How to Nationalize the Internet in Canada | Hacker News Reader

How to Nationalize the Internet in Canada

anarc.at

48 pointspabs378 comments

> In 1984 (of all years), the US Department of Justice finally broke up AT&T in half a dozen corporations, after a 10 year legal battle. Yet a decades later, we're back to only three large providers doing essentially what AT&T was doing back then, and those are regional monopolies: AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen (not counting T-Mobile that is from a different breed). So the legal approach really didn't work that well, especially considering the political landscape changed in the US, and the FTC seems perfectly happy to let those major mergers continue.

So the Justice Department broke up AT&T, then allowed them to effectively reform decades later, and somehow that proves that regulation doesn't work ... even though regulation is exactly what is being proposed here. So don't trust the government to regulate... but trust the government to regulate. Got it.

Honestly, if you want this problem to go away: Mandate that all communications services using public rights-of-way be obligated to sign peering agreements with all comers on some specified set of terms...or have their access to that right-of-way revoked.

> So the Justice Department broke up AT&T, then allowed them to effectively reform decades later, and somehow that proves that regulation doesn't work...

I fail to see how this is proof that regulation doesn't work. Perhaps proof that America fails to apply anti-trust laws aggressively enough. The DOJ, if it chose to, could do a hell of a lot here on its own, if it wanted to.

Hell, imagine if AT&T had just gotten nationalized outright! Every other developed nation in the world built out its internet infrastructure thanks to national structures, the post office is a public thing... obviously a bit late in the game now but nice to think about.

Not to mention that mandating peering agreements is also regulation! I do agree that peering agreements are a very good and reasonable solution for when something is already built out though.

What didn't work was trying to make big corporations play nice and care about the customer.

What is proposed instead is not regulation but city-owned or municipal-owned fiber networks so that you don't end up with awful, vendor-locked internet at absurd prices due to monopoly on your location.

> What didn't work was trying to make big corporations play nice and care about the customer.

> What is proposed instead is not regulation but city-owned or municipal-owned fiber networks so that you don't end up with awful, vendor-locked internet at absurd prices due to monopoly on your location.

Instead, in the worst case, you get horrible city provided internet that is extremely oversubscribed due to budget.

We get that defacto, move somewhere that's only serviced by Comcast (and where they have actual laws saying no other internet providers can provide in that district).

In the current case, you still have mandatory consumption, but you're forced to pay a corporation instead of having it be municipal.

This is false. Plenty of small ISPs exist, including 5G from Verizon and ATT

Rather than horrible private-company-provided internet that is extremely oversubscribed due to profits?

The "horrible" private-company-provided internet are used by almost everyone in the world. Which provider is "oversubscribed" due to profits?

Has that been tried successfully anywhere? Suspect that starting with such large pseudo-monopoly players as we would be in canada - that they would find a way to effectively sabotage that.

It's the reason telcos and ISPs in Denmark offer high-speed, affordable services. If the naturally occurring circumstances aren't conducive to a competitive market, using regulation to ensure those circumstances do occur seems like one of the lightest touches you can do, regulation-wise, to avoid market failures.

Note: this works poorly in DK. See the stories from the Hiper guys about how YouSee treats other providers in YouSee's coax network.

Dong also royally screwed up fiber deployment in many areas, and when TDC got it most stuff stalled in some places for what, a decade? And for some reason we're still putting coax into new buildings instead of fiber (e.g. all of Ørestad).

Coax sucks. Throughput is nice but latency is an order of magnitude worse than fiber.

/rant

Denmark is rated as one of the best countries for internet access.

Though so is the US, just with high costs. America can be a weird mix of sensible government policy and anti-regulation, pro-corporate insanity. In this case it seems like a government-corporate effort forced other corporates to act and managed to beat legislative attempts to maintain monopolies.

https://hbr.org/2018/09/why-google-fiber-is-high-speed-inter...

To be clear, I am not skeptical about regulation in general - i am skeptical about this specific regulatory strategy.

Right, and to be clear, I was answering that this specific regulatory strategy (forcing ISPs and telcos to let their competitors use their infrastructure with specific terms, including a cap on the profit margin they can charge for this) is in effect and working well in Denmark.

