Ohio Republicans close to imposing near-total ban on municipal broadband | Hacker News Reader

Ohio Republicans close to imposing near-total ban on municipal broadband

arstechnica.com

577 pointssamizdis394 comments

"It's not even clear who proposed the new law. "The language, inserted without prior public discussion during recent state Senate deliberations on Ohio's two-year budget, is drawing condemnation from numerous sources. Officials have not said who put the language in the Senate budget document, only that they learned of it for the first time last week," the Akron Beacon Journal wrote on June 13."

How did we end up with such a gross lack of accountability? That seems more scandalous than the bad idea itself.

I think it's common for Congress to vote on legislation thousands of pages long well before any of them could possibly have had time to read the final version. So this is, sadly, not surprising.

Well then, they are failing to fulfil their responsibilities.

This is a generally overly simplistic take. It would be impossible for any single legislature to read all the bills, so that is not done. The vast majority of large bills are produced ahead of time and only marginal changes are made as the bill gets closer to a final vote. The bills are read ahead of time by key members from each party and almost every legislature's staff.

The bill was produced by the legislative staff working for the legislator. I assume their staff read the bill they were in charge of producing.

This is a symptom of the problem.

At this point, the only bills we can pass federally are budget reconciliation bills an small token "Juneteenth is a holiday" bills.

Why? Primarily because of the senate filibuster rule. We require that 60+ senators agree on every bill passed because every bill gets filibustered. That doesn't work well when you have

A: A party that coined the phrase "do nothing democrats"

B: A senate minority leader that openly says their job is to stop any legislation from passing.

Compromise is dead at this point, because regardless of the compromises made, the minority party will filibuster.

So the end result is the only bills that get passed are budget reconciliation bills and those try and cram in everything that could possible be thought as "budgetary" into a single bill. Hence, thousands of pages long legislation.

If you want to be mad at giant bills, be mad at the party that filibusters all tiny bills. Go read HR-1 and be mad that THAT bill is being filibustered (make federal voting day a national holiday and extending early voting). Go read any of the small common sense bills that get filibustered simply because they came from the opposing party.

And if you really want to get mad, go read up on the Jan 6. investigation bill that had 24 amendments added by republicans and 6 added by democrats that was ultimately filibustered.

That's where we are at. We've got Democrats bending over backwards to try and appear bipartisan and Republicans who are playing the game of "The best way to make democrats look bad is to filibuster everything".

Yeah. My it'll-never-happen dream is that Congress adopts the rule that no member can vote for a bill that they haven't personally read in its entirety. My second it'll-never-happen dream is that the president starts vetoing every bill longer than, say, 100 pages (except perhaps budgets) simply because they are too long.

Oddly enough, computers are enabling this. You couldn't get bills thousands of pages long with typewriters, because they get that long with a series of changes. It just wasn't physically possible to re-type it time after time, and then run it through Xerox machines to produce copies for everyone who needed them.

In the end, it doesn't really matter who inserted the language. All of the Republicans in the legislature are voting for it, so pick any one of them (without loss of generality) to serve as an example.

The way the accountability aspect is supposed to work is that voters are horrified and hold their elected representatives accountable by voting them out. As it turns out, though, most people are profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out. These voters will just keep getting reamed by their ISPs and if the GOP tells them it's somehow Democrats' fault, they'll probably believe it.

Thanks to gerrymandering, most people can have their shit together and awful stuff will still happen.

Representative democracy works when you remember who you voted for, and track whether they work on fulfilling their promises because of which you voted for them.

In the US, people mostly remember the president / vice-president names, because they are so widely publicized, some possibly remember the name of their Congress representatives, or can google them up in the rare case when they need to write to them about some issue. AFAICT very few people even remember who did they vote into the state legislature.

This is very sad, and certainly disfunctional.

This isn't true. Polling shows people dislike congress but like their congressional rep.

How does that make what he said not true?

It implies that they're sufficiently aware of their local representative to approve of them.

They may not "remember who did they vote into the state legislature", but they're not totally unaware of them.

I've thought of starting a social media website where people can upvote proposed legislation to draw attention to it, and people can indicate their own preference on legislation and track it. Then, come election time it could tell you something like "Mr Your Politician votes the way you would prefer 20% of the time" or such.

In Switzerland there's http://smartvote.ch. It's not exactly what you're describing but close.

I like it! Ping me if you want help. Draw the contrast between the popular policies and the reps that only pay lip service to them. Open API that might be a good place to start:

https://openstates.org/tx/bills/?query=&session=87&classific...

the problem with this is that I think few people care enough to enter their preferences, let alone to come back and check. not to mention that most people don't really expect politicians to follow through on their promises, and anyone who does will probably figure out how they want to vote via other methods. the only way I see this idea actually becoming useful is if it starts being displayed somewhere people already go, like in a google results page

We can't fix people not caring. It might help make it a little easier to care and keep track. Especially if there's some good flamewars happening on the site (half joking about the flamewars). Seriously, if you could make it a decent place for concrete discussion of the laws people would probably visit just to get in on the discussions, just like Reddit.

my point is that since people don't care it might be hard to get people to use the site. And you might have trouble getting enough people to use it in the first place to get these discussions going - why wouldn't they just do it on reddit or twitter where everyone already is?

> the problem with this is that I think few people care enough to enter their preferences, let alone to come back and check.

Game-ify the shit out of it? Farmville, but for electoral awareness? Somehow piggyback on the inexplicably-popular-and-viral "take this quiz to find out which X from Y you are" thing?

I think you'll struggle with a network effect issue. people aren't already on it - and already have plenty of places to discuss politics - so people won't come on the site and so people won't really care about the points they get on it

Promise resolution tracking for political choices could be a useful tool. With each promise tracked you could produce a percent which could be displayed with the candidates picture and a brief synopsis of their "score". The contact information and a tool to initiate communication would all be available (even if the communication is just email), and you could even have the politicians join so that they could have like an intern respond to messages or something.

This has probably been done, right?

There is one in Ukraine, see links below. Interested to know about such ones for western countries.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=uk&tl=en&u=https:/...

it's easy to game and those sorts of stats mean nothing to most people.

if it became effective enough that any politicians even heard of it, let alone started trying to game it, that would be great news.

Probably worth pointing out that the great hollowing out of journalism is a likely causal factor here. The chain of events went something like:

1. Web comes out and makes it trivial to distribute information for nearly free.

2. Users find enough "information" (in quotes because I mean "data that satisfies their instinctual desire to feel in the know" regardless of its actual value) on the web for free that they don't want to pay for their local newspaper anymore.

3. Dying paper subscriptions forces newspapers to go online. Even so and even with copious ads, their profit margins collapse.

4. The only news agencies that survive are national news because they can aggregate their journalism costs over a larger number of readers.

5. Bereft of money, local news agencies get bought up by conglomerations that produce "local" news which is a slurry of national stuff, press releases, and relatively low quality local reporting.

6. People stop reading the local stuff entirely since it's frankly just not good any more.

7. Now everyone is only clued in to national politics since national news sources rarely write about state or city politics.

Have you ever read the local rags from two, three decades back?

Think Buzzfeed with no spellcheck. You had colorful characters, but I wouldn't argue the informational content is all that more hollow today than in that time period.

There have been actual studies done showing a clear correlation between the decline of local news and an increase in municipal- and county-level corruption, so it's hard to argue they were entirely useless.

Yes, I have. :)

Sure the writing quality wasn't always great, but it was a functioning conduit of information about what local politicians were up to. And, more importantly it wasn't drowned about by other information sources so a greater fraction of people actually consumed it and were clued in to what was happening in their city and state.

I'm reminded of the 'Information Bubble' section in Wait But Why's 'A Sick Giant's essay. Essentially, once upon a time the big media outlets had an incentive to reach a broad audience. The biggest megaphone had to appeal across the political spectrum. Then, cable news, the Internet, etc. balkanized journalism. Everyone could easily shift themselves into whatever bubble they wanted to pretend was reality.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html

I wonder is there any country that's not true.

> The way the accountability aspect is supposed to work is that voters are horrified and hold their elected representatives accountable by voting them out. As it turns out, though, most people are profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out.

It's unfortunately more than ignorance. These budget bills have to be balanced so they include hundreds of items in them. It's a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. With that large amount of provisions, it's easy to slide in things that only peripherally pertain to budget.

I wish this were broken up in such a way that any changes to how things work and to laws need to be done BEFORE if required by the budget, such that the budget vote stops being this monstrosity.

> profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out.

This strikes me as unkind. It's true of some, surely. But people are just busy. The whole theory of representative democracy is that direct democracy is impractical, so we delegate most of the work to people who focus on governing. You also ignore the extent to which the average voter is energetically manipulated and actively discouraged from participation. In the 2020 election cycle alone, There was $14.4 billion in direct spending alone. That's ~$90 per voter.

If we want more people to engage, wishing for better humans won't get us anywhere. We should do just like we do for tech products: figure out how to make useful behaviors easier.

Agreed. I'm obsessed about policy and legislation. Books, a lot of participation, lobbying, comparing notes with others. I feel like I barely understand what's going on.

A bit cynical take here? What if people vote for GOP for other reasons and because there is a two party system they have to weight this issue amongst others.

How is it cynical? They are all voting for it and so they all support it.

In every case I can think of in life, there are things I care about and things that get swept along with that.

I have one electric distribution utility provider. They use service trucks that have internal combustion engines. Suppose I was passionately pro-EV and against ICE vehicles; it would still not be a contradiction that I purchase my electricity distribution from that one available grid provider. "He's buying from them, so clearly he must support their use of ICE vehicles."

I can virtually guarantee that you disagree with at least one position that the candidate you voted for has taken. They're your representative, not your agent.

How is your view any less cynical? Implicit in yours is that the party knows that and does as much bad stuff (like this) because they know they have unwavering support on a few issues.

Ideally, bad representation for issues that aren't intrinsically GOP should be corrected in a primary. I don't know much about primaries (I'm an independent in a state where I can't vote in primaries), but I have a funny feeling primaries don't see much fair competition.

Half America hands it’s brain to one party, the other half to the other party. Many problems stem from this.

Both parties have internal diversity.

Dems span all the way from Sinema to AOC. GOP goes from Collins to Taylor Greene.

People can express their individuality in the primary process fairly well, especially for national elections with lots of candidates.

But at the end of the day, every election is between the #1 and #2 candidates, and those candidates are going to be a hard compromise for lots of people.

We should ask Duck Cheney’s daughter about the diversity of her party, she seems like a poster child for that.

Sure, Collins is vastly different from MTG in style/demeanor, but are their voting records really that different?

That’s the mistake people keep making about Collins: she says things that sound reasonable and sensible, but at the end of the day, she votes with the rest of the party almost all the time.

Lisa Murkowski has been more independent and she may well lose her seat because of it.

> Lisa Murkowski has been more independent and she may well lose her seat because of it.

Luckily, Alaska passed a ranked choice voting / open primary proposition in the last election cycle so it won't be possible to primary her out of the election (as was done in the past, forcing her to run and win a write-in campaign.) Still, We will have to see how much the administration drags it's heels on implementation...

Ironically, Lisa has been one of the better state representatives from Alaska (many others have been very corrupt). This is despite her father literally giving her his senate seat when he was elected governor.

It is naïve in the extreme to pretend that Susan Collins is any kind of moderate. She never takes a stand for her supposed principles and never casts a vote that makes a difference. The GOP allows her to occasionally vote with the Dems on symbolic gestures, or in cases where her vote would not be decisive anyway, so she can better present a façade of comity, moderation, and political independence to her constituents despite years of shattered promises. In practice, she takes marching orders from Mitch McConnell and always falls into line when it matters.

The only single time within my memory that she was part of a 1-vote margin against the GOP was when John McCain faked out McConnell and at the last minute rejected the ACA repeal in 2017. Collins had been told she was allowed to vote against because her vote would not matter, she did so, and McCain’s No vote came afterward.

