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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Seriously. I don't understand why there isn't a movement to regulate ISP's like utilities at this point. Why aren't mayors and governors running on this as a major plank?

ISP investments, profits and pricing would all get regulated by the municipality. Performance is monitored and guaranteed.

I've lived in many, many apartments in NYC and each building has only ever had one choice -- Spectrum (was Time Warner) or Optimum. And it's always the same -- it's $24.99-39.99 at first, then after a year it's jacked up to $49.99-54.99, then another year up to $69.99.

It used to be you'd call to threaten to cancel and they'd re-lower it. But they haven't agreed to do that for over 3 years now -- they'll just let you cancel. They know you don't have a choice.

ISP's are so obviously by now a utility like water, gas and electric. Why aren't we treating them that way?

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Because very large companies with a lot of money are willing to spend vast fortunes to ensure we don't. If it costs them $200 million in lobbying to ensure that they hang onto $1 billion a year in revenue, that's well worth it to them, while the rest of us are too busy paying our too-high monthly ISP bills to scrape together $200 million to counter their lobbying.

A regular diet of TechDirt[0] on the subject, going back many years, tells quite a story.

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=muni+broadband

Why are the entire population just accepting the lack of democratic representation to defend their interests?

I'm not sure what you're suggesting as an alternative. Large groups of people just marched in the street to protest far more heinous injustice that this corruption and the result was violent attacks by militarized police.

What do you suggest it looks like for us to not accept this?

Because they're too busy fighting amongst themselves on wedge issues.

People like to claim that but I don't see that as a real reason. I honestly think Americans have just gotten used to being stepped on they just accept it.

That's my working suspicion. They gave up.

If you grow up with no experience of not being stepped on, exactly what would you be giving up on? How exactly do you expect people on average to not accept the general state of the world as it has been for their entire existence?

Acceptance is the default. People, by and large, often do not have the experience of holding ideals of which to give up on that do not in one way or another map onto their experiences in a way suggesting they are living in-line with their ideals.

Well others have pushed back.

What I would like is for you guys to at least say this, instead of all the tiresome "freedom" stuff. Acceptance is the first step.

oh i'm with you there

At this point only a general strike or an armed insurrection would be enough to budge the corporate/state system from its entrenched positions. Voting is not working- many politicians promise to fix this and other problems but once in office they have no incentive to actually do so.

Voting is working. The problem isn’t that (voting); it’s voters who don’t care and vote while uneducated on the issues.

Because some people just like to be used. I think they call it codependence.

Well, yes, but actually not quite...

It's an infrastructure game.

If I need to build new fiber/cable/whatever to X homes to get N% * X new subscribers, then those costs & profits have to amortize out to at least 0. And most of the time they dont.

We tried to fix this for electric power by separating transmission from distribution ("deregulating") and allowing consumers to have a choice.

There is conflicting evidence as to whether or not this actually lowered prices for consumers.

For internet services, bandwidth is essentially free for providers (for typical usage), so the main costs involved are infrastructure upkeep & customer support. Cable TV distribution & phone/security services typically subsidize these costs too.

Municipal broadband is a nice idea, but it takes a unique set of circumstances for it to work. Consider how many other municipal infrastructure services are 100% run by your city/county.

Maybe there's a different approach. The federal government wants to prevent Huawei from deploying telecom equipment in the US. Maybe we should look at a top-down approach to internet infrastructure funding, the same way we do with highways and schools. If they want to set the rules, they should put up the money to do so. But then again, look at the poor state of our bridges and tunnels...

What's abundantly clear is that telecommunications services are an essential piece of infrastructure for modern commerce. COVID eliminated any doubt whatsoever about this fact. So how do we make sure it's funded well, but also run efficiently? It's not a trivial question by any means.

> Municipal broadband is a nice idea, but it takes a unique set of circumstances for it to work. Consider how many other municipal infrastructure services are 100% run by your city/county.

Where I live, my electric, water, sewer and gas services are directly run by the city. Trash and recycling are billed through the city but operated by a vendor. They're great. I would love to have internet service through them, and the fact that this town above all hasn't managed to do that is ridiculous.

> Municipal broadband is a nice idea, but it takes a unique set of circumstances for it to work.

