“Dark money” groups help private ISPs lobby against municipal broadband
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
To me that seems like a strange argument against a municipal service. Surely no one expects other things like road maintenance to be financially self-sustaining?
Instead it’s just an argument that subsidies for private businesses is good but public works is bad, which seems silly.
Bullshit. There are many ways such a thing could be funded without being on the backs of individual taxpayers.
By that logic should corporations get a tax break because a corporation isn't going to be using the public library given that it's a legal fiction?
Come on.
I think you stopped reading, or at least comprehending what you were reading, early.
The same can be said of virtually any government service.
You benefit if the local businesses have reasonably priced Internet, rather than paying hundreds of dollars a month for "commercial" services from incumbents. You benefit if your neighbor's kids have access to better education because those kids are the ones that are going to provide essential services to you as you age. And so on.
Everybody benefits from infrastructure even if they don't use it directly.
P.S. Yes in this case your benefits aren't large, but (1) your costs are small because internet is a paid service so the vast majority of the costs are covered by those who directly benefit and (2) infrastructure is cumulative -- the benefit of public infrastructure is greater than the sum of the parts.
...therefore, by definition, any infrastructure project is to be considered "worth it" and should be welcomed by everyone in the community. To be against government rollout of infrastructure is to be against everybody's best interest, right?
I'm not against government-provided services across-the-board. But apologists for infrastructure spending often seem to make this argument as if it's the last point to be made. The great thing about a private company "overcharging" or "underserving" a community is that citizens aren't forced to be in a relationship with that company for their services. That's not the case for infrastructure spending by the local government. It's much harder to vote with your feet than to vote with your wallet.
The fine line to walk with government spending is to find a way to incentivize competition in the local marketplace, without destroying it in the process. It's not an easy problem to solve.
But that is rarely true for any privatized infrastructure alternative. There is often direct financial relations through taxation anyways, either tax breaks for the company or outright having the municipality foot the bill(see most stadiums)
Then there is the potential resource usage itself - e.g how much of the land in that city is now dedicate to toll roads that could be free, or in the internet infra case it's often exclusive rights to the poles all of the lines are ran on.
How would you consider those to be "privatized infrastructure alternatives" then? To me this sounds like further evidence of citizens having fewer alternatives available because their money is being spent on things they may not (or may!) care about.
> Then there is the potential resource usage itself - e.g how much of the land in that city is now dedicate to toll roads that could be free, or in the internet infra case it's often exclusive rights to the poles all of the lines are ran on.
IDK, public rights-of-way don't seem to be the place where big disagreements are found? Passing a local law to allow common access to utility infrastructure seems qualitatively different than establishing a municipal competitor.
This is a hilarious thing to say about broadband, where the incumbents go to great lengths not to compete by carving out markets onto monopolized checkerboxes where customers are forced to use one ISP if they want anything meeting the FCCs definition of broadband, and their neighbor across the street (or next apartment building) has to choose another monopolist ISP on their block.
10Gbps is absolutely great, but then the city might create an entire bureaucratic structure around it and in 30 years when it's not great anymore the apparatus won't die or be displaced like a company eventually would.
Which is not to say that in this scenario this is not a bit of a farfetched scenario considering that's precisely what the incumbents are doing as you pointed out.
I would fully agree with you if there was actual competition. As it is, I have no faith that terrible internet companies - especially monopolies - are guaranteed to be replaced by better ones (see Ma Bells offsprings/reconstitution).
My ideal scenario is that cities lay down the last-mile fiber and handle physical layer connectivity issues between homes/offices and an exchange (for a fee). ISPs would provide Internet connectivity, that way, you get actual competition, and the cities stick to their core competency: infrastructure.
This shouldn't be controversial, and it isn't controversial for people in places where discourse hasn't been poisoned with these go no where derailing talking points.
I'm not saying that municipal broadband is a net loss, but there are no silver bullets. Subsidies are one way that a municipality can "pick a winner", and in so doing, it can assure all of the competition loses. Sometimes that's a net win, sometimes it isn't, your claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
It is a very straightforward way for municipalities to incentivize and create competition.
As to other infrastructure projects, there are ways of calculating the public benefit to determine whether the project has positive ROI, even if no direct payments are made by the public.
This is what I jokingly call the Libertarian's Lament: anything I don't use is a waste of money.
