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Comment by btipling | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why the government should create regulation to tell private companies what to do with their property in this case. I think a lot of the 'net neutrality' hubbub is irrational driven panic. If you don't like the service they provide just pay for something else that does. Running to the government every time a company does something that inconviences you as a user strikes me as dangerous. This isn't life saving health care, the vast majority of the arguments and infographics highlight the many shows you might not be able to watch or websites you might not be able to access. I'm sorry but your need to catch the latest Glee or access your friends update on Facebook aren't a convincing enough argument to agree to letting the feds regulate what private companies do with their business.

Let the downvotes commence.

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I've gotta say, whichever PR consultant came up with the idea of spinning net neutrality as "government intervention" really earned his pay.

But you're right. I'll just start my own trillion dollar nation spanning infrastructure project which owes it's existence to leased-from-government-for-nothing rights of way at every single level.

Here's the problem, in my view, with your position

" If you don't like the service they provide just pay for something else that does. "

In many localities there aren't many options for high speed internet service. The fear is that ISPs will find it easier to form a cartel and exact tolls than to compete with each other on service.

Then that is the problem, ask yourself why that is?

Oh yeah, its because the local government gives monopolies to certain companies. That is the root of the problem, address it there instead of bandaid hacks that break core system.

It is not explicit granted monopolies, but more so de facto monopolies arising because the costs for a competitor to enter the ISP business are prohibitively expensive. With material costs, labor costs, and easement costs, it takes a major investment to run a mile of cable.

My question is this: Why are fiber lines not administered by public utilities? It works for power and roads.

Here's a slightly older article (1998) about localities granting cable companies monopolies: http://www.fff.org/freedom/0598d.asp

As for the public utilities I completely or agree, or perhaps do it one better. Set up a not for profit that's independent from the government that sole purpose is to provide bandwidth with no restrictions.

Several locations have tried this (including my home state of Utah), and the cable/telco duopoly lobbyists got new laws passed that prohibited or severely restricted municipal broadband projects.

So once again, it's a problem with local government - a government that is a lot more responsive than the FCC or any federal solution. If the teclos can manipulate your local gov, imagine how effective they'll be at the national level.

I agree that local and state governments are a problem, but only because these national corporations have so much power over them. I don't agree (or at least I'm not yet convinced) that the FCC or Congress adding some "light touch" neutrality regulation would be a terrible problem, or that it's an either/or situation. In other words, these national ISPs need to be fixed at a national level, while broken local regulations need to be handled at a local level. Fixing one may help fix the other.

Once an ISP has established connections to several towns in a region, they can make much more compelling offers to nearby towns than an ISP with no presence in a region, because they've already got a backbone to the area. This is on top of the advantage that almost every residential ISP has in that they already have a monopoly on some other service (phone or cable TV).

ISPs probably should have a monopoly within a town, because it's not economical to set up several independent parallel data networks. The problem isn't that local governments grant these monopolies, it's that they don't regulate them. Ideally, local governments should be tightly regulating prices for internet connections and mandating that they are fair/dumb data pipes.

However, most towns don't have much bargaining power compared to the big ISPs who's quarterly revenue exceeds the town's GDP. Since the free market can't ensure fair or cheap internet connections when operating on the scale of the individual consumer or on the scale of whole towns, then we need to use state or federal legislation to keep the monopolies in check.

ISPs probably should have a monopoly within a town

Better yet, separate wireline service from the ISP. You rent the fiber, coax, or twisted pair copper link from the local infrastructure provider, who neutrally routes your traffic to your desired ISP.

The interesting part is that we are talking about private companies that depend on easements to function. When a business depends on easements, there is probably not a true free market going on. No regulations in that case are very dangerous.

This is an important point and worth providing a link to a full explanation of easements. Wikipedia seems to have a pretty comprehensive (and accurate from knowledge) review of the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement

It seems to me that same argument would apply to my local telephone, power, and natural gas company. Are you saying that they should not be regulated either? Just trying to understand your position here.

The simple explanation is that things like the radio spectrum over which wireless anything operates is not property owned by a company; it is a public good owned by all of us. Therefore the government has a role to regulate it.

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