Internet really needs to become a public utility operated by the city/state on cost, rather than to line the pockets of greedy corporations...
The place it normally gets interesting with this approach is where exactly do you put the demark, especially in the FTTN world. Since you are going to most likely want the public utility to own the DSLAMs in areas with low/medium (eg, suburbs) population density, because the area covered by a cabinet is so small (because technologies like VDSL2+ have such a small optimal zone) and rack space in cabinets is normally at a high premium.
You are also going to most likely want the public utility to own the fibre backhaul from the cabinets to a central exchange. Because of port density constraints and the fact that the DSLAM is probably going to need to be managed by the public utility to stop access seekers doing silly things that affect other access seekers customers.
Now the public utility is also going to need some Ethernet switches to split this out to the various access seekers. Then you have issues of regional backhaul etc...
The issues are different again with the PON (Passive optical networks) family of technologies, but you can pretty much swap DSLAM for POLT, though the customer densities change the economics a bit.
With ISPs handling regional level aggregation and backhaul would probably be the optimal level in my mind at this point in time. But it is becoming interesting what the ISPs role really is anymore, once you take such a large amount of the infrastructure management off their hands. Since it would seem to be in between a traditional consumer ISP and an ISP that purely does transit.
Is it really that expensive to string cable? Fiber was laid like crazy all over the country in the late 90s, just not for the last mile. The "last mile" cost is probably all in dealing with the government to get permits and such. In which case government is the problem. They just need to make it easier to build.
Because of that, the physical connection should be provided and managed by the government, or a designated government run corporation as a non-profit. The service carried on the hardware should be serviced by private companies with equal access to the hardware.
That's great, until your city decides to start filtering/adding caps/blocking your favorite protocol/etc, and then you don't have any other choices.
I wouldn't mind cities becoming ISPs if people vote for it, but they shouldn't become the only providers.
You clearly don't have much experience with govt.
> The local power station, for instance, can't say that you're only allowed to charge your cellphone during off-peak hours, or that you have to pay extra for every kWh used by your bigscreen TV.
CA does it the other way - they ban devices with certain energy characteristics.
And even if things are good now, do you trust that things will stay that way in the long-run? Better to have more than on choice...
> Internet really needs to become a public utility
> operated by the city/state on cost, rather than
> to line the pockets of greedy corporations...
Under Capitalism, shouldn't people simply choose another supplier when your ISP does stupid things?
Up here in Burlington VT there is about to be some heads rolling on how the gov handled the gov run phone/internet company.
I can't even imagine what 50MB must be like. The fastest connection I can get here in Georgia is 1.5MB ADSL that costs $35/month (plus phone service, no naked DSL offered) and stops working every time it rains.
If this wasn't the case, you'd have a dozen pairs of copper phone wires and as many cable TV coax lines running into your house, all by different companies -- those industries have existed for far longer than the Internet has, and have traditionally been ridiculously profitable. That you don't have more than one telephone line and one cable line is a strong indication that last-mile infrastructure is a natural monopoly. Whoever gets to your house first basically owns you.
It is. It's an all too common knee-jerk reaction in well-off western societies that when something doesn't go exactly your way, call for politicians to fix it with force. And politicians are all to happy to oblige.
In Britain, back in the early 80s when British Telecom was operated on cost, and not lining the pockets of greedy corporations, it would take weeks or even months to have a single phone line installed.
Arguing that all (or the great majority of) public organizations are wildly inefficient on the basis of i) philosophy, and ii) examples, is like arguing that all (or the vast majority) of governments are dictatorships because back in the 80's, Romania was one.
The argument fails to incorporate some very basic and well understood market mechanism. A company whose products consumers are forced to buy (either because they are subsidised or because they have a government-enforced monopoly) are less inclined to invest and take risks in development. Why take a risk when people are already buying what you have today and can't go anywhere?
Another factor is political interference and the ensuing ICan'tBelieveItsNotCorruption. What happens when the pipes clog up before there's budget for increasing bandwidth because more people than expected are downloading and seeding torrents? Is the memo that says that it's mostly porn and piracy anyway, and we can just block the ports going to be ignored over pumping money in new bandwidth? To help people get porn? Protect the children, save money and get re-elected -- all in one firewall.
Yes, absolutely, a government run business can be more efficiently than a private one, and sometimes if can get some infrastructure in place where it simply isn't practical for for private actors to work. But it's never because they don't have to make money for their owners.
People in big cities usually have a choice of ISPs, but in rural towns, often there is only one "high-speed" ISP. It's kinda a sad state of affairs. I've recently gained a very interesting view, as I'm currently living in Japan. I'm American born though.
And the solution of course is not to have the state run it. It's to introduce competition.
Yes - but nowhere it's stated that the choice must be between immediately comparable services.
The alternative choice they have is to go build their own ISP. But, such a venture is difficult, expensive and risky, and thus wasn't deemed a better option than sticking with the current offering. Until the municipality came around and forced the citizens to undertake the venture.
How does anyone benefit by having two or three equally-slow internet connections into their house (say over copper phone wires, coax, and BPL), rather than having one much faster connection (fiber)? All the money spent duplicating parallel infrastructure could potentially be spent making a single more robust network, one that gets upgraded more frequently.
It doesn't make much sense to force each would-be ISP to drag lines out to their potential customers' houses; once customers have a connection, a second one is just waste (unless there's some way to use both at once, but there generally isn't and most people couldn't afford to anyway due to the way they'd be priced -- each ISP has to recoup the cost of its own infrastructure).
