Cuomo and Schmidt push to cap price of internet to $15 for low-income NewYorkers | Hacker News Reader

Cuomo and Schmidt push to cap price of internet to $15 for low-income NewYorkers

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The only description of what that $15 per month actually buys is broadband. The idea of a maximum price cap seems kind of ridiculous compared to a minimum service criteria, like a free meal at a soup kitchen compared to a minimum service guarantee.

You are not driving prices down by regulating them, you are driving them down by introducing more choice and competition, something that usa ISP market fundamentally lacks.

> You are not driving prices down by regulating them, you are driving them down by introducing more choice and competition Deregulation has proven _not_ to work for internet service providers. They're natural monopolies and oligopolies and as such antithetic to free market competition.

There are some relatively good examples around the world of regulated, utility like fiber networks in particular that _do_ work at actually encouraging free market competition between internet service providers.

> Deregulation has proven _not_ to work for internet service providers.

Proved by whom exactly? It works perfectly in the rest of the world. I've got a choice of 5 internet providers. People living closer to the central part of the city have 10 to 15.

My experience from western Europe is that only regulation forces ISPs to play fair with competitors. Even while the law is VERY VERY clear about it, they're still playing deaf and you essentially have to go to court to have the law applied (which smaller providers can't afford). Deregulation means supremacy of the private company, without any legal recourse, which can never be fair to users.

I am genuinely very curious to learn about a deregulated place with 15 competing providers available to a single place to live. I wonder what drives that rare phenomenon.

Please tell me more about this!

Densely populated areas are worth the shot even if you compete with 14 other providers.

I am certainly not saying that is not the case. I'd just like to have practical examples of success stories of deregulation in this area. I haven't found any yet myself, and I have plenty of counter examples...

Of course you are. Do you think these evil capitalist vampires who built a monopoly on infrastructure through corruption over the years, are going to share it with their future competitors?

To use a big ISP's infrastructure they'll ask for a check in millions of euros. At least that's the case in France with Orange/Free/etc despite having strong regulations claiming they can't refuse to interop with competitors. For those curious, i'm talking both about collecting and peering agreements.

ISPs, just like any other capitalist business, is a mafia. If you want common people to have decent services, you need to treat it like a mafia.

Missing is Verizon's reaction.

On the one hand, Eric Schmidt says the Telcos have overbid in the 5G auction and don't have cash left to roll out new networks without price rise, and on the other hand he pushes price caps. If they go through in NYC why should the rest of the country also not require it? And whats Big Telco's response then?

Just a weird ass character pushing random shit just like he did at Google.

It just so happens that 15€ is a typical price point for 100M uncapped, unlimited 4G service in Finland.

$15 for Internet service for all isn’t out of reach.

I wonder if it would make more sense to just have a profit cap. Like “internet must be provided to low-income New Yorkers at cost + 10%”. That way it’s always at least profitable to reach more people.

The predictable result of the above is plenty of people getting cheap internet, but perhaps many people won’t get it at all because it doesn’t make any sense for Verizon to get the internet to them if they can’t recoup their investment - so they simply won’t. The above “profit cap” preserves the incentives for Verizon while achieving the boost in consumer surplus.

What is "at cost"?

If they increase everyone's salaries in Comcast by 50% then "at cost" increases by 50%. Or they could order 5-star Michelin dining delivered by helicopters to WFH employees and call it a "business meal", and "at cost" would be higher as well.

Too easy to abuse.

Let me introduce you to Hollywood accounting : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

The way to maximize profits in a "cost + 10%" scenario is to maximize cost x market, thus maximizing the 10% x market. Setting an indirect target is the quickest way to having a bad economic policy--if you want affordable internet legislate it and let the market figure out efficient ways to achieve it.

Good point. There has to be a better way than price caps though, price controls are well studied and have a tendency to reduce aggregate consumer surplus

Where are the places to live in new york, if you are on a low-income?

dude, NYC is 8.4 mil people.....

Queens, Bronx, half of Brooklyn (aka east new york), etc... even Manhattan has lots of low income housing, and of course Harlem

You'd be surprised, but NYC is one of those places where there are more low-er income folks than most other cities.

Just dropping by to mention nycmesh.net an amazing self-organized Internet Service Provider. They're not everywhere just yet but where they are they're for sure providing the best (volunteered) service for the lowest money.

They're currently connected to two Internet Exchange points and have hundreds of antennas. See their map: https://www.nycmesh.net/map/

We need more self-organized cooperatives like that, whether in the ISP world (like guifi.net or ffdn.org federation) or in other areas of life. That's the only way we can effectively defeat capitalism without relying on our corrupt governments.

See also: https://peopleschoice.coop

NYC drivers are also at it with https://drivers.coop

Imagine living in 2021 and still thinking this propaganda talking point from 1949 still holds any weight with anyone.

We know competition doesn't work. Competitors get bought out. We know the stock market doesn't work. Money raised gets used to automate away jobs, not expand and increase the number of human beings actually needed by the company. We know pricing doesn't get corrected, at all, because everyone who runs businesses or owns property is so rich they are able to self-sustain and ignore any market signals urging them to adjust prices.

