Nationalize the internet | Hacker News Reader

Nationalize the internet

dailydot.com

59 pointsourmandave63 comments

When people want something nationalized, it usually comes with the asterisk *as long as the gov officials managing it are part of my tribe and preferred policy set. This isn't always bad, since sometimes we all are in general agreement, but it's important to ask yourself: in political systems power can shift fast, do you want these policies to be part of this shift? Do you want the internet to be managed by trump appointees?

Even if it isn't caught up in partisan fighting, the average voter isn't going to want to spend money on upgrades.

Do you think your grandma wants to increase the price of her internet by 10 bucks a month to get gigabit? Mine wouldn't.

Indeed, while I really want to like the proposal, democracy in the US doesn’t seem strong enough (and the judiciary don’t seem interested enough) for it to work.

It’s easy to imagine the Internet facing a different class of threats, from a united front of spooks, rights-holders-groups, and moralists. I can’t imagine the open uncensored web surviving long, unless it had some kind of mini constitution of its own.

This said, the future under private companies doesn’t look great either. ISPs are uncompetitive, exploitative, and anti-consumer, and the corporations who act as censors (Google, Apple, Facebook) have increasing skin in the rights-holder-group game, and are happy to build censorship machines for lobbyists, spies, and other authoritarians.

Maybe it’s worth thinking about what such a “Constitution for the Internet” might be now, before it completely disappears. (And perhaps while TBL and Vint Cerf have some fight left in them for a roadshow)!

I genuinely struggle to understand proposals like this. The current political system is broken - the FCC is symptomatic of that. In what world does it seem like a good idea to give more power to that broken system?

Then it's equally broken for everyone.

Nationalized or quasi-nationalized (heavily regulated) telecom companies used to be dysfunctional and sometimes comically inept but at least they weren't actively hostile against consumers and businesses.

Do you remember the monopoly ATT "ma bell" when a long distance call to friends or family was so expensive that it was reserved for emergencies or very special occasions?

Maybe they weren't actively hostile in their pricing but compared to today when you can talk to anyone in the world for no cost, it's not something I'd want to return to.

Data services back then like frame relay were so slow they could barely carry a single voice conversation over them. Long distance switching involved physically connecting together circuits over vast distances, the equipment involved was fantastically expensive and extremely intricate, in many cases all mechanical.

So yeah, it was stupidly expensive to make long distance calls because the equipment itself was stupidly expensive. Now the net cost of adding a phone circuit is almost zero, they just provision it on the digital switch. That today they charge for long distance is the criminal thing: We can video chat to anyone in the world for basically free.

The singular reason for declining prices is not deregulation, but the simple fact that as technology improves the cost of data goes down. First it became practical to transmit voice over IP, then later video, and now it's trivial for both cases.

The world you don't want to return to is where IP isn't omnipresent and bandwidth is crazy expensive because the equipment to handle it at scale hasn't been invented yet.

Technology has helped bring down the cost, obviously. But a big part of the reason long distance was so expensive was because government regulations forced AT&T to use its long-distance service to subsidize local service: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/r....

That's just part of the reason. The real question is did deregulation actually decrase prices and increase competition as was promised?

Here (Ontario) we had one telephone company and one cable company prior to deregulation. The telephone company (Bell Canada) was very tightly regulated. While telephone service wasn't necessarily the least expensive in the world, it was very reliable and at least ten years ahead of what was being offered in the US. By virtue of their rapid conversion to a fullly digital network, made possible by their partnership with Nortel, services like ISDN, the precursor to DSL, were reltively cheap and readaily available.

I knew people in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s that could not, for no amount of money, get anything faster than dial-up. Local telecom providers, of which there were many, were all using obsolete equipment and had terrible infrastructure. At the same time in Ontario anyone could get dual-channel ISDN for around $50/mo.

After deregulation here there was a little bit of competition, but then, like the US, the market quickly stabilized into a live and let live state where nobody wants to compete with anyone else for fear of retribution. Cellular service packages are suspiciously identical in terms of features and pricing.

Since they're de-regulated there's little we can do. We can't force them to fix their pricing. We can't force them to compete. We can't tell them to do a damned thing they don't already want to do.

Now Bell Canada is too busy being a media company, it owns a bunch of television stations, to care about anything other than profit. There was an opportunity there to keep them regulated and have a neutral, non-discriminatory network provider, but that ship has long since sailed.

