12 ms·

The telecoms are masters of destroying competition through legislative means. They utterly destroyed DSL competition during the dawn of broadband (my first comp

The telecoms are masters of destroying competition through legislative means. They utterly destroyed DSL competition during the dawn of broadband (my first company sold to independent ISPs; I watched them all wither and die within the span of about four years, as broadband took over and they were prevented from competing by shady behavior by AT&T and Verizon), and now they're trying everything at their disposal to continue to deliver poor service at high prices without effective competition. The difference this time is that Google is bigger than they are, and not quite as much of a pushover in the legal domain. It's still an uphill battle, and consumers are still going to be the ones to suffer under pathetically poor quality and expensive Internet service (the US is something like 14th in quality/speed/price in the world for Internet service, despite it having been invented here, and despite having vastly more infrastructure investment at all levels). The best thing that could possibly happen for the Internet in the US would be the swift and total annihilation of anti-competitive companies like AT&T, Verizon, and the major cable companies, leaving room for innovators to step in and fill the void. But, that won't happen...they're too good at stacking the deck to remain in leadership positions in the market, despite delivering terrible service on nearly every front. Not that I'm bitter, or anything.

beedogs 11y ago
I'd like to see the Sherman Act used against Comcast / Verizon / ATT. It's like the executive branch has forgotten that law even exists.
- mkhpalm 11y ago
  Its not that our politicians have forgotten. Its that applying certain laws would conflict with getting filthy lucre. http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYear=2015 http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYea...
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    The fact that Alphabet is just above AT&T in that list is what gives me hope that this time it will be different. It's a nasty business, and I hate that Google has to participate in bribery in order to be allowed to innovate on behalf of consumers, but the alternative of having AT&T writing the laws is far more awful (and is why we're in the mess we're in when it comes to Internet service in the US).
    - dforrestwilson1 11y ago
      In 15 years when the search engine have failed to evolve because Google is a monopoly and has no incentive to keep improving it, you may have a different perspective. I am not defending AT&T, just pointing out that corporations do not care, and all of them (even Google) ultimately seek profit margins at the expense of others.
      - SwellJoe 11y ago
        I'm confident there will come a day when I'm ranting about Google and their anti-competitive practices (and not just, or even most importantly, on the search engine front) and rent-seeking. Google will be scary when they achieve the soulless status of T or VZ.
      - greglindahl 11y ago
        Uh, some of us started complaining about search engines failing to evolve a decade ago, guess we were before our time! Or at least too early to market.
      - ansible 11y ago
        In 15 years when the search engine have failed to evolve because Google is a monopoly and has no incentive to keep improving it, you may have a different perspective. LOL, Wut? I don't think you appreciate what it takes to maintain and improve a search engine these days. For example... Remember when link farms were big? They were doing this to boost their score for the existing PageRank algorithm. All search engines had to detect this, to determine in an automated fashion (because the web is waaaay too big) when to ignore that crap. And in a related issue.... spam. Fifteen years ago, guys like me were trying to fight it using regular expressions to filter our inbox (Spamassassin). It was a losing battle, even then. We've needed the very best machine learning to try to keep our heads above water. The spammers are constantly improving what they're doing too. The search engine looks the same (simple one-line text box), but the infrastructure behind it has vastly changed, and continues to rapidly evolve. Go read the Spanner and F1 papers... that stuff certainly didn't exist at all when Google started.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    You know lobbying isn't campaign donations right.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  I know, right? Google's in blatant violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, but rather than use it, the White House let a paid Google shill be in charge of the FTC, which is supposed to enforce it. But yeah, ISPs are a pain too.
qaq 11y ago