It has worked reasonably well in the UK. We had British Telecom which got split up into BT Openreach who own the network and BT for the consumer side then around 2000 IIRC they mandated that other Telcos/ISPs be allowed to use the network and now we have dozens of companies offering the same thing for varying prices.

IMO the main downside is that because Openreach own the network it means a lot of the country is stuck on ADSL with FTTC still being rolled out and FTTP mostly a pipedream due to decades of underfunding and where fibre is being rolled out it's because of Government spending rather than Openreach funding.

Also, the rollout of fibre in the 80s was intentionally stopped by Thatcher as it would make it hard for American owned companies to compete.

https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

> Unfortunately, the Thatcher government decided that it wanted the American cable companies providing the same service to increase competition. So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP, the assets were stripped and the expertise was shipped out to South East Asia.

> "Our colleagues in Korea and Japan, who were working with quite closely at the time, stood back and looked at what happened to us in amazement. What was pivotal was that they carried on with their respective fibre rollouts. And, well, the rest is history as they say.

Regulation is like violence. If it isn't working, you aren't using enough of it!

I used to live in a building that managed its own building-wide internet connection. I.e. instead of each unit paying $50-$100 and running a cable modem or dsl router, there was a single net connection, an ethernet port in each unit, and you paid via your building maintenance fees. It came to about $20-25 per unit, so half to a quarter of the individual price.

Even at the scale of a single building, sharing and making the internet a public utility worked well and saved everyone money. I strongly agree that’s where we should be headed with this essential national infrastructure.

My city has made many poor decisions over the last 60 years. Basic infrastructure such as sidewalks are an after thought, I would not trust them to roll out internet infrastructure.

My provincial government can't keep a budget and it doesn't seem to matter what political party is in power. I picture national internet being as good as the Canadian medical system, excellent if you dont use it. If your life depends on it you might not have a great experience.

That’s not how I would describe the Canadian medical system, and I know quite a few people who's lives have depended on it

It's utterly bizarre how the Canadian medical system has been framed by some.

It's not perfect, and probably overwhelmed right now, but it's a triaged, fairly effective system that does what it's supposed to. People that need care tend to get it effectively, especially if you're closer to a large urban centre and it's neither a tax burden nor a heavy financial burden to citizens.

The sentiment, mostly I gather from other interests in North America paint a different picture. I know of half a dozen people that would not be alive today if it were not for the system we have. No financial burdens. Just reasonably good care.

>It's not perfect, and probably overwhelmed right now, but it's a triaged, fairly effective system that does what it's supposed to. People that need care tend to get it effectively, especially if you're closer to a large urban centre and it's neither a tax burden nor a heavy financial burden to citizens.

Right now, it is impossible—let me repeat, impossible—for people in Atlantic Canada (for non-Canadians, the easternmost four provinces) without a family doctor to get one <https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/nova-scotia-still-struggling-to-...>. The waitlist has been years long for years. This is not something occurring only in rural areas; this is true in big cities like Halifax.

This is the same situation as the opposite side of the country, here on Vancouver Island the waitlist for a doctor is only getting longer. That combined with offices closing (can't get enough money doing their fee-for-service work to keep the doors open with rising rents and everything else) has created an awful non-emergency medical system. Our province cares, but not enough to forcibly do something about it. Medical professionals are some of the worst treated employees next to teachers.

And lets not start talking about long-term-care...

Also on Vancouver Island and can confirm that the only way to see a doctor for many people is to walk into the Emergency and wait 6 hours.

And yet the standards for medical and nursing school are still so stringent relative to historic standards that a huge number of incredibly intelligent, passionate people are being prevented from pursuing these degrees due to… quotas? It’s utter madness.

Compared to other single payer systems like Germany, Canada's system isn't all that great. It is true that serious, life-threatening diseases get adequate care, but for all the other less urgent stuff, it can be a long, painful wait.

Germany does not have a single-payer system. Private insurance is an option if you're self-employed or make a high enough salary.

"Universal system" would have been the right word to use.

