If 'Big Tech' Is an Antitrust Problem, Why Are We Ignoring Telecom?
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It also matters what is happening going forward. Even in areas with no wired competition, wireless (cellular and satellite) exerts competitive pressure. 15% of high income households have abandoned wired internet for cellular only, and that number is growing. (There are more cellular-only households by a large margin than ones that use something other than Google search.) Meanwhile, there is no viable competition in sight for Google Search or Android.
Do they though? I mean, bing exists, sure, but it's inferior and more expensive (by lacking quality). Hey, you can switch to satellite telephony/internet or connect two tin cans with a string if you really want to get off of your mobile provider.
> cellular internet doesn't work for all the people in areas with bad cellular reception to begin with
But the majority of US citizens have a choice, right, the population centers do have multiple carriers?
For example if I wanted to purchase internet, I have a choice of two providers. If I don't choose either of those two, I cannot have internet.
For search providers, I have a choice among a much larger variety. Google may have larger market share, but you're not locked into using Google like you are with your ISP.
There's a difference between having multiple potentially inferior choices and only having two choices full stop. In my experience living across multiple states now you don't have a choice of ISP.
I'm from EU, Google has 95%++ market share here and there are not other serious options (besides Google's resellers, which are a bit slower, and not quite as good, but close). Bing exists, but the quality is abysmal, so it really isn't an option, just as satellite internet probably isn't for most US states (I assume - it is an option in Europe, albeit not a great one).
If you ignore the price, you have plenty of options for wired internet: hire a company to lay fiber straight to your home, connect it to a data center on the other end. Price and quality are the big factors in whether something is an alternative. Dial up or GPRS isn't an alternative to broadband, not because it's much more expensive, but because of the quality of service. Satellite internet can provide you with all the bandwidth you need, where ever you need it, but the price is prohibitive.
I do agree with you though: saying money isn't an issue when looking for alternatives is absurd. You can pretty much solve anything by throwing money at it. "You have an option if you consider it an option to pay 10x or 100x the price" misses the point entirely imho.
Would breaking google into 4 companies give us 4 googles or 4 bings? Considering that the more data you have, the better your results, it seems like winner take all is the norm in any sort of data-driven tech.
Can that be said for wired internet carriers? And can that be said at the municipal level and not just the national level? My point is that in many areas, people generally don't have a choice in who their internet provider is. So if you look nationally, yes, the coverage is split between several companies, but at the local levels the areas serviced are often carved up such that there are local monopolies.
DSL, cellular, satellite, cable broadband, and fiber broadband are not equivalent.
By your reasoning, as long as POTS exists, dial-up ISPs are a competitive threat.
I have no alternative. I am being bled dry because there is no competition of similar service.
Please, if you're going to compare things at least stick to fruit. This is apples and basketballs.
I don't even have working voice cell coverage at my house, much less data. Again, almost certainly due to a an entrenched monopoly limiting the market outreach of competition, and thereby obviating the requirement that they themselves perform adequately enough to retain customers.
Q.E.D.
The only other way to get your math to work out is to assume that only a very small portion of Comcast’s footprint has no other cable/fiber competitor.
As to your cell situation—what mechanism do you think creates this competition-limiting monopoly? And why doesn’t that same mechanism apply to say my house (in the DC exurbs), where all of the big 4 have a decent signal? (Or the majority of the country, where at least three providers have coverage?)
Not saying much at all there.
So what are they using? Mobile phones--Pew says 20% of adults do not have broadband at home, but own a smartphone. Or nothing--Pew reported that 11% of U.S. adults do not use the Internet at all.
Thus the U.S. feels pressured to keep up.
European or Asian (broad rhetorical buckets) regulations have no direct impact on US domestic regulations. Meaning that even if the EU held Google accountable they could continue to operate at home without changing their practices. While the argument can be made that regulation is likely to follow domestically I don't think that can be held as a truism under current geopolitical landscape.
Even if domestic regulations followed there would undoubtedly be a gap, during which companies would leverage that imbalance. Google would be pressured to make the most of its advantage in its shrinking monopolistic market while smaller companies would press their advantage abroad where they have better access to the market, investors, and customers.
