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Comment by rolobio | Hacker News Reader

I’ve had fiber at my house from day one provided by a local ISP. Comcast came in and buried their own fiber lines (years later) for all the houses in my neighborhood. Soon after, my ISP bumped my speed and lowered my monthly bill.

We desperately need more competition. It’s the only thing that actually lowers prices.

Also, I will happily pay higher prices to never pay for Comcast again. So they won’t see a penny from me.

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> We desperately need more competition. It’s the only thing that actually lowers prices.

Unless it's a deep pocketed behemoth coming and stomping out local competition because they can afford to lose money on price dumping.

Though I agree with the general idea of the competition.

This is all covered in microeconomics. Competition is very good for society. Things that stop competition are bad and require government action. The scenario above is describing the behaviors of a “natural monopoly” due to the barriers to enter the market. As with all monopolies, regulation or some government action is normally required to promote competition and stop bad behavior (some examples of government actions are described in the link below / the root article is an example).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

I really wish microeconomics was a required course in high school or primary. I find it to be one of the least understood of the well-established fields, and one that matters when we get older and vote or debate on these topics.

I hate how corporate lobbying is described as "government action", as if the government here is the actor and not the condom.

The government is the actor. Do you think that corporate lobbying gives corporations the right to write their own laws, or something? Lobbying is paying someone to speak to a government representative. Every government representative has the full authority to respond, "No? That's stupid," and if they respond any other way they should be the one held accountable for it.

>Do you think that corporate lobbying gives corporations the right to write their own laws, or something?

Given how common it is for politicians to pass bills directly written by corporate lobbies, yes. I think exactly that.

People worry about price dumping waaay out of proportion to how often it is a problem.

Usually when there is a deep-pocketed entity stomping out local competition they are using regulatory capture as their main tool (this is what Comcast seems to do) and the problem is competition has been made illegal.

In situations like this, my default assumption is that it is illegal to lay competing cables until proven otherwise. We had a similar situation of massive monopoly provider in Australia back in the early 2000s, the economics didn't stop new companies laying new cable to compete with the incumbents. That all died when the government launched a new national network though.

That new national network ("the NBN") is so hit-or-miss that it's not funny.

My current connection in Brisbane is 1GbE download (incredibly fast for Australia), but only 50mbps upload. That 50mbps upload is the fastest commonly available speed in the whole country. Most ISP's don't offer anything faster than 20mbps. :(

Reliability isn't great either. Had an 8 hour (!) outage overnight about a month ago, then a ~2 hour outage last week. Both caused by NBN Co, rather than my ISP.

The concept of hosting anything actually useful or important from home infrastructure is just laughable when there are commonly multi-hour outages. It's just fucking stupid. :(

My favorite part of NBN was always data caps. Data caps on internal traffic thru fiberoptic backbone!

Do data caps still exist with the NBN in recent years?

I somewhat remember them from years ago, before I moved overseas for a while.

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