In reality none is preventing competition it's just none is really competing.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  Are you at all familiar with the history of consumer Internet in the US, and the role AT&T, Verizon, and later Time Warner and Comcast, have played in it and the laws that regulate it? I'd recommend you read up on municipal broadband, and the war the telecoms have waged against communities doing an end run around their shoddy and expensive service. Likewise, look at the hoops they've forced Google to jump through to achieve even modest fiber rollouts. Google is among the biggest companies in the world. The only thing saving Google Fiber is that they are not some scrappy startup, but one of the most powerful companies in the world; without that power and economic clout, they would die a horrible death at the hands of AT&T's attorneys and pet legislators, as nearly every one of the thousands of independent ISPs did in the 90s and early 2000s. Innovation in consumer internet service has been thoroughly strangled by the telecoms and cable companies. They've divided up the turf, come to some gentleman's agreements with each other about pricing and access, and now we're all just here to feed the cash cow. If ever there was a classic case of collusion (and, hell, I might even call it racketeering) among modern "legitimate" businesses, the telecom and cable business is it. If you believe the lack of innovation and poor service is merely that no one is "competing", I'd encourage you to give that market a go. There's no competition, after all. It should be easy, right?
  - rayiner 11y ago
    > Likewise, look at the hoops they've forced Google to jump through to achieve even modest fiber rollouts. What "hoops" have companies forced Google to jump through to achieve Fiber rollout? Almost all the resistance to Google Fiber has been from municipalities that are not willing to waive build-out requirements, which Google demands as part of the package of "fast track" permitting necessary to be a fiber city.
  - qaq 11y ago
    If I had few Billions I would certainly give it a go. Independent ISPs relied on legacy Telco infrastructure as opposed to doing their own build outs. Google has enough $ and resources to compete they just don't really care to do it (look at the $ they allocated to google fiber). Apple can buy out any of the mentioned companies with cash on hand several times over but they are not interested in competing in this market. So in reality yes none having resources necessary to compete is interested in competing. In my area an independent provider is doing a fiber build out it slow and expansive for them (the area has comcast monopoly) yet none is preventing them from doing the actual build out.
diskcat 11y ago
Another case of the government intervention in the free market hurting the consumers, since large corporations will always be better than consumers at hijacking the legislative/legal system to their benefits. If you have the only poles in town (because the local government said there is only enough space for one pole line) then you have effective monopoly over lined communication. The solution to this of course is Georgian rent over space, in this case a rent over the only space in town that poles are allowed to be erected, which would be quite expensive, thus making their monopoly position untenable.
- xenadu02 11y ago
  Or you know - have the government own the poles and sell access to anyone who wants to run lines. Private roads are impractical except in limited circumstances (that require a huge number of public roads to enable). Infrastructure like this is similar.
  - diskcat 11y ago
    >Or you know - have the government own the poles and sell access to anyone who wants to run lines. That's the status quo with the government owning the land upon which poles may be erected instead of poles. So I don't see how moving the government ownership up a step would solve anything.
    - guelo 11y ago
      Because you can't have multiple poles on the same land. One pole owned by the government that all businesses can use.
      - adventured 11y ago
        That can work but you have to do a much better job of outlawing all forms of government-protected monopolization and its half-way equivalents. Otherwise what you end up with, are local governments that want to cut deals for extra cash with AT&T et al. Local governments are supposed to not be allowed to cut monopoly deals today, but they still conspire with big telco to rig the game any way they can.
tn13 11y ago
It is really time for Google, Apple, Microsoft to lawyer up and lobby, threaten and arm twist politicians into kicking ass of these telecom companies. At the end of the day Data-speeds are going to be bottleneck for their profits. Google and others should have invested massive money to maintaining their political bitches. If they had we would have had better privacy today. If DoJ has to courage to ask Apple to hack their phones it is probably because in past companies like ATT complied without putting up a fight.
- brink 11y ago
  What really needs to happen is that we get money out of politics entirely. The last thing I want is for Google or Apple to become another AT&T.
  - tn13 11y ago
    There is no such thing as politics without money. It is some socialist utopia. I think companies lobbying for competing causes is better than some regulation where only scums get to lobby scumbag politicians.
- r00fus 11y ago
  So do you think the Apple spat is as simple as a shakedown or turf war by the "security" state corporate cronies?
