Los Angeles Becomes First US City to Outlaw Digital Discrimination
themarkup.org
themarkup.org
Isn't it a fact that it will be more or less costly to roll out service in different neighborhoods? Everything will differ, including the local labor pool, the distance from the central station, etc. It makes about as much sense as decreeing that all grocery store items in LA should be priced exactly the same, or that all gas stations in LA must have the same priced gasoline.
The article refers to a recent FCC ruling on "disparate impact" (without intent). To me, that's the greatest flaw of all civil rights laws, one that causes government encroachment upon every facet of American life. Literally everything causes disparate impact.
You can lay more of the burden on the upper middle and middle income deciles (since the costs are spread implicitly via costs to comply with regulation and liability avoidance), and avoid taxing the top percentiles, which really would require a broad wealth (or property) tax. Or alternatively, much higher land value taxes which hit the top percentiles too.
This seems like it just means everyone will pay whatever the highest cost for anyone is. Doesn't seem like it burden's the middle more than anyone else.
This is always the intent when government does not explicitly provide a taxpayer subsidy, because the cash cannot come from the government, otherwise the government’s finances will reflect the higher cash outlay, necessitating higher tax revenue, which could end up with higher tax rates for richer people.
Being poor (long term, i.e. across generations) actually has little to do with how much money is currently in your bank account and everything to do with how much knowledge is in your mind. That's why you could take a highly paid [insert profession], take every penny and possession of theirs and dump them on the street penniless and homeless, and they wouldn't stay poor for very long if they didn't want to.
I finally happen to be in interviews for a potential remote position now, but it took years to get here, it was not easy, and staying in high school for longer would not have helped.
Now, I'm still lucky to have access to computers. Try telling someone without that kind of access to just find a remote job if there are no local jobs in their area. All the education and skill in the world still might not help them if they don't have access to employment opportunities at all.
I also, however, wonder if maybe government assistance should be available to people who can lay out a clear financial plan, so that at least the households that could make use of that money can have it available to them.
That probably could have saved us much earlier - we can afford to do the research on where we can go in order to stretch our money further (to have an acceptable standard of living, but at a less extortionary price), but we'd need a cash injection in order to make it there. Once there, though, our existing rate of income might finally have been able to break even, even if we don't manage to immediately find new jobs.
Of course, if I manage to get my upcoming job, that'll save us too. It'll multiply the family income by, what, almost 6 times?
This was addressed in my comment by “services”.
> help poor people by giving them cash or services,
Also, it takes generations for broken families to learn the habits and build relationships of successful families. And it only takes 1 generation to break a successful family.
However that doesn't mean we can't help even them, by normalizing certain levels of various things no matter what the wealth. The main issue is tragedy of the commons style issues, like free bathrooms in SF being destroyed or otherwise used improperly, driving costs too high to continue.
This is only incidentally tragedy of the commons, which refers to publicly-accessible things that if individual actors rationally maximized their own utility would become depleted. Smearing excrement over a public bathroom is not rational utility; it's a crime whose perpetrators should be disincentivized from doing so.
LA is drawing one line at the city limit so there’s only one cost. All customers will pay an equal share of the total cost.
This allocation is a matter of perspective but neighborhood boundaries are a classic tool of oppression. Similar to toll roads and bus fares. It costs a lot to be poor.
Famously AT&T was required to offer local service at a loss to maintain their monopoly. This seems consistent.
Society benefits when everyone has access to basic services.
Fiber is owned by the city, which rents out access to a number of ISPs and communication providers.
They compete on price and product offerings.
Works like a charm.
Wealthy customers are more likely* to balk at a price and demand breaking the ISP monopoly in their area.
* They have the time and means to hire lawyers
https://themarkup.org/still-loading/2022/10/19/dollars-to-me...
- the internet, through which most of all civil life and beyond flows
- grocery stores and gas stations.
The internet is a public utility at this point. You’re arguing that poor neighborhoods should pricier or worse water and sewage hah.
I'm certain there's plenty of people here would agree with that.
> You’re arguing that poor neighborhoods should pricier or worse water and sewage hah.
