I'm guessing the reasoning for offering worse service is not because the ISP's are actually mustache twirling racists, but because there are economic factors that make it more profitable to do so. Anyone know what those might be?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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