Domestic inaction would be a net loss in the face of foreign regulation.
98% of census blocks have multiple ISPs offering 10Mbps+
82% of census blocks have multiple ISPs offering 25Mbps+
(This doesn't count wireless offerings.)
[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-355166A1.pdf
‘Measuring the Economic Impact of Broadband Act’ was introduced in the senate recently.
Even the larger ones still only have a few hundred people (and those are dense, apartment-heavy areas where multiple ISPs are common anyway).
I don't doubt there is some polishing the numbers, but it's still a very granular measure.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18644726/fcc-broadband-re...
> But the 2019 version of the report has come with an unusual amount of political baggage
What? Why baggage? How? Zero explanation, just FUD.
> The census block system relies on data that only shows where providers could easily offer service, not where they actually do.
Yes, that's how it works. Also why every ISP I know charges a connection fee: they're not going to connect unless you first agree to be a customer.
> Starks’ statement questioned the figures. “It’s incredible to me that an error this large — approximately 62 million in overstated broadband connections — didn’t materially change the report,” he said.
BarrierFree is a New England service provider [1], in urban centers where customers have numerous internet options. [2] Without altogether leaving their geographic regions, there's simply no way for their results to affect the FCC report. Probably why their mistake initially went unnoticed.
> Starks points out in his statement that some blocks are larger than 250 square miles.
Maybe 0.01% of the time. No wonder this man is perplexed at statistical averages. Look at any census map and you'll see that census blocks are very focused.
And to top it all off, the article includes zero suggestions for improving the admittedly imperfect measurement. Comes off as just a hit piece.
It's really easy to fix, but just more work.
How about the actual number of homes that can get high speed data? The ISPs already know this to the single address, because when you go to their website to sign up, they tell you right there if you're qualified based on your address.
All they have to do is be forced to share that database with the FCC.
The link below is for a NJ suburb , and lists 6 ISP competitors. But three of them are just satellite services and two are Verizon. In practice, there are exactly two competitors here: the phone monopoly and the cable monopoly, but the FCC would point to this to say that there's robust competition!
Here's another one I just picked at random, in a suburb of Oklahoma City.[2] The FCC lists 9 different providers. 3 of them are Satellite, 2 are Cox Cable, and 4 are AT&T. Again, there are exactly two competitors here: the phone monopoly and the cable monopoly. Look around yourself.
Two long-term competitors are not enough for meaningful competition. Duopoly competition has the same strategic profile as the Prisoner's Dilemma. When you have the same two players in the game over a long period of time, they learn to cooperate. See Axelrod (1980) etc...
Regulatory capture, juking the stats, crooks and liars all.
[1]: https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/location-summary?version=dec2...
[2]: https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/location-summary?version=dec2...
It even claims we have AT&T fiber! Nearby neighborhoods do have it (along with google fiber) but not this one.
"Two long-term competitors are not enough for meaningful competition."
That is a legitimate argument.
Or to impose compulsory sub-licensing of those wires at fair and reasonable terms defined by a government agency. Like other countries with wire monopolies are doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_franchise_fee
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM6309.html
https://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-ju...
https://consumerist.com/2014/05/10/why-starting-a-competitor...
> SEC. 7. AWARD OF FRANCHISES; PROMOTION OF COMPETITION. (a) ADDITIONAL COMPETITIVE FRANCHISES.- (1) AMENDMENT.-Section 621(a)(1) of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 541(a)(1)) is amended by inserting before the period at the end the following. ; except that a franchising authority may not grant an exclusive franchise and may not unreasonably refuse to award an additional competitive franchise. Any applicant whose application for a second franchise has been denied by a final decision of the franchising authority may appeal such final decision pursuant to the provisions of section 635 for failure to comply with this subsection.
The 1996 Telecom Act also mandated non-discriminatory competitive access to poles and rights of way: https://pubs.naruc.org/pub/635DF852-FCB3-B3A2-D381-9A307381F....