I dunno. Germany seems to be having a lot of problems lately, will their medical services maintain that high quality?

Its interesting to compare ISPs from my country: the UK. Here, we have a decent selection of ISPs, and the industry is tightly regulated by OFCOM. I believe the network that most ISPs use is the same (owned by Openreach) but there is also a network owned by Virgin as well. Consumers have rights such as the ability to back out of a contract you signed if you are not getting the speeds you were promised by the ISP, and you can also escalate complaints to the regulator if you're not getting anywhere with your ISP. I think you also have a right to back out of a contract when they put up the price. Otherwise you have to pay a termination fee.

Switching companies is really easy. You just contact the ISP you want to switch to, and they pretty much sort out everything from there. Prices across the market are pretty similar although there is some non-price competition going on. For example, Sky (the UK provider of satellite TV) will give you a discount if you subscribe to their satellite service making your internet cheaper than it otherwise would've been. In the UK there is the concept of the 'loyalty penalty', a term not only used in regard to the ISP industry but also other services like gas, and electric. It is used to describe the situation where people who stick to one provider tend to be paying higher prices than those who frequently switch providers, and hunt for better deals therefore people are often encouraged to take advantage of how easy switching is.

I hear these stories from the US where people find they only have one provider in their region which is a completely foreign concept to myself. And when I was in British Columbia where some of my family reside, I noticed there seemed to be a duopoly on the ISP market: Shaw, and Telus. They also remarked on how expensive their service was. I don't know what the comparison is but it doesn't surprise me at all under such a market.

The UK system is .. better than nothing, but as you say almost all the hardware is owned by Openreach. So if there's a fault it collapses into a finger-pointing game. And the underlying cost of the hardware and operations to support it is the same.

So what is an ISP? Well, it's like an electricity "supplier" in the UK (eg Bulb passim): it's a thin shell company that buys in a wholesale market and sells to the retail one, while running a call centre to deal with the annoying retail customers. Some people have called this the "playing at shops" theory of market operation.

There is some theoretic academic suppport for tight regulation of the "natural monopoly" parts of the network and allowing competition on top of that.

The UK has leaned more towards the pretend visible competition and underinvestment behind the scenes while allowing profiteering, but even within that there's some room for innovation.

Really boring improvements like saving money on admin by getting customers to pay via Direct Debit or using the internet for customer service were often pioneered by small companies which then forced others to follow to compete. Could a well run nationalised company have done that too. Yes, but they'd have been sabotaged and attacked for political reasons, so in reality its possibly an okay compromise.

Bulb is a good example. Good customer service, non predatory pricing, supporting renewables. Broken by weirdly anti-market moves from a conservative government to patch up other anti-market decisions they'd made to subsidize fossil fuels.

> Here, we have a decent selection of ISPs, and the industry is tightly regulated by OFCOM.

The may be the perception because stats show otherwise: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Interne...

The Uk is doing pretty bad.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings... here they seem to be doing better, by the metric of "how much to get 60Mbps or more"

It's reasonable to explore the idea of creating (or privatizing...) public services. I feel the article should have done more of an economic analysis, especially of harder examples, to properly compare with existing options and where they're available. Ideally the analysis would include the historic costs paid as well, as technology marches on and instead being some company's burden it becomes the people's burden.

It would scale better than a private company could, especially in a country the size and density of Canada. Instead of a set number of workers and amount of funding allowing building at a constant rate the government would be able to hire workers in every area, with local tax funds, for a very sudden and broad start. Towns could build out the local network, and link via microwave, before the fiber backbone reached them.

author here: I'm a computer engineer, not an economist. had I gotten into "more of an economic analysis", I am sure proper economists (here?) would have slammed me down much harder than engineers (?) did here.

The best way to ask questions is being wrong on the internet. :D

No estimate is ever perfect but it'd be good to get within a ballpark of the price. That'd be enough to start to compare to what we pay for the existing service and how many years of status quo payments would be required to replace them.

Considering the CRTC already plays a very large role in regulating telecommunications in Canada, a job at which they have utterly failed (some of the highest mobile rates in the world), I'm not sure why one would want to wholesale have them run the entire internet in Canada. And that's not to mention the horribly run airlines and rapidly crumbling healthcare system (post-Covid).