I didn't say she's a moderate. I just said she's a far cry from Taylor Greene.

Playing "teams" with zero regard for individual legislators contributions is a large part of how we got here.

You don't think it's fair to consider the Ohio GOP representatives who unanimously voted for this a "team"? Tell me how considering them as individuals is even remotely illuminating.

The lack of accountability isn't helped by the fact that terms can be 1, 2, 4, 6 years and it's incredibly difficult to remove someone once they've been elected. Many voters often have short-term memories and are so pre-occupied with life trying to stay afloat they can't keep track of politicians to hold them accountable during th next election. They end up forgetting the issues they had after the past election, eat up empty promises yet again, and re-elect the same people or new faces and names with the same platform of lies and lack of representation of their constituents, over-and-over again.

Said politician is then free to step on the backs of their voters for some period before the next campaign for election starts without fear of being removed from office.

This country is fucked without proportional representation. There's no accountability without alternatives, and this prohibition isn't going to make Ohio Republicans vote Democrat. Only PR can make enough shades of alternatives to break out of local maxima.

Proportional representation was a non-starter for rural states when the country was founded, and it's going to be one now.

There's no deal you can make with rural states where they give up their stranglehold on the Senate and Electoral College and get... nothing... in return.

It sucks, but that's the way it is.

This one is manageable. You could do proportional voting within each state without changing the balance between states. Say 5 instead of 2 senators from each state and proportional voting within each state.

I'm not saying this doesn't have other problems, it's just an example that the rural states problem is not a hard blocker for proportional voting.

Yes it is a hard blocker. You haven't described any negotiation so far as to why rural states would like to surrender power without corresponding wins.

5 senators proportionally represented or 2x-3x representatives proportionally represented does not weaken small state power at all. It simply ensures more views within each state get heard.

PR != no districting.

That means the state which normally would've been a solid block of red now turns purple. Surely that is a compromise of power for those who hold it?

What is the rational incentive to do so?

You're shifting the goal posts: is the issue small state power, or republican power via small states?

Small state power is unchanged. Full stop.

Republican power is also not necessarily worse for the reason you gave: blue big states will also be more purple. PR is certainly in the favor of moderate republicans, whoever they may be.

What Ericson2314 is referring to is the coordination + prisoner's dilemma problem. It appears that if every state enacted this at the same time, almost everyone would be better off. That being said, any state that is strongly one party or the other is incentivized not to do this.

California's legislature can choose between giving a high percentage (63.48%[1] in 2020) or 100% of it's electoral votes to the democratic candidate. Alabama's legislature can choose between giving a high percentage (62.03%[2] in 2020) or 100% of it's electoral votes to the republican candidate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

That is very true. This would best happen if the level of government above the elections in question requires they all work the same way. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Representation_Act_(Unite... would require that all the house districts go SVT PR at once. Likewise, a state could reform all their state legislature districts at once.

I can't wave any magic wand for gridlock at that level, but that bypasses the coordination failure by not requiring coordinated steps at all.

Any one state is incentivized not to do this alone. It only works if everyone does it at the same time. In addition, if every state did this, states could break away to increase its influence.

That doesn't mean that this is impossible. There seem to be two ways this coordination and prisoner's dilemma problem could be resolved. First, by a constitutional amendment (unlikely) or second in a similar way to the National Popular Vote.

National Popular Vote is a bill with the goal of making the winner of the popular vote the winner of the presidency. The way it works is that states pass a law to give their electoral votes to the winner of the popular votes ONLY until enough states with enough votes pass the same bill.

This bill currently has been enacted by 15 states (195 electoral votes) [1]

[1] https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

The popular vote has been swinging in the direction of the national Democratic party for over a decade; Democrats would love proportional representation.

Why would the GOP want to give middling members the room to break rank when the margins of power are so razor-thin? What is the selling pitch?

Approval voting would allow third parties to win without having to change the number of seats.

But would they actually win enough and consistently, to allow for a proper third party with a healthy organization to form and stay alive?

Almost certainly, though not necessarily right away. In two-party first-past-the-post, you never vote for the people you like the most. Approval gives you the chance to vote for who you like the most /and/ the one you think is most likely to win amongst people basically on your side.

https://asitoughttobemagazine.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/

I'm not sure about this. There are a bunch of "rural" states that still have large populations in pretty urban areas (eg Nevada, Vermont). It seems totally plausible that the urban parts of enough rural states are more than happy to give up their electoral power to shift the political balance.

I'm assuming a Constitutional Convention would be required to change the way the Senate and EC work, though. That's impossible now and perhaps forever.

Not really. States can choose their electors however they want, including following the National Popular Vote. At least, that’s the theory behind the NaPoVoInterCo [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

It's a bit more complex than that, in that the constitution guarantees a republican form of government. In reality, those who oppose republican forms of government will push for these compacts and they are in a minority, so there aren't enough electoral votes to make this relevant and actually trigger the compact, but if it were to be triggered, you'd bet that there would be some constitutional challenges.

We could abolish states. Gigantic unilaterally-voting political bodies are a bad design. Accepting legislation purely because some group is in the majority is a bad design.

Say you have two very large groups of junior developers and a handful of senior devs. Both groups of juniors propose conflicting pull requests using diametrically opposed designs. Then everyone votes on a PR. The group with more juniors ends up getting their PR merged. Even though both designs might be total crap, and in fact the groups might intentionally avoid good code just because it looks like the other group's code.

The solution is to disband the two gigantic groups and either A) create one mega-group, or B) create small "two-pizza" groups. Enable peer review, and empower the seniors to provide the necessary guidance and control to prevent a group of incompetents from merging shitty code just because they didn't like some other group's code. Oh, and mandate validation testing, and metrics to show whether the code should be kept or reverted.

Political power is never given freely. It must be taken. If they do t like it, too bad.

So just a second Civil War then? That's how you think we should resolve it?

Presidential systems are unstable are known to be unstable. It's high-time the US stopped thinking it is exceptional.

I don't want war, but I think taking the threat of war, mass unrest, etc. seriously is the only way we're going to be able to muscle-through the reforms needing to avoid it.

Our current institutions are massively politically unsustainable, and doing nothing about it is not going to maintain the peace in the long term.

Couldn't it cause them to vote for different republican candidates? I have a sense that these one-party states must have some internal division within that party, don't they? It seems to be the natural way of humans to always subdivide their homogeneous beliefs and create disagreement.

Yes, and that would be a significant improvement as it has the potential to break the cycle of needing to hold ever more extreme positions in order to get elected; downballot votes can flow towards the center.

The "wings" of each party --- which is currently an insider baseball phenomenon very hard for voters to follow --- would just have their own parties. So Ohio Republicans would probably continue voting for former republicans, but the menu would be way clearer.

> This country is fucked without proportional representation.

US has 13 states that send only 1 or 2 representatives to the House (6 states: 1, 7 states: 2). Then 2 states with 3, and 6 states with 4. At these 21 states, proportional representation would not differ (much) from the current two-party system.

Then again, those 21 states contribute only 50 out of the 435 House representatives, so maybe that wouldn't matter much. Maybe it could work, if the rest 39 states went properly proportional.

> Then again, those 21 states contribute only 50 out of the 435 House representatives, so maybe that wouldn't matter much. Maybe it could work, if the rest 39 states went properly proportional.

Yup.

I also have no problem increasing the number of House representatives or making multi-state districts.

Proportional representation in the state level will solve state problems. National Proportional representation instead of state wise proportional split as common now is needed.

If the national legislatures determine national policies, there should be no reason to split representation by state at all. There is every reason to split by actual interests evenly, this is only way minorites views get a voice like californian republicans or Texas democrats

It will also break the two party system eventually, people are not binary, neither are their beliefs there won't be need to compromise and go with a dominant party

This article is about a within-Ohio state issue. (It’s the Ohio state Senate, not the Ohio Senators in the US Senate.)

Yes and? Everyone assumed I was talking about congress but what I wrote equally applies to Ohio and other state legislatures.

I everyone assumes something other than what you meant to communicate, it seems fair to conclude the communication wasn't clearly understood the way you intended.

Sure, I'll happily admit saying "this country" was bad/unclear because it led everyone to think only about the federal level.

I thought you might have substantive point about PR not working within Ohio to follow up.

I am a big fan of the idea of using citizen assemblies as you can end up with not just proportional ideological representation but alse proportional geographic representation.

Can you blame them? Everyone on the left has been calling them stupid and ignorant for decades. How are you supposed to trust those same people?

Both sides are guilty of this. We can discuss a myriad of ways to fix our political system, but the root issue is a low trust and highly divided society. No system will fix that.

Everyone on the left.....

You’re right! I’m sorry - I made the same mistake I’m criticizing for.

I know it’s not everyone. Reading this thread is hard - even if one side is objectively right, it doesn’t matter. Compromise is the only way forward. I don’t like considering the alternatives.

I am all about compromise the same way Mitch McConnell is all about compromise. As long as you come over 90% of the way to my point of view, I'll give 10%.

> The way the accountability aspect is supposed to work is that voters are horrified and hold their elected representatives accountable by voting them out.

It's always too late by this point. It's a flaw. The elected official get's to screw over their constituents for the duration of their term..

That is one group. There is another that, while they may be informed of the ill their particular group supports, believes the group across the partisan chasm to be literal evil incarnate.

Let's get rid of first-past-the-post already.

As someone from Ohio, it's partly due to partisan voting but mostly due to gerrymandering that Republicans control the state.

Trump won the state by 8 points in 2020. It's mostly due to voting, and partly to gerrymandering.

Are you from Ohio?

Trump isn't imposing a ban on municipal broadband, state lawmakers are which are in power due to gerrymandering.

We don't have municipal broadband in Washington State, either, despite the DNC holding a monopoly in the State, County, and City level around here. And by monopoly, at the city and county level in the Seattle area, 100% of the elected are Democrats. At the state level, they hold the governorship and both houses.

Somehow, it certainly is the Democrats' fault.

Washington state law has recently been changed (rather, is in the process of changing) to explicitly allow municipal broadband. In the case of the Senate bill, we see all but one Republican opposing it, and all but 3 Democrats supporting it.

Did the Democrats make it illegal for your city to offer it, though? I think not.

There are many ways to make it illegal. A popular one is to make it so difficult for a competitor, that they just give up. I recall a story a while back of one giving up because the existing ISP successfully prevented them from running wires.

Sorry, don't have a reference for that, as I don't recall specific details.

But the point remains. Their lack of any opposition at all at the county and city level means they can, and do, whatever they want. They can also count on a judiciary that approves the illegal laws they pass (such as a city income tax. The judge's dubious rationale was the employer was paying it, not the employee, although both are at the expense of the employee).

A state income tax is unconstitutional in Washington, so the city just required the employer to pay it.

Sadly, the Democrats simultaneously argue that capital gains should be taxed as ordinary income, and yet passed a state capital gains tax arguing the capital gains are not income.

So, yeah, blaming the GOP in Washington State isn't going to work.

Democrats like money, too.

And ISPs have a lot of it.

Not having municipal broadband is different issue than having municipal broadband outlawed state-wide.

https://ilsr.org/washington-state-removes-all-barriers-to-mu...

Seems to me the Democrats in WA have worked to allow municipal broadband to exist whereas the Republicans in OH are trying for the opposite outcome.

> In the end, it doesn't really matter who inserted the language. All of the Republicans in the legislature are voting for it...

Are they? From the article:

> Last week's vote to restrict municipal broadband "was along party lines, with 25 GOP State Senators voting in favor of the Senate budget bill and the chamber's eight Democrats voting against it."

(The quote was from the Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR)).

But what the quote says was that the Republicans voted for the bill, and the Democrats voted against the bill. They aren't (at least on the evidence presented) voting for or against the broadband limitations, but for or against the budget as a whole. Are the broadband limits why the Democrats are voting against? From the evidence given, we can't tell.