Most big cities--which have the density to have multiple viable wire-line competitors--don't have competition for the same reason they have high housing prices. They make it onerous to build infrastructure. Baltimore, for example, would be a great Google Fiber city. It has city-owned conduits everywhere that would make deployment relatively easy. But nobody wants to build fiber there, because the city insists that every neighborhood has to be wired up, without regard to potential demand: https://www.wypr.org/post/why-comcast-one-and-only-cable-and...
> “We’ve, in fact, asked other cable operators if they’re interested in coming into the city and, so far, nobody else is,” says Minda Goldberg, a chief solicitor in the city’s Law Department.
https://www.wired.com/2014/06/holding-back-high-speed-intern...
> But don’t pop the champagne. Many factors could derail the progress. One is a complaint sometimes raised when Google, in particular, starts negotiating with a community. The complaint? The new investment will create a digital divide because Google does not commit to connect every neighborhood. The argument, while sometimes well-intentioned, ignores history, economics, and the reality of the digital divide. Moreover, its proponents fail to acknowledge the consequences of their arguments.
> As we have seen in Gig.U negotiations, must-build requirements make projects unsustainable. Communities can wish for anything they want but if the economics don’t work, it won’t happen. Recently, Los Angeles put out a request for proposal (RFP) seeking a guaranteed citywide fiber build out. Broadband policy expert Harold Feld correctly noted, “I look forward to their RFP for a unicorn supplier, because I think it's about as likely under these terms.”
HOWEVER, there is ZERO competition so:
* data-caps
* horrendous over-charges
* UPLOAD (on a 1000Mbit line) ~= 30 Mbit
So very much no. The wired-line sector is a natural monopoly that should be like roads to the airport. I should pay a very small bit in taxes for good connections to the global hub, and at said global hub I should have my choice of services from many providers.
The state had the forsight to lay tons of conduit a decade or two ago whenever they do road work so that there's plenty of space for bandwidth upgrades and what not across the entire state.
For huge swathes you can have lovely ancient old ADSL on your copper phone line or Comcast via cable. Oh and all Comcast plans in the Bay Area, regardless of what the marketing says, have a 1 TB bandwidth cap and charge for overages up to 200 dollars on top of your monthly bill, unless you pay them an additional 50 bucks a month to get the _actually_ unlimited option on all of the plans offered. As you can imagine, many of us living here routinely blow through a terabyte of bandwidth - just one cloud connected security camera can eat a third of it easily.
That’s literally it for most people.
> Silicon Valley, by contrast, seems like some parody of American municipal mismanagement.
And not hear "You were saying something about best intentions?" from Jules in Pulp Fiction.
ex-Verizon areas that aren't rural generally have fiber coverage, excepting Finn Hill. They committed to a bunch of smaller suburbs to have 100% fiber coverage by 2008, which mostly got done. Sadly, they only go up to 300mbps symmetrical for $50/month iirc.
Cable internet is the only game in town in most of the valley unless you want 40mbit DSL.
If Frontier is your RBOC, they have 300Mbps for $50 iirc in 90% of the non-rural areas they serve. Check https://frontier.com/order-online/plan/package
Comcast is hot garbage, both the offerings I mention are fiber, and the gaps seem to be caused by poor enforcement of the franchise agreements in the relevant locality, eg: Frontier was supposed to have 100% fiber coverage in Kenmore a decade ago, but the city isn't consistently assessing them fines so there is no reason to meet the contract.
Seattle has no universal coverage mandate, but a complex customer income weighting metric to prevent redlining. IMO we negotiated a worse agreement than Kenmore: https://www.seattle.gov/tech/services/cable-service/cable-fr...
"Speeds up to 12 Mbps are available in your area!"
It's not just that they are monopolies, but that they are anticompetitive monopolies. In some cases, they are even granted by local governments.
I absolutely believe investors would collectively drop a cool $50 billion if they could become a direct competitor to Google. Why can't they? Not because Google will go after them in a direct way, but network effects are de-facto monopolies, and you'd probably have to spend a $500b dollars and never make money to start making a real dent. Its an impassable moat - the only chance any company has is to have a massive share of whichever platform comes next.