>If it can't get enough people wanting to use it at what it costs to run, I can see that as a good argument it shouldn't exist
Government services are not meant to run at a profit, which I think is the crux of the argument from private service providers: "We can't compete with someone who doesn't run for a profit, because it leaves us no room for a margin." Which is true. Then again I'm glad no one is trying to supply me water or sewer services at a profit and personally think privatizing electric service was a mistake. So from my perspective it's preferable to have a utility ISP.
Even if neither of those are true, there's still value in a municipality not relying on potentially a single company for something as important as internet. But that's admittedly a harder sell.
The government is not free to burn it's money as it pleases. Some form of democracy, represented or direct, instructs it how to spend it's money.
Did you miss that part?
I have never once in my life heard anyone describe the US Military through such a lens.
Additionally, US could very well force the sharing of infrastructure to get the market working better and force the market players to only discriminate its prices by region, not just where there is competition.
TL;DR: market failed, they can't cry because they didn't do the effort.
A service that charges money and is meant to compete with private companies should do so on even grounds lest it just becomes a de-facto government monopoly. That's fine if that's the goal but, in that case, it shouldn't be charging money at all and should just be providing the service by default.
Operating at a middle ground where it's subsidized by government funding but isn't providing service to everyone but is available to everyone isn't a logical place to be.
The reason why the argument against municipal service's financial sustainability makes sense is because it's often sold to and voted on by the population it serves as being solvent.
There are three situations that make sense to me for municipal broadband.
1. Charge a fee and operate without government funding, similar to a non-profit but government run. Probably with an exception for expanding the network to cover the entire municipality but, once that's complete, maintenance should be sustained by the program. Essentially, providing at-cost broadband and subsidizing accessibility.
2. Broadband-for-all. Government provides broadband as a service, provided free of charge to the end user and funded by taxpayers.
3. In lieu of some kind of broadband subsidy gated to a limited population (low-income, most likely). Broadband-for-all... if you're poor.
Municipal broadband is usually proposed as and passed by voters as #1. The requirement for it to be self sustaining is to allow for competition in the market to still exist. After all, the problem we are trying to solve is created by the monopoly (duopoly if you consider DSL competitive to cable or have access to fiber) so replacing one monopoly with another is not seen as progress by many. #1 gets support from the broadest constituency because different groups like it for different reasons.
#2 is not usually broadly supported enough to be voted in and #3 doesn't solve the problem that #1 and #2 aim to.
> Surely no one expects other things like road maintenance to be financially self-sustaining?
Because nobody every voted for road maintenance to be self-sustaining. People usually are voting for tax increases that are meant to pay for roads.
When a lawmaker needs technical information about a proposal, they have to ask an industry professional. That industry professional may be paid to be there, and offers complementary research services to the lawmaker. (Or they may volunteer their time). This is lobbying, and oftentimes it's a good thing!
I briefly worked for a lobbyist for a fisheries organization - he was paid by a fishing association to answer calls and put together reports about what sort of damage various laws were going to do to fish stock or fisherman's earnings for a particular region of Alaska. But it definitely creates a conflict of interest if only one side has someone there or that side is completely up-gunned.
When a nonprofit group pays for political activities, I could see why someone might refer to it all as "lobbying". But if a lawmaker needs research or opinion from an industry professional, they are not going to call up someone from a "dark money" PAC when they can just get someone from Comcast on the line directly and all the free resources they might make available.
For example could you suggest the correct law for dealing with the environmental impact of a new building? If not where would you get the information from?
Lawmakers do not have time to become experts in everything they deal with.
Just being briefed on an issue from both sides isn’t sufficient, they could both be wrong.
With what money?
Moreover, should a lawmaker be able to spend as much money as they want on "research"? Oh hey, look at that, turns out this research firm that employs my son is the perfect firm for this topic!
The government entity that makes all the laws and decides how the money is spent, can’t allocate funds for their core purpose?
Individual lawmakers may not want to, but they can if they wish to.
There are already government departments that can be used and believe it or not, there are actually people who can write public tenders without undue favoritism.
A single lawmaker should obviously not have an unlimited budget, but the legislature as a whole should have access to sufficient funds to make laws fit for purpose.
Nowhere have I suggested that you have to trust Comcast - yes they can brief but so should the opposition. It is then up to the lawmaker to some compromise between the briefs.
Nowhere have I suggested that you have to trust Comcast - yes they can brief but so should the opposition. It is then up to the lawmaker to some compromise between the briefs.
