House Republicans propose nationwide ban on municipal broadband networks
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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It's better to wait until something significant happens and there is significant new information (SNI) to discuss.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
That's a pretty easy claim to make about most articles.
HN does better when it steers clear of generic discussion, the same way an exploring spacecraft does best to steer clear of the largest planets or any black holes in the vicinity.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
That goes 10x for generic ideological or political threads.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The idea that a bill proposal article is somehow going to " rarely go anywhere" and etc seems such a generic idea that you could apply to anything.
It's clear in this thread and others that content of the bill and the issues it involves is what drives the discussion, not the fact that it is just a bill proposal, and that's what should determine the quality or whatever we're determining about the discussion.
As for 'ideological' that again seems a simple way of just applying a generic stamp that could go on any topic.
These brush strokes you use are way too wide and random IMO.
Beyond that if ideology even does plays into things, that's not a reason to sweep it away. Ideology has collided with infectious disease, we still talk about it. If there's too much ideology in a thread, that just seems like a great tool for folks to use to simply derail the discussion.
Yes of course ideology and politics enter into lots of things. The question is if an article has enough substance to support an intellectually interesting discussion that doesn't end up being dominated by flamebait and boilerplate. There's no intention to sweep political or ideological topics away altogether. That's another point that's been explained many times, but I'm afraid I have to give you another one of those links to point to it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
These criteria don't seem particularly wide to me and they certainly aren't random. They've evolved out of the 13+ years of experience we've had running this place. I do get, though, that they can seem random at the level of a particular post, from the perspective of anyone who hasn't seen the dozens/hundreds/thousands of previous cases that motivate the moderation style. That's another reason why I quote those links so often - it's an attempt to show how the practices here have accrued from a large corpus of similar cases over a long time.
The main thing we're trying to avoid on HN is too much repetition. The generic topic in this case has been repeated many times over many years on HN, and since there isn't a significant new development in this case (that's the point about proposed bills), there's nothing to steer the thread in a non-repetitive direction. To my eye the comments in this one make that point quite clearly.
The reason I mentioned the links was because 'this is the policy' didn't really seem to apply when I was addressing the amorphous reasons for the policy that could apply to any number of active discussions on HN right now. I didn't doubt it was an actual policy.
But either way it's not my call, best of luck to you.
Thanks for that. I can understand not wanting to read several whole bunches of old moderation comments :)
I can only conclude this proposal is in bad faith.
I therefore speculate that big ISPs like Comcast must be paying the politicians behind the bill.
NPR covered a local government a while back that tried to build a local ISP but was shutdown when players like Comcast brought in their legal teams to make building a government-run ISP illegal in that jurisdiction.
We absolutely must not see a ban like this at the federal level.
>> I therefore speculate that big ISPs like Comcast must be paying the politicians behind the bill.
And after reading this quote from the article:
>> PCMag recently named Chattanooga, Tennessee, the best work-from-home city in the nation, citing in part the city's "widely available broadband Internet" provided by the Chattanooga Electric Power Board. Comcast initially tried to block that public network from being built but eventually upgraded its own service to better compete against the public option.
It seems very plausible.
The ISP market, being usually a duopoly or monopoly, is an exception due to how broken the market is. But in most occasions it is a bad idea. I don't doubt the proposal is in bad faith, but the excuse is reasonable.
Okay but as a consumer, I just care that there's good internet available. If the government can provide that using "unfair" advantages, then why do I care?
Wouldn't ISPs be happier just installing their hardware somewhere and reselling their capacity wholesale and outsourcing all that last mile work to the local towns?
it does not
I live in Arkansas, am on co-op owned fiber. It is by far the most stable, fastest, and fair priced service I've ever had. I can call down to the shop any day and get a call back from a network admin within an hour. They provide TV and phone here too.
The other option is AT&T (MAYBE 6mbit) dsl.
...her CLEC/co-op is still in existence because it was too small to be a valuable acquisition during WorldCom's flameout.
Maybe Starlink will finally goad them into competition. But if we had non-profit muni internet, everyone would need to compete.
A bill that won't go anywhere but gets a lot of attention is a great time-waster. Think of it as part of a DoS attack on meaningful legislation.
Municipal owned fiber is great -> you permit and add it on EVERY dig. Putting a new sewer line in? Run fiber. Someone wants to replace their sewer lateral? Run fiber. Repaving? Run fiber. Someone doing a new development. Run fiber.
You can actually wholesale it out as well if you want and let folks compete on top of it with backhaul etc (at whatever level you want, from customer service / billing handoff only to some backhaul network comp). That said, fiber to the home is pretty close to a natural monopoly. Everyone should have a fiber to their house, but it makes NO sense for competing providers to string up fibers in most cases and so they do not.
I'm on fiber now with a hardwired set of connections to pretty much everything. It is AMAZING! I do remote work, video conference, large files. Even my 300Mbps cable service only had 10Mbps upload (or less), so wife and kids doing whatever on things (dropbox file sync maybe for large vidoes) meant my zoom calls were dropping. Gigabit is 4-6ms (!) ping to major services. And symmetric.
Ok, I can see how a municipality can make everything else very expensive and slow if they become an ISP with a government attached.