If "unique set of circumstances" means "not getting snowed under by lawsuits from major ISPs", then yes, this is true. But that's the government's fault for letting ISPs get away with such tactics.

> Consider how many other municipal infrastructure services are 100% run by your city/county.

Consider how many would be if the government would stop favoring major ISPs.

so your trash and recycling and water would be 100% municipal if the government didn't favor major ISPs?

I suggest you dig a little deeper and find out where these services actually come from in your community.

With whom my city subcontracts is irrelevant to me. I pay my city, and get the service I want. The fact that my city opens up the contract every few years to new providers is irrelevant to me. My relationship is with my city, and I wish the same could be true for my internet service.

> Seriously. I don't understand why there isn't a movement to regulate ISP's like utilities at this point. Why aren't mayors and governors running on this as a major plank?

Who do you think gave them these monopolies in the first place?

Exactly. They're making money!

Your local power, water, trash, etc company's have a local monopoly and serious regulation. Internet just has the monopoly bit.

My local trash company, in fact, does not have a monopoly. The city I left to move to where I am now implemented a monopoly trash service shortly after I left, and gave my street to a trash hauler that is quite possibly the most consumer hostile company I have ever had the displeasure of working with... worse by far than Comcast. Also interestingly, internet options were Comcast or I think Quest fiber. Sucks to be whoever bought my house, I guess.

There are like four different trash services we can pick from. It's kind of crazy to me. I guess when all you need is a truck, it's not a hard business to get into.

That's the answer to why most Americans have "no real choice" in Internet service providers, as well in countless other services like healthcare, where anti-competitive behavior has become normalized and tolerated (or actively encouraged) legally.

Even when it's not legally a "monopoly", it's a collusion among the most powerful corporations and their revolving-door regulators that allow continued exploitation of the public.

The ISPs have bought themselves some democracy. They've managed to get numerous state laws passed to prevent local government from doing any of this.

This is correct. What happened to Wilson, NC is fairly illuminating. Big ISPs convinced governments to pass laws that make it illegal to make an ISP as a utility.

Planet Money - Small America vs Big Internet https://www.npr.org/transcripts/865908114

IMHO more important question is why ISP market in US is so broken, while it works in other places.

Instead of 'bad' regulation like heavy handed regulations of 'investments, profits and pricing', there should be 'good' regulation to improve competition without direct market intervention.

Running small ISP is extremely simple, i started one (non-profit) while studying a university. Why this does not happen in US?

There are laws on the books in many states/municipalities thanks to heavy lobbying efforts by our cable/telco companies that prevent it.

US Internet system is rigged to benefit the providers. This exactly the reason after every year we switch back the internet connection between me and my spouse, to keep the internet cost low.

For most part US doesn't have functional government to manage these things properly.

I would say all of marketism is rigged to benefit providers

>Seriously. I don't understand why there isn't a movement to regulate ISP's like utilities at this point. Why aren't mayors and governors running on this as a major plank?

There was one, it was called Net Neutrality...

How old are users on here?

Net neutrality was/is solely about content.

I'm talking exclusively about pricing and profits.

Totally different things. How old are you?

Ma Bell as a regulated monopoly for long distance gave us pretty great service. It wasn't cheap.

Then force ISPs who own infrastructure to allow competitors to use it. Residents are technically the ones who own it and lease to these monopolies at the local level.

ISPs are more like Ma Bell than a free market while they keep getting exclusivity agreements from localities

Residents don't own infrastructure if a local monopoly delivery company does. I don't own the electrical lines coming to my house.

Nothing wrong with a system where the infrastructure is a regulated utility and ISPs can use it. Just don't assume it will be better or cheaper than it is today. There's no reason to believe that infrastructure won't cost you $100+ per month before you buy service on top of it. Or that it will be more widely available than today.

Considering all the broadband expansion contracts that ISPs have weaseled out of (while still keeping government grants) I imagine we've paid for most of the infrastructure many times over. Profits aren't suffering.

> Nothing wrong with a system where the infrastructure is a regulated utility and ISPs can use it.

Or, alternately, ISPs could continue to own the infrastructure but be required to allow other ISPs to rent or pay for passage on their last mile infrastructure.

