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Comment by Inconel | Hacker News Reader

It's very interesting that you say the biggest hurdle was regulatory capture, that is certainly depressing.

This leads me to another question that maybe you or someone else can answer, although I understand if you can't for various reasons. There seems to be a ton of very smart people working at Google and I can't imagine that they would go about trying to set up their own ISP without taking into account the huge pushback they would get from existing telcos, so I would imagine they had plans to deal with all of this. Did Google underestimate the amount of pushback they would receive, did they feel they could effectively lobby for changes which turned out to be unsuccessful? Or has something else changed in the proceeding years since Fiber originally rolled out that makes Google think it is no longer worth the fight?

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I'm not sure, exactly - most of the discussions about whether Fiber would be viable happened long before I was on the team, and in any case I wasn't privy to them. Here is Milo Medin's (Google Fiber's "founder") testimony before the House Oversight Committee on regulatory issues in ISPs:

https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Testi...

(From Apr 2011, over a year before Google Fiber actually launched.)

Calling the disputes over utility poles in KC "regulatory capture" is quite a bit of historical revisionism. This ArsTechnica article does a good job of explaining what the dispute was about: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/why-att-says-it-c....

Also, Google got very preferential treatment when it came to pole access in Kansas City: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100008723963904438626045780306... ("The cities are discounting other services, as well. For the right to attach its cables to city utility poles, Google is paying Kansas City, Kan., only $10 per pole per year—compared with the $18.95 Time Warner Cable pays. Both cities have also waived permit and inspection fees for Google.")

My bias in this thread is pretty obvious, but to me, that ArsTechnica article doesn't make AT&T look any better. Their response was basically "Here, you want to be a telecom? Go clear all these regulatory hurdles that we've already done", without at all addressing whether those regulations are worth having in the first place. That's almost the definition of regulatory capture: when regulations exist to create barriers to competitors rather than to protect the public interest.

I think it's actually the opposite of "regulatory capture." It's not about the incumbent getting special treatment, but making sure a new entrant doesn't get special treatment.

If the regulations only serve to protect incumbents by raising the barriers to entry, ignoring whether this is the case here, rather than the public interest, isn't it still valid to argue that this is regulatory capture? I'm genuinely curious here and not trying to be obnoxiously argumentative.

Yes, that's a literal textbook example of regulatory capture.

There are many other examples of rent-seeking. One of the most common ways of using government to eliminate competition is what is referred to as "regulatory capture." This is the case where regulators end up acting in ways that benefit the industries that they regulate. Many government agencies are generally created with the high-minded notion of protecting the public from rapacious behavior of corporations. However, these corporations can use the government agencies to protect themselves from competition, most frequently by encouraging a set of regulations that makes it very difficult for newcomers to enter an industry. They use the creation of regulations as a barrier to entry.

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf200wd/node/160

Before claiming "regulatory capture" don't you have to make some facial showing that the regulations only exist to protect incumbents? The regulations at issue are Title II, which everyone here loves.

> It's very interesting that you say the biggest hurdle was regulatory capture, that is certainly depressing.

Why is that depressing? Do you feel any company should be allowed to build a phone line above your street, instead of being a regulated monopoly?

This is what happens when you do that:

http://io9.gizmodo.com/photos-from-the-days-when-thousands-o...

You know, returning home to the USA a couple times a year, I am really struck by how many freaking power and phone lines are everywhere. It seems like every single street, except for the very core of cities downtown, and only the very wealthiest neighbors, have buried lines. In Germany, almost every town and every highway is free of these (IMO) ugly poles with lines everywhere. It's really an eyesore when you finally glance up.

Germany is also a significantly smaller area with more of the population in high density zones compared to most of the USA.

Aboveground cables are easier to repair and much less expensive to string up over thousands of miles.

I hear this argument a lot and it doesn't really hold water. Essentially every little town, village, city, even along highways, everywhere in Germany, the cables are buried. Even in low density towns. Even to farms out in the country. Pretty much the only things that aren't buried are high-tension lines.

Lines exposed to the elements wear faster than buried lines and are subject to more outages due to weather and accidents.

It's just that in the USA towns and cities are either too disorganized or too cheap to invest properly in infrastructure. Burying lines seems like such a small thing until you realize how ugly lines strung everywhere are. It makes me feel like I am coming home to a third world country sometimes.

My mother-in-law has a cabin in northern Minnesota. It's three miles outside a town of 150 people. Her utility lines are buried. Meanwhile, I live four miles from the center of a metro area of three million and everything in my neighborhood is above ground.

I suspect the major difference is that the power and phone companies in the little town are customer-owned coops while the utilities in my metro area are huge conglomerates.

A lot of those pictures seem to be due to limitations in the technology they were using, not limitations of regulation... however, to address your question- if society decided to grant someone a monopoly, it should be to the government, not a private entity. So, for example, if society decided we only wanted one set of fiber cables ran throughout the city, they would decide that the city would run them, and then lease access (using VLANS or similar tech) to any service provider that wants to use them.

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