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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that eliminates the incentive for companies to build faster, better internet. We'd be stuck with what we have now for a very long time.

I do think it's fair to blame municipalities. Look at something that is much easier to build out: wireless networks. Cell coverage has dramatically improved over the past 10 years. In part, that's because multiple carriers are competing for customers and municipalities have largely stayed out of their way.

One could even argue that we're reliant on cable providers because there were no incentives for the highly regulated phone line providers to improve their networks.

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Nope.

Regional competition for services which require expensive infrastructure is non-existent once the first player has entered the market.

Any competitor trying to enter would need to build out the expensive infrastructure, only to be undercut in the following price war and lose because of recent costs. It's textbook game theory.

This lack of competition leads to a deterioration of quality of the service as the sole market holder doesn't need to continue to invest in infrastructure. Instead they can invest in lobbying which helps further cement their hold on their market, or invest in advertising to take customers away from shittier service alternatives, like DSL.

Quality is the exact reason why something like transportation is handled by local governments, as opposed to letting private toll roads dominate the market, which have no incentive to patch pot holes when it's the only option available.

> Regional competition for services which require expensive infrastructure is non-existent once the first player has entered the market.

This is just as true when the first player is a local (or State) government as when it's a private company.

> Quality is the exact reason why something like transportation is handled by local governments, as opposed to letting private toll roads dominate the market, which have no incentive to patch pot holes when it's the only option available.

Local governments often don't do a good job of patching potholes either. (Nor do State governments, which often own major highways.)

Not so. Public sector monopolies are not aligned with profit-hungry shareholders, board of investors, executives looking for bonuses, etc. Instead public sector monopolies are aligned with quality, and making enough revenue to break even.

And don't cherry pick some individual poorer counties for road performance, even though on a whole they are better. I could cherry pick Somalia as an example of privately maintained transportation monopolies.

That's a great argument for a monopoly on roads but a poor argument for a monopoly on communications infrastructure.

You only have a single road leading to your house. But you already have at least two communications lines, perhaps more.

I don't, and many people in the U.S. don't either.

DSL is an inferior good, not the same service, for what can be considered high speed internet. It's not a duopoly when you need high speed internet.

How can you eliminate competition that does not exist? By definition, what the cable companies are doing now is eliminating competition, because there is none. Any change is an improvement.

>We'd be stuck with what we have now for a very long time.

Being stuck at the speed of light sounds ok to me.

Someone probably said the same thing about our power grid fifty years ago. And here we are...basically the exact same dumb power grid decades later.

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