A far better solution would be regulation of the wires, but open competition for providing the final connection to the internet - a la Singapore. Despite a population smaller than Toronto it has 3 major providers with per month costs dipping below $50 (all in) for 1 GB fiber.

The referee hasn’t stopped the players from cheating - from that you’ve concluded that the referee’s employer shouldn’t field a team because they would be bad at the sport.

Meanwhile your water hookups just work, aren’t expensive, and you barely ever think about them.

I’m not familiar with singapore’s situation, but we do already have shared use of the wires.

If the referee, with the power of the sovereign state behind it, is incapable of stopping the cheating (more accurately they are actually enabling it through regulation), what makes you think if they had total control they could do better?

I remember when Telus used to be run by the government (Alberta Government Telephones). Telus might be a mess today, but I don't have fond memories of AGT either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Government_Telephones

It’s possible for gov to be bad at one thing - regulating bad actors in a system that both encourages monopoly, and allows the regulated corps to influence the regulators - and yet be good at another fairly different thing. In this case providing a service to a large number of people at a low per-person cost - see the post office or water + sewer as positive examples.

State-run isn’t synonymous with “badly run”, except it is when the state is actively trying to sabotage it so they can privatize it to enrich their pals. I don’t know that was the case in alberta, but it wouldn’t exactly shock me if it was… certainly that is the case with the post office in the states in the past 30 years, icbc under the bc liberals, and plenty of other examples

I agree that state-run doesn't have to be bad. But man, at least the examples I've seen in North America, the probability of state-run being mediocre is really high.

What seems to be true is the more local it is, the better run it is. Running something at the national level is pretty much a guaranteed that some soft-middle will be forced on everyone.

Fair enough. Per the article, the internet is good at decentralized. National framework + municipal or regional gov based carriers… sounds perfect.

>The internet is designed to be decentralised, and having large companies like Rogers hold so much power is a crucial mistake that should be reverted.

The government has been propping up the oligopoly and anti-competitive environment. Basically making it impossible to compete against them.

So now we have bell, rogers, telus, and cogeco dividing territories. If you're lucky you get more than 1 option but that's generally untrue.

Totally agree this should be reverted. We need to drop all these regulations which are making thispossible.

>The question is how. Some critics were quick to point out that we need more ISP diversity and competition, but I think that's missing the point. Others have suggested that the internet should be a public good or even straight out nationalized.

Literally nobody thinks it should be nationalized. The government is the one at fault here and the government coming in with a trillion $ and emininant domain to seize private property is the dumbest thing I've heard in years. The government can't even seize firearms like they wish to do. Good luck seizing rogers and bell. Tons of shareholders would be expecting huge$ that canada clearly doesnt have.

There's no reason to continue responding any further. Canada doesnt have a trillion $ sitting around to do any of this proposal.

Nice idea but likely will never happen.

Canada has a lot of corruption and protectionism that we pretend does not exist.

Also the FREEDOM movement and American style conservative politics are very loud here. Anything the government does will be viciously attacked.

It'd be better if the author tried to identify aspects of the economy that fall into natural monopolies and therefore must have some element of public control such as 'right of way' etc.

There's 0% chance the Quebec government would start nationalizing 'farming' and there's almost no situation wherein Nationalization makes sense other than for things that involve narrow corridors of control (i.e. for power/rail) lines, and for things that scale too big for private industry.

Governments can do 'water works' doesn't mean that they are efficiently run, we wouldn't have them do unless we needed to.

Having gov. involved in some things like fibre layout and last mile ownership, possibly the little 'last mile physical boxes, sure, but the equipment and everything after that we want to have competitive.

Canada needs more competition, not a single Kafkaesque provider of services.

> Canada needs more competition, not a single Kafkaesque provider of services.

I might need to repeat this a few more times, but I am not proposing a single provider. I'm proposing a multitude, regionally-based, monopolies, owned by the relevant state authority (municipal, provincial, federal), based on the scope. Those could be state-owned companies, coop, non-profits, I don't care: the point is that internet access is fundamentally a monopoly, so it should be state-owned, just like roads and water (ways).

