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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I might be naive, but I would imagine that companies respond to incentives. So when they choose to upgrade networks in more prosperous neighborhoods, they probably estimate that the willingness to pay for such services is higher, or more sensitive to speed, or something else that means more money. And when a government says build X and we'll pay you Y, they consider alternatives and opportunity cost and do the most economical thing. If the state is unhappy with certain distributions they can try to change the economics, like giving vouchers. But overall the state has a bad history of trying to manipulate markets especially through dictate.

If you look at everything through the lens of race you can say things like Versace is discriminating against certain groups by not placing their stores in their neighborhoods. It's just silly.

Corporations can be stupid and discriminatory or smart and greedy. So I guess you have to choose which you believe it is.

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This isn't about run-of-the-mill discrimination, this is about the companies receiving government money to build out broadband to areas and then just not doing it. The government should just claw back the money and impose fines on top of that but the regulatory agencies in charge are corrupt.

>this is about the companies receiving government money to build out broadband to areas and then just not doing it.

I see this repeated often, but I've seen very little in the way of details. What was the government program that gave ISPs money? Were there any strings attached?

The FCC has spent tons of money on rural and underserved broadband. Search and ye shall find.

Imo it was ridiculous that spacex got dinged in the program. Plenty of pigs at the trough have been promising and not delivering. Starlink has been delivering yet wasn't good enough...go figure.

> The FCC has spent tons of money on rural and underserved broadband. Search and ye shall find.

I did a search for "fcc rural broadband funding" and all that showed up was a bunch of programs from the post-pandemic era, and those have specific targets attached. Moreover, the programs in question are only a few years old so it seems a bit premature to conclude that the ISPs are not building out broadband. Finally this meme predates the pandemic by years, so I'm still at a loss as to whether the claim of "FCC gave a bunch of money to ISPs and they didn't do anything with it" is actually true or not.

There have been several programs over the years - most recently you can look at the Biden's "Infrastructure bill" (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) which $65B for broadband.

Older than 2020 has been:

1. Connect America Fund (https://www.fcc.gov/general/connect-america-fund-caf) which has been around 2011

2. Obama's stimulus package of 2009 which allocated $8B (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest...)

I'm pulling these acts from this book: http://irregulators.org/bookofbrokenpromises/

and cross referencing them with wikipedia or other sites. People have been really sore about since the breakup of Ma Bell in 1984. The fact that so much money was spent and America isn't covered in Fiber is a real tragedy.

>1. Connect America Fund (https://www.fcc.gov/general/connect-america-fund-caf) which has been around 2011

The FCC website seems to suggest the funds were given in exchange for ISPs providing internet in an given internet. Did the ISPs not follow through? If so, is there more on this?

>2. Obama's stimulus package of 2009 which allocated $8B (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest...)

The linked wikipedia page just lists a dollar amount with no accompanying detail, and google doesn't turn up much either, so it's unclear under what conditions the money was given out.

>I'm pulling these acts from this book: http://irregulators.org/bookofbrokenpromises/

I didn't feel like reading all 581 pages of the book, so I looked at the summary instead. Based on my quick skim, there's little in the way of details in terms of actual examples of government money being handed out with the expectation of it being used for broadband, and the ISPs not following through. There were however, many examples of ISPs failing to meet their broadband expansion plans, which is a slightly different claim.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/att-took-283-mil...

This is one fairly recent example. They didn't just get provided "money to use for broadband." They were expected to provide service within an area, and they didn't actually provide service to people they said they were capable of serving.

SpaceX messed up their application

Then go after them for violation of those contracts. Why do we need a new rule/law?

LA can independently go after local scofflaws because the Federal agencies tasked with enforcing the federal rules are corrupt and not doing their job.

So may fix the Federal corruption first? Also, LA is also known for corruption:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-14/a-guide-...

LA has standing to act and file a suit to do that if they have evidence of corruption.

> If the state is unhappy with certain distributions they can try to change the economics, like giving vouchers.

That voucher is still being paid out of our tax. Either way, somebody's got to pay.

The government saying "You can provide service at any rate, but you have to give the same rate to this whole area" sounds like a much more market-friendly solution to me. Providers can still compete and try to bring the cost down, they just can't do it in a way that leaves poorer part of the city unconnected.

If you're against regulations because you don't trust government, consider what happens when the government gets to decide who receives vouchers, how much they are worth, and what services they are good for.