I apologize if I read into something that wasn't there. To clarify, I won't be upset if some poor neighborhoods happen to pay less for internet service than wealthy neighborhoods, either. And I fully understand your argument made elsewhere that you consider internet access to be a public utility that should be equally priced within the area, much like power or water.
Nowhere did I make that claim. I'm simply saying that if a service costs differently to provide in different areas, then it's reasonable to expect different prices paid by the consumer. Of course, you can also make a valid argument that certain kinds of services should cost the same everywhere in the overwhelming interest of public benefit; kind of like how it costs one stamp to send a letter whether it goes from your house to the next house over, or from Florida to Alaska. But it doesn't mean that the former position is automatically unreasonable or discriminatory.
I'm also having a hard time understanding the proposition that internet access is more vital than food and transportation.
It doesn’t cost differently to provide water and sewage to poor neighborhoods, at least as far as the consumer is aware and in theory for how it’s supposed to work. On top of that there are ample heating/water/sewage subsidies for those neighborhoods, which further invalidates the internet market cost argument. That is assuming the internet is viewed as a public utility at this point. Which, for anyone using it since 2010 or so, is hard to argue with.
It costs more to connect neighborhoods which are further away from the town core, or up/down hills (requiring pumping). These may in some circumstances correlate incidentally with poverty, causing a "disparate impact" which nobody set out to deliberately create.
For instance, consider a trailer park that is several miles out of town because that's where land was cheap and where zoning permitted it; running water and sewage service there from the town will very likely be cost prohibitive. Instead, water will probably come from one or more private wells and sewage will be sent to a septic system dug specifically for that neighborhood. This will be done because it is more affordable than hooking up to the town's utilities.
> at least as far as the consumer is aware and in theory for how it’s supposed to work.
Costs to deliver are one thing, what the consumer ends up paying if they are low income is another. Across the board, controlling for state-by-state variations, poor folks aren’t (supposed to) be paying premiums in cost or quality on their water/heating/sewage. Often, they are subsidized. This law proposes pulling the internet into that basket of approaches. Seems good to me.
Isn't it usually the wealthier neighborhoods that are farther out?
Well, you're presupposing that ISPs are public utilities. I've lived in exactly zero places where I had a choice of providers in power, water, or sewer (what I consider to be actual utilities), and I've lived in exactly zero places where I had no choice of "broadband"[0] providers. I understand that there exist places where this is not the case, but exceptions don't unmake the rule.
I just looked up a random house in one of the poorest neighborhoods of LA (South Central), and found that it has access to both Spectrum coaxial service as well as gigabit symmetric fiber provided by AT&T. I promise you I didn't cherry-pick this example.
[0]: Such as it may be.
Edit - just going to expand this to we’re talking about the consumer costs, not the price to deliver. So, low income consumers within utility systems (ie live in a city like LA) usually have subsidies for every other utility they get - water, heating, gas. It is viewed as inhumane to shut off heating in the winter, for instance. Tech industry and their enablers forced life to run through the internet, but no, that development didn’t turn the internet into a public utility… for sure. That same internet that the US govt by and and large developed and handed over to private sector later. Libertarian market-based technology politics love to forget where the industry came from in the first place, and the role it plays now in people’s lives.
In developed areas, I certainly do.
Same deal with net neutrality. In a healthy market we'd have it naturally, without laws prescribing it. We don't have a healthy market, so here we are. And there's no greater gift to the monopolists than the position you're taking.
Everything has diminishing returns. Of course it matters what it costs, no matter what "it" is.
> it should be considered a basic right
Many people disagree that positive rights (that require something to be provided to the right-bearer by the state at the expense of others) are on the same level as negative rights (that forbid the state from imposing some restriction or penalty on the right-bearer), or should indeed even be considered "rights".
And on top of that originally developed by the govt, then handed over private sector, and then 20 yrs of effort forced everyone to run their lives through it. But definitely not like a utility, at all.
The audacity to treat it like a market good vs as a public utility astounds me.
Today, in 2023, my mother can do WFH consulting in her retirement in part because she can reliably run an HD low-latency video stream, because their neighborhood has fiber and cheap, high-bandwidth service. But my coworker's parents have hugely oversubscribed cable and no fiber options and can't make a video call out because they have negligible upload.