That's my dream for internet infrastructure here in Canada. A national crown corporation that owns huge fiber runs across the country and undersea/cross border runs with other countries. Provincial crown corporations handle runs between cities and out into rural areas. Municipal departments own the runs to each address within their cities. It's paid for by selling access to Bell, Rogers, and any smaller independent ISP that might want to exist. Government doesn't actually supply internet to anyone; they just own and maintain the physical infrastructure since that's a natural monopoly. Competition happens at the edges by providing various services like internet access, with equal access among ISPs to use the shared infrastructure. With the immense cost of runs to each address eliminated, small ISPs would be reasonably easy to found and compete with the big players. We have groups like Teksavvy already, but they are so beholden to Bell and Rogers they can't truly compete since the big guys act like the mafia.

1) 'Regionally based monopolies' are 'monopolies'.

2) Your assumption about the internet is flawed: the 'rights of access' form a civic problem as you describe, but not the technology. Sewer drains are a well-understood problem, internet protocols are not, and they adapt rapidly. I don't have a problem with them regulating last-mile access issues, but I have no faith in my local government's ability to provide coherent access over time.

Canada is intensely mediocre as a country. Maybe the most overrated first world nation. I do not think nationalization would be any better.

It's interesting to me how often you comment things like this about Canada.

What exactly is your relationship with Canada that you find it necessary to chime in like this everytime the country is mentioned?

There seems to be a smug moral superiority among Canadians that they are somehow better than the Americans. Having lived in both countries and many other places in the world, I have not come across a more mediocre, conservative, lethargic, non innovative, risk averse culture than modern day Canada. It wasn't always like that but the last 50 years have been a disgrace. They are only getting by because of their small population which will change soon because tax payers need to be brought in and only the bottom of the barrel will immigrate there due to a lack of exceptional skills / industries in the country. Places like the US and UK are where you can really flourish if you want to push humanity forward. When Canada's only industry is real estate you know it is a country filled with risk averse people sitting on their bums on top of a house like a lazy dragon and waiting for it to appreciate. Also if you have been there recently, nothing works there anymore especially their healthcare and airports.

As a Canadian, I vehemently want to disagree with this comment, but I have a difficult time doing so. Our government failed to rein in the housing market and it became easier to just sit and watch your house appreciate than strive to do better. For example, there were years recently where average houses in cities across the country appreciated more than average incomes in those same cities - I.e. the house “earned” more than the owner. With that kind of nonsensical scenario, why would anyone feel motivated to work harder? Just leverage up and buy another house.

I hope this corrects. Good times make weak men, weak men make tough times, tough times make strong men, strong men make good times. I think we are heading toward tough times.

You weren't kidding, this guy is angry.

Never been there, what makes it mediocre ?

I've lived there and in the US (and other countries.)

I would say it is best to be poor in Canada, best to be rich in the US. So if you are middle class in Canada, there is a good chance you are living hand to mouth and if you are poor in Canada, you have the luxury of time. From first (well technically second) hand experience, a family of 6 can be on the dole in Canada until the children are grown up after which the parents can go on disability until retirement kicks in.

It's not necessarily a bad way to go, the children of the aforementioned family utilized the free education and healthcare to get a leg up and most of them became middle class. At which point they will see the other side of the coin.

Most of their "advantages" (in "progressive" policy, "free" healthcare etc.) come from the fact that they have us paying for their defence, coupled with having plenty of natural resources and good geography. It is not a country that seeks or bothers to innovate much beyond riding the coattails of the US like a typical large anglosphere nation. In other words, the Australia of North America. Their primary tech sector functions as a cheap outsourcing service for US companies. The national industries are natural resources, real estate, and immigration. Canadians are tremendously proud of their "recent" innovations that are decades if not centuries old. If you look at the typical Canadian cultural propaganda, the country appears to have nothing to show beyond insulin (invented a century ago) and the Canadarm (a gimmick that allows them to pretend to be an aerospace player). They have no launch vehicle to speak of and their leaders happily destroyed their aerospace industry (see Avro Arrow and the whole Bombardier forced sale incident during the Trump era). The primary reason for their high quality of life is easy access and integration with the US market, without which they would be much poorer. They claim to be a middle power but are more like a middling power. By every metric of innovation and technological achievement, they are an embarrassment.

