Comment by jacobquick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobquick | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This article is ridiculous shilling. Who do you think lobbies state and local governments to keep the cost of entry high for access to the streets they've been digging around in? The "big cable" trade association who "shouldn't be blamed."

The cost argument is based on numbers that factor out long-term costs of letting contractors dig wherever they want. They rip the streets to shreds and since it's the lowest bidder the asphalt has to be completely redone after one or two winters. In Boston we watched this happen to most of the region during the big dig and that work was being done by the best people available.

The open access argument is absurd. What they mean is they want to run fiber down streets with high incomes and let the cable monopolies continue to gouge everyone else.

It's a real shame but if you want residential internet to get better in the US there's probably going to be a lot of federal spending involved. Which we could have managed back when all the cable lines were first being run. Back when we had a functioning government. In the 1970s.

> What they mean is they want to run fiber down streets with high incomes

You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want cheap prices and high quality service, then you have to deregulate the industry, and a deregulated telecom industry will focus on the high-end consumers, just like every company does. Apple doesn't focus on making computers for poor people, and all those companies peddling their wares on Facebook aren't selling basic essentials affordable by poor people and people in rural areas. Someone in the tech industry should understand better than most that in nearly any industry, companies will chase premium, up-market consumers because that's where the money happens to be.

If you want poor people and people in rural areas to have high-quality internet service (or really, any internet service), you have to be willing to pay for that. The way municipalities have chosen to pay for that is granting utility monopolies. That decision isn't something that comes for free. It comes at the cost of worse service for the wealthier urban people who would get better and cheaper service in a free market.

Also, as a practical matter, municipal and state governments destroy everything they touch. I'm not a small government drum-beater, and I'm a proponent of regulation in many contexts, but the lack of transparency and scrutiny makes municipal government regulation the worst kind of regulation.

Apple isn't a utility so isn't a relevant comparison. Cake isn't a utility either, that's a foolish aphorism and is not a relevant comparison because we aren't talking about a limited resource.

I can have both reasonable prices and universal service because now that Verizon is cutting people off from land-based phone lines, broadband is the country's communications utility, and it is entirely reasonable for a society to use its elected government to construct infrastructure and guarantee utility service to all of its citizens. It means both regulation and spending at the federal level: Verizon or Google or whoever picks up the cost of digging where it's profitable, taxes are spent make them whole where it isn't, but the regulation is they have to do whole counties at once. Yes, once you've gotten everyone to 1gbps or 10gbps or whatever "as good as it can reasonably get" is you can go ahead and deregulate for a while.

Municipal governments have, for good reason, the right to manage their local right-of-way, because no one outside of town cares about that one blind turn on Middleofnowhere Street where someone's going to get killed one of these days. That's the only scale of government that can or will manage traffic safety or road conditions for local streets, and they have to have a say on how construction is done.

The federal government will end up writing a huge novelty check to solve this or it won't happen. It'll be 10 times bigger than it needs to be because the corruption there is somehow just as bad as at the municipal level.

Writing a big novelty check to make it happen is another option, and a perfectly fine one (see, e.g., the interstate system). But there is no situation in which everyone gets service, the prices are reasonable, the quality is high, and nobody writes a big check.

>If you want cheap prices and high quality service, then you have to deregulate the industry, and a deregulated telecom industry will focus on the high-end consumers, just like every company does.

Uh, if the industry is focusing on high-end consumers, they're going to be gouging the hell out of them. That's hardly cheap.

If you want cheap prices and high quality service, then you have to deregulate the industry, and a deregulated telecom industry will focus on the high-end consumers, just like every company does.

Or acknowledge that regulations are not all created equal.

"If you want poor people and people in rural areas to have..."

"We" as in the people who control our culture, only want the 1% to have all the money. It seems pointless in that environment to allow poor people to have cable TV... they are not being permitted money, jobs, health care, education, healthy food... why bother running expensive fiber anywhere except the richest neighborhoods. Don't pander to a cultural view which has been obsolete for decades. "We" want the poor to be deprived.

"makes municipal government regulation the worst kind of regulation"

Its the impedance mismatch of a multinational getting regulated by a tiny city. Its just inherently wrong. Like having the military regulated separately by every little village, or having the EPA regulated by every little town rather than at the level of the pollution impact they regulate. Or having the feds decide HOA rules.

I will say if you ran a tiny one town CATV system, then it would be reasonable for a tiny town to regulate it. This is not whats being discussed of course.

> "You can't have your cake and eat it too."

Sure you can. You can grant ownership of the underlying cables to the company willing to build out the network, essentially granting them guaranteed utility profits even if a competitor springs up via the Open Access that you can mandate as part of the deal.

When DSL was oh-so-briefly deregulated, small towns might not have been enjoying the (relatively) high-speed bonanza their neighbors were shortly offered, but they were still getting DSL (inasmuch as they physically could) and AT&T was still profiting off the network, even when competitors were offering the higher-margin services over AT&T lines.

It worked just fine for voice services and it worked wonderfully for the short period of time it applied to data over that same network.

There's no reason it wouldn't work just as well if applied to data over fiber or coax or whatever else.

> a deregulated telecom industry will focus on the high-end consumers, just like every company does.

It is not actually true that "every company" focuses on high-end, nor is it true that "that's where the money happens to be". There is at least as much money to be made by focusing on low-end consumers in most markets, at least when it's legal to do that. McDonald's and Burger King make more money than any high-end restaurant that charges $200/person; Walmart makes more money selling clothes than does Saks Fifth Avenue.

Those who want some service the most and are willing to pay for it often do get it first, but the masses generally get it soon after - and they get a BETTER PRODUCT - the bugs get worked out while serving the early adopters. The first silk stockings were made for the Queen of England, but within a generation similar stockings were affordable by the average working girl. The brilliance of the market is NOT in making more stuff for the queen - that is a very limited market opportunity - but in bringing costs down to serve the masses.

(I agree with some of the other stuff you wrote, just not the claim that companies inherently serve the rich first. Some do, some don't. And these sorts of regulatory restrictions almost invariably hurt the poor the most, as they have the most to gain from new options becoming available. Rich people can usually afford to opt out or buy their way out of the service level that poor people are stuck with - private schools, private security patrols, or in this case: buying your own satellite dish.)

The big difference is that McDonalds and Wal-Mart take advantage of economics of scale to get the kind of extremely cheap prices that allow them to make money from serving lower-income customers. That state of affairs doesn't exist in utilities. It's far more expensive to serve a poor rural customer than a rich urban one.

I gave up when I hit this nugget:

"The problem? Local governments and their public utilities charge ISPs far more than these things actually cost. For example, rights of way and pole attachments fees can double the cost of network construction"

Actually digging holes in streets, obtaining right-of-way access to private property, and putting up your own poles is half as expensive as just using the holes and poles the public has already built? Oh, really? I'm more inclined to think they're grousing about not being able to mooch the public's infrastructure investments for free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com