- 05 11y ago
  It's really naive of you to think Google of all companies is interested in strong privacy protections. Their singular income source is based on keeping a secret profile on everybody on the internet - it would be akin to cutting the brunch they're sitting on.
  - tn13 11y ago
    Where did I even mention anything about privacy ? Wrong comment ?
rokhayakebe 11y ago
The best thing that could possibly happen is informed citizenry. We REALLY do not need to worry about laws and regulations and instead begin to vote with our dollars where we can. If we started to shift our money in a concerted way, companies will begin to behave. Edit: I would like a site where we can fund independent researchers who can truly tell us what is in our best interest as consumers, then we can follow accordingly.
- ghshephard 11y ago
  "We REALLY do not need to worry about laws and regulations" Laws and regulations shape the marketplace, and determine which vendors you can vote with your dollars. In the absences of a free-market, there is no option to vote with your dollars. It's like voting in an election where the potential candidates have been preselected by an oversight board (see Hong Kong)
  - vonklaus 11y ago
    This is untrue. Leverage shapes market and it is being proven that laws and regulations are malleable. Unfortunately, this cascades down from regulation, to law, to rights. While Taxis and regulatory controllers found it difficult to challenge Uber on the ground after it had occupied every state and municipality, for better or for worse only enforceable laws provide leverage to exert behavior or the perception of such an enforcement.
    - ghshephard 11y ago
      Taxis and regulatory controllers found it difficult to challenge Uber because they didn't operate a taxi service - they were operating an entirely new market which hadn't been envisioned and had little to no regulation around. I guarantee you Uber / Lyft would have been shut down hard if they had tried to take street hailing - for 50+ years law/regulations controlled who you could hail a taxi from, and so little to no competition on quality/service took place in that marketplace. BTW, I'm not saying this is completely and absolutely true for all markets (though, ironically, you chose one where it is pretty much an absolute) - but the more and more regulation you see around a market, the less and less flexibility new competitors have to come in and disrupt. Zenefits is an interesting case that straddles this though - in Utah, there was some regulation that made life difficult for them, and with effective lobbying by A16Z, the regulation was changed to allow Zenefits to compete there. And, of course, we've seen ares where they've discovered they really do need to comply with the law - though in most of those scenarios the requirements were so minimal (and probably reasonable) that they weren't much of a barrier to competition - just a minimal level of qualification (like having a drivers license, background check, and insurance for Uber)
emcrazyone 11y ago
somewhat agree. In 2006, I the co-owner of a PCO (Private Cable Operator) [1]. We ran under the radar for many years using the same loop holes for "right of way" and "inside wiring" laws. There are a couple little known facts or not so well understood laws which is why I slightly disagree with you and seems relevant to the article too. 1. There is right of way in many subdivisions to which the likes of AT&T can't keep me out of. It's illegal and monopolistic. One of my business partners was a home builder which was one of the angles but not the only one. 2. When a cable company or telephone company runs cable from a pedastal to your residence, you legally own that cable run. If it's a single family home, it's your property. The same is nearly true if you live in a Condo or an apartment with the difference being the property own owns the cable from the pedestal to the building and you own what is called the "inside wiring" which is the point of entry of the apartment/condo to your rented space. And these two laws allowed us to compete for a long time against the bigger Cable companies, including going into locations where they were well established and kicking them out in the case of Apartment complexes and Condos. Our typical modus operandi was to go into MDUs (Multi Dwelling Units) and offer the property owner revenue share contract in exchange for exclusive rights to the property; something the incumbents don't do. This only works with MDUs not municipalities. There are a lot of PCOs (Private Cable Operators). Maybe not enough to make a dent just yet, but I firmly believe this can continue. Comcast has good lobby power with FCC. They lobby for strict/stupid laws that attempt to create barriers to entry to try and keep the smaller PCOs from doing what we did... [1] http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20081109/SUB01/811100333/cable-provider-clicks-on-vc-cash-nex3-finds-niche http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20081109/SUB01/81110033...
- nostrademons 11y ago