What we need are the voting records on the amendment that added this stupid ban to the budget. That's probably down in a committee somewhere, but it might be on the state Senate floor. What we need is the breakdown on that vote, not on the vote on the overall budget.

But Ars is taking evidence of votes on the budget as a whole, and trying to make them say that Republicans are against municipal broadband. They may in fact be against it, but Ars needs to show that, not just claim it on somewhat-tangentially-related evidence. As it is, one could reasonably wonder if Ars is just trying to spin an anti-Republican narrative.

Simone Biles would be hard pressed to match these gymnastics. And if you think I’m saying that because of partisan reasons, read my history: I am well downvoted in defence of banning municipal broadband in my previous comment.

In any meaningful sense, they’re voting to ban muni broadband.

> But Ars is taking evidence of votes on the budget as a whole, and trying to make them say that Republicans are against municipal broadband.

If you voted for a bill containing a specific provision, it is entirely reasonable to supose that you support that provision, especially when you don't make a public protestation against the inclusion of that provision.

The counter claim is not as reasonable. Just because you vote against a bill containing a provision, that doesn't mean it is reasonable to supoose you oppose that provision (at leat without additional context.)

> What we need are the voting records on the amendment that added this stupid ban to the budget.

That would might give us additional information on who takes a strong stance against municipal broadband (or possibly who got their palms greased.)

> If you voted for a bill containing a specific provision, it is entirely reasonable to supose that you support that provision...

No, that's not reasonable. You support the bill as a whole, not every sentence in it. The strongest that can be said is that you don't disagree with that provision strongly enough to reject the whole bill over it.

It's not definitive proof, but without any statements against the provision, it is a reasonable conclusion to draw.

Why would Ohio Republicans include an amendment that they don't support in a bill that they already have enough votes to pass? If they were against this amendment, it wouldn't be in the bill. It is therefore safe to assume Republicans are in support of the amendment.

> As it turns out, though, most people are profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out.

Next to the good points by the sister comments, there is usually the problem that you won't find somebody who fits you 100%. Are you going to vote someone who, for example, proposes widespread surveillance, just to get someone out who doesn't deny a bill that bans municipal broadband?

As Southpark eloquently put it, sometimes you have to decide between a douche and a turd [0]. No ignorance needed (except, maybe, to stay sane).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douche_and_Turd

>In the end, it doesn't really matter who inserted the language. All of the Republicans in the legislature are voting for it, so pick any one of them (without loss of generality) to serve as an example.

It's not impossible that one of the Democrats did it, so they could pretend to oppose it. Controlled opposition isn't a new thing.

If one of the Republicans did it, can they have the numbers to pass it, why wouldn't one of them take credit for it?

I dream of the day legislation is drafted using git and the public can see the pull request from Comcast Corp. lobbyists adding the language to a Senate staff member's fork of the draft and track it being merged up the tree.

Even with git, that is not the way it would happen. The people working on the bills are smarter than that.

It is trivial to commit someone else’s patch as your own and without any history if you want to write the script. Just not that hard.

Even if the changed was committed by @OfficialComcast, a significant contingent of the temporarily embarrassed millionaires would accept this as the best course of action. After all those captains of industry are experts and probably shouldn't be questioned.

Captain of industry is an ironic name: a captain is typically someone that has been placed in authority by even higher powers, that's not typically how industry leaders like to describe their ascent.

Captian comes from the Byzantine latin word Katepano, while it can mean "placed at the top", there is no implications of higher authority placing them. Usual interpretations are that the person facually at the top how he got there is not really a factor. Somewhat akin to saying "boss" today.

Surprised by your downvotes. Getting into the club is a very social activity usually.

Even that would be fine, we would still see that Representative Smith inserted the language into the bill. Its the person that has merge permissions into the main branch that has the accountability

This solves what, exactly? We already know bill sponsors, the provenance of bills is generally not a problem in the US. All the regulatory capture and pork usually happens in the open already.

I’d be less concerned with elected officials taking credit for “good” legislative language they didn’t actually draft and more concerned with a “language laundering” of sorts. By that I mean situations where the “bad” legislative language couldn’t be easily attributed to any specific elected official’s office because they’ve colluded to make successive, small, innocuous changes that, when taken together, turned in to “bad” language but it’s not easy to pinpoint which change, exactly, made the draft “bad”.

Doesn't matter how it's available if nobody reads it and there's no local journalism.

That is the bigger problem than the way that bills are presented to the public.

What I don't dream of is every commit message in that tree saying nothing but "fixes" or "updated submodules".

Being able to access the laws openly and freely sounds like a novel idea in this country.

It's different from state to state, but most have some repository you can search. Local governments really vary based on size of city (rural areas have almost nothing online, but cities tend to have trackers).

For most people, I assume they're talking about the federal government when they say things like you said. I just want you to know that it's already open and available. For straight legislation - congress.gov tracks bills and gives you the text of most things. Whereas federalregister.gov gives you regulation changes.

Yes, there is a day or two delay on congress.gov from introduction and when it is transmitted from the GPO to the Library of Congress. But overall it's pretty quick.

Have you heard of (YC backed) UpCodes? You might find their legal troubles[1] interesting and infuriating. TLDR: They were sued for copyright infringement for publishing housing code that had been adopted as law.

[1] https://up.codes/free-law

I just posted a dup of this article to be able to make the same point.

How come no one ever slips a good thing into legislation when they can?

Everyone looks at Washington, so state and local governments often operate with no public oversight. It can be a complete shitshow of incompetence and corruption, and nobody notices until the lights start going out, the water is poisonous, the pension fund goes bankrupt (because it was looted), etc.

Last presidential election, there was like a 45% voter turnout in our county. It was historic, and they even ran out of ballots in a couple of places during the primary.

In the most recent mid-term elections for things like Mayor, road commissioner and county council, the turnout was 8%.

8% of people decided who would do things that ACTUALLY impact the day-to-day life around here. Wonder why only the rich neighborhoods get their streets fixed? BECAUSE THE ELDERLY AND WEALTHY PEOPLE THERE VOTE. Wonder why they're spending an unbelievable amount fixing an out-of-date lake/riverfront to be prettier? BECAUSE THE OLD PEOPLE THERE VOTE IN LOCAL ELECTIONS.

Why don't people get this?

As somebody who has tried really really hard to understand enough local politics so that I even know who I'm voting for, it's really really hard. Not only is there a lack of good information sources, it takes a ton of time to understand the issues and what each of these offices does.

And if there's one thing that the elderly and the wealthy have more of than the rest of us, it's time. Time to call up city offices when things are not to one's liking, time to figure out the org charts and bureaucratic relationships, and time to get your neighbors riled up.

I agree. During my last local election I sat down with the mail ballot and attempted to find information on all of the candidates. For 90% of these candidates, at best I would end up on a Facebook page with one paragraph describing their position. At worst I couldn't find anything that told me who they even were. I had to guess as to which "John Doe" was the person actually running.

The old + wealthy people who vote in those elections don't worry about perfection, they just vote the old + wealthy slate and look for the odd dog whistle.

If you skim the positions and get an 80% hit rate on policies which actually match yours (which means you screw it up and guess wrong 20% of the time) that is still way better than not participating at all.

The best information source I've found is to go to join local political advocacy groups, where a lot of information (and misinformation) spreads about candidates, what they've done in the past, and their likely views on future matters.

This takes a toooooon more time than looking up people once you have a ballot. But I'm the other hand, voting isn't such a huge thing for controlling local political outcomes.

The local officials have a similar lack of information about what voters want. So they tend to be easily influenced by a small number of highly motivated people that show up to meetings. In a town or 50,000, if 100 people show up to a meeting and there's no significant opposition, it's quite likely that the 100 people will win, even if they don't represent the community. Because with the small amount of effort that it took to get 100 people to show to a meeting will go much further come election time, and that 100 people who bothered to show up will remember a vote that went against them when they were the only people that showed up for public input.

IMHO, this is hugely un democratic, and a source of many problems. But it's how politics work: connections and organizing, instead of a poll of everybody's opinion on every issue.

I've found it terribly hard to find out when and where local elections are held. Yes - the local county website has this information. But that's only useful if you already _know_ there is an election upcoming. If you don't know, you don't know to go check either.

Local communication has completely broken down. Few, if anyone, watches local TV, listens to local radio (if they haven't been replaced by Sinclair et. al) , subscribes local newspapers (if they exist). I'm not so upset at people, because they have no avenue to learn this information except word of mouth.

National politics at least has enough money to pay for ad spots. Local campaigns rarely can afford such measures.

Check your state Board of Elections website. It's all on there.

> How did we end up with such a gross lack of accountability?

Have a read of Dark Money (Mayer) and/or Democracy in Chains (MacLean) to get a picture of the why and how.

This... gets interesting.

From the Congressional Research Service ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Research_Service ):

* The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 and other 1970s Sunshine Reforms - https://www.congressionalresearch.org/LRA.html

I'd point to the graphs (and the various dots below them - there are lots of graphs there).

The lack of accountability is a reaction to this (trying to protect the members / lobbyists who helped draft it) with the addition of the current polarization of the various parties in state and federal legislatures.

Absentee democracies where 20% or less of the eligible voting population actually vote.

I have said it a million times, and ill say it again:

All bills should be edited in a system/software analogous to Github, where the user has to be authenticated (and verified) and edits can be tracked.

Of course the lobbyist would hate it, but fuck them.

It is tracked already, it is not public of course, but pretty sure privately staffers know where it came from.

Things don't magically appear in a bill, it is just that now no one wants to own up to it as they had hoped to slide it in unnoticed.

>It's not even clear who proposed the new law

I'm going to speculate that it's some state legislator who put this in and probably got $1000 dollars in a campaign contribution, a golf game, a dinner and a hooker for the night. That is all it takes to buy a politician these days. The only reason for any uproar is it's now in the open and they're catching shit for it while trying to distance themselves from it. We continuously elect the most stupid, undesirable, corrupt people to represent us at every level of Government.

Thank you ATT, Verizon, Spectrum

>> I'm going to speculate that it's some state legislator who put this in and probably got $1000 dollars in a campaign contribution, a golf game, a dinner and a hooker for the night. That is all it takes to buy a politician these days.

That's the challenge. When you put someone in charge of money or rules that are not theirs, they become an amplifier for anyone who can find the gate. The problem is that for a big system, someone has to be in charge/have control over it. How do we design it so they actually have the public interest in mind?

Simultaneously, the budget removes funds allocated for rural broadband and redirects the money to a tax break of $22 for the average Ohio family, corporate tax decreases, and about 20% income tax decrease for wealthier folks

First I thought “can only happen in the US”, but I remember that four years ago the dutch coalition government had inserted a very specific tax break in the coalition agreement that no party suggested prior to the election. It served shareholders of two influential companies. Fortunately it was cancelled, it was too embarrassing.

What would it matter if you had a name to attach to it? The result would be the same, and such a discovery would have little to no effect.

> Fairlawn's city-run FairlawnGig network has consistently ranked as one of the fastest ISPs in the country, serving residents and businesses in Fairlawn, Akron, and Bath with affordable gigabit Internet services. The slowest service tier delivers 300Mbps symmetrical speeds for $55/month. The municipal network has resulted in more businesses choosing to locate in Fairlawn, and at least 700 jobs can be directly attributed to the network. In recent subscriber surveys, 95 percent of respondents rated FairlawnGig's service as "very good to excellent," with some customer testimonials referring to the network as "a life saver" throughout the pandemic.

From the article. That is very impressive and a really bad sign for private broadband to be beat out like this.

> a really bad sign for private broadband to be beat out like this

Why is it bad? Sounds like customers are getting high quality service for a good price.

A better way to word that would be "That's pretty damning" or "A clear indicator that private ISPs aren't trying to optimize for the best result of cost-effective speed for their customers."

