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Comment by modells | Hacker News Reader

The root problems are the LACK of regulation of throttling algorithms, content classes, obsfucated service agreements and enforcing the honesty of claims. Letting telcos "regulate" themselves and take over the FCC (Ajit Pai, et al) leads inexorably to unsustainable collapses and calamities like Enron, not necessarily within the telco arena, but externalities borne out in the real world.

No regulation leads to social Darwinian inverted totalitarianism where corporations are free to indirectly exploit, savage and murder whomever doesn't pay.

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Not true at all. Less regulation leads to multiple market entrants that can compete in price and quality. Over-regulation leads to the opposite of that. Remember how expensive long distance calls used to be? A direct result of regulation, same for regulation over airline routes. Regulation led to monopoly routes that gave Pan Am a monopoly on major international routes, making prices daramtically higher than they are today.

To be clear, I am not talking about safety regulation, but competition regulation.

Utterly untrue.

Look at New Zealand and countless other countries who have forcably unbundled their networks. Everyone pays less and there is true competition between providers.

Utilities like the internet gravitate toward monopolies and less competition. Utilities MUST have regulation to protect consumers from their monopolistic nature.

Why does then EU countries have much cheaper and faster internet and cell data than the US? The market there has much more regulations with one explicit goal being to increase competition.

> Why does then EU countries have much cheaper and faster internet and cell data than the US?

At least as to wired Internet, they don't: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t...; see also: https://www.recode.net/2017/12/13/16773062/global-internet-s.... The U.S. beats Germany, the U.K., France, Spain, and Italy (the countries comprising the large majority of the EU population).

The U.S. is also one of just five countries to have more than 90% LTE coverage: https://opensignal.com/reports/2018/02/state-of-lte. The big EU countries have faster LTE speeds, but much lower coverage (ranging from 65% in Germany to 83% in Spain).

That opensignal report is not about coverage. 4G coverage in The Netherlands is 95%+, not 89% as per the report. When the various operators got their 4G licenses they had to provide 95%+ coverage within a certain amount of years.

Belgium has a 94.5% coverage as per last year. The report shows 85%.

The reason is pretty simple, per the report: "OpenSignal's availability metric tracks the proportion of time users have access to a particular network."

That's not coverage. Your source doesn't show what you think it does!

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