Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is a somewhat unpopular opinion on HN, but I think net neutrality is only a mediocre local optimum. We can do much better without it.

Look at Denmark; they top the global ITU ITC ranking for internet service, and how do they do it? By totally deregulating ISPs while setting government policy to allow for competition (instead of trying to force ISPs to follow some arbitrary notion of good behavior in the abject lack of competition). They removed many ISP regulations (nominally antitrust regs) back in 2006 and it worked so well that they completely dissolved their rough FCC equivalent (NITA) in 2011.

We don't need the FCC ham-fist to improve or preserve the quality of our internet services. All we need is to set local and regional line lease policy to encourage actual ISP competition. Every X years, have an open auction to sell shared cable leases to Y different ISPs or something. Now instead of having to force net neutrality, some of the Z different ISPs that now service your house will use privacy guarantees as a cheap competitive advantage.

>encourage actual ISP competition

I don't know about you but in my town ISP competition is practically nonexistent. Usually it's a choice between Comcast and maybe one other local ISP. It's practically a monopoly right now, which is why treating internet as a utility and treating huge ISPs like Comcast as a "government regulated monopoly" makes sense.

This would be just like what we already have with our local power companies. It's technically a monopoly, but it's heavily regulated so that they can't raise prices on your electricity for no reason. It's also very easy to argue that internet is every bit as much of a necessity as power or water is these days.

In Texas, one can choose their electrical utility, but the transmission line are obviously the same for all of them. Public Utility Commissions (PUCs) work differently in different states.

BTW, reading some other comments of yours on this submission indicates you believe this action has something to do with a law and/or legislators; it does not.

I do understand that this isn't an affect of any legislation. But if we were to have legislators who (as bombastically unrealistic as this sounds) had the best interest of the people in mind and who made informed decisions about technology, they could have passed legislation protecting net neutrality. I believe Obama tried to do something like this.

This might work if we had government policy allowing for competition. Instead we prop up existing monopolies and prevent competition from springing up when the incumbent interests lobby (read: bribe) accordingly.

Hey, your roof is leaking. I'll help you demolish it. Then you can rebuild a new roof with state-of-the-art insulation and integrated solar! Of course, I'll only help with the demolition, not the rebuilding, but surely that's OK. When do we start?

Snark aside, it looks like the current government is interested in repealing net neutrality, but not in increasing competition. So, at the end of the day, instead of a leaky roof we're going to end up with no roof at all. I doubt AT&T and friends would have supported the repeal of net neutrality if they thought it would lead to meaningful new competition.

Except that most people don't have ISP choice: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...

Denmark is also small, dense, and wealthy. What works there won't necessarily work in a country like the US.

There are multiple good competitive ISPs in small, dense, wealthy areas of the US like San Francisco. That isn't true elsewhere, even including much of Silicon Valley which isnt that far away.

Do you think the FCC genuinely wants to encourage ISP competition?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com