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Comment by davidfstr | Hacker News Reader

Banning the building of ISPs by local governments - who probably care about their people - and relegating ISPs to private companies only, in the name of “promoting competition” is ludicrous. One does not increase competition by limiting supply.

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.

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>> 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.

>> 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.

One increases profit by limiting supply - an obvious anticompetitive move.

Government-run enterprises are not fair competition since they have unfair advantages. One does not create competition by allowing enterprises which can do dumping at worst, and always have special advantages at best.

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.

> Government-run enterprises are not fair competition since they have unfair advantages. One does not create competition by allowing enterprises which can do dumping at worst, and always have special advantages at best.

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?

Won't someone think of the poor corporations?!

What is the consumer harm inflicted by the government's option being the best one in the market, exactly?

Something I've always wondered: Isn't municipal broadband mostly the last mile? It's the extremely capital intensive work of going from houses to houses rolling out fiber, maintaining a few local relays with equipment and fielding tech support requests.

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?

Not from the perspective of an ISP. Doing this would transform broadband from a value added service to a commodity. In a commodity market, competition is stiff and this often drives profits down to an absolute minimum. The cushy profits they are currently enjoying would evaporate in short order as soon as anyone sensed that there was money to be made by drilling fiber and racking a switch in that colo.

If private companies can't compete with the government-run enterprise, this implies that the government-run enterprise is more efficient. And if the government-run enterprise is more efficient, why exactly should the private competitors even exist?

> this implies that the government-run enterprise is more efficient.

it does not

If it is not subsidized with tax money

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