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Comment by tom_rath | Hacker News Reader

Why?

I used to pay for $30 per month for 20 hours of dial-up access, with an extra $1 per hour charged after that. Market forces reduced that cost significantly as new entrants with new technologies emerged to tap into a growing customer base, and that will happen again if bandwidth caps are imposed by existing service providers.

The last thing I want is for legislators to decide how much my service providers can charge and for what services they'll do so. As with any give-and-take, existing providers will ask for some protectionist advantage in exchange, and that will block new entrants and slow the adoption of new communication technologies.

Ten years from now, this argument is going to sound as stupid as if I had demanded my MP legislate a whopping 100 hours of dial-up access for my $30.

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In the UK, with regulations, I can spend about $50 get unlimited bandwidth, unlimited wi-fi access in 130,000 locations in the UK and in several thousand in 23 other countries, which incidentally includes many in Canada. You also get 5GB of online storage, and 'up to' 8mbps (I believe we were getting 6mpbs).

In Canada I can spend $80 on Bell's best package, get 100GB bandwidth, free unlimited wi-fi access at 650 starbucks, which you can get 2 hours free anyway! You also get 5MB (not GB) online storage (yet they give you 10GB of email storage to keep you off of hotmail or gmail). The only, supposed, advantage with this package is 16mbps, which I contest as fucking useless with such a low bandwidth cap, and I know for a fact (told by one of Bell's very own technicians this nice little fact) that our connection cannot get more than 1mbps (he said in a few months we might get 1.5mbps because they were upgrading the lines) and they're trying to fucking sell me 16mbps like I can actually use it!

The thing I want most is for service providers to choose how much my service providers can charge me, because I can pay $80 for shit I cannot even use! When we canceled our service with Bell they happily kept trying to charge us for wirecare (this is some moronic charge for faults in their lines, which in the UK they have to service for free cause it's their property) because we hadn't specifically canceled it. They wanted to charge $20 service termination for the wirecare, this despite it being free to cancel at any time if you're their customer... which brings their crazy logic into play. I'm not their customer when they're charging me $10 a month?!

When the Better Business Bureau got involved, all the magical charges they'd created for us (including new accounts that never existed, and thus legally cannot exist as they were never signed into existence, this included an entire change of name to someone who hadn't even created an account with bell!) amounting up to $80 a month magically disappeared.

People have no choice but to go with Bell in certain areas, and their business practices are fraudulent and the Better Business Bureau gives them an F because they avoid resolving the complaints.

>The last thing I want is for legislators to decide how much my service providers can charge and for what services they'll do so.

You can't suddenly impose laissez-faire capitalism on an industry so closely tied to government regulation. Continued regulation is needed so that corporations can't take advantage of the infrastructure privileges granted to them. There's plenty of bandwidth to go around.

No one had a monopoly over dial-up, the difference with broadband is that there is a legislated monopoly.

> You can't suddenly impose laissez-faire capitalism on an industry so closely tied to government regulation.

Pretty much every time it's been tried, you get a ton of innovation and rapidly falling costs.

The US, ICC trucking regulation led to much cheaper trucking.

Telecom deregulation led to an explosion of services, cell phones, and drastically lower prices.

Airline deregulation led to a falling fairs, making air travel accessible to more than just the upper and upper middle class (and, because air travel is much safer per mile traveled than car travel, deregulation has saved tens of thousands of lives).

> this is just profit-mongering

Oh, horrors - we wouldn't want people to try to provide services in order to make money!

The problem is that they aren't deregulating the industry. Providers such as Comcast are legislated monopolies in certain areas, and do not lease out their lines to anyone else. There isn't anyone else to go to when these providers begin instituting caps.

I believe what rms is saying is you can't apply laisse-faire capitalism to a government instituted monopoly. You either need to remove the monopoly and allow capitalism to do its thing, or you need to institute regulation to prevent them from ripping off the customer.

> Oh, horrors - we wouldn't want people to try to provide services in order to make money!

As everyone has said, there's plenty of bandwidth to go around, so why are they doing this? They're doing it because there is no competition to prevent them from doing so. They certainly aren't hurting for money. They're simply taking advantage of the lack of competition provided by government mandate.

> You either need to remove the monopoly and allow capitalism to do its thing, or you need to institute regulation to prevent them from ripping off the customer.

Except that, in general, instituting regulation to fix the problem that the monopoly caused doesn't actually fix things, but only partially fixes those problems, and introduces different problems. Removing the monopoly grant is by far the better solution.

Thank you for saying what I meant to say.

(Josh is my internet comment argument ringer)

It's not laissez-faire and it's not 'suddenly imposed'

If there's plenty of bandwidth to go around and existing providers impose caps, then new entrants will lease that bandwidth and provide residential customers with unlimited bandwidth plans.

Telecom regulations should prevent new entrants from being blocked from doing just that. If they are blocked (and the Canadian system isn't laissez-faire, so they shouldn't be), then you'll have an issue to gripe about.

They aren't blocked, what Bell is doing is trying to block the system! All small ISP's are forced to go through Bell's network, and Bell is trying to charge them higher per gigabyte than they do their own customers, so you have no choice but to go with Bell if you're stranded on their network.

Locally to me, Verizon wholesales DSL at retail prices. So it is $30/month to get it from Verizon and $60/month to get it from anyone else.

The problem being Bell is wanting to cap all the other providers.

Currently here it is the opposite - it is cheaper from other providers than from Bell directly. Now, it wants to be able to also cap those other providers to prevent them from offering unlimited services.

Bell wants to do what it does in the mobile space and nail everyone with massive overage fees after the tiny limits are exceeded. Until mid 2008, the largest cell phone data plan you could get from Bell or Rogers was 5 MEGS. They charged by the kilobyte after that.

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