Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't get why anyone thinks any company should control infrastructure. We don't have private electric lines, or private roads that are corporate funded. We don't expect train tracks to be privately laid. Our entire phone and cable infrastructure were built by private companies (mainly AT&T) by getting tremendous government subsidies and being effectively publicly funded for private enterprise.

There is absolutely no reason that any local government in the US worth its weight in salt couldn't start a fiber to the home initiative where they take a tax hike for a few years to pay off laying fiber to everyone in the district. They could contract with neighbor regions, or with private long line services like Level3 to provide internet access, and then nobody gets ripped off when they get a telecom monopoly in their area, because it is a publicly owned utility.

It is getting to the point where internet access is so ubiquitous and essential that we need to see the rise of public fiber and wifi to enable competition in an area where for the last 30 years there has only been collusion and monopoly abuse. I consider myself a social libertarian but we have proven time and time again in history you can not effectively privatize infrastructure and expect long term benefits to society from that.

Most of the U.S.'s railway system was laid by private companies. Similarly, private companies laid much of the electrical grid, too. They are regulated utilities today but were once free companies.

Even when governments build infrastructure they typically contract that work out to private companies. I'll let you decide whether government contractors and bureaucracies are preferable to making the guy who built it have his skin in the game.

More importantly, if someone else wants to build it, as long as they follow rational rules (that can be imposed ex post facto) it is irrational for the taxpayer to clamour to pay for it.

"There is absolutely no reason that any local government in the US worth its weight in salt couldn't start a fiber to the home initiative where they take a tax hike for a few years to pay off laying fiber to everyone in the district."

We. Can. Not. Afford. It.

In case you haven't been paying attention:

Unemployment is high, so new taxes are tougher to sell than usual, and income tax revenue is declining.

Home values have just taken a big hit, so property tax revenue is declining.

The housing market is having a difficult time clearing in many areas; i.e. prices are still too high and there's a surplus of homes, which sit abandoned. This stretches local services (fires, copper theft, copper theft of e.g. gas lines which causes fires, homeless, drug activity, etc.).

Expensive pensions, healthcare, etc. cause costs for government employees to keep going up.

In short, state and local governments are overextended and are feeling a need to cut services, not expand them. The federal government is too, to some extent, but they can essentially print money.

Of course, these are generalizations; they obviously won't apply to every locality.

Not necessarily. Laying fiber might be end up being revenue positive without a tax increase -- depending on the time frame and its effect on stimulating the economy.

The assumption behind any infrastructure being laid is that it will be a net positive gain. You wouldn't consider it otherwise. If everywhere in the US with a population density over around 50 persons per square mile got end to end fiber via local taxes (and to argue the supers problem, if a region can't afford it, they don't have to do it - many localities in the US are prospering just fine, while some are destitute. Its a case by case situation) the benefits to society would be massive.

Same thing with maglev trains along the east and west seaboards. They cost a ton, but in 50 years they would usher in new eras of mobility and an order of magnitude less cost to transport goods extremely quickly.

One of Google's stated requirements for the fiber project was the ability to impact business. They specifically wanted a location where there was an industrial market without access to reliable high-speed Internet access.

Fiber is a benefit to businesses. When my city installed a fiber line with the assistance of a large regional credit union headquartered here, we also saw a couple data centers and co-location facilities move in. The lines paid for themselves in a more than reasonable time frame.

In reality, the big thing holding back municipal Internet access or the installation of high speed lines is not the lack of money in the government (the government doesn't need to pay a dime). It's that the government is willingly allowing the existing local telco to maintain their monopoly with bans on the installation of new cable. Make it cheap and easy to drop new lines in and the market will expand to fill the desire.

Studies have shown that fiber to a house results in a net increase of about $10K in the house's value. Since typical property taxes are about 1% of the value, any local government that does this is looking at about $100/year extra income per house, ad infinitum.

You can use bonds to pay for fiber, because fiber is infrastructure (like water, electricity, roads).

Here's how I would like to see it: the City provides fiber infrastructure, and charges a base fee for it. This gets your traffic to some termination point(s). If you want access to the Internet, you pay a third party to carry your traffic to/from the Internet past those termination points. It'd be an open market, so carriers would try to undercut each other.

I doubt studies really show any such thing. They probably showed that when fiber is rare in a residential area, it may add $10K to a house value. When it becomes common, it won't.

We. Can. Afford. It.

Laying fiber would create jobs all over the country, not only by employing companies to lay the fiber, but by creating work for the companies that manufacture the fiber. More people working means more tax revenue and it means they have money to spend elsewhere, which in turn creates additional jobs in local regions - once again increasing tax revenues.

What the US cannot afford is to continue to cut federal, state, and local jobs when there is already not enough demand in the private sector to provide anything close to full employment.

In my "Can't. Afford. It," comment [1] I wasn't referring to the trickle-down effects, job stimulus, or long-term return on investment. Those are certainly worthy issues to discuss, but in comment [1] I was limiting myself to saying that, regardless of the merits of the proposal, it might be difficult for many localities to come up with the financial resources to implement it.

> What the US cannot afford is to continue to cut federal, state, and local jobs when there is already not enough demand in the private sector to provide anything close to full employment.

Whether creating jobs should be a goal of government, or merely a side effect of implementing policies, depends on your politics. (It's as much a question of "big-government" vs. "small-government" as "left" vs. "right".)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4294310

> it might be difficult for many localities to come up with the financial resources to implement it.

Which is why they should issue voted-upon bonds, instead of tax incentives to the corps.

Some might debate whether what you say is true but it doesn't really matter because it would be political suicide, I think, in the near future to try to push this agenda anywhere outside of the Valley.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com