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Comment by weej | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you, but there is one key difference...you are paying your ISP for the service. Google, FB, etc. provide free service offerring in exchange for your data.

If ISPs are going to monetize customers traffic then their terms of use better damn well call that out.

There is potential here for new business model for privacy based ISPs (ex: think duckduckgo for ISP) where customers pay a premium for such an offering.

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Do you need an ISP? How about a preconfigured router / modem that uses a privacy-minded DNS + VPS? My parents and most of my friends for example wouldn't know how to do any of that.

Mind you many of them have no idea, but as their goto I could make a smart recommendation and they would likely follow.

Oh! And package it with a better than average 2FA. Maybe a Yubikey or similar.

More or less sec in a box. Perhaps not 100% complete and bulletproof but better than the current situation.

bahnhof.se is an example of this. (swedish isp).

No there isn’t. Where in the world can you select your ISP? in a meaningful way.

Not the U.S, that's for sure.

But from what I've heard practically anywhere in Europe, and definitely in Japan.

You have Internet choice in most of Europe if you count DSL, but people in the U.S. tend to dismiss DSL out of hand. Excluding DSL, in German you've got cable ISPs which largely don't compete in the same geographic area, and almost no fiber penetration. France is similar, though with more fiber (but still less than in the U.S.).

yeah in Japan you have major net providers and there is even a difference between the network you rent and the ISP. For example you can be on a NTT fiber line but use a different ISP on that line.

> For example you can be on a NTT fiber line but use a different ISP on that line

as an american living in a major city, this exceeds my wildest dreams of internet service.

It's the difference between a regulated pro-consumer free market, and a lobbyist controlled market presenting a duopoly as a free market.

It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful.

The difference is that NTT lost money for years offering wholesale fiber below cost: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.489... (pages 11, 16). It could do that because it has a national near-monopoly in the wholesale space (it get some money from every subscriber, no matter what ISP they use), Japan's economy offers much lower returns than the U.S.'s (making low return infrastructure investments relatively more attractive), and NTT is 1/3 owned by the government (which ordered it to deploy fiber, regardless of profits).

> It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful.

Well regulation can be harmful if it protects the incumbents and prevents the introduction of new players. Lobbyists are usually pushing for more regulation, not the opposite.

It's not about regulation or not regulation, it's about what kind of regulation makes sense for a free market.

If this is a serious question in Kiev I had a choice of 4 high speed providers at a cost of about 1/10 what equivalent xfinity service is costing me here :)

Your random eastern european country? My apartment complex is wired by at least 2 ISPs. If I don't feel like using any of them, LTE-for-home boxes are available for reasonable price with reasonable data caps from a couple other ISPs.

pretty much everywhere in europe.

In India, most metro have 2-3 broadband providers, and most of country have 4-6 mobile internet provider.

I have three major ISPs available where I live that can over 100+ meg service.

Four here (Portuguese city near Lisbon) offering at least 250mbps.

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