Why would it be a surprise to anyone that a major corporation is optimizing for shareholder profits rather than anything else

Do you buy Apple products or Samsung phones? Not every for-profit company is so myopic. For broadband companies to be orders of magnitude worse in _the key performance metric_ than public offerings should be a wakeup call.

Apple seems like another case of the same thing?

In which key metric is Apple being beaten by a much smaller company?

This is an obvious result when competition is sparse, and particularly when it is artificially limited, which is the core point of the original article, where lawmakers are intentionally trying to limit competition (in this case, in the form of small, local government projects).

Government is usually pretty bad at IT, yet muni broadband easily beats most private broadband. Just let that sink in. It shows how lazy and terrible most private broadband companies are. They're sitting there cashing checks and that's about it.

This is what happens when we allow monopolies to run wild. They have no incentive to provide anything.

They're not just cashing checks, they're also writing checks to Republicans in Ohio to stamp out their competition for them.

Municipal broadband doesn't have to deal with the expensive parts of giving service to remote areas.

Which is why it's crucial for Republicans to stamp this out as quickly as possible. Of course they're being lobbied to do so by ISPs, but more importantly, the existence of successful municipal broadband disproves neoliberal dogma that state-run anything will always be less efficient, more wasteful and more corrupt than privately owned alternatives. This belief is crucial to their political platform.

Every second they allow these municipal ISPs to exist and be effective, the stories that keep them in power are being undermined.

It is not that state-run enterprises are always less efficient, but they usually are especially in the long run, and often have unfair advantages that block market competition (direct subsidies or advantages from connection to political power).

While it is possible that some cities would have great municipal ISPs, it is also likely that some cities would just outsource network operation to some shitty ISP who has good connections to townhall and people would pay much more (indirectly through taxes) and would not have alternative (who would compete against subsidised service?).

A state-run enterprise is to me not preferable over a healthy market, but it is almost always preferable over a private monopoly. As a citizen you have no leverage over a monopoly, whereas a state-run enterprise still has a democratic feedback loop.

Also, the Republican small government platform goes much further than just railing against government-run enterprise: it essentially states that all government intervention in the economy is bad (both morally and from an effectiveness standpoint; the effectiveness angle is crucial to make their platform appeal to enough people).

In the case of ISP monopolies in rural areas leading to low quality and high costs, I think it doesn't seem likely that the free market will solve this problem by itself any time soon. So politicians without a small government ideology might consider methods such as good old breaking up monopolies or other antitrust measures. Of course, this can not be done at a local level, and if small government ideologues are in power at the state level, this approach is dead in the water.

So if you're a local government and you want to attack this problem, what are your options? Municipal broadband is the only approach I can think of that's within the reach of a city council. So yes, it's a band-aid, but it's the best you can do as long as the state-level is run by small government ideologues.

The main question is why US ISP market is often described as private monopoly, while in other countries there is significant market competition. Start and run small wISP is easy, these can naturally grow to bigger ones, especially when there is no real competition.

> So if you're a local government and you want to attack this problem, what are your options?

First, do not obstruct. High easement prices for fiber installations, long bureaucratic procedures for building permits for fiber installation, forbidding of overhead fiber cables ...

Ensure that for new constructions there is passive infrastructure (e.g. microducts or dark fiber) that can be leased to ISPs on per-subscriber basis.

Encourage citizens to start a local co-op working as ISP.

What is a municipal government if not a “local co-op”?

A local co-op is a fully private entity that has no power over non-members, while a municipality is a governmental structure with powers of local ordinances and taxation.

On a more practical level, a local co-op ISP is a single-goal entity, whose participants are persons interested in that goal (getting good Internet connectivity). A municipality has many tasks, and municipal broadband would be just a small part of it.

Should we also then have a local road coop? What about a local water pipes and sewers coop? What about local school districts coop?

Why are some single-goal entities the right decision, why are other decisions better solved by a multi-goal entity?

> unfair advantages that block market competition (direct subsidies or advantages from connection to political power).

You mean lobbyists?

That's actually the opposite of my experience when it comes to natural monopolies. Specifically, that publicly-owned water/electrical utilities have:

1. lower prices 2. better, more responsive customer service 3. higher reliability

Just look at LADWP and Silicon Valley Power compared to PG&E and SoCal Edison in California. All four a subject to the same regulations, but the two municipal utilities are an order of magnitude better than the private ones.

State-run enterprises are bad if you would otherwise have a competitive market. But here's the thing: electrical utilities and ISPs are not in competitive markets.

I agree that private natural monopolies are bad and publicly-owned utilities are better. But i disagree that ISPs are natural monopolies. There are not really comparable to water or electricity - you can easily have multiple overlapping distribution networks or passive/lower-layer infrastructure leased per-subscriber. Just have public setup that encourages competition instead one that discourages that.

>and often have unfair advantages that block market competition

I don't care. I don't care about the market. Let me say it again: I don't care about the market.

There should be no inherent right to profit off of critical infrastructure in this country. Water, power and Internet are important enough to society that they should be regulated like a government entity, if not being one outright.

Infrastructure like running thousands of miles of power poles, digging trenches for fiber, or laying water and sewer pipes is not a place for disruptive startups or fierce open-market competition. They're natural monopolies.

Should cities allow private ISPs to run fiber in public rights-of-way or on power lines? Sure. Don't block it. I'm okay with that.

But this idea of /stopping the government from providing essential services because megacorporations might lose money/ is outright immoral.

> the existence of successful municipal broadband disproves neoliberal dogma that state-run anything will always be less efficient, more wasteful and more corrupt than privately owned alternatives.

It's easy to be the best service provider when competition is quashed by rules and regulations. How are private entities supposed to compete when states and municipal governments are no longer afraid to blow their budgets? These services are essentially subsidized with unlimited dollars from the federal government.

That's not to say there won't be competition. Various governments will eventually create their own broadband services and states will adapt the best policies to ensure they are competing with the best states/services. This would(in the future) serve to disprove the "neoliberal dogma that state-run anything will always be less efficient, more wasteful and more corrupt than privately owned alternatives".

The "neoliberal dogma" asserts that the private sector without competition from government will out perform by all metrics in the long run. Comparing a world of government run services to a world of private run services over the course of 100 or 500 years would be necessary to get a better idea.

There are other ramifications that arise when governments control services. Corruption, in it's many forms could degrade the service. For instance, if the government becomes radical and disables certain individuals or groups from connecting to various online entities, the argument still exists that "example" government run broadband provides the fastest speed. However, it is a mute point if you are one of the individuals or groups that is being targeted.

Using the above example of targeted restrictions, the private sector solves this by having competition. If there is a group that wants something, there would be another to provide it.

The alternative to municipal broadband in many regions seems not to be a healthy free market with lots of competition, but a single monopoly providing poor service at high cost.

The great strength of neoliberal ideology is that it seems uniquely capable of turning its own failings into arguments in its own favor. Whenever it fails -- such as in the rural US where there are large swathes of the country where there is no competition, poor service and high prices -- its defenders are quick to point out that these failings are the result of their theory not being applied with sufficient purity.

Their predictions of lots of competition, high efficiency, and low prices fail to materialize not because the theory is wrong, but because there are still some rules and regulations, and clearly, those rules and regulations are what prohibits the neoliberal paradise from coming into existence. Not only did the theory not fail, the failure of its implementation is proof of the correctness of the theory.

As is the case with your comment, this argument is rarely paired with an argument (or evidence) of how exactly the existing rules and regulations prevented healthy competition from materializing in the specific case under discussion. This is taken as a global, self-evident truth. The possibility that some regulations might make encourage rather than inhibit competition (such as regulation that allows you to keep your phone number when you switch providers) is never mentioned.

> such as in the rural US where there are large swathes of the country where there is no competition, poor service and high prices

If rural individuals were willing to pay the cost for broadband access they would have it. They are not. So there is no market for competition at this time. The neoliberal argument does not assume that everyone should have equal access to the best services, but that a free market will provide what the market is willing to pay at a better efficiency than government.

I think you meant libertarian, not neoliberal.

I'm not sure, I understand neoliberalism as a set of beliefs specifically about how the economy should be run, and libertarianism as a philosophical position and system of morality.

So my understanding of the relationship between the two is that libertarians tend to hold neoliberal beliefs about the economy, and many neoliberals are libertarians. But it's perfectly possible to hold neoliberal beliefs and not be libertarian (for instance, you could be a religious fundamentalist who believes the state should be run as an autocratic theocracy, but who also believes the economy should be run according to free-market capitalist principles).

If that's correct, my usage of neoliberal seems alright to me.

> the private sector solves this by having competition.

And the ISPs fight like hell to simultaneously avoid competition and go in all together on lawsuits like https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/isps-sue-new-yor...

The idea that private competition will solve broadband internet problems in the US has been garbage for many, many years

>> the private sector solves this by having competition.

>The idea that private competition will solve broadband internet problems in the US has been garbage for many, many years

I live in an area that just rolled out a municipal last mile fiber network. I have two choices for ISP, one cable, one DSL.

Once that fiber is connected to my home though, I will have twenty choices for ISP. That is competition.

And it took government intervention in order to allow for that competition.

There is no denying that governments with nearly unlimited resources can provide services in areas that the private market doesn't exist. Individuals are not willing to pay the price that is required to provide service to rural areas. The municipal governments either take on debt or subsidize the cost with increased taxation.

ISPs indeed fight like hell to avoid competition. They take advantage of government mandated monopolies as well. There is no denying that corporations take advantage of government rules and regulation to gain a competitive edge. Any strict neoliberal should denounce this.

I've actually seen some pretty terrible municipal broadband options. So just because it's successful in one place does not really prove anything. There are also some cities (including mine) which have fantastic ISPs (multiple competing) offering cheap gig fiber and there is zero need for government involvement in our internet.

Variability in the quality of offerings in any given city/town seems like a particularly important reason to _not_ implement a blanket statewide ban on municipal broadband.

If the quality of a municipal system sucks, the voters presumably have some leverage via voting to get it fixed. If a private provider has a local near-monopoly and sucks, and the state has banned the local municipality from competing, the only winner is the provider.

They can also buy a private solution that’s better and/or cheaper. The danger isn’t that the municipal broadband is bad. It is that it’s good and then poor Comcast can’t make a fuckton of money while paying minimum wage to its employees. The horror.

That isn’t an argument for blocking them. If the advocates of this truly believed in the power of the free market, why would they bother?

No, it's an argument against another $68 Billion, 170 mile High Speed Rail[1]. Just because the government could do something efficiently, doesn't mean it will be done efficiently.

There are so many examples of this type of massive program bloat, every state in the union has numerous examples.

So while there are some cases where a municipal fiber network has been built efficiently and well, that is the "unicorn" example, not the norm it seems. Besides, nobody has operated one of these municipal networks long enough to see if the local government has the stomach (or pocketbook) to maintain the network long-term (10-50+ years).

Yes it can be done... but will it? That's the question that should be debated, particularly when the local government already doesn't have a balanced budget or has excess debts. Local governments can't just print money like the Fed... and that $9 Billion Bond Californians voted for doesn't even cover 15% of the cost of the HSR.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail

>power of the free market

A government controlled or subsidized competitor doesn't result in a free market.

Then the current ISP situation is not a free market, because they're constantly subsidized. States pick individual winners for broadband all the time, private companies get direct contracts and grants to lay wire, government works directly with companies to subsidize costs for lower-income families.

In general, the 'competition' we're talking about here isn't between individual businesses and the government -- it's between the entire categories of privatized solutions and public solutions. There are (at least) two theories for how to provide a service: to have communities pool resources in the form of a local town/city government and provide it themselves, or to have the service completely privatized.

By creating public options for some social services, but still allowing the private market overall to compete alongside them, we can start to determine which services cost more money to operate, and which end up providing better outcomes. There are some concerns, but many of them are mitigated by the fact that municipal Internet is only... municipal. It's not a massive nation-wide thing.