I can use Bing. I can use DuckDuckGo. I just don't want to.
However, I've been a Verizon customer for almost a decade against my will.
If Google began to charge for their services, at least there would be a way out. If a single market telecom raised prices or change policies, there isn't any real recourse.
If it is the later I can say I have definitely been harmed by cost cutting measures related to quality of service within telecom. Contractors who don't have enough training and are overworked have completely supplanted full time personnel who know their company's product and can provide competent support.
Google's probably the best but being better than your competition or offering products they don't doesn't make you a monopoly.
semantically, that's true (since mono- implies one) but that doesn't mean that they can't all exert monopoly power in the same market and be an oligopoly. each establishes unfair advantages in the same market and stifles competition, like effectively excluding new extrants, for instance.
monopolized markets aren't simply defined by the number of dominant players, but rather by how fair and competitive the markets are. while market share is an often-present characteristic of monopolists, you could have one player with 60% market share that doesn't have sufficient market poewr to raise prices. and higher profit margins resulting from undue influence over a market (with or without significant market share) can be the telling characteristic of a monopolist.
in constrast, (asian) night markets seem to be a paragon of competitive markets, where there will be 29 competitors for the same product all lined up in a row.
I don't like it because it's not how market economies are supposed to work, but we absolutely need strict controls on pricing. For example: instead of allowing them to charge 4000$ for an ambulance ride, set the limit to something more reasonable, say 100-300$ depending on the COL in that area.
Also, expanding the labor supply of doctors and nurses would also help. Right now, there are strict limits on the # of doctors that can be made.
edit: i ask that question, because who is going to eat that cost?
If the hospital is charging 200$/hour or more for administration or more then they should eat that cost
basically it says the milleage is just 84$ (that includes all ambulance related costs: maintenance, gas, depreciation of the ambulance, etc) and that's already being very generous. Another 127$ goes to state of new york. we can get rid of that entirely.
they didn't mention the cost of labor, but we can assume about 75$/hr as you said. maybe another 75$/hr for rediness. "Part of what shocked Santoro is the fact that he received what he considered very little care: An EMT took his vitals and gave him oxygen, he said"
Where the heck does alll the rest of the 2100$ go? I would guess: It's all markup that goes to administrative waste and profits.
So, let's get rid of the extra 2100$ worth of administration and keep everyone's ambulance bills lower. that will lower your health insurance bill by a huge amount too.
There are alternatives to Google search. I used them before Google existed. I still use them today, when I want to. I have the choice, which is exactly the difference between the telco monopolies and this tempest in a teapot about Google.
To me this is not the biggest issue. The biggest problem is YouTube.
YouTube is a ravenous black hole that you can't keep content out of--and that is ALL Google's fault. If I put a video online and I don't want it on YouTube and it winds up there, YouTube should have to pay a sufficient fine in a timely enough fashion such that it won't happen again.
Instead, Google banks on the fact that the small guys would have to expend so much money to fight Google that it isn't worth it. That's behavior that the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age would be quite familiar with.
But also what you're asking for is ridiculous. It's not reasonable to expect content aggregators/platforms to be able to conduct provenance investigations on all content.
Why should YouTube be liable when someone with a vendetta misuses their platform?
Why? It's content they have no license for right on their servers. It's a purely political decision for providing safe harbor. But there could be made legal arguments for doing not.
But as for why most of those legal arguments don't make sense: what you're suggesting is that if I defraud you, you're now partially liable for the damages from that fraud to third parties, even though you're one of the injured parties.
That's not how our legal system works.
Why not? A mere mortal would have to get permission from me to derive a monetary benefit from my content. Why should we exempt Google from that?
People seem to have forgotten that it is not the job of the content creators to make sure that Google has a scalable business. If Google can't scale provenance clearance, then they should have to shut down general uploading.
YouTube is not a search engine and does not deserve the same protections.
> Why should YouTube be liable when someone with a vendetta misuses their platform?
Because Google has legal recourse against the person with the vendetta for recovery. You can also make situations like this eligible for exemption (but Google would have to prove it).
