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Comment by kanox | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is a monopoly problem as much as a collusion problem: multiple providers exist but many regions each have a single provider. If this is a deliberate agreement then it's extremely illegal.

Where I live there are multiple high-quality ISPs at my building, the US should find a way to encourage multiple ISPs to be present in every single neighborhood.

People who complain about "too many ugly wires" should be ignored: it's much better to have ugly cables on poles than slow internet.

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Your building, you say. I can choose between at least two providers in my apartment in Brooklyn, NY.

But somebody in upstate suburbia cannot, and they are lucky if their only provider is not utterly bad.

Density is key here. Suburbia is not dense enough, and is finicky enough about digging or running wires, to make building a competing network lucrative. And the US has a ton of low-density suburban population, even in formally urban agglomerations like LA or Houston.

One solution is to live in a proper city, but proper cities are not very numerous in US, and living there is more expensive.

Wouldn't it make sense to share the pipes the dumb light pipes and compete on service?

That's more or less how it works here in New Zealand. A private company, Chorus, has a monopoly on the network itself, and can only provide the network to other ISPs and not direct to the consumer. I kind of presume there are other regulations in place, or conditions for the $1B subsidy they got for rolling out the fibre network.

As it is, for a household to get a plan that offers download speeds of 700Mbps-900Mbps and no data caps, we're paying NZ$109, or about US$72/mo.

> As it is, for a household to get a plan that offers download speeds of 700Mbps-900Mbps and no data caps, we're paying NZ$109, or about US$72/mo.

Which is pretty good, relatively speaking. 330Mbps HFC Comcast is USD$74.99/month here in SF.

And there's good competition, I'm paying NZ$90 for the same speed (900/400) with no data cap. Static IP. And all the NZ prices quoted include sales tax (NZ law requires this) so the equivalent US price without sales tax would be about US$52/mo.

Agreements between the local government and the provider aren't really collusion, just government created monopolies.

As for some kind of collusion between providers, if not competing is preferable for companies, why does anyone ever compete? Verbal agreements or not. Common sense says if you undercut someone's price they will cut their price too in response. Just offer the same price, stay out of their neighborhood, etc. Don't need to wink and nod about it. Yet we see fierce competition all over the place because that strategy doesn't work. New entrants always come along and they can't make a profit by playing that game when others already have all the market share. If you only see a single provider it's either a govt-protected monopoly as I mentioned above, or a beneficial monopoly that is holding prices too low for competition to see an opportunity.

Most good theories of monopoly power encompass the abuse of natural monopolies via collusion

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