Removing the policy, even all these years later, doesn't change the fact that the policy still has a hugely disparate impact.
The red lines are still there in the exact same places, it's just not on an FHA insurance map denoted by "white" or "not white", it's on a fiber coverage map and says "fiber" or "no fiber".
The FCC's ruling (mentioned in the article) piggybacks off of the disparate impact clauses of the various civil rights legislation[0], which says that even when there is no intent to discriminate, any action taken by any entity that results in a difference of outcome along protected lines (whether it be race, sex, etc.) is considered to be a discriminatory action. Which, upon examination of available evidence, ends up meaning that every action taken by every entity can be considered discriminatory, since nothing in life affects every subgroup of a population in equal proportion to their composition of the population.
But back to the point of internet access: I submit that it's a better solution to remove the impediments (of which there are many, in this highly-regulated sector of the economy) to some enterprising person coming along and rolling out fiber service in your coworker's neighborhood, than to order private businesses to essentially ignore economic realities on the ground. Heck, I would consider a publicly-funded ISP in LA to be a vastly lesser evil, because to routinely ignore economic realities eventually leads to famine and ruin.
As I noted in another thread, you can have the USPS mail a letter for you for the price of one stamp, whether it goes from your house to your neighbor's house or from Florida all the way to Alaska. That's an example of something that explicitly ignores the underlying economic reality (that it costs way, way more to do the latter than the former) because A) the USPS is a government agency that B) has a government-granted monopoly on letters and C) serves the public good. UPS or FedEx, on the other hand, will charge you vastly different sums depending on (among other things) how far your package is going. I find ISPs to be more like UPS and FedEx than USPS. They're for the most part not government agencies and are generally not monopolies[1].
[0]: https://ballotpedia.org/Disparate_impact
[1]: Of course, a duopoly can be as bad as a monopoly in terms of internet access. I'd be in favor of something like a public utility that owns the lines, and have competing providers serve access over those lines.
I don't have an answer to the problem but I am not sure forcing pricing standards is the answer. Seems like it would be better to just handle it locally and build city owned internet as well.
Should Erewhon be forced to operate equally in neighborhoods of different diversity - even if they clearly appeal to a certain type of customer?
Why should ISPs invest evenly / charge evenly if it doesn't make sense for them?
The funny thing about good business people is - they're usually more interested in making money than being racist (obviously there are exceptions).
Most places you have one option, and that is it.
IMO, it falls into the same bucket as other utilities - water, power, etc an should be heavily regulated to ensure adequate and reasonably priced access.
This isn't a typical consumer product you buy at the store where I'm worried that the government will be bad at responding to consumer tastes, what consumers what out of their internet access is extremely simple: fast and reliable internet, that's basically it. It's not something where's a lot of questions of exactly how and where to advance things and give different offerings, like a smartphone or brand of yogurt or whatever.
How many and which upstreams to connect to makes a big difference. What technology is used for the last mile access network makes a big difference. Who to peer with and who to let run CDN appliances in the network makes a big difference. Oversubscription ratios in various parts of the network make a big difference. Address policies make a big difference.
Now, if the municipality wants to run last mile and hand it off to whatever ISPs want to take it in some central locations? That makes the municipal job simpler: they just need to measure quality on their network, and anything that happens after the handoff to the ISP is not their problem. But that's a more complex product for users than a single provider to blame for everything.
You cannot have a targeted negative effect without mustache-twirling racists; what you have instead is an incidental negative effect. I discussed this elsewhere in the thread, but the "disparate impact" clauses of various civil rights legislation attempt to deal with precisely this -- cases when in the absence of any intent to discriminate along protected lines, nevertheless an outcome arises that impact those protected groups differently.
I posit that this part of civil rights legislation is fundamentally flawed, because it is basically not impossible that any policy or action, public or private, impacts all subgroups of a population in equal measure. Make a law regulating taxis? There's a disparate impact on men, who are 85% of all cab drivers. NFL negotiates player pay? There's a disparate impact on black people, who comprise over half of the players. Covid policies close ski resorts in Colorado? There's a disparate impact on white people, who are the overwhelming majority of both people who work at ski resorts as well as those who visit. In none of those cases is there an intent to cause protected groups to be affected differently, but they are.
