Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

People on HN generally love municipal broadband. For good reasons. It is almost without exception better than any of the national ISPs. Cheaper too.

Municipal broadband is just 100% publicly-owned. That's what that means. When you have a national ISP, you might not get a service at all despite the ISP guaranteeing service in exchange for money from the state they've taken. You get a service that starts at $60 but somehow gets to $140 in a few years unless you do the annual cancel dance and if you do cancel you have no other options anyway. And what are you really paying for? Lobbying to make municipal broadband illegal.

And these same people will defend the status quo because of "property rights". Nobody here is Jeff Bezos. Does it seem like things are going well? Is this a legitimate belief in unfettered property rights? Or is it just that you believe you'll be Jeff Bezos one day so you'll benefit from the status quo?

This is the origin of the quote possibly misattributed to Steinbeck that Americans view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".

Besides economic and historical facts, I think one of the biggest reasons to flee municipal broadband is its liability to become a tool of government repression. What we're essentially proposing is that at the dusk of paper and analog media we want the government to be the provider of information and communication infrastructure.

I'm reminded of a quote from Martin Niemöller.... Perhaps our Constitution would protect us against such things. But why risk it?

This is just a slippery slope fallacy and I'm honestly confused as to why it's so sticky. Are we really concerned about possible repression by Marquette, MI? And what would that look like exactly? Also, what are we comparing it to? Social media companies do untold amounts of repression.

My problem with this kind of argument is that it weights future hypothetical harm as more important than documented historical harm. Did we forget how Verizon FIOS throttled Netflix [1]? Also, what examples do we have of any municipal broadband in the US doing any kind of repression?

The truth here is that big companies are more complicit to government intervention than small ones are.

It's an odd quote to bring up because Niemoller was a concentration camp guard turned survivor who was arguing against inaction against the Nazis because it doesn't affect you, against being a bystander basically.

Are we really likening municipal broadband to the Holocaust? Really?

[1]: https://blog.flashrouters.com/2021/07/12/tired-netflix-throt...

Yes, we should really be concerned about the government repressing internet users on its network. Surely you've noticed the hubbub about age verification recently. Maybe not Marquette, but in other places I certainly would expect the government to try to, for example ban porn under the guise of "protecting kids", or policing "hate speech" under the guise of preventing "incitements to violence". Now, you may not like porn, you may think you don't engage in hate speech, but as in the Niemöller quote, we shouldn't wait for the next disfavoured group to be us. We are I think, thankfully, very far from that, but I don't even want to take steps in that direction.

Maybe this is just a hypothetical future harm. I'm not sure the benefits are any more concrete. After all, if Fios throttles your Netflix, you can (usually) pick another competitor. Would a municipal broadband provider permit competition? Seems unlikely to me, unless the state is willing to forgo the taxes from citizens who go with a private ISP, which I don't think they'd tolerate.

And what if all the ISPs were throttling, i.e. you really had no alternative? I think it's worth asking what economic forces are incentivizing that, and why we think municipal ISPs wouldn't be subject to them? And if they are, who is paying to compensate?

> The truth here is that big companies are more complicit to government intervention than small ones are.

Seems backwards to me. Small company, small litigation warchest. It's "yessir" or we evaporate you. Why do you think it's the other way around?

You don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to believe you’re better off in the long run with strong property rights. To your example: I’ve got 10 gig fiber from a private company. My alternatives are 2 gig fiber from a private company, or 2 gig cable from a private company. I don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to wager that, if the people who ran Baltimore City Public Schools ran my broadband service, I wouldn’t have even 1 gig service.

The fact is, we have tried exactly what you’re suggesting. We don’t even need to get to the brutal communism of China or the Soviet Union. The “social democracy” of India and Bangladesh (where I’m from) left those countries’ economies in the toilet.

The best case scenario for social democracy was the DDR. My wife lived for a year in former eastern germany—in 2001, when the socialist government was as far back in time as Obama’s first term is to today—and folks recall being reasonably happy under socialism. But western germany was still much more prosperous, and it took huge solidarity payments to help the former east germany catch up.

The "brutal communism of China" is just hilarious on its face. It's like a Freedom House type position [1]. Funded by the State Department btw. I'm sure it's unbiased.