  If it's just replacing a telco monopoly with an exclusive contract, isn't that just as bad (from a consumer perspective)? The whole point was that telcos ought to compete based on speed, reliability, and customer service, not on obtaining the favor of property owners & municipalities.
  - amazon_not 11y ago
    Yes, it's bad from a consumer perspective. Still, it's better to have a monopoly to be subjected to some kind of competitive pressure than none. In an ideal world we'd have open access to infrastructure.
mtgx 11y ago
It doesn't help that the US is not a real democracy. For instance, the Green Party actually has in its platform many telecom and media reforms, including breaking up the big monopolies. http://www.gp.org/democracy#demFreeSpeech http://www.gp.org/democracy#demFreeSpeech But you wouldn't know it, because apparently US citizens are only allowed to vote for 2 parties - ever. When the US gets proportional representation and takes money out of politics, then we can start discussing real solutions to problems. Until then you're only going to get a "right" and a "left" argument for what benefits Corporate America, the real "People" the government listens to.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  Counterpoint: if a third party can't get its act together for the clusterfuck of a Presidential election we're about to experience, it may not be entirely the system's fault.
  - 7952 11y ago
    People assumes that the underlying structure of a political party is an effective mechanism for getting power simply because a couple of parties have a lot of power. But at the grass roots political parties are just very pretentious social clubs. Trying to compete on that level seems prone to failure. It is much easier to try and influence the direction of one of the incumbent parties by taking over the leadership (Trump) or just purchasing influence. So you get parties that are completely detached from the underlying ethos that their members naively assume exists. But actually a large party has no more ethos than a golf club or a frat house.
    - douche 11y ago
      Teddy Roosevelt couldn't make a third party work, and that was in a pretty lack-luster field.
  - mtgx 11y ago
    You "can't get your act together" as a third party in a First Past the Post system. The winning strategy is always to vote for the 2 biggest parties. And the media not only strongly favors the two parties and cuts everyone else out from the discussion, but they also cut out any "grassroots" activist that is anti-establishment (unless you're already a media celebrity like Trump, which ends up getting them higher ratings). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&app=desktop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&app=desktop 43% of Americans are Independents, and only 29% D and 23% R. And yet most of them still end up voting D or R - do you think that just happens because they end up liking the D or R, or because it's a systemic problem that always forces them to vote for the "lesser evil"? If you don't think this is not just a problem, but a catastrophic one for US democracy, then the media has brainwashed Americans more than I thought. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig
rayiner 11y ago
The fact is that the telecom industry has return on capital among the lowest of any industry: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/a-long-term-look-at-roic http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corp... (Exhibit 2). Software and related services, in contrast, has among the highest returns. So if Google is looking to spend a billion dollars, they can make several times as high a return putting that into their software and services operations than into building fiber. But ultimately, Internet companies are reliant on the physical infrastructure to provide their service. That puts them in an odd situation: they need someone to build those pipes, but they'd rather not do it themselves because that's not an efficient use of their capital. So has it occurred to you that nobody wants to step in and compete, not because of the regulatory hurdles,[1] but because no investor wants to pour billions of dollars into an industry that's about as good at making money as airlines? [1] After all, investors pour tons of money into highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals, because the return on investment justifies it.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  This whole story is about a tech company pouring billions into building infrastructure.
  - droopybuns 11y ago
    Nowhere in this story is the number "billions" used. Second, google's strategy is not to invest billions, but seek subsidies or exceptions to municipal access fees by specifically targeting communities that decide to change rules that have existed for decades. Finally, never forget that the new competitor's main monetization tactic is harvesting your usage data & selling your data. I am all for increased competition, but fuck Google. They are the devil.
    - dang 11y ago
      > fuck Google. They are the devil. This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to call names in arguments. The comment would be fine without the last sentence. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