Actually this is how most management decisions are made. Other people brief the decision maker and the decision maker then makes choices between the,m. The decision maker is only an expert in decision making and not necessarily the details.
There will be exceptions for many readers of this board as the decision make acts more like a dictator as they are an expert in the necessary field.
A more pertinent example would be encryption. It is only through extensive industry lobbying that lawmakers have not mandated backdoors yet.
Every single interest is moneyed. Ultimately it's still a democracy and the lawmaker's job is to get votes, not run a multi-discipline research team.
Should we roll back every traffic law, consumer protection, safety standard, science funding, civic policing, or national defense law ever written?
Digressions aside, what value is there in allowing an uninformed person to make impactful decisions on complex matters?
Yes, all of the time. My entire life is making uninformed decisions. I am not a chef - I read reviews of restaurants. I am not a mechanic, I ask my mechanic for car advice. I am not a doctor, I pay them to tell me what's wrong and what treatments to take. Seeking out expertise is a paragon of making wise choices.
2. Seeking out expertise is a paragon of making wise choices. Seeking out moneyed interests is not.
If you were to pass legislation about crash safety for cars, would you not allow input from anyone who knows how cars are manufactured?
Obviously interested parties as well as the general public should be allowed input to the legislative process. However, input should not be solely or even primarily be sought from moneyed interests. The legislature has entire government departments at their disposal and should if need be commission their own research.
Are you trolling or is this a serious position?
First, I don't agree that lobbying is a good thing, in general. It's made our democracy more of a plutocracy<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index>. Citizen's united in 2010 really hurt us here.
'When a nonprofit group pays for political activities, I could see why someone might refer to it all as "lobbying"'
--I think your confused here as trade groups are NOT non-profit groups. Non- profits can't do much lobbying<https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/lobbying>
Calling a Comcast lobbyist for information, is like me asking a car sales person, what car I should get. He will undoubtedly point to industry paid for studies that, for obvious reason's should be considered suspect at best
1. There are experts that aren't employed by companies or trade groups. 2. A success story for unbiased information has been the CBO. It's not perfect, but from everything I've read, it's done better than either party in it's predictions, overall. We should have more like it, for research, because that's what's needed and rely on other less biased experts.
The point of the original article was about 501(c)(4) organizations running PR campaigns. And that they don't really have direct sway with lawmakers. That's what I was speaking to.
I think the CBO is an amazing accounting organization, but even they rely on industry data organization and commercial forecasts and outside consultants.
Regardless of how you feel about Citizen's United and PACs, any representative democracy is going to have lobbyists. The only thing that changes is who's allowed to have one, how you account for them, and what you call them.
You don't think it's a good thing that I can call my congressman and express my opinions and concerns?
Me calling my congressman is lobbying.
> using multiple millions of dark money to influence legislators
I use dark votes to pick my legislators.
You’ll have to be more specific about what you mean by dark votes.
Is there numbers on this? Because of how "dark money" is defined (ie. any sort of 501(c) nonprofit), technically any 501(c) charity (eg. even something like NAACP) is "dark money".
People can be wrong and later realize their mistake, it's not something we think about when supporting a cause; how will I be viewed in the future for this? Maybe we should.. Until then, anonymity in donating allows someone to express their opinions as they see the mores of the day to be, now, without fear of retribution, and protected for the distant future when they've realized how wrong they were and changed.
This is the part that’s always bad.
IMO “dark money” is the perfect term. Even if it’s in aid of a cause I agree with I still think the concept is sinister and would rather it not exist.
What's the reasoning here? How is that always bad?
There seems to be a lot of potential for abuse in forcing everyone supporting any cause to publicly disclose their identity -- supporters of a given cause could be individually targeted by opponents; people could be intimidated into supporting causes they don't actually favor.
There's a reason we cast secret ballots in elections, and I don't see much of a difference in the risk/reward equation when it comes to donations to nonprofits and social causes, whether political or not.
And what benefit do you get from knowing the identities of everyone donating to a specific cause? Are you going to oppose something you already reject on its merits even more because someone you don't like is donating to it, or change your mind and start supporting it because someone you like does?
EDIT: the post I replied to was edited after my reply to add a lot of context that it now looks like I’m ignoring. Sadly I don’t have the time to address it point by point, so to clarify: this comment is a reply to the first line of the parent comment only.
It's only wrong to those who disagree with the opinion being shaped.
Why?
