Another US state repeals law that protected ISPs from municipal competition | Hacker News Reader

Another US state repeals law that protected ISPs from municipal competition

arstechnica.com

53 pointsrntn23 comments

Minnesota resident. The smaller the ISP, the better the service and support. My in-laws in a town of 3k have more reliable Internet at their lake cabin, and faster, than I did in the city.

I was very excited when competition arrived. I now pay 1/2 the price for symmetric gigabit that's solid as a rock. Xfinity is a joke - they'll practically force you to use their equipment, which has a public WiFi access point that any Xfinity customer can use. Why? No idea.

While I favor competition, I have no faith the the ability of municipalites to run anything. And they exempt themselves when it suits them (for example, where I live it's illegal to hire a private hauler to pick up your garbage. You must pay the city to do it, and it's quite expensive compared to what people outside the city pay).

They recently contracted with a company to provide "municipal" internet in competition with Comcast, AT&T and another small local provider. The fallout of that is lineal drilling through people's yards as they run conduits for their fiber. The number of sewer lines, water lines, and gas lines that have been punctured is astonishing. People are living for months with mud piles in their yards from the drills and little flags all over the place from the utility locating services.

If Comcast were doing all this people would be screaming from the hilltops, but they put up with it because it's "municipal".

Sounds like you just don't trust groups of people.

I don't trust groups of people who can legally reach into my wallet and who vote on their own salaries.

Amen

Sorry your society has poor controls on public service. Sounds like a problem with the constitution; too bad it makes you sound like a crank.

That does sound frustrating. I'm pretty anti government in general, but one thing my city has done is make the best internet service I've ever had.

My IP address hasnt changed in the 7 years I've been here and I don't even pay for static IP. Plus I get symmetric gigabit for $70.

The profits are required to be rolled back into infrastructure upgrades. That's why we even got fiber. They just had a huge pile of money lying around and said "I guess we'll upgrade everyone to fiber". They already had conduit installed because of good city planning so it was just upgrading switches and running wires for the most part. (I'm sure it was more than that, please don't hang me by my hyperbole)

The municipal wifi option in Minneapolis was just fine when we had it. Super cheap and plenty reliable.

I'm not sure what else the city has done, but having 2-3 broadband providers has been amazing. Even before they passed this bill. The offerings in the country are top notch. Our lake cabin got fiber access with gigabit before our suburban home did. We asked if they offered it and two days later they dug to our cabin and had it all wired up.

Is this municipal? No maybe not. But is it obvious that the small ISPs are fighting for their customers? Yes in both service and support. MN is doing something right.

i used to feel this way and say “the government is terrible, look at example x, y, and z” until someone asked me a simple question, “using the same standards, how many companies have we seen that are just plain awful?”

this simple question made me realize that honestly, i think far more often i see terrible customer service, terrible end product, etc… from companies than i do from various government projects—particularly the larger we go in scale. it feels like daily here in hn we see someone who is struggling with some company with literally no way to get help at all.

for every bad government project we can point to multiple awful corporate attempts.

at the end of the day i don’t think better or worse is inherent to either. there are positives and negatives to both but missteps, growing pains, corruption etc… are pretty clearly not limited to one or the other.

The difference is that lousy companies get flushed away by the market (unless government keeps them around), but nothing next to a miracle can get rid of a government program no matter how bad it is.

again, if you keep the same metrics. there are plenty of just plain awful companies that have been around for decades. i’ve seen terrible restaurants, terrible construction companies, just awful search engines, etc…

and we’ve all seen many government projects started and then abandoned.

I would posit that the number of failed companies exceeds the number of abandoned government projects by many orders of magnitude.

I can personally choose to not give my money to a company I don't like. I can't choose to not pay for government projects I don't like, or that are corrupt, or that never end, etc.

You can, though, vote your representatives out. And they don't want to be voted out.

Having lived through the initial installation of Verizon FIOS into existing neighborhoods in my area I can tell you it is exactly the same situation when private providers are involved. People were screaming from the hilltops and no one cared. Through the use of lobbying dollars to make sure the laws are written to limit their potential liability and the use of "subcontractors" owned by the company to shield them from any remaining direct liability they suffer no consequences.

> The new language says cities and towns may "not discriminate in favor of the municipality's own communications facilities

Why not? Imho private isps should be forbidden if municipalitees want to diy. Just like the previous law. All this honesty and fairness is really not deserved.

You really want to give the government a monopoly on internet connectivity?

With some well crafted requirements. Have someone independently compare it to a private offer. If they fail everyone involved gets fired.

The question to ask imho is if an isp (or any privatized service) can just be allowed to go bankrupt. Can people live without internet? Or is it something that needs to work?

Fairness is not something you strive for because someone deserves it. It's because it's the only way to run a stable society.

Minnesota, because it was too hard to put in the title apparently.

Submissions generally use the title of the source article.

Yeah, Ars could have (and should have) put it in the title, though.

They want you to click through and find out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com