However, this kind of situation is BY FAR the exception. Far more common is someone uploading and monetizing content that is not theirs to do so.
Right, but that mere mortal is the one defrauding Google.
> YouTube is not a search engine and does not deserve the same protections.
DMCA safe harbor doesn't apply specifically to search engines.
> Far more common is someone uploading and monetizing content that is not theirs to do so.
Yes, that's defrauding Google. The point is that Google shouldn't be liable for when someone defrauds them.
> Because Google has legal recourse against the person with the vendetta for recovery.
The problem here is that you're claiming that google should be liable for a painful enough fine that it won't happen again. If you're our for punitive damages against a billion dollar corporation, no, you can't, get recourse from an individual. Sure google could sue me for the value of the fine, but that doesn't mean I can pay.
Except that Google is still defrauding me too. Google should not get to make money off of my content without my permission.
If Google were simply hosting the content and not serving ads, not taking paid subscriptions, etc. then your points that Google should not be liable for the behavior of the users holds a lot more water.
For example, YouTube could set the default that everybody can upload, but people can only monetize or serve ads on content after verification. Now, I still think YouTube would need to be disincentivized as it is still freeloading off the commons, but that's a very different problem, and YouTube is in a much more sympathetic position.
Now, would all of this kill YouTube? Quite possibly. However, once you prevent YouTube from freeloading, you might actually get a video service that has a business model that doesn't suck.
disclaimer: my opinion, as always
I don't see how this can be true, Search is one of the most vulnerable, least defensible, no-moat services Google offers, and also its most important. DDG and others suffice for mainstream searches, even if techies and others notice Google is still better for niche specialist topics.
It's very easy to switch, only habit and "it just works" keep mainstream searchers on Google. As a monopoly it seems so tenuous, a far cry from owning a natural monopoly on physical infrastructure.
But yes, cellular and satellite providers have started to provide a saving grace of disruption in that market. We'll see if it ends up being enough.
So while it appears that wired telecom is a monopoly they don't make money like monopolies. Compare Google Fiber with Google Plus. Google had people literally begging them to put Fiber in but backed off because they couldn't make (enough) money. Plus was a hugely important project for them but they canceled it because they couldn't beat Facebook.
We've seen major tech companies take aim at the monopoly/duopoly product of a rival and they've all failed:
Microsoft poured billions into Bing, Maps and mobile for little market share
Google couldn't dent Facebook with Plus
Amazon and Facebook's phones fell flat
Was that the reason, or was it because the other telecom companies were lobbying to keep Google from accessing rights of way and expanding to other cities. (One failed example:[0])
In many jurisdictions, the cable and telecom companies are attempting to make it illegal for municipalities to install their own government-run internet because they really don't want to compete. It's ridiculous. [1]
Had Google been allowed to compete like in other industries, they probably would have crushed the telecom companies. But they weren't allowed to.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber#Reactions [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/another-state-la...
Yes.
> or was it because the other telecom companies were lobbying to keep Google from accessing rights of way and expanding to other cities. (One failed example:[0])
A failed lobbying example is terrible evidence compared to the sweetheart deals Google got and the lengths cities went to attract Google (from Wikipedia):
The initial location was chosen following a competitive selection process.[18] Over 1,100 communities applied to be the first recipient of the service.[19][20] Google originally stated that they would announce the winner or winners by the end of 2010; however, in mid-December, Google pushed back the announcement to "early 2011" due to the number of applications.[21][22][23]
The request form was simple, and, some have argued, too straightforward.[24] This led to various attention-getting behaviors by those hoping to have their town selected.[24] Some examples are given below:
Baton Rouge, Louisiana supporters remade the Supertramp song "Give a Little Bit" to "Give a Gigabit".
Greenville, South Carolina utilized 1,000 of their citizens and glow sticks to create "The World's First and Largest People-Powered Google Chain."[25] From an aerial view, the title "Google" was colorfully visible.
Topeka, Kansas, temporarily renamed itself "Google".
