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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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".

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.

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