Everytime there was road construction they laid conduit, first from SLC to Provo, then to all the smaller communities off i15, then all the rurals. I live in a rural town with 45 thousand in the entire county and I have access to 1 gig fiber. In my previous rental in an even more small town (500 residents) I still had fiber. This was 45 minutes from any other town.
Utah rocks for broadband and is one of the best models I've ever seen.
How is this even logically coherent? If there is one private provider then municipal provides competition and is good, but as soon as there are two providers, municipal somehow becomes becomes competition-limiting overregulation? Give me a break.
They're basically using the Nazi playbook, as described by Jean-Paul Sartre:
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
What is it going to take for us to get rid of this absolutely broken system?
This, I can possibly get behind, depending on the details. Part of the reason we end up with regional monopolies or duopolies is the high up-front capital costs involved with building out a network. This unto itself favors bigger players. Additional costs, whether from regulatory controls or making the permitting process more painful than intrinsically necessary further stacks the deck in favor of big players. So removing unnecessary regulations and making it easy to get permits is Good.
Arguments against government-provided services are not intrinsically wrong in all cases, either. It is quite easy for the government to set the rules such that competition is impossible for all but the biggest or politically-favored (or both) players. That's if competition is possible at all; de jure and de facto bans have the same effect. So, I do view government-provided ISPs as something to be approached with caution.
However, if there's any governmental level where the locals have a chance at keeping their government accountable to abuses and forcing the government to allow an ISP that sucks less to offer services, that's going to be at the local level. It's a numbers game, and the getting the numbers together needed to remind the administrators, councilors, and other officials that they are servants, not masters, is far more achievable at the neighborhood, municipal, or county levels. At the state level, it gets a lot harder a lot faster, and come the federal level you are playing on hard mode.
That's why consider this proposal to be misguided at best. Time to add another thing to the list of things to write my rep and senator about.
The bill that directly addresses muni broadband [1] seems very specific to "a State or political subdivision thereof." Would a community nonprofit/coop style muni broadband be affected by this bill?
0. https://republicans-energycommerce.house.gov/news/press-rele...
1. https://republicans-energycommerce.house.gov/wp-content/uplo...
It doesn't take a lot of mental gymnastics to decide to support it.
Note: expect the big ISPs to increase this anti-competitive lobbying as they are concerned by Starlink (and its competitors), new ISPs funded by rural broadband grants and dev such as CBRS and software defined radio.
Since the telecom companies have divided up regions to avoid completing with each other, the threat of municipal broadband is one of the few competition inputs to prevent the exact stagnation and poor service that has taken hold.
I know some local areas near me are just SOL as far as good service goes. The local monopoly actually has run lines across people's yards and just left them there exposed for years. Some folks just bury them themselves... they're doing work for the company, so they don't accidentally mow over their neighbor's internet connection.
I also highly doubt anyone supporting this bill is actually concerned about monopolies, since if they were they'd also be banning the non-competition between telecom companies that has municipalities considering their own broadband in the first place.
Well in a way they are, they're almost certainly sponsored in some way by them.
Should private companies have some access to rights-of-way? Perhaps. Should governments be prevented by federal law from providing public services through rights of way? Absolutely not.
Next, let's ban libraries, public pools and public schooling, because those are all lost opportunities for capitalists to make money.
(and yes, well said)
Satellites give you an amount of bandwidth per geographic area based on how many satellites are overhead at any time, and how good they are. If the population density is low, then that's a lot per customer. If the population density is high, then it is very little per person.
The result is that satellites are a wonderful solution for getting internet to rural areas, and are not a solution for towns.
I mean, after supporting the reversal of a fair and free election, leading to a violent insurrection, anyone who still engages in this 'both sider-ism' is basically a lost cause at this point.
I far respect people who at least pick a side than continue the 'both sides are equally bad' argument
Majority of people tend to be more centrist, but that doesn’t get as many clicks / ad dollars.
The US is the only developed nation where you have no hope of getting elected to political office at _any_ level of government unless you pledge to align yourself with either Red Team or Blue Team. Campaign platforms and public opinion always boil down to some variant of, "if you think we're bad, you should see the other guys!" as your comment confirms.
To the extent that both parties engage in creating and retaining laws that further ensconce the practical existence of only two parties (see gerrymandering), yes, both sides are equally bad.
~50/50 party split is one of three natural equilibrium points of a first-past-the-post election heirarchy. If I'm a party manager allocating resources (or platform positions) to win elections in that system I would be a fool (and get fired) if I overspent to get 60% of the vote when 51% would do the trick (and I/my organization could potentially use the rest of those resources to get over the margin in a different race).
At the same time, a party that is losing and can't raise more money to spend in a race will naturally shift their positions to appeal to a larger number of people to gain margin that way. In the long and wide term, things will tend to balance there (absent structural reform or the collapse of one party or the other).
>The US is the only developed nation where you have no hope of getting elected to political office at _any_ level of government unless you pledge to align yourself with either Red Team or Blue Team.
It could be worse: in some developed countries you can't get elected unless you align with the single party.
This shall not pass.
Conveniently ignoring the fact that the telecom industry gets subsidized to the tune of billions per year, despite decades of failing to accomplish the objectives that they said they would while being subsidized.
Just look at other countries, why do other countries have better AND cheaper AND more free network access? Nobody (in the right place at least) seems to ask themselves that in the world's greatest nation.