And what does it mean to "shape public policy"? I see that terminology used frequently in a way that factors out the autonomy and decision-making agency of the actual individuals who constitute the "public", but isn't it up to them to decide whether to accept or reject persuasive discourse in the public sphere on their own terms?
Second, the way you're describing that situation seems very odd. Surely the legislator in question had to make an intentional choice to accept the draft legislation from the corporate representative, make an intentional choice to introduce it into the legislative session, and then the other legislators had to intentionally choose to vote in favor of the bill, then the governor had to intentionally choose to sign it into law.
There are a many processes involving individuals taking intentional actions sitting in between the the corporation proposing the bill and it becoming law, so characterizing those people as having "zero input" seems invalid on its face.
If your complaint is that the intentions and incentives of the people who actually conduct the legislative process may not be aligned with what you consider to be the overall public interest, that's a totally valid argument. But that indicates a problem with the legislative process itself, so it seems very strange to attempt to address it by imposing limits on public discourse far upstream of where the problem is occurring, instead of proposing reforms to the legislative process itself.
Perhaps it makes sense to require disclosure of authorship of all draft bills brought before the legislature, including all incremental revisions made between initial proposal and final voting. Maybe all legislative work should be done in public Git repos, with detailed commit messages being required.
But that's a very different concept from forcing disclosure of the identity of anyone who donates funds to any organization expressing opinions in public discourse.
That’s not what’s on the table—the issue in question is whether paying others to magnify your views with a direct aim at affecting policy is something one should be able to do anonymously. Especially if we restrict this to “paying enough money to buy a substantial amount of an entire person’s time dedicated to promoting your interests” then this very much does not mean forcing everyone who supports a cause to abandon anonymity, but even without that carve-out for small time donors, it still doesn’t.
Are there other sorts of persons?
You get one vote and the other people get one vote. With Dark Money, one side gets access to control a million votes and you get one vote. That's wrong.
> and I don't see much of a difference in the risk/reward equation when it comes to donations to nonprofits and social causes, whether political or not.
NonProfits and Social causes are about fixing issues directly. Giving money to a shelter that supports Runaway Gay Teens or a Pets or the Homeless is not the same. A single person giving millions of dollars to a single organization that is designed to influence the vote and lives of millions of people is not the same thing.
Also, corporations are not people, so a corporation giving to a cause (No matter the cause) should be known by everyone.
No, that's not correct at all. "Dark money" doesn't control anything at all, and is usually just used for outreach and advocacy in an attempt to persuade people to make choices consistent with certain aims or principles.
The "million votes" you're referring latterly to are the aggregation of the "other people's" votes you mentioned formerly, and those people decide for themselves whether the arguments being made by advocacy groups are sufficiently persuasive to factor into how they are casting their votes.
> Also, corporations are not people, so a corporation giving to a cause (No matter the cause) should be known by everyone.
Corporations are just organizational models used by people instrumentally to pursue their goals. They have no concrete existence or any independent moral agency, and so factor out of the discussion entirely.
This is incorrect. Corporations have a concrete existence nd extreme power fully controlled by a tiny board of directors, not by "people" but by "select people" and your attempts to suggest we all use corporations when it's really just a few elite rich people using those corporations is bullshit obfuscation popular among corporatists and plutocrats.
And there are millions of C-corps, S-corps, LLCs, partnerships, and other formal entities used by millions of Americans to organize their business affairs at all levels of scale and complexity. And millions more have their savings invested in the stock market and are responsible for electing the directors who sit on the boards of publicly-traded companies. The idea that corporate structures are only used by "a few rich elite people" is abjectly false.
"Dark money" is the alternate term most of the beltway prefers as it keeps them safe from RICO indictments and uncomfortable attention to the hypocritic duality of a country that practically river-dances to democracy.
This is just political bribery with more steps and ceremony.
It's also a tool for those with unpopular-to-power opinions express them without fear of retribution in a society that insufficiently protects them.
When it comes to money, though, those with more of it usually have less to fear from retribution.
In this way, speech through money is a fairly dubious argument. It's, on balance, a definite corrupting force.
Dark money is a good term because it implies a negative thing and that negative thing is a good guess here.
For instance, your very comment is published under a throwaway. Couldn't we say that your comment, being an attempt to influence us, shouldn't be anonymous? After all, perhaps you could stand to personally benefit in some way?
However, anonymity has a cost proportional to its impact. That cost is that the impact of the anonymous act will have no retribution. A person is more likely to act in a negative-sum way with anonymity.