But in any case, this is all kind of a moot point because city-maintained broadband doesn't seem to me to be any more of an overuse of government resources than any of the other privileges and resources we're already giving away to private companies in the space. In a genuinely free market, I might be a lot more hesitant about this. But given the current state of the broadband market, I really don't see a problem with small communities and cities voluntarily deciding to try their own hand at connecting themselves to the Internet.

Well that's great, you're lucky. If that's the case than I'm sure your local, municipal government has no desire to get involved.

almost like having competition drives innovation up and prices down.

too bad most ISPs have literal monopolies over entire regions of people.

The economic angle can't be stressed enough. I live in suburban / semi-rural western Ohio and provide IT support services to a number of small businesses and government entities. I have personal experience with a number of workers who weren't able to work from home effectively because their Internet service wasn't up to snuff. Sharing their DSL or WISP service w/ their children doing home instruction during the pandemic became an either / or proposition.

>300Mbps symmetrical speeds for $55/month

Eye watering. Broadband pricing is consistent in most places throughout the country and the aggressive asymmetry of upload feels like nothing short of rent seeking. In places where you can get fiber (barring the few communities that already have it fully deployed) costs $300/mo. for symmetrical gig. The next option down is broadband with 35 Mbps upload at $120/mo.

I have symmetric 1gbps from Sonic in San Francisco for $60/month and a VoIP phone line to boot.

I’ve heard of many other ISPs in the US closer to this number too.

Note none of them are the big ISPs. All of the consolidation and removal of the local ISP has been terrible for the consumer. I get that it’s far more expensive now to start one than it was with dial up, but there needs to be a better path forward that decentralizes control and ownership of infrastructure. Particularly this BS of only ever having 1 real broadband choice in a given zip code.

I’d love to see all the recent anti-trust fervor get pointed towards the Comcast’s of the world and understand how they as cartels have unofficially split up the country.

I live in a smaller metropolitan area in the southeast and 400 down/20 up is $95 a month because I don’t bundle it with other services. Fast.com maxes at 200 down so I think they are throttling certain things. I get 400 when using their Speedtest. I want to do some automated testing/logging throughout the day for a good month to have some good data to share with them but not having any broadband alternatives means they ultimately don’t care. I had the faster service for a year when it was randomly set back to the base speed. Calling and complaining about it and it gets fixed but no compensation as I couldn’t tell them exactly when it was changed and they had ‘no clue’. This was after arguing over a $99 upgrade fee initially when I increased speed. She said it was required for the tech to ensure my service was working properly. But wouldn’t have to send a tech to my home. I got that fee waived eventually after explaining I was trying to pay them extra every month and I knew for a fact a tech wasn’t doing anything specific to my account to ensure it worked as I used to work at charter and knew the provisioning process. Oh yah... they were just as scummy of a company to work for. I can only imagine things will get worse with Spectrum after their ‘no caps’ agreement expires from the Time Warner merger.

I understand the opposition to another government service on ideological grounds, but the response in Ohio seems merely pro-monopoly and not pro-market. Is there anywhere in the country where state Republicans are looking for ways to increase competition in the broadband market? Everyone uses the internet, I don't understand why only one party is looking for a solution to this problem.

Because corruption.

Afaik only in Arkansas have Republicans seen the light and are actually supporting municipal broadband (https://www.govtech.com/policy/arkansas-opens-the-door-for-m...). I wonder what made them come to that conclusion, it would be interesting to see if that can be replicated elsewhere.

Everywhere else, Republicans are trying to shut muni broadband out. They are colluding with the legacy ISP monopolies to keep speeds low and costs high.

I find this surprising because they don't seem to consider the long term economic damage this will do to their states. Who is going to want to move there to work remotely if the internet is expensive and slow?

It honestly feels like short term thinking is dominating not only businesses, but government officials too. It boggles my mind, frankly, because of the exact things you mentioned: losing citizens, economic damage, and so forth.

Perhaps the incentives just aren’t there to think long term, for either business leaders or politicians.

Could it have something to do with which party supporters are gonna lose more if internet is slow? Can internet be linked in some way to poll results?

Almost certainly not. When you make things marginally worse across the board on an infrastructure matter (in this case by reducing competition) rural areas almost always lose more.

Politics is business. Business is about making money. From those foundational facts, it's fair to infer that if state Republican politicians are working to ban cities from providing basic services, the politicians are doing this because they think they can make money doing it.

It's wrong. But then, politics, in its current incarnation, is business.

And more importantly, make money for themselves and not for the city/state etc.

The only reason people hate graft more than they hate boondoggles is because in the former case it's nearly impossible to bury your head in the sand and pretend like the money was smartly allocated.

No matter how you cut it at the end of the day the tax dollars are being squandered on lining pockets they shouldn't be.

Extra points for using 'boondoggles' in a sentence :)

It's not surprising. Elected officials care more about getting reelected in the next election than long term effects of their decisions. So they are incentivized to care more about the short term.

In my new world order we'll vote to fire people in charge, not to hire them

We have a system like that with judges in some states. Examples of judges failing to be retained are sparse https://ballotpedia.org/Retention_election

Certainly not a good thing, but I'd be surprised if this has a measurable impact on the overall attractiveness of a location. Even expensive internet is likely less than 10% of overall expenses and, in my experience, it's very hard to tell if your internet will be good or bad without literally plugging in a modem, which realistically most people won't have the knowledge or means to do.

Call me a cynic but I guess my thought is that if incremental decreases in qol and poor planning were enough to drive people away from the republican party it would have happened long ago.

Is there ever bad fiber internet? If a place has fiber to the home, there is a pretty high probability that it is better than whatever garbage the coaxial cable company is peddling.

I have had fiber at two different houses and the first one was worse in that I could only reliably get 890 Mb down and 920 Mb up. The second house I get 950down/950up with the same provider and same hardware. There is variability but nowhere near as much as cable.

Ziply was awful. We got screwed by them when they bought the fiber network in our area, canceled our autopay, and then didn’t bill us for three months until we had racked up a bunch of late fees. My wife spent hours on the phone with them getting the issues sorted out. It was the worst customer service experience I’ve ever had with a broadband provider. I’ve had Charter, Qwest, and Comcast.

That’s a people problem. I assume the actual product worked fine though?

I'm not sure about at the state level, but several republican controlled cities in Utah also have or are building municipal broadband.

Republican cities are fine with municipal broadband, because it solves a real problem in those cities - local leaders are generally more pragmatic that way.

Republican state and national leaders, on the other hand, are generally more concerned about their political narrative. They're not the ones impacted by the crap broadband in the cities.

They do consider it, but it's lobbying. The ISPs control a lot and have a lot of money to 'donate'.

I think it makes political sense for them to do this. The "small government" political platform obviously appeals to large corporations and ideological libertarians, but these groups don't get you a majority in the election. So how do you get average people who don't directly stand to gain from these policies to vote for you?

You convince them that governments are intrinsically ineffective, that the private sector will systematically perform better. This is presented almost as a law of nature, if you disagree you simply don't understand economics.

The existence of a clear and prominent counterexample (a government-run competitor outperforming privately owned businesses) is pure poison to this story, so they cannot allow it to exist.

They -- knowingly, deliberately -- choose to hurt the people they represent and the economy of their state to save their political platform.

The Ohio Republicans literally were bribed by a failing nuclear power plant and have faced barely any reprecussions from it due to the gerrymandering and general reliable partisanship in the gerrymandered districts. Only a year later is the (now former) speaker of house being removed from office after being re-elected in 2020! I wouldn't be surprised if the ISPs are also literally (and not even in the figurative sense of legal campaign contributions) bribing someone to put this into law.

I presume religious groups that support Republicans see internet as a source of evil.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/04/04/13684/how-the-in...

"the drop in religious upbringing, the increase in college-level education and the increase in Internet use—that together explain about 50 percent of the drop in religious affiliation."

Doubtful... it seems neither party is interested in breaking up monopolies. They'd both rather bend them to their interests is some selfish power move.

What's the point in the breaking up, if you just let the pieces reassemble a few years later?

Campaign buzzwords. It's the same reason neither party will actually do anything about 2A or abortion. Can't get your base riled up if the issue is resolved

I would love to see an amendment passed that limits all campaigns to the 3 months immediately preceding an election. Campaign, get elected, go to work, and not campaign, get elected, immediately start campaigning again. It's never not campaign season. Except we can't pass an amendment because everyone is campaigning.

>Doubtful... it seems neither party is interested in breaking up monopolies. They'd both rather bend them to their interests is some selfish power move.

Except reality[0] doesn't comport with your statement. That's not to say that the bills proposed are perfect, but they are from one party (and not the one trying to block municipal broadband in OH).

Just some food for thought.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/five-new-bills-a...

>but they are from one party (and not the one trying to block municipal broadband in OH).

Did you even read the article you linked? There's clear Republican involvement...

"“Big Tech companies are stifling American innovation with their monopolistic behavior,” said Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Tex.), who co-sponsored two of the bills.""

"Bipartisan movement

It’s unclear whether any of these bills will pass. The last one, the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act, appears most likely at this point since it’s a relatively incremental piece of legislation that already has bipartisan support in both chambers. But the fact that the other bills, which garnered bipartisan support in the otherwise highly partisan House, suggests that a major overhaul of antitrust law may be imminent, even if these specific bills don’t survive."

>Except reality[0] doesn't comport with your statement.

Let me know when they pass....

There's a serious argument to be made to keep the government out of areas which ought to be free market territory. If there's not enough demand for internet in these areas to justify multiple service providers, perhaps that's OK, because to provide the service would be a waste of resources... Just because internet is a utility does not mean the government ought to be the one providing that utility.

Also, this just reinforces the argument for projects like Starlink -- which could change the game in rural broadband. Conservatives have a lot of motivation to oppose government programs and that does not necessarily make them corrupt.

What America needs is more intellectual + centrist + pragmatic conservatism to counter Trumpist BS, not necessarily more government programs....

A municipality's decision to implement common locally-owned internet as a public utility IS the free market. The State should not get to decide what's a "waste of resources" for me and my neighbors.

If your neighbor doesn't use the public internet for whatever reason, then making your neighbor pay for it is a waste of resources.

And some people do not have cars or children in schools or use the food banks or go to community college.

Not everything is about the individual cost/benefit, and individuals can benefit from society wide benefits.

Further in this direction. The neighbor that doesn't use this internet will still benefit from the value of new jobs and opportunity that it will bring.

Internet access should be considered a utility and explicitly NOT subject to "free market" territory. It's a core driver of our modern economy and essential for pretty much everything these days. It should be mostly if not wholly subsidized by the state like the interstate highway system.

> What America needs is more intellectual + centrist + pragmatic conservatism to counter Trumpist BS, not necessarily more government programs....

I don't think this is about Trump, GOP governments have failed to reduce government programs for 5 decades now, and almost always resulted in more deficits: https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*pqIXolEpzpTNktAgIclA-A.png

From the outside (I'm not from the US) it looks like the small government talking point has been empty rhetorics since inception.

> free market territory

The free market in the United States for broadband Internet has failed. Time for plan B.

DSL, Cable, 4G, wifi, starlink, GEO satelite.

There's plenty of options

Yup. Plenty of 10mbps options.

Why is that. There's clearly the potential for competition, there isn't a monopoly on internet provision - the investment to set up a WISP is minimal.

Why isn't the market providing that competition? Why can't you run fiber through your sewer for example? who owns the sewer?

"If there's not enough demand..."

Demand is not that simple. There could be tons of latent demand and the internet seems to be one of those things that seems to show induced demand as well. People are incredibly adaptive and may be working around the problem of crappy internet one way or another.

If there was just straight up "demand", these near-monopoly ISPs form a market of "you can't vote for whoever you want as long as I get to choose the candidate" type systems. That does not a healthy market make and supply/demand do not work out like it does in econ 101 textbooks in unhealthy markets.

