Comment by EarlKing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EarlKing | Hacker News Reader

> 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!

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