Given where Canada is and what we have, this is our perfect place. We have never needed to be a superpower, and we don't have the population base nor the geography. Our economy is resource based, and most everything centres around that, so more efficiency rather than innovation is needed.

We have a reasonably high quality standard of living and output. Not every nation needs to be a testosterone driven "we're #1".

As a Canadian, I agree. Canada has plenty of natural resources, good geography, powerful military allies, huge trading partners and high quality of life. It sure is tough here!

(But seriously though, you are more or less correct except for the part about us all being "tremendously proud" of our recent innovations. Nobody gives a shit.)

>the Canadarm (a gimmick that allows them to pretend to be an aerospace player)

That name "Canadarm" is related to how Canadians are far more flag-obsessed than Americans. The maple leaf appears in the logo/signage of every single company in Canada, including Canadian subsidiaries of US companies.

If Canada had a full space program of its own, we'd see red-and-white Canashuttles (named Anne Murray, Rush, Gordon Lightfoot, and Margaret Atwood) launching from Cape Canadaveral in Labrador.

The country has nothing to show beyond insulin and the Canadarm.

And basketball. Don’t forget Canada invented basketball.

Canada used to innovate, a lot- and was a decently recognized power during the world wars. Now.. not so much. I blame it on companies gaining more power, the conservatives privatization national assets leading to higher col and lower standards of living. More and more companies extracting wealth to provide the bare minimum.

Canada of today is not the Canada of last century.for both better and worse.

But that’s just what I think, and what I’ve seen over my life, could be wrong

So, basically, the Europe of North America.

I guess high CoL and low wages relative to the US.

And where you live is better?

> some 911 services themselves failed), hospitals (which couldn't access prescriptions), banks and payment systems (as payment terminals stopped working), and regular users as well.

Otherthan the regular users, each of these critical systems was built with an obvious and conventionally correctable point of failure.

Given the recent authoritarian behaviour of the Canadian government you'd have to be out of your mind to advocate giving them control of anything.

Though I doubt private ownership would stop them taking it away from you if don't toe the party line.

This is like wanting your internet to operate like the local DMV. No one in their right might would conclude the Canadian Government is in any way capable of improving internet service Canadians currently receive.

Worked out for the norse, internet infrastructure is owned by the municipalities, like waterpipes, all fiber to the last farm and tel-companies just rent it.

Markets just dont work on infrastructure necessary for the public. They usually devolve into monopolies/oligopolies or scaming the public through serial privatization. Wasnt it london, were the privatization of the public water supply failed three times?

Do the Norse have a large land mass with great distances between population centers and many small towns in between rugged mountains, rivers and forest?

Yes

I just checked a map. I disagree.

That being said, coverage outside of key population dense areas isn't particularly great. Not that there are many people there to complain about it...

> many small towns in between rugged mountains, rivers and forest?

This is what all of Norway outside of Oslo looks like, yes. Also fjords.

Right they do have those things, I should have been more clear, the scale of Canada including all those things is much greater and more difficult to deal with though.

To put things in Canadian context, this is advocating that the Federal government - which cannot even operate a passport printer properly or keep airports running in a non-catastrophic manner - be trusted with critical infrastructure.

All while one of the most brutally divisive and tyrannical Prime Ministers in Canadian history is sitting in power.

Hard. Pass. The tri-opoly at least acts as somewhat of a check on a Federal government that seems desperate to control the internet.

Same. Some good arguments are made about decentralization and the ideals for efficiency aren't bad, surely the author is a smart person. I remember singing "God keep our land glorious and free." as a little kid. Nowadays I feel like I'd need to add an asterisk at the end of that line, that points to a note in the margin, that says "To the extent it is, or could ever be".

It’s more like wanting the internet to be run like the water or sewage hookups. Something that by and large isn’t expensive and just works most places.

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