What free market? In most places in the US cable and Internet service is a local monopoly. This argument is getting more and more threadbare as the Republican Party gets more outré.

It is totally pro-monopoly. I live in Ohio and many of our communities are only served by a single provider. Those providers offer fairly sluggish service as well as fairly high costs. People that I work with regularly complain about one or the other. My community discussed community broadband (going so far as to put at least exploring it to a vote on one of our ballots). It was shot down ("Why do we need to increase taxes to pay for this? I already have the internets... no one needs more") and shortly after that we finally got a second provider. Just that second provider caused prices to plummet. I went from being stuck with getting anywhere from 5 to 30 down (advertised as "up to 100") for $75 a month to getting gigabit internet for $65 a month.

I heard a while ago that Ohio wrote into the Constitution a monopoly on casino gambling.\

Not knowing if I was remembering correctly, I read through the state constitution, and holy hell, they dedicate like seven pages of the constitution to casino gambling for four gambling facilities. For reference, most other sections are a few paragraphs, at most.

It's not that uncommon, actually.

In The Netherlands, both running a lottery and running a physical casinos are reserved for two state-owned companies. By law, half of the profit goes to charity. The rest goes to the government.

In Sweden, the government-owned liquor chain Systembolaget is the only one allowed to sell stuff containing more than 3.5% alcohol. Norway has basically the same thing going on.

The idea is that things like gambling and alcohol consumption have an overall negative impact on society, but completely banning them will cause even more harm. Having a state monopoly makes it easier to promote safe and moderate consumption, as no profit is required and criminal figures are kept out - at least in theory.

Oregon has a state run liquor board over distribution. It's great as technically they own all the product in a licensed liquor store so prices are identical. You can walk into any place, make a request for a certain bottle, and it usually arrives in a few days at the same price it would be anywhere else. If only we could apply that model to other services...

And they run a nice, light weight web site designed in the mid-2000s which lets you search the entire inventory for the liquor you want, where to buy it and for how much.

Well, these aren't state-owned entities, which is a key distinction. Most people are okay with state-run monopolies. This more akin to if The Netherlands updated their constitution to say that only Coca-cola soft drinks are allowed to be sold in the country.

Most states would put something along the lines of, "A state gaming commission will be created, with the duties and structure granted to them by the Congress of <state>." Then pass a subsequent law outlining the nitty-gritty details.

IANAL, but I suppose this is the result of some fuckery by the casino owners. It's probably easier to modify the constitution than it is to get actual laws past.

Same thing happened with marijuana.

https://stonerdays.com/will-ohio-legalize-a-marijuana-monopo...

Roughly one-third of US states have various forms of monopoly over liquor sales; sometimes it's just over wholesaling, and in a few states, only state-run stores are allowed to sell beverages over some ABV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_sta...

It was/is a sensible strategic move to frame cannabis legalization as "regulate it like alcohol"; but looking at the bizarre patchwork of regulations for each state regarding alcohol (a historical side effect of the gradual elimination of Prohibition), a lot of that baggage is now getting carried over to cannabis ("from grain to bottle" compliance -> "from seed to sale").

I personally consider states and investors getting a steep cut or artificial monopoly to be a lesser evil than tolerating the grave injustice of the War on Drugs, but as legalization becomes more normalized, it's worth paying attention to these details and policy trade-offs on new state initiatives.

Source: Coloradan who formerly worked in alcohol compliance.

Not sure how it works in other states but in Ohio, voters can vote in changes directly to the state constitution. Thus the constitution is huge. I'm not sure what it takes to get on the ballot but it sounds like a way for special interests to just bypass the legislative process if they can get voter approval. There were 4 casinos permitted in the Ohio constitution change across 2 owners, but no provision for competitors to come in, it's just these 4 until another amendment.

Unfortunately, any citizen's initiative that is placed on the ballot in Ohio is an amendment to the constitution. This has an upside in that the legislature can't really override the direct will of the citizenry, but it also means that things that might not be a great fit for the constitution are there.

Massachusetts' Constitution practically grants Harvard sovereign immunity. There were different purposes and circumstances 230 years ago however.

https://malegislature.gov/laws/constitution#chapterVSectionI

The monopoly exists in certain sub categories of internet. Gigabit is limited to the terrestrial providers that each municipality allows access to the monopoly they have on the telephone poles. There are alternatives in most rural areas to the terrestrial services, but not in the gigabit speed yet.

https://www.whistleout.com/Internet/Guides/ohio-satellite-in...

> Viasat's plans start at around $50/month and with it you get an unlimited data at speeds up to 50Mbps

Starlink exists:

https://governor.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/governor/administra...

wikipedia: > Starlink beta testers have been reporting speeds over 150 megabits per second

Viasat's plans have 3 Mbps maximum upload, 500 ms minimum latency, low monthly caps, and high contention. Even they acknowledge VPN use might be impractical. The $50 plan is too slow to call broadband according to the FCC. 50 Mbps costs $150 plus equipment rental. It's a last resort for people who can't get terrestrial service.

Starlink availability is limited for now.

My mom gets some kind of terrestrial radio internet like WiMax for $80+ a month. The speeds are 10Mb up, 1Mb down. The cable company wants a wheelbarrow full of cash to run a line up to the house. There is no phone line run to the house.

She might be a good SpaceX Starlink candidate.

It sounds like this is just one provision in a big budget bill. My guess is it didn't even factor into how most of the legislature voted at all. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them didn't even know it was in the bill.

Oh yes, this. In every small Iowa town they have private ISPs/ cable service. Hurray free enterprise! But they're all monopolies, given by the city to some favorite son. The biggest house in any midwest small town, is the cable guy. Gouging the highest prices the locals will tolerate.

That's what Republican 'free enterprise' looks like.

When Republicans say they are pro-business they actually mean they are pro-entrenched corporate oligopolies.

Replace "Republicans" with "Politicians" (at the state and federal level), and the statement is just as correct. I believe the problem is allowing private money to affect government, but I have no idea how to fix it.

This isn't clearly a R vs D issue, perhaps localized. TN has a surprising amount of gigabit muni broadband in very, very red areas. Though another R has done her damnedest to stop that.

Pro-market and pro-monopoly are mere principles which don't matter when the sausage gets made. Politicians have no problem keeping their fingers on the scale, provided they get paid well for the service.

Because politicians in the US exist to accept bribes for personal gain. Very few of them seem to give two shits about anyone besides themselves. Especially on the right side of the aisle.

No party is -actually- looking for a solution to the problem. The main problem is municipal monopolies which the federal government has no control over (ie Charter pays the city a fee to be their only cable provider in X neighborhood or AT&T won't lease line space to competitors on their utility poles, etc.) Local government have vastly more powerful controlling interests than Washington in terms of a company can just up and leave. Google tried to get around this but has ultimately failed the majority of the time.

If you live in Ohio, here's what you can do to call your rep:

Find your rep at http://www.ohiohouse.gov. Call 1-800-282-0253 [0] and tell the aide you oppose House Bill 110 [1], Section 122.4091.B [2], and state your reasoning in 1-2 min. May be good to cite the municipal ISP FairlawnGig's success: this [3] is a good read on the subject.

[0] http://www.occ.ohio.gov/content/how-call-your-legislator

[1] https://www.legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/legislation-sum...

[2] https://muninetworks.org/sites/www.muninetworks.org/files/Oh...

[3] https://muninetworks.org/content/new-fact-sheet-ohios-commun...

Don't do this, it's pointless if you complain about Republican elected officials they typically just try to siphon resources away from your area. If you really think this will work please use a false identity to avoid being targeted.

Can you cite your source for this? I've never heard of a politician retaliating against a constituent for voicing their concerns.

I live in Ohio, can confirm this is false. Every state representative I've met with has been happy a citizen is taking interest in local politics and has been open to a conversation. A state rep is not going to target you house or street (not even sure how this would happen) because they disagree with you

I live in Virginia and I was proudly told this by a Republican running for office. They have a DB so they can pool data state-by-state and cross-reference it with social media.

My advice if you don't believe this is true, just ask! They are very open about talking about this and feel that Democrats do the same thing.

Yet another example of Republicans literally ruining democracy.

I think this is terrible advice. Not participating never helps.

I live in rural western Ohio. My Representative and Senator are both likely to turn a deaf ear to my concerns. I still see value in making sure that their office has knowledge of my concerns and position. Maybe it won't change their position on a particular issue, but their staff is definitely interested in keeping tabs on the opinions of their constituency.

But that's not the right way to evaluate political energy on any topic. Instead that office will likely tap into party mechanisms and systematically test voter messages until they find the right one.

Innovate Ohio has a nice map of Internet service availability: https://innovateohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/innovate/priorities/...

I'm going to be mentioning to my Representative and Senator's offices that there are significant parts of their Districts that are underserved and some completely un-served. There is no reason to think that this portion of the Bill will do anything to drive Internet service behind enhanced (or even provided!) in these areas.

The economic disadvantage imparted by lack of Internet service in these areas is very important to me. As the economy continues to embrace remote work the people who live in these areas are being put at a greater disadvantage by disallowing municipalities from providing services. It certainly makes these areas unattractive for anyone who might consider moving into these areas.

ISPs cannot compete with local cities offering the fastest and cheapest access in their area, so rather than improving the services offered or incentivizing their customers they simply buy a stake in the Ohio legislature and ban the competition.

This is so, so stupid.

Yes, it is. But the ground rule has always been 'follow the money'. Expect companies, and their paid for legislators, to protect their revenue streams, no matter how badly it screws any individuals.

This is the fight we are in, and have been since the post-WW2 boom.

They can compete even with municipal internet. They just don't want to because then it will become a commodity market which will cause prices to race to the bottom instead of a scarce market which allows them to charge higher prices and avoid reinvesting in their network to improve quality since there is no comparable service to compare their quality against.

>ISPs cannot compete

Or they simply don't choose to...

I don't know how common this is but I live just outside of Ohio and use a small ISP based in Ohio that is a sort of spinoff from the municipal service they have.

That is to say, A municipal service exists as CompanyA and they started a private CompanyB to service people outside of the municipal service area. To the best of my knowledge it uses the same core infrastructure for both companies.

If they shutdown I will have no options in my area besides dish. It is a good product too; 400/10 with 40ms latency and very stable at a decent price.

Honestly, I would have to move to keep my job unless Starlink became available.

EDIT - I called my ISP and I am wrong. Both company A and B are private and this ruling will not impact them. While this news is still terrible, it should not impact me as directly as I had originally thought.

I hope you’re letting your representatives know that — I feel like a lot of these guys assume there’s not much cost to the decision, so why not take that lobbyist’s money? The prospect of losing good jobs in their district is a bit more noteworthy.

I live in WV and work a job based in PA.

Working on a communication (will call and email) to Ohio reps now, but they have less than zero reason to care about my opinion on the subject.

I contacted my ISP to see if they think it would impact them and asked if I can help in some way.

Apparently something similar passed in PA recently https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

What an odd hill to die on. The article doesn't mention lobbying efforts at all, and I'd be very curious to take a look at the money trail - there's got to be one. This isn't a strong enough idealogical position and both parties are expanding government. Theres no way the majority of the house and senate have managed to avoid slow speed and service interruptions, so they must know that 10Mbps might as well be dial-up these days.

If I can take the naive view for theatrical effect here, who thinks this is a good idea? Who thinks this is how you serve, help, and represent the people of Ohio? On what grounds would you assert that the people are saying "Please stop me from enjoying this kind of service, for I lack the willpower to resist the scourge of fast cheap connectivity!"

In other words I guess the thing that jumps out is how blatant and transparent it is. If you're a corporate lapdog all set to fuck your constituents, at least cover it up.