Still, anonymity is essential because it protects the underpowered in their expression. We as a society have said that, on balance, anonymity with speech is good. And I think that's reasonable.
With money as speech, this logic is broken. Money is the purest form of power within our society. Giving money is an expression of power. The more money, the more power to express.
We then get all the negatives of anonymity with none of the benefits. What's more, as those with money can express a lot more than those without, the negatives are amplified.
Another way to think of it is that freedom of expression as a sort of democratic value because it equalizes power. Speech as money removes the equality of it.
To be more concrete, I believe that I can post anonymously but it would be dubious for me anonymously fund a lot of people posting here.
Obsfucated?
Anonymized?
> Cannon said use of the phrase "dark money groups" when referring to 501(c)(4) organizations "often reveals a stunning level of ignorance." Cannon pointed to the Supreme Court's 1958 ruling in NAACP v. Alabama, which held that the NAACP did not have to provide its membership lists to the state. The court decided that "compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute... a restraint on freedom of association."
The Danish fiber infrastructure is in large parts build by the power companies, because they where doing the digging anyway. Other parts are build by ISPs, or as municipal projects. Once the fiber, or cable, is established all ISP can use it. This ensures that all companies have almost the same coverage and can offer their services around the country, but cutting down on the cost, by preventing parallel infrastructure from being build.
The areas where it's not financially viable to build out the infrastructure, like some islands, the municipalities or even the government, can step in an build the infrastructure, or pay a company to do it, and then leave the services to be offered by the ISPs.
For bandwidth, I don't know, but they all share a database that customers can use to lookup what speeds are available for their address. I think what they do it that they have trunks coming in at various locations, so that after a certain point you transit from the fiber provider to the actual ISP. My fiber provide, which I never deal with, I only interact with the ISP, have connections to 130.000 homes and businesses. At their terminus the ISP needs to be present with a connection of their own, or more frequently, one they rent from back-haul providers.
That allows me to pick from 13 different ISPs on a single fiber connections and about the same on the cable from the local cable-tv provider. Prices are pretty much identical, but then there are added services or the quality of the service where they differentiate.
How you share bandwidth between parties depends on the setup. More often than not the end user only has one service provider at a time, thus there is neither any sharing or contention.
Let's say, for example, a city hall member is on municipal WiFi on their personal phone while in-session. Instead of going through the difficulty of getting them to hand over their phone to a FOIA officer to search for responsive documents, why not just submit the FOIA to the municipal IT department and get the logs that way?
Is there a good reason why this category of concern shouldn't actually be be a concern?
edit: yes ISPs sell your data. that's a separate concern outside of this.
It's harder because it couldn't be a targeted attack and would need to rely on the failure of the people handling the request. But failures happen... constantly.
2. Why can't the municipal ISPs just... not keep records? I'm not sure why ISPs should be keeping logs of browsing history in the first place.
2. You're joking, right?
However, there is a major misunderstanding about the kinds of records ISPs can keep. They cannot store your browsing data for most major websites, because they don't have it. Widespread use of SSL/TLS along with the rollout of eSNI and DNS over HTTPS means the most interesting details of your browsing are encrypted. "Customer A sent 57 and received 94 packets to/from IP W.X.Y.Z on YYYY-MM-DD" is certainly not full anonymity but it's not hardly the detailed breakdown that "browsing history" implies.
That "most" is doing a hell of a lot of work there.
Damn near all major websites are using TLS now. Support for eSNI is probably a lot lower though (see sibling comment).
Sure, WE can exercise good browsing hygiene... but what about someone who's the victim of domestic violence and don't have that option? Or kids who aren't technical and need to raise a major issue. Or an older grandma who hasn't owned a computer in years.
It's very easy to say "just do X, just do Y" when you're not in their shoes and only talking in these abstract "EHHH, 99% is good enough." terms
I hope some day you can see where I'm coming here, but I'm not holding my breath. Good day.
https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-...
It's not even an uncommon issue. I'm currently dealing with a large local police department who released to me thousands of peoples' SSNs, finger print hash, tattoos, etc etc from ALPR data in a FOIA lawsuit where I was co-plaintiff. They saw no problem with it and asked us if we expected them to redact the info.
So yeah, I fully expect somebody to fuck up at some point.
What type of sensitive logs would you want to keep for "running operations and debugging issues"?
>Widespread use of SSL/TLS along with the rollout of eSNI and DNS over HTTPS means the most interesting details of your browsing are encrypted.
