens all the time here. And, as someone whose politics runs very far to the left contra this forum (I'm a regular Jacobin reader), I can appreciate the annoyance. I did strike me as a bit dissonant, coming from you.

Edit: also, not having to constantly battle either a) trolls or b) what I feel to be right wing libertarian myopia is one of the reasons I've commented so little here, so, I Get It. I've been a reader/lurker for something like 7 years now. early 2009, I believe.

Some years ago, during a phase in which every other comment on this site seemed to be accusing me of being an NSA shill, I made a decision never to spell out my particular (boring, especially if you know where I live) political beliefs in response to people accusing me of having a particular political inclination. Doing so might simplify (dumb, lazy) arguments. But we shouldn't have to do that.

I remember that. Not one of the brighter HN moments. I've done a small amount of activism, come from a family who have had run ins with the security state (had my own as well). It can be jarring to then turn around and have to defend a position that automatically grants you "shill" status to online nutjobs.

I was wrong to have brought up your personal political beliefs. I apologize for that.

The arguments you are making, however, are dependent on the idea that markets are a necessary mechanism for the existence of the modern internet.

You have the right to withhold your political beliefs from anyone in any context.

You've gone astray by demanding that others de-politicize their language in a similar way.

I believe that about the Internet. I don't necessarily believe it about anything else.

I am fine with politics, as long as the political discussion doesn't take the form of "here is what I have inferred about your personal political beliefs".

> most people can tell you how fast their Internet connection is

Most people on HN, maybe. Most consumers can maybe recall the speed advertised by their ISP (but maybe not, given how ISPs mostly used named tiers and often don't prominently identify even the advertised speed), but that can be a very different thing from how fast their connection is in practice.

This presumes that innovation comes about only as a result of competition.

I don't believe that it always does. I do believe that almost all of the innovation we've seen on the Internet has come from competition.

Would it not be fair then, to say that came about from specific circumstances peculiar to America?

Why would that be the case? Has it generally been the case that innovations on the Internet have been generated from countries where the Internet is (more like) a public utility, and only then imported here? That's not my impression.

My own feelings on this would take a long time to sketch out, and are pretty diffuse tbh. They would also depend not so much on the internet per se but on high technology in general. I would point to early Israel, which was highly, almost exclusively socialistic (and in ways not reproduced anywhere else, i.e. the kibbutzim) as being capable of high tech innovation with a highly dynamic state sector. Also, I feel it worth pointing out that (even though it doesn't make my argument any stronger) that just because something has been the case up until now doesn't make it The Only Way It Works.

So, just to be clear: this isn't a blanket belief I have about technology. The modern Internet, however, appears to me to have developed largely in response to consumer demand, first for email, then for web pages with pretty pictures, then for secure web pages, then person-to-person audio, then small-scale video, then large-scale video. At each interval, some random company introduced software demonstrating one of those features, and it caught on, and the Internet was built up in response to it.

An ISDN BRI was zippy fast in 1997. I liked my ISDN! And if it weren't for Youtube, I might still like my ISDN.

If the Internet were a regulated utility, we'd have to petition for the local Internet authority to roll out something faster than 128kb/s. But of course, I didn't petition to get my DSL line: I just switched ISPs to one who'd provide it.

Lord only knows what Google would have had to do to get Youtube connected to the counterfactual regulated Internet.

Like I said elsewhere, I think regulated utilities work reasonably well when there's just one figure of merit (usually: price). I think the approach falls apart when the number of variables increases.

Interesting. Thanks for taking the time to respond. Something for me to think about, seriously. Seeing the argument sketched out like this is illuminating as to its extent, I appreciate it.

I'm sure if the government had retained full control of the Internet as a regulated public utility, the US would have the finest Department of Streaming Video in the world.

The attitude that leads to you ridicule government provided services is exactly why I made my previous comment about your obvious political bias. It wasn't any more rude than the sarcasm that you're exhibiting here.

Ask the Brits about the NHS.

One difference between my comment and yours is that you were in fact incorrect about my political inclinations, but I am not in fact wrong about the service model of a regulated public Internet.

You're doing the same thing by asking me to litigate the NHS: presuming that I'm opposed to all government services and all regulations. I won't play that game: you are out of bounds by personalizing this, and asking me to pass a purity test to continue arguing with you isn't reasonable.

Argue better.

I haven't asked you to do anything of the sort. I point out the NHS because I want you to explain why the internet is fundamentally different. You've done an excellent job explaining how the existing internet emerged. You've done nothing to discredit my actual argument.

Why is this any different than the previous upthread comments you called "rude" and labeled with Forum Psych 101 : Fallacy Section. Its kind of ugly, honestly. I say this as someone who has actually taken the time to email you before, thanking you for calling out racism.