Look at the recent history of the Ohio general assembly. These representatives know their jobs are safe, or at the very least, the party knows they will remain in power. Why is that? It could be a combination of many things: their constituents are single issue voters and they happen to be on the same side, they have too strong of an incumbent's advantage, the state is gerrymandered in a way to make it impossible for their party to lose control, pending voter laws, etc.

We see time and time again, at all levels of government: people voting against what they claim are their interests. It goes to show that corporate lapdogs don't need to cover anything up, because of the positive feedback loop where corporate lapdogs keep getting elected!

Why should they bother covering it up though? Ohioans approve wholeheartedly of this, and will reaffirm their approval in the next election. Sure they’ll complain about the extra costs and the poorer service, but then they’ll go vote for the people who made this decision for them. Most will consider it a small sacrifice to protect against the dangers of socialism. The people with options and who disapprove have already left - Ohio and it’s cities are losing population for good reason.

Easy, it’ll be done by saying this protects the consumer and taxpayer from poor infrastructure and waste, versus having the best in class available for Ohioans.

Come up north to Michigan where the air is crisp. Ohio is the worst.

People need to vote with their ballot, wallet, but also with where they choose to take residence.

A lot of people can’t even afford to put down a security deposit on a new rental. Moving is completely out of reach for them.

I really dislike this rhetoric. You are not wrong but at the same time I think too many groups hold fast to this notion that people are weak and powerless and need government to take care of them. So if you can’t move, you’re just gonna stay for the rest of your life in a state you hate? No way, live free or die. It might take longer but it can be done.

I don’t think that’s entirely realistic, I was able to do it when I worked at McDonald’s and they actually pay better here relative to rents than they did at the time. There a certainly people in that situation but it’s a relatively small %.

When you tell people to "vote with their wallet" it means that money equates to will/democracy and there is a far far far larger "warchest" of dollars from Comcast, Verizon, and ATT.

Does this mean Comcast is the will of the people since they have the ability to spend more? I'd sincerely hope not.

I know what you meant by your comment, but the "with wallet" part has been irking me lately because there is substantial corporate interests that has more money than us but they don't have more votes than us (not yet at least).

I was trying to illustrate that there are different ways to 'vote' for what you want in the world.

At the end of the day you are electing your officials in Ohio and they are the ones helping to make these things happen.

tl;dr - reward good behavior and specifically do not reward bad behavior.

In purely practical terms, upsetting a small number of constituents is not nearly as risky as upsetting a corporation such as Comcast, Verizon, and ATT. I say small number because the average Ohioan isn’t even going to realize this is happening. And, the most a citizen can do to voice their displeasure and hold the politicians accountable is casting a single vote to the opposition. And that’s assuming this is a dealbreaker that would cause someone to cross sides.

Meanwhile these big companies can spend wildly on political opponents, hit pieces, or withhold donation money.

I’m considering moving from Ohio but mainly because we get taxed to shit here (12th highest overall in the nation) and yet don’t seem to have anything to show for it. From my perspective the only benefit I would theoretically get from being in a red state would be saving $ on taxes, and I don’t even get that here.

All that being said I apologize but I don’t see much appeal to Michigan lol

Michigan has nice lakes and forests, but the economic opportunities in the most beautiful parts of the state (the northern lower peninsula and the upper peninsula) seem very limited.

For the kind of work I do living there wouldn't work. If I were willing to move to a "remote work"-only lifestyle it might be possible, but that's what I want. My family visits Michigan almost every summer, gets wistful thinking about how wonderful it would be to live in some of these beautiful and wild places, then runs the numbers and discovers it wouldn't be economically feasible.

One thing I wonder is why couldn’t private companies be formed to accomplish the same thing? Honest question.

ISPs have a high cost to entry: you have to run fiber everywhere to offer service and you don’t get revenue until you do that and people sign up. Major players can slash prices below cost until you fold and then jack the rates up (I live in an area with 3 gigabit options: service here is cheaper and better than only a few blocks away where it’s just Comcast - and everyone you call on the phone knows whether you have competition at your address).

The model I’d like would be having fiber either be owned by the city or a highly regulated utility, with a market for ISPs to provide service on that infrastructure. It’d be much easier to enter the market if you just need to peer at a few locations rather than each house, and it’d be nice if there was a no-frills option for people who only want reliable IP without all of the add-on services.

That high cost of entry is paid to the municipality isn’t it ? Why build and run a business when you can just collect rent / taxes instead.

The idea is that it’s a long-term investment which everyone can share, similar to how most places build roads or water pipes rather than expecting businesses to build those with duplication and gaps.

> The model I’d like would be having fiber either be owned by the city or a highly regulated utility, with a market for ISPs to provide service on that infrastructure.

That's how telecoms are organized in NL, although through loosening of regulations, mergers and acquisitions the service geography is reducing to separate islands of non-competing monopolies. Yet, it still works decently well. Also energy is the same (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_the_Neth...)

As a counterexample, the creation of the "energy free market" by spinning off the local infra from the energy brokers and producers has turned into a convenient excuse to screw customers over billing and passing the buck back-and-forth to keep the money.

Agreed.

One interesting approach that took place in Johannesburg was that a suburb took matters into their own hands to get an open access fibre network installed. They formed a ratepayers association, got a critical mass of the households to sign up for an installation fee and a promise to join, and appointed a company (Vumatel) to install and run the network.

It was transformational: Within a few years average internet speeds in every neighbourhood that adopted the approach went from 5-10Mbps to 100Mbps-200Mbps, with some areas getting 1Gbps. And being open access, it means that you still get competition between commercial ISPs offering their services over the shared infrastructure with a small amount of their fee going back to maintain the network. What's more because the barrier to entry for ISPs was lowered there were a bunch of new and extremely competitive options.

I thought it was a really smart way to overcome the chicken and egg problem of high speed internet infrastructure.

That’s the same thing as municipal broadband.

Not quite. What makes this interesting is that the municipality (and other government structures) had no involvement beyond approving the permits for trenching.

There's also no ongoing contract with the municipality, nor is it funded through taxes.

If you think that access to information networks is critical to a functioning modern society, then you can't leave the provision of that service up to the private sector, because the private sector can always just decide to close shop.

If we had a powerful bureaucracy, robust oversight, and a lot of subsidies then I'd see it differently. We have all that for food, which obviously is critical. We almost have it for electric power, also critical. We don't have any of those things for networks.

Ask Google Fiber. Its because getting access, permits, and everything you need takes a very long time and has very high costs. The incumbents won't just let you just run cables next to theirs, they might need to make changes to allow room for you, etc. Incumbents and their influence make it nearly impossible to compete. Government has an advantage here since its permits itself for example.

Edit, link: https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...

Because drawing cables is hard. Politicians doesn't want their cities to look like https://www.alamy.com/bucharest-romania-september-20-2020-ma... so they regulate it to death.

The image is from Romania, and they have among the best internet in Europe.

I think most ISPs are looking for a rate of return on their investment that's hard to get, given the cost per mile of stringing high-speed cable.

When I first moved to suburban Philly (2006), Verizon FIOS had promised to grow into the many neighborhoods and towns in my county of 900,000 people. But apparently the cost of installing 2-way fiber proved higher than expected. So a few years later, they later announced that only the towns in the county with high population density might get FIOS in the foreseeable future. Neighborhoods with larger lots would have to be satisfied with only Comcast.

Ohio: Google is a public utility

Also Ohio: ISPs should be entirely unregulated

First thing I thought reading this too. They ate making a fool of themselves and think it hurts Ohio’s position as a tech leader.

In which ways such ban would benefit people living in Ohio?

None. But it would benefit the big ISPs, so...

If you own ISP shares and live in Ohio, very much.

Or if you are an elected official that gets lobbying from Buckeye Cable...

I can't wait for starlink and tmobile home internet to eat their lunch.

More, "If you own ISP shares and live outside Ohio"

It would allow them to compete to set up high quality ISPs rather than being forced to subsidize a low quality local alternative.

It’s one thing to pay a bill. It’s another thing to pay it twice.

In what part of the US does this ever happen? Where are all the small “mom and pop” ISPs? Oh, right.

There are actually a lot of mom and pop ISPs. Mostly wireless (WISPs).

https://www.wispa.org/what_is_a_wisp.php

Could you explain your reasoning here?

Do you expect a ban on municipal broadband to improve either the quality or price of internet service and if so are there any examples of this happening?

Surely the "high quality ISPs" would easily outcompete the "low quality local alternatives". Let the market decide, and let ISP customers vote the local alternatives out with their wallets! And if a local authority were to insist on using public money to subsidize a thoroughly outcompeted municipal broadband, then the locals will be free to vote them out with their, well... votes.

A fine principle in theory but there are serious status quo effects with governments. Governments rarely ever roll back benefits that don’t pencil out. The reason being that people are loss averse.

Knowing from behavioral economics about loss aversion, it is reasonable for us to want to avoid placing ourselves in a situation where it forces us into foolish policy decisions.

For what it’s worth, I am generally in agreement with you, except that majority rule to extract money from some people to provide for others strikes me as poor taste. If the ones who want the service want to collectivize to pay for it, it makes sense to me that the government run that enterprise.

The difference between a market and the government is that if a product is unviable with 50%+1 but viable with 99%, that 50%+1 population can force it upon the rest. That difference to me is significant enough that I don’t think claiming voting as equivalent to market spending is reasonable.

Lots of assumptions in that statement, care to elaborate preferably with links to reputable data?

TIA

Care to state which assumptions you disagree with? I will target my attention there then.

Somebody owns shares in an ISP, or gets their salary from one, or has somehow drunk the kool aid.

ISPs, once they have a legislated monopoly in localities, have a solid track record of stagnating investment in improved capabilities regardless of billing increases.

Forcing ISPs to compete against self-motivated local establishments of ISP services is what makes capabilities and prices work best for the customers.

Most muni broadband isn't even subsidized, they pay for it with subscribership and still offer dramatically more value than comcast et al. That's how bad our monopoly ISPs are. The protection they get also gave Google, of all companies, a hard time spinning up some competition. There's something to be said for not putting our internet connections in the hands of government, but it absolutely is not a problem of stifling competition. There's none to stifle.

> In which ways such ban would benefit people living in Ohio?

It wouldn't. It's also completely crazy to assume that concern entered into the minds of the legislation's sponsors at all. See the other thread today about the nuclear bribery scandal if you have any doubts about the Ohio legislature's integrity:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27534408

Is there a realistic way for the US to get away from piling on extra conditions to large existing bills? This kind of thing seems to come up every few months and especially with budget bills. Or is it basically in the "as soon as there's more than 2 parties" area?

Democracy?

The issue is that we have too many people per representative.

You representative doesn't need to care about you, they need to care about donors for mass media.

I see parallels in tech as well. Some companies are openly anti consumer but run massive advertising/brainwashing campaigns. One will go as far as saying 'privacy' but turn around and give your information to the US government and China.

First past the post voting systems are also a problem, as you are always voting for the lesser evil.

FPTP isn’t “also” a problem, it (and more broadly the absence of proportionality in the electoral system) is the empirically verifiable problem. (See, e.g., Lijphardt’s Patterns of Democracy.)

Representation ratio is much discussed, but unlIke FPTP there's not really support in comparative study of democracies for it being a source of adverse results (poor satisfaction, reduce dimensionality of the policy option space, etc.)

Much as the accuracy of sampling is, despite common intuition to the contrary, dependent on the absolute, not relative, size of the sample, representation ratio probably doesn't practically matter much once the absolute size of the representative body gets past a certain point (and beyond a certain absolute size, logistics make size increases adverse independent of ratio.)

I don't know about state budget bills, but at the Federal level, the budget bill regularly gets unrelated stuff tacked on because it can't be filibustered in the Senate and there's a lot of political pressure to pass the bill.

As to fixing the underlying problem, I've been advocating for a benevolent dictatorship by a race of alien superbeings. It neatly avoids the political turmoil and will hopefully result in cheap, easy to use jetpack-based transportation.