Surveys of Chinese citizens show very high levels of satisfaction with their government [2] while Chinese people view the West through the "kill line" [3]. The funny part about that is the NYT blaming the kill line on "state media" [4] when it originated on Chinese social media. But that's how deep the anti-China propaganda goes in the US. The transformation Chinese people have seen in their daily lives in their lifetimes is something undeniable [5], liting ~800M people out of extreme poverty. What has the West done in that time? Does it seem like things are going well?

So all I did was point out how people like municipal broadband and you went straight to the slippery slope fallacy "but that's communism!" without actually knowing what communism actually is it seems.

The idea is pretty simple. The people should have a stake in the value they create. You know who else believes that? The US Department of Defense [6]. Is the Defense Department "Communist" too?

[1]: https://freedomhouse.org/country/china

[2]: https://ash.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/final_pol...

[3]: https://fpif.org/how-the-kill-line-redefined-the-american-dr...

[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/business/china-american-p...

[5]: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstrea...

[6]: https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2026/06/the-pentagon-is-...

You seriously can't expect us westerners to listen to the Chinese people about their government. How can we trust them, they are in a police state with the most imprisoned people, have oppressed, immiserated, and genocided minorities for decades, selectively enforce law for the elite, and are initiating wars of aggression across the globe. You can't trust anything coming out of a brutal regime like that.

Err, wait a minute...

I’m quite impressed by China’s current authoritarian capitalist system. I was talking about the brutality and incompetence of China’s Maoist communism.

Ironically, China proves that “democratic socialism” is exactly the wrong thing for a developing country. Democracy is optional for a developing country, but capitalism is indispensable.

> liting [sic] ~800M people out of extreme poverty. What has the West done in that time?

Well, producing the demand for those manufacturing jobs, for one thing.

>I don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to wager that, if the people who ran Baltimore City Public Schools ran my broadband service, I wouldn’t have even 1 gig service.

Pay up. Municipal broadband is objectively better than the other options pretty much everywhere it hasn't been banned.

Municipal broadbands were laying 1 gig fiber service while Spectrum and Comcast were still selling 10mb/s as standard.

Municipal broadband has never been banned in Maryland, where I live. Or in New York, Delaware, or Georgia, where I’ve also lived. Where are the great municipal broadband networks in these state?

I live in a town with municipal power, and the general consensus in the area is that the towns with municipal power are loads better at it than the main private utilities in the area. There's no intrinsic reason why a publicly-owned utility should be better or worse at its job than privately-owned utility.

But to talk about broadband more specifically, one of the main reasons why municipal broadband started becoming a thing was because in many areas, where there is but one (private) broadband provider to choose from, that provider would proceed to refuse to upgrade the infrastructure even when municipalities offered buttloads of cash to pay for the upgrades. So the municipal broadband choice becomes "get municipal broadband at 1 gig, or private company broadband at 25 meg (asymmetric)."

> There's no intrinsic reason why a publicly-owned utility should be better or worse at its job than privately-owned utility.

At scale, why would utilities be different than other government services, such as schools or transit?

I’m sure there are edge cases in parts of the country that are too poor or sparely populated to support a robust private sector. But I don’t live in a place like that, and most people don’t. I live in the suburbs of Annapolis. And I’ve lived in Chicago, Baltimore, New York City, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. Would I rather have Comcast run my internet, or the governments of any of those cities? More to the point: would I want to live in the counterfactual scenario where the 1996 telecom act had gone in a different direction, and those cities had built broadband networks that were now 30 years old in whatever shape they were after decades of maintained by those cities?

My experience with the municipal services these cities do run says “no.” And that conclusion is counter to my ideology. I like public infrastructure. I structured my life around commuting over the DC Metro and Amtrak for years. But, for example, the DC Metro deferred maintenance to such a degree that the automated train control built in the 1970s had to be shut off in 2009. Headways got longer, the ride got much rougher. It stayed that way for fifteen years until they turned ATO back on last year. So in 2026, the big achievement is that we’re back to the ride smoothness we had in 1980.

We flirt with the idea of municipal broadband every couple of years (we built dense fiber connectivity throughout the village a decade or so ago for other reasons). But the economics are brutal; to pencil, you need significant uptake, and you're competing with AT&T and Xfinity, both of which (if you're clear-eyed) are better offerings than the muni can compete with, so you're not going to get that uptake.

The buildout issue is real, and is a reason to explore public-owned broadband in underinvested areas. But even if we had only AT&T here, none of the arguments really work. Even the monopolism concern isn't operative (AT&T and Xfinity don't jack their rates up in places they happen to be the monopoly supplier --- they quote nationally visible rates).

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