I think ISPs mostly upgrade infrastructure when customer willingness to pay goes down, such as when Google Fiber or a similarly superior alternative comes to town. I'm having trouble thinking of instances when incumbent ISPs offered a substantial improvement to service or prices in response to positive incentives. Their main business model is sitting on the status quo for as long as money continues to flow in.

It's the same thing through a different lens. Customers willing to pay more for better service could be less willing to pay for standard service.

When Google Fiber comes to town, it usually results in paying less for better service.

The article agrees with you and it seems to be glossed over entirely in the comments.

> We’ve also noted that when those big ISPs do finally deploy service, they tend to prioritize white, affluent neighborhoods — which generally see faster, cheaper, service than more diverse, poorer neighborhoods.

Any argument that talks of following incentives needs to account for the fact that people with more money pay less.

Said corporations should probably cease taking subsidies, then, no? Rather than taking the subsidies to build X, and then not doing so, anyway.

> But overall the state has a bad history of trying to manipulate markets especially through dictate.

If the market is competitive and the cost is excessive then yes. If it's an oligopoly/local monopoly and the providers can charge as much as they want that just means there will be slightly less surplus left for the shareholders and management.

You cannot live a successful modern life without a number of things, power, clean running water, reasonable options for transportation, and I'll happily add high speed internet access. Comparing luxury things Versace to necessities of life is incredibly dishonest. There's plenty of space for a rational discussion about if LA County is behaving badly, but preventing people with power from taking advantage of, and abusive people without is the responsibility of a just society. High speed internet access is no longer a luxury. And ISP which have a much worse reputation for taking advantage, acting abusively to extract more profit, shouldn't get a pass on their generalized asshattery.

PG&E's asshattery has led to fires, deaths, and entire towns being burned from the map. For profit utilities have proven that they indeed require assistance in acquiring alignment on their responsibilities to the communities they serve.

>You cannot live a successful modern life without a number of things,[...] and I'll happily add high speed internet access

Define "high speed". I understand that you need internet access to bank, interact with government, and receive education, but all these use cases don't require exceptionally fast internet. You can get 12Mb/s down with ADSL2 tech from the 2000s[1], which should be more than enough for essential use cases. True, it's probably not fast enough for multiple concurrent netflix/youtube streams, and updating steam games is going to be a slog, but those are arguably luxuries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADSL#ADSL_standards

Why bring up ADSL2? It's not a long-distance protocol at all, you need to be within 2 miles of the exchange hub to reach that 12Mb/s that you quoted. That's probably fine for subscribers within the city limits, but for more rural areas it's hardly relevant. DOCSIS techniques (cable rather than telephone modems) had quoted distances of 20-50 miles IIRC (although I can't seem to find any authoritative figures on that, probably due to search engine deterioration).

Plenty of CAF, RDOF, BEAD and similar program funding went to forklifting ADSL2 cabinets into rural locales to provide the service OP mentioned.

These were often back hauled by bonded SHDSL or similar Ethernet over Copper technologies, so you end up with a bunch of people on 12Mbps connections sharing a small pool of bandwidth, resulting in congestion, jitter & packet loss for everyone.

Deploying fiber would have not been as inexpensive to implement though, and for many years getting any connectivity was more important than delivering future proof connectivity.

interacting with your peer group isn't a luxury. If you're the only one with an unstable or weak connection, it makes it harder to participate fairly. If you're already not member of a privileged socioeconomic group, why are we making it harder?

what about the new huge pre-trained AI model my highschool kid wants to play with. She only has a few hours a day, but you're right, having it downloaded within a week would be a luxury. she's lives in a poor neighborhood so she should have to wait while everyone else gets to explore, experiment, and contribute commits back to the repo it came from.

But instead of attempting to enumerate a large set of things made more difficult. would you say that also applies to electricity? Having a washers and dryer is a luxury right? shouldn't $ELECTRIC company be able to charge more before they install the lines for you? Oh sorry your neighborhood isn't zoned for ovens. This is unavailable, check back in a few years.

Sure I agree with your premis. We could totally allow people to get away with being shit, and unfair to people without money. But we shouldn't.

I agree with the sentiment of your post but also want to make the case for outliers. I work from home and have to frequently need to make very large data transfers (hundreds of GB in many cases)

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