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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I certainly do! It astonishes me that the article here under discussion treats them so.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I'm prickly about this, because, as you might know, this happens all the time here.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Ask the Brits about the NHS.
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.