beedogs 11y ago

I'd like to see the Sherman Act used against Comcast / Verizon / ATT. It's like the executive branch has forgotten that law even exists.

mkhpalm 11y ago
Its not that our politicians have forgotten. Its that applying certain laws would conflict with getting filthy lucre. http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYear=2015 http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYea...
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  The fact that Alphabet is just above AT&T in that list is what gives me hope that this time it will be different. It's a nasty business, and I hate that Google has to participate in bribery in order to be allowed to innovate on behalf of consumers, but the alternative of having AT&T writing the laws is far more awful (and is why we're in the mess we're in when it comes to Internet service in the US).
  - dforrestwilson1 11y ago
    In 15 years when the search engine have failed to evolve because Google is a monopoly and has no incentive to keep improving it, you may have a different perspective. I am not defending AT&T, just pointing out that corporations do not care, and all of them (even Google) ultimately seek profit margins at the expense of others.
    - SwellJoe 11y ago
      I'm confident there will come a day when I'm ranting about Google and their anti-competitive practices (and not just, or even most importantly, on the search engine front) and rent-seeking. Google will be scary when they achieve the soulless status of T or VZ.
    - greglindahl 11y ago
      Uh, some of us started complaining about search engines failing to evolve a decade ago, guess we were before our time! Or at least too early to market.
    - ansible 11y ago
      In 15 years when the search engine have failed to evolve because Google is a monopoly and has no incentive to keep improving it, you may have a different perspective. LOL, Wut? I don't think you appreciate what it takes to maintain and improve a search engine these days. For example... Remember when link farms were big? They were doing this to boost their score for the existing PageRank algorithm. All search engines had to detect this, to determine in an automated fashion (because the web is waaaay too big) when to ignore that crap. And in a related issue.... spam. Fifteen years ago, guys like me were trying to fight it using regular expressions to filter our inbox (Spamassassin). It was a losing battle, even then. We've needed the very best machine learning to try to keep our heads above water. The spammers are constantly improving what they're doing too. The search engine looks the same (simple one-line text box), but the infrastructure behind it has vastly changed, and continues to rapidly evolve. Go read the Spanner and F1 papers... that stuff certainly didn't exist at all when Google started.
- rayiner 11y ago
  You know lobbying isn't campaign donations right.
ocdtrekkie 11y ago
I know, right? Google's in blatant violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, but rather than use it, the White House let a paid Google shill be in charge of the FTC, which is supposed to enforce it. But yeah, ISPs are a pain too.

qaq 11y ago

In reality none is preventing competition it's just none is really competing.

SwellJoe 11y ago
Are you at all familiar with the history of consumer Internet in the US, and the role AT&T, Verizon, and later Time Warner and Comcast, have played in it and the laws that regulate it? I'd recommend you read up on municipal broadband, and the war the telecoms have waged against communities doing an end run around their shoddy and expensive service. Likewise, look at the hoops they've forced Google to jump through to achieve even modest fiber rollouts. Google is among the biggest companies in the world. The only thing saving Google Fiber is that they are not some scrappy startup, but one of the most powerful companies in the world; without that power and economic clout, they would die a horrible death at the hands of AT&T's attorneys and pet legislators, as nearly every one of the thousands of independent ISPs did in the 90s and early 2000s. Innovation in consumer internet service has been thoroughly strangled by the telecoms and cable companies. They've divided up the turf, come to some gentleman's agreements with each other about pricing and access, and now we're all just here to feed the cash cow. If ever there was a classic case of collusion (and, hell, I might even call it racketeering) among modern "legitimate" businesses, the telecom and cable business is it. If you believe the lack of innovation and poor service is merely that no one is "competing", I'd encourage you to give that market a go. There's no competition, after all. It should be easy, right?
- rayiner 11y ago
  > Likewise, look at the hoops they've forced Google to jump through to achieve even modest fiber rollouts. What "hoops" have companies forced Google to jump through to achieve Fiber rollout? Almost all the resistance to Google Fiber has been from municipalities that are not willing to waive build-out requirements, which Google demands as part of the package of "fast track" permitting necessary to be a fiber city.
- qaq 11y ago
  If I had few Billions I would certainly give it a go. Independent ISPs relied on legacy Telco infrastructure as opposed to doing their own build outs. Google has enough $ and resources to compete they just don't really care to do it (look at the $ they allocated to google fiber). Apple can buy out any of the mentioned companies with cash on hand several times over but they are not interested in competing in this market. So in reality yes none having resources necessary to compete is interested in competing. In my area an independent provider is doing a fiber build out it slow and expansive for them (the area has comcast monopoly) yet none is preventing them from doing the actual build out.