A small plane bearing a banner reading "Will Google Play in Peoria, IL?" flew over the Google campus in Mountain View, California.[26]
The mayor of Duluth, Minnesota, jokingly proclaimed that every first-born child will be named either Google Fiber or Googlette Fiber.[27]
The city of Rancho Cucamonga, California, dubbed their city, "Rancho Googlemonga".[28]
One of the islands in Sarasota, Florida, was temporarily renamed "Google Island".[24]
Municipalities and citizens have also uploaded YouTube videos to support their bids. Some examples:
A YouTube video in support of Sarasota, Florida, used the Bobby McFerrin song "Don't Worry, Be Happy".[24] A video for Sarasota was uploaded through Facebook’s video service.[24]
Comedian and United States Senator Al Franken made a YouTube video to support the bid of Duluth, Minnesota.[29]
Ann Arbor, Michigan, has its own YouTube channel[30] featuring a David Letterman-style Top Ten list delivered by town VIPs such as Mayor John Hieftje and University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman. Ann Arbor also held a city-wide GoogleFest,[31] kicking off with a gathering of hundreds of participants dancing and chanting "Ann Arbor Google Fiber, ain't Nothing any finer."[32]
All of those examples are the kind of thing that municipalities do because it's easy and doesn't actually address any of the base issues.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseackerman/2012/08/04/how-ka...
Provo sold them their fiber network for $1 as another example. Every city that got Google Fiber gave up concessions and promised to help Google expedite construction.
It seems pretty clear to me that ISP is like landlord - they need to either be nonprofit or it is a matter of time until whoever is in charge discovers or is replaced by someone who knows that most of the customers are pretty darn stuck and can be shaken for loose change.
I feel like the fact that cities are willing to kowtow to google for Please God Any Alternative To Our Isp Overlords is evidence that the ISPs are doing something that is particularly bad and most small governments are powerless to stop it.
I would want to see the margins for just operating high speed internet service. I suspect their overall margins are lower because their financial picture is clouded by things like cable TV and content costs. A big reason why telecoms suck is precisely because if you just want high speed internet, they force you to buy all their bullshit content as well (for me, it's cheaper to buy internet + cable TV than just internet!), and they make it hard to buy that content any other way. The main action I'd like to see taken against telecoms is to force them to spin off their content businesses (and they never should have been allowed to buy them in the first place).
Something doesn't add up. If it costs $50/mo to get cable TV content, why does it cost me $-10/mo with comcast?
1. https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/tech/2016/04/11/googl...
You can't really break it out that way. The TV service and internet service use the same physical wire. That's a fixed cost per household and once you have it, it's only marginally more expensive to send TV with the internet. Double so since people without cable packages tend to replace them with streaming services.
That values the content at near zero, which I think is not correct, and part of the game telecoms are playing with their (local) monopoly pricing power.
If you want to do a comparison compare consumer internet cost vs performance to places with a healthy and regulated market for internet service.
Also, by this logic Amazon could never be regulated. It doesn't make sense.
If they were really wasting ~20% of their revenue someone would buy them or do a hostile takeover.
Why risk innovation when stomping out competition is much more straight forward and predictable?
When I look at major industries: social media (sadly, IMO), telecom, health care, transportation, military, and more; what I see are industries that need regulation in order to meet the needs of society, but that is based on my point of view of the world. My guess is that the folks with capital and data, and thus power, view the situation very differently, and are more focused on their own needs than those of a more nebulous society that has needs. I believe that this can be seen in the practices of businesses throughout the United States.
So, are "we" ignoring telecom? No, that headline is aggravating. Why isn't it "Antitrust issues in Telecom"? Because society has been trained to be enraged. Why? Because it serves those who already have power, and they disagree with me about how regulation should work.
Then when the low-hanging fruit is all those agencies can pick, which happen to have the largest impact on middle- to low-income families, it gives more fodder to cut and gut the agencies.
There are government agencies that I'd like to see gutted, though, like the prison system, the support of the weapons manufacturing industry by our military which I calculate as grotesquely unecessary, etc. There are others that disagree with me strongly on this issue. I'm not right, just opinionated.
