Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackmott | Hacker News Reader

>non-profit member-owned cooperatives

some might call that government

It's a form of single purpose government where you know that your "taxes" are only ever going to the one thing the "government" was set up to do (also, there's the bit where you can resign your membership without moving to Somalia).

Most of the problems with modern government can be understood as a case of severe feature creep.

Don't these structures exist in the form of water districts and mosquito control districts?

I think the key difference being that with the hypothetical cooperative they can't compel your membership just based on where you live.

If that statement stopped holding true (as it sometimes does in the real world, with block associations that are compulsory) then yes I'd say it's equivalent to government in all the important ways.

Maybe the differences are subtle, but there are differences. That said, I've long been a proponent of shifting more and more services from "the state" per-se to these kinds of cooperatives. But I'm a government hating libertarian, so...

once all your services are shifted to the cooperatives, the red tape of all the different cooperatives will annoy you and you will hate those =)

Then you just use Gubernetes(tm) to organize your micro governments and all your troubles go away.

It can be argued, that communications, in particular internet connectivity is considered essential infrastructure, like roads and is the responsibility of the government to deliver. This doesn't really stray from my pragmatic libertarian view, but is just an argument of what is or isn't "essential infrastructure" or how it should be delivered and paid for. A backed cooperative is fine, so long as other providers are allowed to continue to operate (should they choose to), so as to establish baselines and competition.

> A backed cooperative is fine, so long as other providers are allowed to continue to operate (should they choose to), so as to establish baselines and competition.

That generally doesn't work out very well. If the incumbent keeps half the customers, the cooperative then has almost all of the same expenses but half as much revenue. And so does the incumbent. So costs per customer are double until one of them goes out of business.

This is what's happening now in the areas that have a legacy telephone company and a legacy cable company. The telephone companies have essentially given up on upgrading their infrastructure and are just milking what already exists until the cable companies put them out of business, because coax can carry more traffic than telephone wire. And neither of them is interested in installing fiber while the other still exists, because it would force the other to either do the same or slash prices, either of which is worse for both of them than the status quo.

But the initial outlay of Fiber won't be recouped in a short period of time regardless, and a government backed coop will have that paid via tax dollars regardless... If they're laying fiber via taxes, they're laying fiber, that is a fixed expense. And frankly as part of what I consider as essential infrastructure (communications), I'm mostly okay with that expense being from tax funding at a local level.

So, the coop actually has a pretty unfair advantage, but as long as it's local communities, I'm mostly okay with it. And as to local communities, larger cities are more disconnected than smaller towns. So there's some difference there. The coop doesn't have to be setup to recover initial outlay... it depends on the structure and how it's setup with the local municipality. As to the incumbents, they were also largely funded via tax dollars for initial outlay, and instead of planning for reinvestment/growth, they've chosen not to do so, and deserve to see upstarts encroaching on them.

In a cooperative, people voluntarily cooperate. But government compels them to cooperate.

But it's more complicated than that because the more local a government is, the easier it is to walk away from and the less crap it can do without strong negative feedback. It is more like a co-op, albeit it one that can change the rules on you after you've made a sizable investment. And one where people who've invested nothing have the same amount of say that you do!

Coop is not government, companies like Austin Energy is. Government monopoly is often far worse than its private counterpart.

She's really trying to say that the government manages the physical grid monopoly with no overlying network. Networks pay for access. Otherwise there are multiple fiber runs and waste.

Governance, government. Sure. I can buy that.

Are member-owned and worker-owned just variations on a theme?

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/...

it could also include a local agency fed up and finally looking to provide a service Comcast, AT&T, etc refuse to provide/expnad/etc.

In gold rush area along Highway 49 in Califnornia you have two prominent Coop/Local solutions .. Plumas Sierra Telecom who provides service to Plumas, Sierra and (I believe) Lassen county with different broadband options... PSREC has been adding fiber options.

Down towards Volcano/Sonora/Hwy 88, you have Volcano Communications.

In each case, rural communities stepping up where AT&T/Comcast and others step aside. These are endeavors I happily support.

Maybe they were fed up but it was the $15 million in government grants which made this happen.

true, there are forms of government where your vote is correlated to your contribution

Reply on news.ycombinator.com