If we have to choose between direct government control or government-endorsed cartel control that will just ease towards full monopoly sooner or later, I would rather just skip to nationalization so we can start talking about how we reprivatize it in a new, competitive fashion.

Telecom is like health care. What we have now combines all the worst things about a private system with all the worst things about a state run system.

If you think we have the worst things about a state-run system, you haven't tried using the internet in certain countries which do not need to be named.

It's far from as bad as it can get.

> skip to nationalization so we can start talking about how we reprivatize it in a new, competitive fashion.

Can you give an example of this successfully happening with other industries of comparable size? It seems like a pipe dream to imagine giving our government total China-like power over the internet only for them to benevolently hand it back later.

> The current political system is broken - the FCC is symptomatic of that.

If you look beyond the crisis de jour, the FCC over the last 20 years has largely followed the same path as the other telecom regulators in the developed world. Denmark, for example, deregulated telecom until recently getting rid of its version of the FCC: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/mercatus-layton-altern... (warning: PDF).

The biggest impediment in the U.S. has been state and local governments, which have frustrated Congress's efforts. While Congress, for example, made it illegal to grant local telecom monopolies in 1994/1996, state and local governments responded by imposing such onerous terms on potential new entrants that nobody but incumbents wanted to invest. In Baltimore, for example, Comcast has a de facto monopoly. The press, which is largely ignorant of the nuances of telecom regulation, paints it as Baltimore giving Comcast a monopoly contract: https://baltimorebrew.com/2016/10/18/city-set-to-approve-10-....

In reality, there is no exclusivity in Comcast's franchise. Rather, the franchise requirements are so onerous that no other company has even applied to build a network in Baltimore. That's despite Baltimore actively trying to solicit Google and other companies to come in and compete with Comcast: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/snubb....

What few people in this debate appreciate is that telecom is monumentally capital intensive, and that money has to come from somewhere. Moreover, that money is always the subject of competition from other needs. If we depend on private industry, investing in telecom has to be sufficiently attractive in comparison to other investments. If we depend on the government, money spent on maintenance and upgrading telecom infrastructure is money we don't spend on schools, public transit, etc. There is no "free lunch" where you get private companies to spend tens of billions of dollars a year while simultaneously adhering to a raft of government-set public interest objectives.

People seem to make proposals to increase government power and control while thinking optimistically of how the best possible government could use that power, rather than thinking about how a much worse government could abuse that power.

Even when the current government is one you like, you should always think carefully about agreeing to give them more power, and consider what happens when (not if) that government becomes one that is hostile towards you. If an idea to centralize more power and control suddenly sounds terrible under those circumstances, then it was terrible to begin with. If an idea still sounds good even under those circumstances, and has enough safeguards in place to make it incredibly hard to abuse, then it might be a good idea.

The alternative is that big corporations like Facebook and Google will control the internet, which seems way worse.

There is competition and choices between big corporations, limited as they may be. There's only one government.

Concentrations of power are problematic no matter where they're concentrated. At least with those, you have options to avoid them or mitigate them, and they don't have the force of law behind them.

It’s very similar to the question of whether it’s better for the government to provide healthcare or to get it from a private for-profit megacorp with an army of lobbyists. The government is by no means perfect, but at least their incentives are aligned with mine unlike a corporation with obligations to their shareholders.

The FCC was doing fine until Trump in my opinion. The telecom/cable/ISPs have been problematic for a long time due to natural monopolies and too little regulation (in my opinion) but the FCC’s actions have usually been attempts to fix those problems (when the industry lobbyists don’t win out)

If we are going to throw the FCC under the bus because it has taken a huge turn for the worse under Trump, then we’ll also end up saying the same thing about nearly every government department. DeVos is making a joke of our education department, science and environmental positions are filled with people who don’t believe in them, the State department has been shedding experienced diplomats as quickly as possible, etc.

It’s easy to blame government for these things (and more checks and balances, particularly on executive power, would certainly be welcome) but unregulated private schools and letting companies be stewards of the environment is much worse.

First of all, the way that people on both sides of the political spectrum decry the federal and government as authoritarian and at the same time want to give it more power, is literally Orwellian. Doublethink, to be precise.

