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Comment by theluketaylor | Hacker News Reader

Republicans are all for states' rights. Unless it's something they (or their corporate sponsors) want to regulate, then they have never heard of states' rights. Democrats are nearly as bad, so it's not like they can claim any sort of moral high ground here, but at least the areas they want to regulate federally are a little more self consistent.

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.

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It has to be really frustrating for local municipalities / regions who want to make it desirable to life / work there ... but they're in a hole of crappy internet determined by some monopoly that isn't responsive / responsible to anyone.

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.

> Democrats are nearly as bad.

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

One side is filled with anti-democratic monsters and captured by corporate interests. The other side is just captured by corporate interests. For sure not equally bad, but that doesn't make one a paragon of virtue.

Nobody is a paragon of virtue.

You are always going to have crazy extremists on both sides: be it Trump-truthers or socialist “China did nothing wrong in the last 50 years and Venezuela is good for poor people” leftists.

Majority of people tend to be more centrist, but that doesn’t get as many clicks / ad dollars.

It seems to me that parent was referring specifically to serving corporate interests, where indeed there is relatively little difference between the parties.

It is clear from context that the comment is about how they are on states' rights and telecoms. Unrelated differences, no matter how stark they are, are not relevant.

Sorry, but there's no way I will ever believe it's just a crazy fluke that given the broad spectrum of political beliefs in the US, two parties each have roughly 49% of public support in terms of issues and voting power for decades on end, and that they regularly swap positions of power every few years.

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.

>Sorry, but there's no way I will ever believe it's just a crazy fluke that given the broad spectrum of political beliefs in the US, two parties each have roughly 49% of public support in terms of issues and voting power for decades on end, and that they regularly swap positions of power every few years.

~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.

Please don't take HN threads further into generic partisan battle. I know the GP contained a provocation, but part of the art of being a good commenter here is learning to resist the temptation to take the bait and respond generically/indignantly to it.

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Obviously Republicans are a big group with diverging interests and alignments on certain issues. Both parties have been more than happy to grow the power of the Federal government over the states. That we have a bipartisan consensus of lobbyist-owned politicians in Washington is not even a novel concept. In fact, probably the most aggressive state to take advantage of states rights is California, which implements stringent regulations at the state level that are far in excess of federal regulations on many things. I don't see anyone arguing that California should be prevented from doing that. At any rate, these are 2 Republicans proposing a bill, nobody has any idea yet what kind of support it has in the House or whether it will die on the vine.

the Democrat's don't claim to have any overarching theory of State's rights guiding them, so I don't think they're nearly as bad.

So much for the free market. It will be interesting to see what StarLink does to broadband over time.

The most charitable interpretation for support of municipal broadband bans is that municipalities have a natural monopoly over rights of way and telecom installation that private companies can't compete against. Not totally unfair, but the better protection is requiring municipalities lease access to last mile lines at fair rates rather than banning them from participating in the laying of lines.

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.

> is actually concerned about monopolies

Well in a way they are, they're almost certainly sponsored in some way by them.

Yes, so much for it. It should not be worshipped at the expense of the societal good.

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.

username checks out

(and yes, well said)

The answer is not much.

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.

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