If Facebook decided to ban me tomorrow for whatever reason, I still have access to the rest of the internet. If my ISP decided to charge another $100 a month to access the internet, there would be nothing I could do to fight it.
You'd have to make an argument that site access is a right, which throws out moderating a platform for abuse or spam entirely.
Specifically, copper/fibre last mile lines are owned by companies which are prevented by law from acting as ISPs, and similarly required to wholesale lease access to their lines to any ISP which wants to use them, at a regulated price (or lower).
The result is a hyper-competitive ISP market where I can choose from dozens of ISPs (almost) anywhere in the country. Combined with a few hundred million in government investment, and I can get gigabit fibre almost everywhere in the country from a world-class ISP.
I have basically no complaints about my ISP, and it's all thanks to government regulation.
What’s more interesting is the recent suggestions of seeing industries with a monopolistic business model such as social media as natural monopolies. Perhaps we should regulate Facebook rather than argue for breaking up telecoms?
We busted up Ma Bell once long ago, and it has just coalesced back together. The capital costs and infrastructure tend towards it being a natural monopoly, so I don't think that we'll reasonably see a million telecom flowers bloom without putting the finger on the scale heavily.
Software is so much more ephemeral, and we have a much healthier oligopoly of big players. Even the sick old man of computing, IBM, is doing better than Time Warner did trying to compete in cable.
I should explain: In simple terms, ENUM allows you to turn a phone number into a SRV record that points at a PBX via a DNS lookup. The ITU allocates the zones to registrars, the zones neatly map to country codes - its a great idea.
However, as you can imagine this is not very popular with big telecoms who are used to charging by the second/minute and location by distance which is obviously bollocks when you turn a circuit switched network into a packet switched one that no longer routes calls via satellites to cross the Atlantic (eg). OK pricing and tech for "POTS" has come a long way since I were a lad but it is still a nice little earner over letting us lot do our own thing.
You can also imagine that Google, Facebook int al would also suffer a collective coronary should us lot be able to do our own comms without them.
I'm fairly sure that you (for a given value of you) can't remember the last time you used a "landline" but if ENUM was available it might have been a few minutes ago and not logged externally and charged as though it was 1970 sigh
This stuff just feels like whataboutism to me. There's no reason we can't tackle both big tech and telecom. If wait turns then the telecom industry will just say "what about other utilities!". Those utilities will say "what about the defense industry!" or whatever the hell.
"What about these bad guys!!" just feels like an attempt to deflect attention away from tech.
I have a gigabit connection from them that I pay $60 / month for (they lowered the price when I tried to leave). It's the fastest internet connection I've ever had.
I hate Telecom monopolies as much as the next guy, but the comparison is so inaccurate to the point of being useless. What's next? Comparing 'Big Tech' to Utilities?
There is some psychology amongst the regulators that results in them not fining or sanctioning large players because they don't want to make them go bankrupt and further consolidate the market.
You can have a monopoly in America, as long as you don't do anticompetitive things to get there, and don't do anticompetitive things while you are there from within your company. (protip: the trick is to change the laws and regulations to favor advantages you have and make it impossible for new entrants)
This is NOT vaporware. The theory behind it is simple and solid. It works and is happening right now. The fact that is uses shitcoins doesn't make it a scandal or get-rich-quick scheme.
In other nations, with functioning regulation, unbundling was considered unworkable so they required that a separate entity would own the local loop.
Telecom/ISPs are afraid of antitrust, being labeled a utility and competition, they work overtime to throw the blame onto Big Tech starting way back with net neutrality and Netflix share of the market. It wasn't Netflix using the data it was the users. Since then ISPs have been funding mud slinging against Big Tech so they can compete with them on ads by removing privacy protections and content so they removed net neutrality against the will of everyone [1].
Maybe 5G will shake up the telcos and ISPs controls they have bribed to put in place using regulatory capture. The attack on Big Tech is partially funded by them just like oil companies pushed anti-nuclear energy along with opposition to green tech. Big Oil funded many of the anti-nuclear campaigns, probably even had some sabotage involved [2].