Second, this article argues that the government should have a try at running the internet since the private sector ostensibly failed. The irony is that the situation today is exactly a product of government mismanagement. A vital infrastructure is underdeveloped, overpriced and operated by a duopoly - where exactly was the US Government when this happened? Where was the antitrust authority? Where was a liberal President of eight years, a man deified by the likes of the Daily Dot, who took on health insurance companies? Did the Congress deign to investigate this issue? And did the voters "vote them out" for failing to do that, as the author suggests?

Of course not. People tend to have a job, a life and a hobby - they can only care about a limited set of issues. And an increase in broadband pricing or a change in ISP product set is not one of those. They can get riled up, short term, but probably won't be able to sustain pressure, as is the case with the second amendment or healthcare. This is why the government officials have for so long neglected this issue, and this why the nationalized internet bureaucracy will have the same relationship with third party contractors (that ISPs will become) as FCC does.

I am not an expert on broadband legislation, but it seems like a better solution would be encouraging investment into small scale ISPs. A federal legislation that ensures backbone access, major tax cuts for investors, a lot of red tape for ISPs trying to get above city-wide coverage, things like that. If you have 2-3 ISPs per town and tens of those in a large city the net neutrality issue goes away.

edit:spelling

Generally, when you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, nationalization isn't the way to go.

I strongly disagree. I think if you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, giving it to the government is the last thing you want to do.

If you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, decentralisation is the way to go.

Edit: Oops! I totally misread your comment ("is" vs "isn't"). Turns out I'm agreeing :)

Governments inflate agency costs ad infinitum without increasing the QoS. This is not a law but based on statistics around the major countries.

Not always. Many European countries have nationalized healthcare, yet manage to have better healthcare outcomes than the US even though they spend much less per capita.

The question isn't why _government_ leads to inflated cost, the question is why _American government_ leads to inflated cost.

Better healthcare outcomes? I think you mean access: For example, the NHS looks very good until you realise that the rankings include access; Based on case-by-case outcome alone, it ranks relatively poorly - certainly less than most people would guess.

The US government spends about the same on healthcare as others do, the difference is in the amount of private healthcare spending.

Is that why America's private healthcare system costs more than any other country and yet we do not have any where near the top outcomes?

What statistics are you cherry picking to make your argument?

Other countries don’t have an entire political party who sees it as their mandate to sabotage all government social services.

Government interference is precisely the cause of our high medical costs (for instance, what do you think would happen to the price of Doritos if the government required everyone to purchase one bag of Doritos every week?).

Second to that is the government interference in farming (specifically, corn subsidies, which have led to an increase of corn products our food, resulting in higher inflammation levels in humans and the animals we eat, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc.).

IOW, more government == more worse

Medical costs were skyrocketing before the mandate and that growth has slowed since ACA passage. Your Doritos thought experiment isn't based in reality.

Edit: because its so silly: A better parallel would be a world where everyone needed Doritos. In this world if you found yourself in a situation where you needed Doritos and didn't have it, you could check into a 7/11 and get a bag at the outrageous price of $5.00 for one of those little lunch ones. Thanks to Reagan, your Doritos needs cannot be turned down by 7/11 even if you can't pay. Everyone else has to pay for your overpriced Doritos.

Does it make sense to buy cheap Doritos insurance now instead of the high cost of Emergency Doritos?

How do you juggle that option with the fact that other countries with much more government intervention (or entirely government led, like the NHS) have much cheaper healthcare, and better outcomes.

If everyone mandated that you had to buy dorritos, it's in dorritos interests to put the price up. But if the government produced the dorritos, and the government isn't a for profit business, it's in their interests to keep the prices as low as possible, at cost.

There was this great thread I saw on /r/libertarian, where someone posted some images about the NHS. It was supposed to make 'socialised medicine' look terrible by showing an obese guy costing the NHS £200 a day for a bed while refusing to reduce their diet - "hey look with socialised medicine you are paying for this guy! How bad is that!!!"

However it backfired when all everyone was talking about was how it only cost £200 a day for a bed.

Most people in the US have very little choice in health insurance providers, and very little involvement in the transaction between the insurer and the health care provider. It's technically private but really the customer (patient) is almost excluded. It has lost almost all the attributes of a normal private business.

How do you measure outcomes? The rich in Canada come to the States.

Measuring outcomes is a pretty standard flow and is aggregate. What rich people do is irrelevant as most people are not rich.