What's the adoption rate for eSNI? My impression is that most sites still don't use it.
>"Customer A sent 57 and received 94 packets to/from IP W.X.Y.Z on YYYY-MM-DD" is certainly not full anonymity but it's not hardly the detailed breakdown that "browsing history" implies.
It could be pretty bad if it's shows you as using grindr.com or whatever.
Which is exactly to be expected. If you could tell how widely it's actually used that's a problem. Encrypted Client Hello (the successor which was actually deployed) is GREASEd so that a client which could do ECH and a client which is doing ECH look the same to outsiders. The server knows which is which, but of course the server already knows that it enabled (or did not) ECH.
I expect that at some point one of the CDNs will want to advertise that this is a thing they offer. Once upon a time CDNs got a lot of blast for disliking the practice of claiming in TLS that you want some.ordinary.example as a way to conceal the reality that your HTTP transaction is for Host: censored.or.prohibited.example. One purpose of ECH is to enable them to deliver the same functionality but without all the technical problems.
Now of course if they actually love censorship and so on, they'll do nothing, but it seems to me several big CDNs want to do this once they have a fix for the technical problems, which ECH gives them.
I don't buy that for a moment. My ISP collects a lot of low-level information, but they don't need and don't collect the sort of information we're discussing here.
The individual users have actual hard links (or very rarely, some sort of radio) to somewhere and for that I agree you want diagnostics. "Sorry Ma'am I see your fibre went dark 18 minutes and 47 seconds ago, we'll have a technician out to investigate tomorrow morning". But the IP stuff is just bits, "You use Netflix a lot" isn't "useful for running operations" it's marketable information, it's collected because you can make money.
Maybe you'll get to the same destination but I very much doubt it. Of course, if your starting goal was to snoop on the customers and you were just looking for an excuse...
The above statement makes no sense at all. The whole Internet is built on connections between autonomous systems and all traffic is IP based. There is nothing but ASNs and IPs and information about them and the flows between them is extremely helpful in operating an ISP.
I also don't disagree about the usefulness of this kind of information, my argument is that ISPs can't always get by on coarsely aggregated data alone.
For the city hall member, if you could show that they were doing city business on a city device, you would have a case for why the FOIA request should be granted because that would be a government activity.
For example -- is your neighbor's email address suddenly public once they email someone within a government agency? Why? Why not?
And you're wrong about the city hall member topic. I specifically mentioned "in session" because in many municipalities, the activities they do while in session are responsive to FOIA. That includes their browser history. Regardless of the device they're using.
That's not exactly true. FOIA requirements often make the records of government entities subject to public release, and if a government entity is running an ISP, it's not clear that records that include sensitive information about their customers would necessarily be excluded. Lots of information about housing, land ownership, vehicle ownership, among many other things, is indeed public record, and includes a lot of PII.
I just don't understand the fascination with government-run ISPs. If it was economically feasible for a municipal government to run an ISP, why not just organize a community non-profit to do it instead, and avoid all of the pitfalls of mixing politics -- with both its peculiar incentives and unique constraints -- with service provision?
The municipality owns all the hard assets, such as ducts, pits, poles and fiber optic cables. Private service providers then sell Internet access and other services that on top of that.
The municipality cannot leak or hand over information it does not have.
Open access is a tried and true concept, easy to implement. However, you should also be working on better local governance, since that is the root cause.
But without significant scale and guaranteed uptake --- hard when you're competing with two household name ISPs --- the fixed costs of just running an ISP (or the backend infrastructure for a white-label ISP to build on top of) are prohibitive.
The best case scenario requires that the municipality is also underserved.
> But without significant scale and guaranteed uptake --- hard when you're competing with two household name ISPs --- the fixed costs of just running an ISP (or the backend infrastructure for a white-label ISP to build on top of) are prohibitive.
This is incorrect. Running an ISP is very cheap and the fixed costs are minor. It’s the building of a network that is expensive.
Source: I personally run an ISP and have built multiple networks.
Note that the economics here don't appear to work even given that we already have a municipal fiber network covering the whole municipality.
I’d be making mad cash if I had a municipalwide fiber network at my disposal.
If there is no muni network to be, I hope you are at least leasing dark fiber and other assets to ISPs.
At this point it would be for the gov to subsidise starlink terminals in economically unviable areas
Opposed to health, trains, water other big infrastructures, internet seems pretty much a solved problem to be wasting money over it