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Comment by cdoxsey | Hacker News Reader

> They can supply better service at lower cost because they don’t have to line the pockets of executives and investors.

Instead they line the pockets of bureaucrats, unions and the local mayor's brother in law who had a truck and "won" the contract to lay fiber.

Then a citizen posts a screed decrying the behavior of the city board, and lo and behold, his website is suddenly unavailable to the rest of the city.

In a free market its competition which lowers costs. Firms can try to "line the pockets of executives and investors" but if their competitors don't, they're going to lose. We need more competition not a government owned monopoly.

A municipal internet is tolerable because a local citizenry can hold it accountable, but the further up the chain you go, the more likely that power is going to be abused.

Particularly as it relates to free speech.

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>his website is suddenly unavailable to the rest of the city.

Lots of people have been concerned about censorship when it comes to net neutrality. Not sure why the response is that we want legal protection instead of technical. All of the major vendors of devices that access the internet are pro net-neutrality. Can't we get censorship-resistant, privacy aware DNS resolution at the very least? Maybe not exactly this, but something like this would be nice:

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/dns-over...

I think realistically protecting DNS responses would be enough. Even a relatively advanced adversary would have trouble blocking your access to specific sites that way. Can you block a specific CloudFlare-protected site, or specific Twitter accounts? Not really.

AFAIK, the bits you can do with DPI aren't cheap. Only adversaries with reasonably deep pockets can apply. (To be clear: referring to things like sniffing SNI on TLS connections.)

Why do you think DPI isn't cheap? You're aware you can use Snort to drop packets based on SNI at 10gb+ with commodity servers, yes?

"More competition" is not going to happen in the US. The telecoms have secured regional monopoly status, in part due to structural factors, but also through government favor.

You have that backwards. Its primarily through gov favor (ILEC / CLEC / etc) - the structural factors are a by-product of their monopoly status not a cause.

So now, we have neither competition nor regulated utilities. Instead, we have the worst of all worlds: unregulated monopolies.

Funny, that's the exact problem we have today. Only instead of the government blocking your "free speech", it's Google, or Facebook, or whoever's platform that free speech occurred upon. It's also the behavior we can expect to see with the Title II restrictions removed from ISPs, with nothing on the horizon to replace them.

But don't worry, only governments can impinge on your free speech, so it's totally OK that Google and their ilk revoked your DNS. /s

> In a free market its competition which lowers costs.

What competition? For most of my hometown, we have two options, and we're not going to get a third without government influence. Low costs - hah. They're raising their prices (in concert with each other), because they know you don't have a choice.

> and we're not going to get a third without government influence

Sadly it is government influence which limits you to two, requesting more action from them will certainly only make things worse.

No, there's no legislation where I live which prevents competition. What's preventing competition is the tremendous up-front costs (laying fiber or copper), combined with the near-certainty of being under-cut by the incumbents are what really block competition. Who would invest millions into expanding services with the guarantee of failure?

Sure, the under-cutting is temporarily good for the consumers, but once the new player has been bankrupted, the prices go right back up.

We've seen it before; we'll see it again.

I'm not sure yet what to think about the idea of internet access as a social program.

However, I'd be less irritated about losing Net Neutrality if competition actually existed in the US. Break up the monopolies and maybe we can talk about allowing the free market to guide companies to do the right thing instead of requiring regulations.

In many (most?) cities in the US there is a local monopoly with just one or two high-speed providers. And this results in no real competition. I'm OK with my current (and only) provider but I'd like the option to change to someone else if they offered comparable speed at a lower cost.

I get that the cities don't want the poles along the road loaded down with a dozen different cables, but fiber optic is a lot thinner than copper pairs. Or perhaps they could have a couple of companies run the infrastructure at the wholesale level and resell to the "retail" broadband providers.

> I get that the cities don't want the poles along the road loaded down with a dozen different cables,

There's plenty of space on the poles. Cities don't let companies build fiber because of politics. It costs nothing politically to vote to deny an application for a franchise. Most voters just don't care about it. But grant a franchise on non-restrictive terms and potentially end up with new fiber being built to rich neighborhoods but not poor ones? As Google learned in Kansas City, now you've stepped on a political landmine.

All I'm going to say is that the Internet was so much cooler before the big players destroyed everything about it that made it that way. I worked at an ISP before the consolidation--even with dialup, it was just better. What we have today is censorship and police state spying.

The problem where I live is I have two ISP choices that are equally bad for different reasons. One the one hand I have the reprehensible Comcast whom I won't do business with ever again because of how they screw people and how bad cable tv is. On the other hand, I have Frontier, the world's shittiest phone and DSL service which is way over-subscribed. My neighbor refers to it as "North Korea Internet" which is accurate. I only go through Frontier because Comcast as a company is ethically far worse.

In free market there is also collusion though. Hard to prove and causes huge damages to the economy.

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