You sound very pedantic. Please illustrate yourself and don't talk if you don't know https://data.worldbank.org/topic/public-sector?start=2010

I'm surprisingly sympathetic to idea of nationalizing the internet, but the paragraph about "deregulation in general is bad" seriously baffles me. Not only because taking a principled stance on "regulation as a whole" is abhorrently coarse for me, but they specifically reference the airline industry -- and then links to an article talking about how good deregulation was? -- without blinking an eye or realizing that a vast majority of people view the 1978 airline deregulation as an obviously good thing.

I'm now slightly less convinced that nationalizing the internet would be a good thing.

People in countries other than the US might have something to say about that!

You mean, like china?

Maybe not because it’s a confederation of peers. As for ISP’s, Australia is not a good example because it’s poorly run, which it doesn’t have to be.

Instead, perhaps a GSE value-for-money internet, TV and mobile provider that’s a non-profit, customer-first, no-nonsense, doesn’t gouge people no matter their zipcode, and upfront about privacy and pricing. That way, where monopolies / oligopolies form and rural customers miss out, there is an alternative at a reasonable price. It’s like single-payer for connectivity that’s not the only game in town.

Less extreme, more practical and better run than the post office... more like a credit-union. Heck, make it partially employee- and/or customer-owned so people care.

I don't think creating a government monopoly is the solution to the problem. I think there needs to be more competition rather than less.

I think a good first step would be to remove the current barriers to local municipalities setting up their own internet services. There are a lot of small rural communities that have really crappy internet service, because the giant companies are unwilling to invest in the infrastructure required, but they do everything in their power to prevent the local governments from setting up internet service for their communities.

Chattanooga is an excellent example of what can be accomplished by local government, including gigabit fiber internet at reasonable rates.

This is going in the complete opposite direction than what's needed. You definately don't want a single ISP especially if it's run by the government.

You need more ISPs. A lot more. But for that to happen you need to make the last mile neutral and preferably run by an independent third party.

The next best thing would be for the last mile ISPs being required to lease the last mile to other ISPs at a fixed rate. This still has problems as the last mile ISP can pull some shenanigans like prioritizing their own customers for repairs, messing with the other ISPs traffic, etc.

No.

"Now observe the practical demonstration of the fact that without property rights, no other rights are possible. If censorship and the suppression of free speech ever get established in this country, they will have originated in [the FCC in] radio and television.

The Property Status of Airwaves: http://www.criminalgovernment.com/docs/aynrand.html

I would love for this to work, but im afraid the temptation for the government to control / censor information would be too great.

Either the corporations are going to do it, or the government is going to do it. Pick one.

The former please - it's been my experience that switching from Verizon to AT&T is somewhat easier than a bloody revolution.

What if they merge? Then what?

Anti-Trust?

What if the government isn't interested in that?

Civil law suits.

That's going to be really hard when the court is stacked with those sympathetic to the conglomerate because it can buy unlimited political influence.

This is not the case when there's a multitude of smaller players that have a vested interest in maintaining a competitive marketplace, or where they're all boxed in by regulations so that investors don't get wild ideas about unlimited potential profits.

I agree this is a dumb proposal, but what's interesting is that we're at a point where we have to decide whether the government or handful of huge corporations with local monopolies should be in control of the Internet. If that's the choice, I personally would favor the government which is at least notionally somewhat under our control. It's not like the Internet monopolies have any incentive whatsoever to push back against government attempts to assert control or censorship.

The better solution is a breakup of the massive telecoms into many, much smaller companies, including forbidding local monopolies on home Internet access. But I have no hope of that happening anytime soon.

> Conventional wisdom has been that private industry is better equipped to handle things than the government. Deregulation has been the agenda of baby boomer conservatives. And it has failed. It has failed the environment. It has failed the airline industry. It has failed education. It will fail the internet.

The biggest trend in administrative law over the last few decades has been reductions in the degree to which the government micro-manages the economy. In both the U.S. (with bi-partisan support) and the EU, industries have been privatized, invasive regulatory regimes have been replaced with light-touch ones, etc. Germany energy law post-1998, for example, is pretty recognizable to someone familiar with American energy law. There was a time when the government either owned major industries, or micro-managed things like the routes airlines or trucking companies ran and the prices they charged. Pretty much the whole developed world has agreed to get rid of most of that.

