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Comment by byrneseyeview | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to find holes in the analogy. But part of his point is that this is an easier problem to fix, because the scarcity is artificial. If we could legislate more oil into existence, that would be an easy problem to solve, too.

I'm not sure how serious an issue bandwidth really is, though. It doesn't seem to be the limiting factor in many activities.

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> It's easy to find holes in the analogy.

That's the sign of a bad analogy. He should have just made his point (a sensible one) and got on with it, without what to me looks like attention-grabbing hand waving.

That's exactly right: the scarcity is artificial and will hurt any country that implements measures to limit bandwidth.

I'm wondering if we could find a study or report that measures online commerce output in relation to a country's commercially available maximum bandwidth. That could be a pretty graph to look at.

I disagree - he used the initial analogy to show why the wired-bandwidth monopolies are bad, then shows how we can avoid being bandwidth-subservient like we are already oil-subservient. It's not supposed to go through the whole article.

I don't think that its that easy to actually "legislate" more bandwidth. Bandwidth will be much scarcer in the future as most communication will go over IP. The reason technologies like IPTV are not wide-spread is because there is not enough bandwidth to scale such bandwidth hogging technologies. So the bandwidth issue is a bigger problem which cannot be solved with just legislation. You need legislation combined with infrastructure to expand bandwidth.

Perhaps not bandwidth per se, but how much of your income you spend on it, taking your money away from spending it on other things. Add up your cable, cell, internet bills. Do you make choices to not do or buy other things in order to pay those? Sounds similar to the "hard choices" that get talked about on the evening news due to increasing gas prices.

> I'm not sure how serious an issue bandwidth really is, though.

He keeps going on about consumer telecom. Does anyone seriously believe that household consumption of cable TV, web surfing, and cell phones is an economic driver? Seems kinda ridiculous to me. They're just consumer amenities.

Good responses. I seem to be in total agreement with you all. Very well stated.

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