The better way, and the way that actually fosters more competition where it counts, is to have a good, shared, high-speed infrastructure that all providers can operate on and which is made available to all on non-exclusive and non-discriminatory terms.
I think the proper vehicle for these sorts of things are public-private partnerships, similar to the way that transportation projects have been handled for years. (Ex. both the Erie Canal and the NY State Thruway were done by public/private partnerships, called "Authorities" in NY state parlance.) This provides a degree of isolation between the day-to-day management of the infrastructure and the machinations of the political process, and also discourages wasting of taxpayer funds, or raiding of infrastructure funds for other projects. The state might support a project via bond guarantees, but could reasonably expect it to stand on its own (and operate as a non-profit) from then on.
That strikes me as a compromise solution which is likely to produce the most competition where it actually benefits users.
Does that make it bad?
> Isn't the system you currently have simply Capitalism in action?
Does that make it good?
Nowhere else have I come across people who dismiss ideas by saying - Oh, that's Socialism - and seem to think that that's enough.
Game Theory says that mixed strategies are almost always (in the technical sense) the best, so the instant dismissal of ideas simply being they have a flavor of socialism seems stupid, and yet it seems that it's the instant reaction of many, many people in the USA.
I could be wrong, it might not be the case, and it's interesting to see that the perception from outside the USA might be wrong.
You're right about the loudmouths here, but it'd be a mistake to let your sense of public sentiment be overly colored just by volume.
Calling something socialism here is a pretty good debate hack, like calling someone racist or anti-semitic or whatnot; it's enough of a social taboo that the so-accused will usually feel compelled to defend themselves against it, thereby derailing the original course of discussion...this is a good strategy for winning unrefereed debates.
No, it's all paid for by the government. That, my friend, is Socialism. And it's a good thing.
(Actually, it's a bad thing; if people had to pay the full cost of using the road network, it would be a lot easier to get people to take public transportation. But I am just saying it's clear that Americans have nothing against Free Stuff From The Government, even if that Free Stuff is paid for with tax dollars.)
The fact that the roads are owned by state and local governments does not inherently make them socialist.
This is true, but only because most of the people decrying "socialism" don't understand that many of the things they support are also socialist. Both the right and the left are already fairly socialist in the US; Norman Thomas, who ran for US President on the Socialist Party ticket a bunch of times in the early 20th Century, was asked why he wasn't running again at one point and replied that the Republicans had embraced all his major platform points, and the Democrats were already beyond that, so he'd accomplished much of what he'd set out to do. I can't find this in a minute of googling, so maybe it's apocryphal.
In any case, socialists on the right were discredited effectively everywhere by WWII, and in the US, socialists on the left were discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Union around 1990 and/or the (perceived?) near-collapse of Britain in the 1970s.
Also, it is very hard to have a mixed plan because eventually one will exploit the other. Game theory is great and all, but most of the time I don't think it applies to multiple trials -- which is what the real world is.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
This is certainly not Socialism, as the use of government to provide services that individuals and businesses cannot efficiently provide goes back thousands of years, well before Marx started writing.
Due to physical property issues, it needs public rights-of-way for deployment and maintenance. Also, fixed infrastructure costs are very high and only become cost effective with widespread buy-in and positive network externalities.
It makes no economic sense to build two or more parallel networks side-by-side, with each capturing only a fraction of the potential customers.
As a result, an unregulated telco in a natural monopoly has no competition and minimal market incentives to innovate and improve service. Consumers cannot "simply choose another supplier" because other suppliers wouldn't be crazy enough to sink the necessary huge capital investment into a competing service.
In general, the options to deal with this situation are:
* Public ownership and/or administration.
* Regulated monopoly with mandatory service quality benchmarks and profit reinvestment requirements.
* Introduce competition by forcing telcos to offer wholesale service to resellers.
* Introduce competition through public investment in parallel facilities.
* Introduce competition by allowing network service providers to leverage their networks to offer different services (e.g. cablecos offering telephony, telcos offering streaming video).
If companies (private or state owned) are making huge profits at the cost of tax-payers money, then capitalism or socialism doesn't make any differences...
What do you have against lining the pockets of greedy corporations? If there was no profit in it for them they wouldn't be doing it at all and you'd have no internet connection - or almost anything else.
Using 'greedy' as an insult to corporations is like using buoyant as an insult to ships.
I am strongly disagreeing with the grandparent post's sentiment that the ISP should be closed down for being "greedy" and "lining it's pockets".
Being surprised when a company maximizes profits is like being surprised that water runs downhill.
If we want them to invest in infrastructure rather than pay out dividends, we should figure out a way to make the infrastructure investment be the profitable (i.e. greedy) choice. Which is sort of the point of the article; by introducing competition that threatened to take away the incumbent ISP's business, they were forced to invest in infrastructure that they otherwise wouldn't have built.
It's a waste of breath to use loaded, emotional words in reference to big companies; they are the closest thing that exists in the economy to perfectly rational actors. If we, as a society, don't like the outcomes they're producing, the solution is to modify the competitive landscape so that the desirable outcomes are produced, not rail against the companies themselves as if they ought to care about things besides profit.
That's where our collective ire ought to be concentrated. Whenever someone starts railing about the evils of corporations, it's generally a (conscious or unconscious) distraction from the true culprits: regulators or overseers who aren't doing their job.
Instead of turning to the government to provide the service (which will result in a sub-par service with no chance of recovery) we should look to innovate and wield new technologies to overcome the barriers and give the greedy corporations a run for their money.
Competition is the answer, not government intervention.