None of the free market capitalist tenets actually work the way they're described, and there's a growing proportion of the population realizing this finally. It's just unfortunate they're being steered towards communism because the communists are currently the loudest opponents of this absurd system built on lies.

Please don't take HN thread into ideological flamewar. It's tedious, repetitive, and not what this site is for.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26850504.

$15 internet, $2000 rent, checks out.

They both suffer from the same problem, of being treated as a private market and not as common/public goods. Housing and Internet should be free for everyone, just like food/healthcare/education...

Is this really mainstream thinking now in America? None of those things are free in Europe and I've yet to find people promoting these insane ideas here, while at least online I can read about these mysterious things Europeans get free for or have.

So is anticapitalism becoming mainstream in the USA? I would say yes, more or less: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/28/poll-sponsored-... Also, historically these ideas were pretty common in the USA, with anarchist IWW being the biggest union of its time.

And what you call "these insane ideas" is actually following articles the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as approved after the second World War. Do you consider basic human rights to be insane?

Also worth noting, most things are not "for free" in Europe. The little rights we have our ancestors fought hard for, and they are being dismantled as we speak in the name of neoliberalism. Not so long ago France had one of the best Education and Health systems of the world, but that ship has sailed because of the desire to privatize everything and sabotage public infrastructure in the name of private profit. See also David Graeber's talk on managerial feudalism and the revolt of the caring classes: https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11241-from_managerial_feudalism_...

American communists are responsible for approximately all of the labor protections Americans have left. 40 hour work week, fire exits, minimum wage, child labor act, and the list goes on...

Stalin was a co-author of the UN human rights declaration. It's a political document, not some ultimate enlightened truth.

I don’t think they are mainstream, but education and healthcare is absolutely free in most of Europe, and I think it is not that controversial of a take that everyone has to live somewhere, so some form of social net/not letting arbitrarily increasing rent would be beneficial to society.

That's such a ridiculous take on it.Have you actually used that "free healthcare in Europe"? It sucks ass.

I get better healthcare in South Korea that is both cheaper and more effective than in Germany or Austria.

If you got healthcare that's cheaper than free, you probably donated a kidney.

On many accounts, it is better than most paid healthcare in the US and it’s objectively better than no healthcare at all, which is what many US residents are left with. But most importantly even the paid healthcare in Europe depends on the infrastructure and industry upheld by the free healthcare.

Yes, I live here. Have YOU used it? Some poorer countries in Europe may have worse healthcare, but it usually has more to do with corrupt government not spending enough on it (but instead on fking stadiums...), and the much much better paycheck on the west (that is west Europe) causing massive migration of educated workforce throughout the years.

What objective problem can you bring up? Wait time is propaganda, not worse than in the US. Private healthcare is simply immoral and barbaric, a constant, externally determined demand for something should not be exploited. And one nation level insurance is the cheapest and best way for everyone (other than the billionaires owning private healthcare facilities and insurances)

You live here? So do I. Wait time is not propaganda.It's real. I can get any type of healthcare service in SK without even thinking about it.

>Private healthcare is simply immoral and barbaric, a constant, externally determined demand for something should not be exploited.

Except you are talking worst case scenario "The US".SK's healthcare is not completely private owned.Quite the opposite actually.

And yet...it's both cheaper and much more efficient than anything in Europe.

> Housing and Internet should be free for everyone, just like food/healthcare/education...

How about having some realistic expectations?

Those are pretty realistic expectations. In that list, only Internet is slightly more complex because it requires multinational supply chains. The rest (housing, food, healthcare, education) can and should be free for everyone, ensured by locally-sourced materials.

As a society, we definitely can do it. The question is do we want to? Unless, of course, you have some compelling argument explaining why we couldn't have all these nice things despite having an abundance of resources.

How would you distribute free food without encouraging excessive waste?

Very good question. Where does waste come from? There's individual waste ("i bought too much cheese") and there's mutualized waste ("the supermarket is throwing away 20-40% of what comes in").

The former is incentivized by individual lifestyles. In a capitalist system, everyone needs their own fridge and food. You need to be pretty rich to employ other people to cook for you (go to the restaurant), or cook for yourself which requires more infrastructure (therefore more pollution). Maybe popular canteens would help? https://dinnerdocument.com/2019/04/30/i-dream-of-canteens/

About mutualized waste, some loss is due to food traveling incredible lengths to reach supermarkets. Strongly incentivizing local production could help for that.

The biggest waste generation machine is competition between supermarkets. All supermarkets need all of their alleys full of food. If supermarkets were a public service (without competition), they wouldn't need to overflow with food that will end up in the trash. If you have never worked in a supermarket, you'll be SHOCKED by the amount of meat and dairy products ending up in the trash every week.

Third kind of mutualized trash is due to financial incentives. When markets decide that your product is worthless, you'll just throw it away. The fact that capitalism even makes "negative prices" possible is fucked up. When producers destroy TONS of food/milk because selling it would make them loose even more money, how is that even a thing?

So there's plenty of room for improvement on food waste, and all of them have more or less to do with abolishing the capitalist system.

$15 internet, $200 rent due to section 8.

Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. It causes nose dives in thread quality.

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