Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

> Netflix could have held out, and made Comcast out to be the bad guy, or could have leaned on Cogent to get the circuits installed - but, in this case, they folded and just decided to pay Comcast.

How would that work? Comcast customers by and large can't switch to another broadband provider and Netflix customers can certainly switch to another video provider (Comcast!). It's not like this is a brand new issue, Netflix has held out for a long time. The Comcast / TWC merger is what finally did it, 30M combined customers is too big to risk on a public game of net neutrality chicken.

Surely they're still working on lobbying efforts to make it illegal for a company like Comcast to simultaneously have a monopoly on selling broadband and compete with services using said broadband. It's pretty obvious at this point that internet access is a utility and it should be treated as such.

View on HN

Completely agree with you here. It's time that the United States realizes that it's approach towards broadband was flawed and tries something new.

Almost nowhere does Comcast actually have a monopoly on broadband.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/why-comcasttime...

""" But there's a silver lining for people who hate this deal: By the government's own standards, the Comcast—Time Warner deal should be blocked. To understand why, you have to know that there's a thing in antitrust law called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, or HHI. In very basic terms, the HHI is a way to measure the concentration of a given market. And the HHI is the test the government's lawyers apply if they want to see whether a proposed merger would create monopoly-like conditions. """

A duopoly or oligopoly isn't much better. There's still a marked lack of choice for the customer, which results in lock-in and higher prices.

The Hacker News readership includes many people capable of starting ISPs. Comcast's large profits, which have been used to fund a string of high cost acquisitions, are a juicy target for potential competitors. Yet you never see discussion of ISP startups on Hacker News because the barriers to entry protect the current carriers. This wasn't the case in the 90s, and had Hacker News existed back then ISP startups would have appeared frequently.

The issue of telecoms not having competition has been the case for years. Back in the BBS days Jack Rickard used to harp on this in Boardwatch [1] magazine. I recall him saying something like, "Two guys with a screwdriver should be able to start a phone company."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch

> This wasn't the case in the 90s, and had Hacker News existed back then ISP startups would have appeared frequently.

Indeed. The late 90s / early 2000s were the golden age of the CLEC. There were certainly pain points (like getting copper pairs provisioned), but I remember not caring that my building didn't support Comcast Internet because I had an SDSL connection from Telocity and an ADSL connection from Speakeasy.

A friend of mine had a pretty nice BBS setup in the early-mid 90's... It took him a dozen requests and 2.5 years to get extra phone lines in. That was definitely a pain point.

I actually knew a lot of small-mid sized ISPs that started off as BBSes... Have a T1 split for phone + data, with several phone lines, and a data pipe upstream. I used to subscribe to Boardwatch magazine as well.

That said, most were either bought out, or went under within a couple years. It was a rough time for commercial SysOps in the mid-90's... not that I really feel bad for them. Times and environments change... The BBS and art scenes are still around today, but not nearly what they were in the early-mid 90's...

I miss it a lot... since most BBSes were based in a local area, there were a lot of get togethers, and you'd meet and talk to people you wouldn't necessarily do in today's internet, which is based in interest groups.

This is true if you have some antiquated definition of broadband that includes a competitor offering "up to" 896kbps while Comcast offers everything from 1 to 20+ mbps, but false for everybody else.

Question: If Comcast is such a monopoly that everyone here keeps repeating ad nauseam, why hasn't it been broken up ATT style yet?

AT&T was broken up into a bunch of smaller regional monopolies that did not compete with one another. (Almost a century after its founding, by the way, and decades of on-and-off litigation.)

The cable industry has evolved into a bunch of regional monopolies that do not compete with one another.

The effect of breaking Comcast up AT&T-style would be... a bunch of regional monopolies that do not compete with one another. And then, as with AT&T, proceed to consolidate via M&A into larger regional monopolies... that do not compete with one another. Same as now.

Welcome to the American telecommunications industry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

That doesn't discount the fact that laying cable costs lots of money is a natural monopoly.

Wait, so in one post, you challenge HN's readership to prove that Comcast is a monopoly, and then two posts later you assert that cable is a natural monopoly. I'm confused what point you're trying to make.

Comcast is a natural monopoly, and there isn't anything wrong with that. Competitors are free right now to lay cabling to areas where Comcast already serves, they just choose not to because it isn't a smart financial decision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com