A simple resolution would be that the physical infrastructure in some area does not support the same speed as in other areas, and it more economically feesable to upgrade in area where the average bill is higher than in area's where the overage bill is lower. The ROI is clear
An ISP usually has a neighborhood hub where local lines connect and feed into the broader infrastructure. I'm betting that ISPs have a pricing model using a "neighborhood utilization ratio" factor, calculated as houses-served-in-neighborhood over total-number-of-houses-in-neighborhood. To cover known network infrastructure expenses (equipment replacement, technician labor costs, etc.), the pricing needs to work out, but low service demand in a given service area for the same infrastructure requires those fixed costs be borne by the few people using the service.
Many infrastructure services typically are more expensive in a rural area, presumably due to this effect but spread over a larger geographic area because population density is lower.
From the original report:
“They’ve made a decision that those neighborhoods are going to be treated differently,” said Callahan. “The core reason for that is they think they don’t have enough money in those neighborhoods to sustain the kind of market they want.”
But as I mentioned in another comment, this might manifest in higher taxes for the top percentiles, whereas a policy of requiring the business to help the poor allows the burden of the subsidy to be paid by the middle income deciles via higher prices for the business’s services.
Some areas are served by underground utilities which means change is much more expensive. For AT&T which is called out specifically, there's a lot of different access technologies, and wireline distance and quality and quantity of lines is a major factor in service quality. There's a lot of older neighborhoods in the area, which have had increased density over time and may not have enough good wiring in the street / on the poles to offer dual pair services. Running new wires or fiber is expensive, and is only economical if the take-up rate will meet some minimum. Servicing multifamily buildings is more expensive/difficult because the utility needs to coordinate with the building owner and wiring from the units to the utility area may not be sufficient for newer technology.
AT&T's access technology needs more outside equipment, and it's harder to find locations to install it in denser areas where buildings are often built closer to lot lines, especially in older areas with small sidewalks and no grass frontage strips.
[1] https://data.lacity.org/widgets/ppge-zfr4?mobile_redirect=tr...
Anyway according to TFA:
Its so important for everyone to have broadband access for full
participation in modern society and no one should be charged more
based on their neighborhood
We can do much better than talk about the "affordable internet".
That's why I wrote this:
https://news.tuxmachines.org/n/2023/03/06/Microsoft_is_Not_a...
Digital Discrimination is multi-faceted, and it applies to all kinds of groups who for reasons of mobility, neuro-diversity, ethics and more, are excluded or marginalised.
Since Los Angeles has never codified exactly what digital
discrimination means, the legislation asked city officials to
strongly consider using the Federal Communication Commission's
definition of the term.
Then the city should be obligated to lock up vandals and refined materials thieves. It's bullshit to tell a network provider they have to provide the same service at the same cost to an area where they have to re-lay hundreds of meters of copper every week.
>Plenty of room there to include people who choose to protect their security and morals but are discriminated against for those choices.
Society should not be obligated to adapt to a crazy person who is only willing to communicate by passing notes via dumbwaiter and only using pseudonyms.
Actually yes it should and that's why we have non-discriminatory laws (the subject of the article) in the first place. In civilised countries we do that in order to avoid what John Stuart-Mill called the tyranny of the majority. But since you already see these minorities as "crazy" I hold out scant hope for your love of other people. I even think the US even has some constitutional basis for the Protection of Minority Rights.
I am talking about democracies where we grant people the right to freedom of opinion and lifestyle choices so long as that doesn't infringe on others. It's a precious thing we fought many wars for, and will no doubt fight many more to preserve.against a mentality that puts the convenience of bureaucratic machinery ahead of human needs and human diversity.
Uh .. aren't these things illegal? Last time I checked people who do crimes are usually taken by the police.
Now there is some pressure the state/city can provide (you can't serve ANYONE in LA until you serve EVERYONE at the same price points) but at some point the whole thing is unprofitable and the companies disappear.
Literally just happened with home insurance.
Having said that, it is reasonable to charge more base rate when someone is likely to not pay their bills on time. Companies hate late payers and non-payers.