By and large, these reforms have been overwhelmingly successful. In the U.S. and EU, you can go almost anywhere and get a 4G mobile wireless connection, using networks built almost entirely with private money. UPS and FedEx--and services like Amazon built on them--are the direct outgrowth of the deregulation of air freight. Consumer airline ticket prices are a fraction of what they were a few decades ago (even though airline technology has evolved very little in that time!).

If you look at hiccups like wireless data caps or airline seats getting smaller as signs that deregulation has "failed," frankly you're off the reservation. Just look at areas of the economy that haven't been subject to deregulation. Some of the worst environmental effects are caused by public water utilities, which have for decades failed to make investments to improve their infrastructure. In most places, public water utilities freely dump untreated sewage into rivers when obsolete combined sewer/rainwater systems overflow, they poison kids by pumping water through ancient lead pipes, etc.

Re-regulation and nationalization is on peoples' tongues here in the U.S., but I'd suggest looking over the pond to see what they're doing. How did Sweden wire up its country with fiber? It wasn't through massive government investment, or by forcing private companies into the charity business through universal service obligations. Stockholm empowered to municipal operator to lay dark fiber, with no government subsidies and no mandate to cover any particular portion of the population: https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Stockholms%20Stokab%20-%20A%.... The network was built out not based on "public interest" considerations or trying to fight urban poverty, but simply by building in a demand-driven basis to high-value customers first.

And unlike the U.S., Sweden didn't wire up rural areas by forcing private operators to subsidize rural customers. Instead, it simply gave rural residents a 50% tax break on the cost of hooking up their own fiber: http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/Opinions/2013/Rural_FTTH....

Most Americans have an outdated notion of European and Asian economies and how they have changed in the last few decades (to great success too). They still think of Europe as universally more regulatory and less economically free, but in reality many countries have had some great outcomes because they have abandoned t their old tendencies in some cases.

I would really like to read a roundup of how other countries have wired themselves up and have states model the successful policies. Some of the policies might work well for an area geographically and demographically similar to a smaller county, and I'm okay with that. There is a lot to be said for forgoing a national policy and instead allowing 50 smaller policies. Economies of Scale doesn't seem to apply to government actions as well as private actions. Instead you seem to get Grift of Scale instead.

Thank you for this. I really appreciate the effort in describing how Sweden did their internet connectivity: it's worth mentioning that Sweden has or at least had one of the fastest average speeds per capita in the world.

Decentralize it! We need better measures of power centralization. When an ISP is effectively able to create its own monopolizing legislation, it might as well be part of the government. The government isn't going to buy them out and improve their architecture, so we need a new internet that is owned and operated by all of us all the time.

The government screws up something simple.... net neutrality... so let's give the whole darn thing to government!

The Government screws up the VA Hospitals so let's give them our entire health system!

Has there ever been a situation that the government screws up and someone doesn't gets the bright idea to double down?

Australia did this. Ask any Australian what they think about the NBN, I doubt any will speak highly of it.

Hm, I’m interested to see a good proposal for this -

>Last Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission, led by deregulation zealot Ajit Pai

Never mind. Unsubstantiated ad hominem in the first sentence. Move along.

I registered just to say this is literally the worst idea I've ever seen.

Hello, friend. Welcome to the site. I see you're new here, so I thought I'd let you know why you're being downvoted.

Your post isn't very substantive. You express your opinion, but you don't explain the thought processes behind your opinion. When combined with the snarkiness, it just wasn't a productive comment.

If you haven't yet, read up on the Hacker News Guidelines[1], that may help when posting something somewhat controversial.

We try hard to avoid forming an echo chamber here. Overly emotional and unsubstantive comments are downvoted, and controversial comments with a lot of substance to them are often(but not always, unfortunately) upvoted.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

edit: The irony of being downvoted for trying to maintain a positive, productive culture on this site is not lost to me. I won't bother to do so in the future.

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

They were new. It's important to teach people these things instead of just deleting every comment that is bad. It's on all of us to maintain this site's culture, it's not just the mods' job.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Noted.

The problem with making the government larger (in terms of responsibilities and influence) is that the incentive to be corrupt grows.

Then, when your government is large, the performance of your country starts depending on having a long interrupted sequence of perfect administrations, something that is very unlikely.

The idea of government is to have an entity that represents the best interests of people, to preserve and grow social capital, and achieve balance, not absolute control.

Being a bit more specific, I think the Internet should be regulated to prevent anti-consumer behavior, but not nationalized. Nationalize the Internet means that only the country can act as ISP.

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