We MUST have true competition and instead of localized monopolies. This is the issue.
Government Regulation can potentially be very scary, but monopolies are 100% scary and even Libertarians should be against them.
Government Regulation can potentially be very scary, but monopolies are 100% scary and even Libertarians should be against them.
You're fighting a pretty tough natural monopoly to get multiple sets of competing wires. That we have both copper and coax is a relic from the days where they could each only carry specific type of signal.
A form of competition could be fostered by making the wire layers into utilities that wholesale to transit providers. However, it already is this way on the telco side. In most areas, there is little third party interest for investing in competing transit networks, so the ILEC is left as the only provider. Perhaps there would be more interest if latest gen technologies were (de)regulated in the same way, but that undermines investment in new physical wires.
How many roads does your driveway open onto? Just one, right?
Now, would you rather that be a public and regulated road, or a private road where the road owner can set up a tollbooth at the end of the driveway and even charge you extra for driving a Toyota instead of a Ford?
I'm all for community networks, but top-down "federal" policy will never prescribe them.
In Seattle we just rolled out an LED streetlight replacement project, it would have been an excellent time to have installed the hardware for city wide mesh network. Power, placement and line-of-site are there at the top of a street light.
If the coax and/or fiber lines were open to competitive carriers, I bet there would be quite a bit of interest.
Pragmatically, I'm still a huge fan of DSL (thanks to Sonic.net/Omsoft). I haven't even kept aware of what the bigcable caps are looking like these days, but I've had many months where I've done >1TB over ADSL2+ (one third of my available bandwidth).
P.S. I live int he city I don't have a drive way the street is my park lot :)
Historically, government regulation is what has been used to create and maintain monopolies and cartels. The regulation is often pitched under the guise as being for the public good, but is then used for quite the opposite. This trick has been played time and time again in American History.
Tariffs, patents, copyrights, and regulatory capture are all mechanisms that corporations use to grant themselves the privilege of monopoly and protect themselves from competition.
Quoting Rothbard in "Left and Right" [1]:
> Orthodox historians have always treated the Progressive period (roughly 1900-1916) as a time when free-market capitalism was becoming increasingly "monopolistic"; in reaction to this reign of monopoly and big business, so the story runs, altruistic intellectuals and far-seeing politicians turned to intervention by the government to reform and regulate these evils. Kolko's great work demonstrates that the reality was almost precisely the opposite of this myth. Despite the wave of mergers and trusts formed around the turn of the century, Kolko reveals, the forces of competition on the free market rapidly vitiated and dissolved these attempts at stabilizing and perpetuating the economic power of big business interests. It was precisely in reaction to their impending defeat at the hands of the competitive storms of the market that business turned, increasingly after the 1900's, to the federal government for aid and protection. In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market. Both Left and Right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and anti-business. Hence the mythology of the New-Fair Deal-as-Red that is endemic on the Right. Both the big businessmen, led by the Morgan interests, and Professor Kolko almost uniquely in the academic world, have realized that monopoly privilege can only be created by the State and not as a result of free market operations.
[1] http://mises.org/library/left-and-right-prospects-liberty
The libertarian position is that monopolies are an ill, and that it is government that creates them.