Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

This is a lot of words. Do you think Internet should be a utility, or not? Obviously: yes. You enjoy water, schools, roads and power. Trash removal in NYC is free, and it's better for that community than being private. But also, you work in tech or something. More customers, less money being paid on meaningless rents. And fuck Comcast, right? Think critically. We don't need ISPs, and little about that ecosystem resulted in innovation that mattered historically.

View on HN

Compare this to California regulating how much insurance companies can charge. IN that case, its lead to horrendous side effects where insurance companies are leaving the state, dropping customers, etc because they will literally lose money on the policies, which has lead to bad outcomes. Id rather that the state actually pay for the things it wants and not put in a bunch of hidden taxes that have strong distortions on principle.

Private companies looking for profit and leaving when they notice that is not profitable is not a undesired thing. If your margins depend on you screwing your customers, your business model shouldn't exist. California will figure something out, maybe making high density residences easier to build, would make a difference. Also, that's not exactly why they are leaving, they are leaving because the state forces them to pay the insurance if an "act of god" (systemic risk, like a wildfire) happens.

The risk of fire has clearly massively increased thanks to climate change. California's rules literally dont allow them to charge prices that account for this. California has an insurance plan of last resort that is now billions underwater, which is a clear sign of the issues at play.

Its not that these insurance companies are screwing their customers; rather at the rates that California requires they charge, these houses should not exist because they are a net negative to society unless their insurance costs more.

I agree on the dense housing. So many of these burns are in areas that we shouldn't have built.

Call me when you have a free market economy delivering broadband.

You don’t.

The situations are not comparable.

Call me when these type of indirect unfunded mandates ever succeed at squeezing blood out of the corpo stone, or when they don't end up entrenching the existing corpos.

Broadband is indeed a market failure in many places. The answer is to create direct competition in the form of municipal fiber, not to cheer on weasely half-baked approaches that just solidify the positions of the monopolist dinosaurs.

Trash removal is free in NY, sure. The city says people should have trash removal provided and it should be centralized.

The equivalent would be that the city pays ISPs to provide service to certain people.

Instead they say "you have to provide them service even though you'll lose money on these customers".

Do you see why this is different?

> "you have to provide them service even though you'll lose money on these customers".

So if you're not yet convinced, fuck Comcast right? Yes! I want Comcast to lose money! I fucking hate Comcast more than anything, almost everyone who isn't working there does. There are things I can imagine never doing, like working for a tobacco company (fuck them too), and working for Comcast. It's okay to sometimes have limits. You can step on some toes without worrying about the ass they're connected to that you might have to kiss later. I will never kiss Comcast's ass. Laissez-faire absolutists do not arrive at economically or socially optimal outcomes all the time.

> Do you see why this is different?

Not particularly, as long as they have a monopoly/duopoly, because that acts as a giant pile of free money which can pay for these things.

If we had some kind of mechanism in place that resulted in aggressive competition, then maybe "you have to provide service for $15-20" would be a problem.

I think it would be quite a bad idea for the city to pay the asking price to this kind of monopoly/duopoly, because that rent will get jacked up extra high.

It should be a utility. I'd like the government to eminent domain all internet infrastructure and resell bandwidth to ISPs at fair prices.

I would in fact enjoy a great deal of schadenfreude. The carriers pocketed giant government handouts but did not make the commensurate improvements in infrastructure those were intended to fund.

I don't see why it's obviously yes. Broadband providers can compete with each other in a way that the water utility or roads cannot.

> Broadband providers can compete.

They can, but they don't unless forced to.

For real. In my area, you can choose between xfinity or comcast and if you don't like those hope you enjoy satellite for way too much money and awful latency.

Spoiler for the uninformed: Xfinity and Comcast are the same entity.

How? A broadband provider either has to create infrastructure costing billions hidden like water utilities or use over the air internet which has it own limitations based on spectrum and not all spectrum being usable for data transmission.

Right but that infrastructure is getting created either way, especially when you have power companies starting regional ISPs!

Not really, not unless we enforce last mile unbundling. There's not going to be multiple fiber lines run to every house in my neighborhood for the same reasons why there aren't multiple power lines or multiple water lines or multiple sewer lines.

electricity rates in California are out of control in the summer because there is no competition.

> Trash removal in NYC is free

Trash pickup costs the city $109 billion.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-16/nyc-mayor...

... the total NYC budget is $109 billion. They are not spending $13k/resident on trash collection.

Edit: according to https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/understandingthebudget.... residential garbage collection is $10 million per week.

Assuming this covers all of NYC's population (8.2 million), that's pretty cheap - $1.22/week. I'm paying $160/quarter, so that's $13.33/week or over ten times the cost to a private company. I assume that my prices are regulated locally in some kind of private/public partnership deal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com