Robert's Rules of Order have a "motion to split" or "division of the question". The UK parliament has a similar rule. It's used for things like this.

The problem is that it makes compromises harder. It's common to say, "I am OK with your motion but it does X harm to my constituents. If you add Y to the bill I'll vote for it." That's a pretty reasonable and common way to reach a compromise, and it doesn't work if other people start splitting the question.

Adding more parties wouldn't really help. The bill still needs 50%+1 to pass. You can do that with one party, or you can assemble a coalition. But either way they're going to make compromises, and splitting a bill makes compromises harder. So US legislatures usually don't have a motion to split.

Still, the UK manages. And so do all of the organizations operating under Robert's Rules. So perhaps it would work.

In this particular case, it is a question for the Ohio residents, not the US in general.

Note that "earmarks" were effectively banned from US spending bills in 2011, though it looks like they may be coming back this year.

I make no opinion on the ban being a good or bad thing here, but it does look like it has some unintended side-effects.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/earmark-ban-didnt-re...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-earmarks-idU...

Do municipal ISPs have to operate with positive revenue?

It seems like reasonable people could object public services competing with with private companies if not.

A middle ground would be supporting nonprofit NGO or Co-ops, which seems to be an underutilized option in the US

Municipal broadband commonly is self funded through subscribership. It is not at all difficult to provide better value than the cable company while staying cash positive, excepting the artificial barriers created to protect that profitability.

>Municipal broadband commonly is self funded through subscribership.

They make that claim but it typically exclude construction costs. As an example, quick googling says that the Fairlawn network mentioned in the article covers operating costs but does not make enough to pay down the initial $10 million worth of bonds (~$1,200 per resident). That seems to be the best that municipal fiber does. That level of success is probably worth it, but it's not exactly a slam dunk.

On the flip side there have been disasters. Provo as an example borrowed $40 million to build out their fiber and then lost millions more operating it. Eventually they had to pay more money for Google to take it off their hands.

There's this idea going around that ISPs are these terrible monopolies rolling in cash. It's just not true. Their profit margin is average for the S&P 500 and it's a risky business due to intense capital requirements. There's a reason Google walked away from the business despite municipalities falling over themselves to get it.

Wow, the story of iProvo is really grim.[1] On top of the 40 million bond, charged every household a $5 fee including non-users, and still lost millions per year until they gave it away. It looks like Google paid them $1 for it, with the option to give it back.

https://reason.org/news-release/think-tank-iprovos-losses-at...

You're welcome to your opinion, but they have proven themselves terrible monopolies. They protect their business through regulatory capture, under-invest in infrastructure, treat end users in non-competitive markets poorly, impose data caps for no good reason. Then there's the fact it costs more for me to get an internet connection without TV than with, so they can inflate their TV subscriber numbers and hide the "cord cutting". Rent-seeking is hardly risk taking. Comcast's 40 billion a year profit, irrespective of what others on the S&P500 are doing, is not well-earned. They easily cost our economy multiples of that by keeping things slow and expensive.

Although the other provisions in the bill mean that urban areas would be subject to the ban anyway, I do want to point out that when the article mentions "cities or towns", the Cincinnati and Cleveland metropolitan areas have a lot of neighborhoods that are independent political entities with their own city-councils, police forces, schools, etc. (I think Columbus is more just one big city.) So there can be weird quirks in local law.

Columbus is weird. It’s simultaneously one big city but also has many other independent local governments working within it that split tax revenue with the city itself. Most of the suburbs surrounding the city have an arrangement like this but they also have their own city government, police, schools, etc.

If you want cheap and fast internet you're not going to get it by making it a utility. You're going to get it by removing the regulations that let ISPs have local monopolies and removing the barriers to competition. Sure, it might require other regulations to enforce competition so companies don't consolidate too much but at the moment the issue is most localities regulate out all the competition.

Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc have fast internet because of competition.

Adding municipal broadband might make things temporarily better but long term it will go bad. See roads and transportation systems all over the country. Then remember that tech moves much faster than road tech. Is the municipal going to upgrade to terabit speeds? No, but competition will.

Note: I'm not saying I support the bill. Rather I'm saying municipal broadband will be a net negative. You'll all cheer it on and it will feel good at first and then in 10-15 yrs you'll wonder why we're so far behind countries that encouraged competition as their ISPs competed on faster speeds and those municipal IPSs are still in government committees arguing over funding.

In Fort Collins there is NextLight broadband that is a municipal service. I am in southern Denver and have Comcast. I would far prefer NextLight. Competition, regardless of private or public, makes things better. Anyone advocating for less competition (and removing a public option does that) doesn't have our best interests at heart and is likely just advocating for their lobbied interests.

I didn’t see any discussion in the article of WHY. I really don’t think I’m well informed by an article that implies that the proposed change in law is A Bad Thing(tm) but fails to present the proponents’ arguments.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ohio-senate-gop-budg... has coverage from John Fortney

To summarize:

1) They just signed a bill into law to provide various grants and such to increase BB. Its bad law to change everything every month. They wanted $200M but shrunk it to a pilot program $20M and want to see how that will work and how it relates to getting federal handouts. Its an area of bad law, they have multiple hands in the pot doing multiple semi-opposing things at the same time, and when you find yourself stuck in the bottom of a hole, first stop digging. There is no central legislation or department for BB in Ohio, only stuff tacked onto other bills, and this is a bad way to legislate something important.

2) Historical small cherry picked successes do not imply expansion is a good idea. If Tesla sold 10K cars to millionaires in 2015, that does not imply one million fully electric F-150 would be sold in 2020, and that was indeed not the case. If its such a universal success, why isn't it happening? It seems fully electric F-150s are coming and NOT because of municipal laws but market forces and federal laws. If it (muni broadband) works so well, how come its always tiny anecdotes, not, perhaps, the entire eastern seaboard including all of NYC, or the entire state of CA or something? And if it doesn't always work, why should little ole Ohio be the lab rat, experiment on someone else?

3) Phone market (and wireless hotspots) seem to be doing better without local government interference than even the most optimistic muni-broadband projections. Why are we doing all of this, the whole debate and everything, if everyone will get better faster service from a wireless hotspot anyway? Its 2021 why are we arguing over the minutiae of how to run wires to every house when cheaper faster already more competitive wireless is the future anyway?

My view (as opposed to Fortney) would be muni competition would mean 1% of the monopoly would be broken, thus Americans being American, we'd eliminate all regulation on the 99% remaining monopoly victims. Nothing quite says "USA" free market quite like a handful of lucky people in a lucky area getting a great deal, and the masses will be paying more and getting less. In the long run, much like long distance in the 80s thru 20s, competition would increase until the product is too cheap to meter or technologically irrelevant meanwhile most billed revenue would go toward accounting expenses for that billed revenue and of course advertising to compete between dinosaurs, its not a productive use of our income. In the long run wired ISP is dead and we'll get satellite or wireless anyway; by the time we run multiple 70s era cable TV hardline to each home or fiber to each home under some legacy wired internet competition system, we'll all be using wireless hotspots that are 100x faster and 10x cheaper anyway. Would have been an interesting bill in 1996 or even as late as 2006, but in 2021 why even bother, by the time muni fiber for $50 arrives at your farm, you'll already be on a years later generation of Starlink running 100 times faster for $15.

A far better bill would be to ensure that all streets had publicly owned cable trunks owned by the municipality and any company can pay to run their cable in the trunk.

Every time a street or path is dug up, put in a public wayleave with a fixed rental price to run your cable. It means that company after company don't need to keep digging the public road up. We don't have private roads in towns, shouldn't have private cable troughs either.

> approved a budget bill that contains an anti-municipal broadband ammendment

With 100% certainty it contains lots of things completely unrelated to the one tiny part of it this article is about. It's most likely those other unrelated things are what was objected to.

Do some digging and you're sure to find some very strange things in that bill. This is entry level knowledge about US politics. It's predictable but nonetheless disappointing to see that HN commenters took the intellectually lazy path here.

Municipal broadband sounds like a good idea, until you see it happen in reality. What happens is cities are often forced to take the buildout to auction, when Comcast comes in with an absurdly low bid and says "oh yeah we'll 'build' it ROFLMAO".

Don't get me wrong, the community coming together to compete is a good idea. But we need to start examining the failures and avoid them. An independent organization would be a FAR better approach in my opinion.

This is basically comical. Elected officials actively sabotaging something good that has helped the people that elected them. I'd love to sit down and have a conversation with politicians like this over coffee and just try to wade through their BS to see what their awful justifications are. Actively destroying competition that has benefited the public? Cool moves guys.

Am I wrong in thinking that a lot of our ISP problems in the US will fade away due to Starlink?

A few people I know with it went from 1Mbps to 20-30Mbps and they're thrilled with it. Once the capacity is higher, there won't be an ISP monopoly anywhere, since Starlink will always be an option. And isn't the monopoly issue the bulk of the problem?

My City Was Gone by The Pretenders

    I went back to Ohio
    But my pretty countryside
    Had been paved down the middle
    By a government that had no pride
    The farms of Ohio
    Had been replaced by shopping malls
    And Muzak filled the air
    From Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls
    Said, ay, oh, way to go, Ohio

Hmm, this pro-monopoly stance reminds me of the cannabis legalization initiative that was proposed previously in Ohio. It didn't pass and I believe the main reason was limiting licenses to the market to ~4 organizations.

Isn’t this the same state that was so fearful of monopolies they were trying to sue Google and declare it a public utility.

I guess the only bad monopolies are the ones that aren’t personally stuffing cash in your pocket.

In the midst of a shift towards remote working, they're really shooting themselves in the foot with bans like this. Ohio needs a tax base more than individual workers need Ohio.

Surely AG Dave Yost has something to say about this, seems right down his alley. Unless suing Google was a purely a political stunt...

Internet is bad because government, solution is to bring in more government. I am not sure how the US ended up with this situation otherwise. I also think that the solution is not to have a state owned internet provider.

https://www.telecompetitor.com/broadband-monopoly-report-at-...

Idea: ban ”campaign contributions”. Cap spending and fund politicians with campaign money so they can reach voters.

No excuse for it. It's corruption.

They should put up new signs saying "Welcome to Ohio - Find It Here - powered by Comcast".

How much were they paid by the monopolists who wrote the actual bill?

"Follow the money"

Republican voters have been voting against their own self interest for the last forty years because of Reaganism. And this last year, they capped it off with Trumpism.

Because both Reagan and Trump (though very different) had such a grasp of showmanship and stage craft.

As far as I am concerned, the people of Ohio are getting exactly what they want, which is exactly what they deserve.

You won't find a more vigorous critic of Reaganite neo-liberalism than myself; but the phenomenon of "voting against self-interest" is not limited to one party. The feedback loops of electoral politics are distant and slow (especially at the national scale), and the winner-take-all voting system constrains political preferences to a relatively narrow spectrum of choices (the Overton window).

These factors conspire to make voting more heavily tilted towards tribal signaling [0] than policy outcomes, and entrenched power structures (both public and private) are incentivized to maximize this phenomenon from both sides of the aisle [1].

[0] https://www.elephantinthebrain.com/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Kasich, DeWine etc get a lot of relative praise from the media but the reality is that they’re among the most corrupt state politicians in the nation. They’re just on the right people’s payroll.

A much more extreme example of this is JobsOhio (started under Kasich). We don’t know what money was given to what businesses under what conditions. I know from personal experience that people did shady things with grants that were supposed to be repaid to charities though — a business gets a grant, gives it to a charity, then that charity returns most of the money by buying a product they don’t actually use from the business. & this stuff was absolutely being given out at least partially on the basis of personal connections to politicians, who I suspect are probably also investors in some of these companies.

However, there was a complete lack of transparency with JobsOhio. So good luck figuring out where all that taxpayer money went (in a red state with one of the highest overall tax burdens in the nation by the way)

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