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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Providing internet service requires a lot of physical infrastructure, e.g. cables run to every home, all the attendant routing and switching gear, a fleet of trucks and maintenance workers available 24/7, etc. Right now the ISPs (phone and/or cable company) provides this. Are you saying that the physical infrastructure should be separated from the ISP function? Who owns the physical infrastructure then?

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The public (ie, local or state government). Like the roads. Like the sewers. Like (some) power lines. Like the phone and coax lines (depending on time period, they have passed between private and public owners, but were always state subsidized in their deployment).

I'd rather deal with some shitty ISPs and some good ones than be forced to use a single shitty government ISP for the rest of my life.

Not a government ISP, you can have private routing centers. Just public wire in the dirt, so that one company can't own the only access to ones home and make it impossible to compete.

While that might have been true of the past, we do have countries like Sweden, where the state is currently rolling out 1Gb/s connections. Even the country side is having fiber rolled out.

The "public" doesn't own anything. You can demonstrate that by trying to sell your share of the thing you supposedly own.

Just because you own something doesn't mean its a liquid asset..

I'm not allowed to sell my own body parts, does this mean they're not mine?

Depending on your mindset, that could be the case.

What's your stance ? That's a very valid question regarding relationships between individuals, with the law and authorities in one group.

Depends on where and who you ask. There are definitely people who will take your body parts in sale. (Think iPhone craze + China and remember back to people selling kidneys.)

They said "allowed", organ sale is very illegal everywhere in the world except Iran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_trade#Current_Restriction...

That's what's they've started to do here in Australia. Government owns the new lines (FTTH), wholesale to ISPs who then compete with services.

Thanks, but no thanks. Have you seen the roads around here? They've been repaving / widening / narrowing / re-routing the main drag near my apartment for something like a year now and it still isn't done, and the design makes traffic far worse than it was before. No way do I want the same people who run the local highway department having anything (more than already) to do with my broadband access.

It's not a perfect analogy, but as the old saying goes... "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert, in 5 years there would be a shortage of sand".

Considering the state of the infrastructure in the US I think the last people I would trust with this is the government. I can see a model similar to how natural gas and even electricity is using in some states, where their is one carrier responsible for the pipes/lines and everyone and their brother selling service over it.

The government got involved with a lot of those examples because private firms at the time (allegedly) couldn't have gotten it done (too expensive, required easement rights on properties, etc).

The internet already exists. All of today's problems are minor in scope to the original problems of connecting the nation together. Why turn it over the government now?

In my perfect world, municipalities would only fiber that ran to every home and to a central facility but they would not manage any logical devices or infrastructure. Any carrier who wanted to have a presence in the facility could, for the same exact cost.

Customers would then be able to pick and choose their carrier and carriers would be forced to compete based upon service. Not happy with ISP A? Call up ISP B, sign up, and they'll put in a ticket to a tech at the facility to patch you over from ISP A to ISP B instead.

I realize, of course, that this a fantasy that will never happen.

Amsterdam seems to be a good example of what you're describing (FTTH installed by the city, Internet service provided by private companies). See:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/how-amsterdam-was...

Several different options are available:

We could have a FRAND like situation, where backbone network entities has to sign a Reasonable and non-discriminatory agreement regarding traffic flows. FRAND like systems has it own set of issues, but it has also clear benefits.

Government is the second obvious one. As with roads, government benefit greatly from improved infrastructure. All roads do not benefit from being toll-roads, especially when the traffic flow can radically change overnight. Who knows where the next youtube will be, or if google will move the servers suddenly after a SOPA directive is voted in.

Lastly, government could loosen their total control of the electromagnetic spectrum. Doing so would enabled a true global mesh network to be built, giving anyone with a receiver/transmitter the ability to participated. So long government claims to own the communication layer in the air, I will hold them responsible for the current communication issues in the cables.

The FCC now dictates that all are ISPs must include a statement on their public websites detailing what types of filtering, rate-limiting, traffic shaping, etc., that they do (e.g. if they prioritize their own VoIP customers over Netflix or something), but I'm not sure that many providers do. Even most of the ones that do probably intentionally try to make it hard to find.

municipalities?

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