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?
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.
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.
I have never once in my life heard anyone describe the US Military through such a lens.
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.
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?
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.