That seems to be the greatest point of contention smaller ISPs have. Getting a backbone connection seems relatively easy, but duplicating the existing telephone pole cabling and drops into people's houses seems to be very capital intensive.

There's no reason for every ISP to have their own cables on telephone lines. Unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how those connections work (which is very possible).

This seems to be the model in Norway for both power and internet service. You pay a small fee for "line rent" in both instances. While this works well for electricity in Norway, IMO it's not that good for internet service. How many ISP's there are depends on who's got a server in your immediate area. I don't know the details of how it's regulated, though. This is just based upon what I see on my bill, and the competing ISP's in my area, whic surprisingly aren't that many, even though I'm in the middle of Oslo.

Nobody on HN can know what "regulate ISP's like utilities" means. The utilities aren't regulated in a uniform way and it isn't obvious what the term means when applied to internet providers.

The devil is really in the detail for that sort of term. Movements are probably held back by the cynical (and realistic) observation that "change the regulation" was the strategy that was tried in healthcare and made the situation worse. Somehow.

Utilities are also guaranteed by law to make a profit. The prices are set to ensure that happens. Cities providing last mile delivery is a better approach to encourage competition.

I’m not totally convinced that more regulation is needed in this case. It might be that fewer would be beneficial, because existing regulations might effectively be regulatory capture. I don’t know enough to know, but what regulations are keeping startups from entering this market?

One question on the $70 price tag. I get that it is high compared to, say, Europe or Asia, but not by much. Comcast/Xfinity gives 1 or 1.5 TB per month for that money.

Now let us compare to business connection. One would think a business has “options” - they are someone who can’t be toyed with. Even their rates are not cheaper! I am talking about price/mbps or price/TB . I don’t think you can get a business connection for less than $100 - yes, you get static IP. We (at home) expect the same “reliability” as a business.

We can cut it down to $50, may be, if we did muni internet. But it won’t become $20

I pay $75/mo for 30/30 fiber. It seems a bit steep to me, but I never think of it as outlandish, I guess.

I'm a bit curious as to whether the speed cap is due to old hardware or what exactly since much faster speeds seem to be common now, but I also never do anything that makes me wish my internet was faster.

I am content.

optimum is now 90 BUCKS A MONTH. for basic internet, no TV, no phone. they are owned by some corporate entity called "Altice" which basically came in and ruined whatever slightly positive features the website had, like an outage map.

Because it's a bad idea to replace a private monopoly with a regulated state monopoly.

Regulation should instead focus on ensuring that consumers have multiple choices, as is the case in other countries.

No company seems to want to be a utility. They all feel the need to compete on inconsequential, value-added crap and bullshit services when all we want from them is the pipe.

A few municipalities have decided to offer fiber internet through the city, but I don't know how common that is. These projects take several years, though.

Because half the voting base hears the word regulate and starts screaming communism. Just because it would benefit everyone doesn't mean there isn't a huge group of people who would rather cut off their nose to spite their face.

Perhaps that now we are work-from-home for so long, there’s a new compelling legal argument for regulating them a utility?

Utilities are expensive to operate and it is a tough sell to do something that will lose money for 5+ years.

And yet America has shitty expensive internet relative to most European countries. So we are doing something wrong.

At least you have mesh options in NYC which are arguably cheaper, faster and more reliable.

> Seriously. I don't understand why there isn't a movement to regulate ISP's like utilities at this point. Why aren't mayors and governors running on this as a major plank?

Politically untenable in this climate. There's a certain subset of the population who will claim that any type of regulation they disagree with is communism, and those currently in power have no problem boosting those voices to prevent ISPs from being regulated.

if you're in NYC, you do have other options. NYC mesh wifi is volunteer-based free isp, with suggested $20 monthly donation. https://www.nycmesh.net.

It’s not obvious that treating internet like electricity and gas would be any kind of improvement in California.

Do you want them metered like all other utilities? Why do people assume it will all be fast and unlimited? It may have claims that it will be but suddenly there will be service issues and the only way to be fair is to meter. You get people who will abuse any service and with them you get calls to make it so they cannot.

Why aren't we treating that way? Because they are still so new relative to other utilities and for the most part a large number of people don't find the internet as useful as people in our fields do. You would be damn well surprised how many families there are where only the kids see value in the net.

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