As I said elsewhere: mine is a substantive dismissal, and theirs is an ad hominem argument directed at a misapprehension about my politics. If you disagree with my argument, disagree with it.

I would love if my internet service was as good as my gas or electric service. Those are both so reliable, that I've never once had to contact customer service. They deliver a standard level of service, according to fair, legally enforced rates. If they ever do have an outage, I'm entitled to pro-rated credits for the service interruption. They will also roll trucks any hour of the day to restore service after major weather incidents, unlike any ISP I've ever had.

Honestly, we should start holding the major ISPs to the same standard as our other utilities.

They're also the beneficiaries of infrastructure which is already built out everywhere and requires only maintenance and occasional repair. It would be great if the same could be said of ISPs. Can it?

You have much better experience with your utilities than I do with mine.

Two days ago, we found out that our gas had been shut off because Nicor's billing system forgot about our auto-billing. Someone came out, shut our gas off, and locked the meter. We paid them, and they informed us they wouldn't be able to roll a truck to turn our gas on for more than a week, despite the fact that the dude they sent to turn our gas off could have knocked on our door (or, for that matter, they could have called) and worked out the billing SNAFU.

Erin go so fed up that she picked the lock on the meter; when I called to inform them that I was holding their meter lock in my hand, they sent an "emergency" crew out. The new dude had an account note instructing him not to turn our gas on, despite the fact that our account was current and the billing SNAFU was their fault.

He made fun of them and turned our gas back on.

Have you ever called to have your electrical service changed? How was that experience for you? I've had that pleasure, too.

The other great thing I'll say about our electrical is that only goes down for 12+ hours at a time a couple times a year. Depending on your expectations for electrical service in one of the largest US metro areas, that might be good!

I don't like AT&T or Verizon. But I would gleefully hand them my billing and field service work for every other utility I have. I haven't had an AT&T outage I noticed in years. I have never once waited more than a day to get them out to address a problem.

"Have you ever called to have your electrical service changed? How was that experience for you? I've had that pleasure, too."

I've done this. It's something the UK seems to be really good at. I checked my annual usage and found the supplier who would charge me the least for that. So I phoned them. That was all I had to do. My bills went down. Fantastic. The UK government seems to be enforcing a competitive market, and I am no fan of the UK government, so this is high praise from me.

Have you tried to have your electrical provider terminate additional power to your house? That's the kind of change I'm talking about.

I have. It is, as far as I know, pretty much impossible. You'd think they would want to enable customers to use more of their product.

Can you tell me more about this "human sense"? If I build a home on Mars should I be entitled to have some third party provide me with "water, gas, phones and electricity"?

A lot of the decisions I personally make are decided by economic factors, even if it is not the primary factor.

Are you saying that this couldn't have been accomplished by a public utility? Or that these companies have produced better outcomes? We made the choice to hand over the existing backbone that took decades and billions of dollars to build.

Yes, I'm saying this would not have been accomplished by a public utility.

I don't know what "hand over the existing backbone" means. Verizon's network consists of optical backhaul links, terminations, and a switching infrastructure that they spent billions to build over decades. They didn't inherit it, and I don't believe UUNet inherited their DS3s and AGS+'s in the 90s, either.

They inherited NSFNET, which emerged from ARPANET. It's in the article.

That's not what the article says. The article, by the way, generates the same question your last comment did: what does it even mean to "inherit" the backbone? Does it mean "be allowed to interconnect with"? That's a pretty counterintuitive definition of "inheritance".

Ah, you're right. Sorry for the misunderstanding on my part. They abandoned NSFNET and declined to pass regulations regarding the new privately built infrastructure. That begs the question: if the government so successfully innovated in this space during the 60's, 70's, and 80's, why did that have to change in the early 90's? Perhaps the prevailing political climate had more to do with it than economic or technical considerations?

I think if you reread my top comment here you'll see me disputing the premise of your question. They funded R&D, much of it at private firms and more still at university CS departments, and orchestrated the installation of a not especially good backbone connecting (mostly) universities.

The thing we use today to watch movies on was built entirely by private companies, responding to the market, which detected and amplified user feature requests nobody even took seriously back in the Gopher days.

It's not just that the Internet of 1992 wasn't especially good: that Internet also solved an easier problem than the one we have today. In particular: more of the work could be delegated to leaf networks, and less expertise and capital was required to provide some semblance of a backbone.

I also object to the tone of this Jacobin article, which strongly implies that the backbone was somehow deeded over to telecom giants. That's false. I was the lead technical employee at a regional ISP in the 1990s, and made friends with many employees at our upstreams and at other companies. Lots of scrappy little companies rolled up to create the regional networks that were eventually consolidated into the giants we have today. Anyone who wanted to go all-in on rolling a regional network into a backbone provider had a shot in the 1990s.

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