ISPs aren't even using the market to get ahead with good products like Big Tech, they are using bribes and regulations that keep them in their false monopolies and fixed markets.
ISPs share fixed local monopoly markets by putting one good ISP and a bunch of smaller ones that don't compete like a Game of Thrones.
FCC reports find almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds, even at 25Mbps, 43 percent of the US had zero ISPs or just one [3]. For a modern broadband innovative market this is unacceptable, there are industries of the future that rely on fast network we can't even get going due to the feet dragging and rent-seeking local monopolies of the ISPs/telcos.
The one time innovators, the ISPs/telcos, have become local monopolies directly harming innovation and network growth, they now have data caps, net neutrality add-ons (like Cox Elite Gamer), content options and privacy protections removed to discourage and reward broadband providers for NOT growing but nickel and diming people [1].
I remember in the 90s when broadband, cable, ISPs, telcos were innovative and the leaps from landline to other sources was amazing. They were innovative then, run by engineers and product people. Now they are rent seekers, holding back innovation, run by HBS style MBAs where everything is a resource and every dime extracted with minimal reasons to innovate or expand without rent-seeking controls in place.
Imagine if water, electricity or other utilities were this toll road like, we'd live in less quality of life.
The network is a utility and platform to innovate and build on, not extract the value and slow innovation
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/fcc-announces-plan-aba...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
[3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/fcc-r...
This is how big of a problem it is. I would recommend any founder to delay startups and let anti trust probes and hopefully splits happen. Otherwise what happened to Snap, will happen to you.
Conclusion: Big Telecom is a net good.
> Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first?
Probably not for the Department of Justice. Some problems with that approach:
1. If you are trying to address the issue of limited choice in ISPs, I don't see how breaking them up addresses that. If you split an ISP that has a monopoly in a state, say, into separate ISPs for, say, each county...you've just gone from having one monopoly to having several monopolies. The limited choice is because there is only one cable coming into my house, and splitting up the company that owns that cable doesn't change that.
Addressing that probably requires something like making the last mile data transport a regulated utility that ISPs operate on top of. That would probably require Congressional action and a new President to do nationwide or to allow states to do individually.
2. Competition among ISPs in a region can vary dramatically city to city, and even neighborhood to neighborhood. I've not extensively researched this so maybe this is wrong, but the impression I've gotten is that an ISP's prices in a region tend to be pretty similar between those places within the region where they are the only choice, and those places within the region where there are alternatives with similar performing alternatives. That could make it hard to show that the ISP is abusing its monopoly in those parts of its territory where it does not have competition.
3. Aside from rural areas that only have DSL via the phone company, in most places there are multiple ISPs available. It's pretty common to have both cable and DSL, and in many cities there is also a fiber option. There's also wireless options, ranging from the regular consumer service of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, and the various MVNOs that are built on those networks, and many places also have wireless available that is not based on the cellular networks.
You might argue that, say, cellular wireless is not really a viable option to Comcast or Charter or whoever the cable company is in a given area, due to the vast difference in speed. But you will have to actually make the argument. You won't be able to just say that they speed difference makes them different markets. You'll have to actually look at how people are using these various services and show that they really are not comparable.
I think that the factors in #2 and #3 make it almost impossible to win an antitrust case against a major ISP as a whole. The DoJ would have to bring smaller cases alleging monopolization in specific regions, tailored to the specific way the factors in #2 and #3 play out in that region.
Having to do this region by region, or even city by city in some regions, would make this a very long, expensive pursuit. (And where they win, there is still the question of whether or not there is an effective remedy they can apply).
Thus, it is probably better for the DoJ to leave this issue to Congress to deal with via legislation.
In both 2017 and 2018, Alphabet is the first listed corporation[0], which is probably the reason I see the claim made, most of the rest are associations.
[0]If you ignore BC/BS, which is a "federation of 36 independent companies", though that is largely a way to deal with the law requiring health insurance be in-state. If you want to, I'd accept saying Alphabet is the second corporation on the list, if we're being real.
...to connect to the gateway they specify, and pull reams of data from with nary a bat of an eye from Washington.