diskcat 11y ago

Another case of the government intervention in the free market hurting the consumers, since large corporations will always be better than consumers at hijacking the legislative/legal system to their benefits. If you have the only poles in town (because the local government said there is only enough space for one pole line) then you have effective monopoly over lined communication. The solution to this of course is Georgian rent over space, in this case a rent over the only space in town that poles are allowed to be erected, which would be quite expensive, thus making their monopoly position untenable.

xenadu02 11y ago
Or you know - have the government own the poles and sell access to anyone who wants to run lines. Private roads are impractical except in limited circumstances (that require a huge number of public roads to enable). Infrastructure like this is similar.
- diskcat 11y ago
  >Or you know - have the government own the poles and sell access to anyone who wants to run lines. That's the status quo with the government owning the land upon which poles may be erected instead of poles. So I don't see how moving the government ownership up a step would solve anything.
  - guelo 11y ago
    Because you can't have multiple poles on the same land. One pole owned by the government that all businesses can use.
    - adventured 11y ago
      That can work but you have to do a much better job of outlawing all forms of government-protected monopolization and its half-way equivalents. Otherwise what you end up with, are local governments that want to cut deals for extra cash with AT&T et al. Local governments are supposed to not be allowed to cut monopoly deals today, but they still conspire with big telco to rig the game any way they can.

tn13 11y ago

It is really time for Google, Apple, Microsoft to lawyer up and lobby, threaten and arm twist politicians into kicking ass of these telecom companies. At the end of the day Data-speeds are going to be bottleneck for their profits. Google and others should have invested massive money to maintaining their political bitches. If they had we would have had better privacy today. If DoJ has to courage to ask Apple to hack their phones it is probably because in past companies like ATT complied without putting up a fight.

brink 11y ago
What really needs to happen is that we get money out of politics entirely. The last thing I want is for Google or Apple to become another AT&T.
- tn13 11y ago
  There is no such thing as politics without money. It is some socialist utopia. I think companies lobbying for competing causes is better than some regulation where only scums get to lobby scumbag politicians.
r00fus 11y ago
So do you think the Apple spat is as simple as a shakedown or turf war by the "security" state corporate cronies?
05 11y ago
It's really naive of you to think Google of all companies is interested in strong privacy protections. Their singular income source is based on keeping a secret profile on everybody on the internet - it would be akin to cutting the brunch they're sitting on.
- tn13 11y ago
  Where did I even mention anything about privacy ? Wrong comment ?

rokhayakebe 11y ago

The best thing that could possibly happen is informed citizenry. We REALLY do not need to worry about laws and regulations and instead begin to vote with our dollars where we can. If we started to shift our money in a concerted way, companies will begin to behave. Edit: I would like a site where we can fund independent researchers who can truly tell us what is in our best interest as consumers, then we can follow accordingly.

ghshephard 11y ago
"We REALLY do not need to worry about laws and regulations" Laws and regulations shape the marketplace, and determine which vendors you can vote with your dollars. In the absences of a free-market, there is no option to vote with your dollars. It's like voting in an election where the potential candidates have been preselected by an oversight board (see Hong Kong)
- vonklaus 11y ago
  This is untrue. Leverage shapes market and it is being proven that laws and regulations are malleable. Unfortunately, this cascades down from regulation, to law, to rights. While Taxis and regulatory controllers found it difficult to challenge Uber on the ground after it had occupied every state and municipality, for better or for worse only enforceable laws provide leverage to exert behavior or the perception of such an enforcement.
  - ghshephard 11y ago
    Taxis and regulatory controllers found it difficult to challenge Uber because they didn't operate a taxi service - they were operating an entirely new market which hadn't been envisioned and had little to no regulation around. I guarantee you Uber / Lyft would have been shut down hard if they had tried to take street hailing - for 50+ years law/regulations controlled who you could hail a taxi from, and so little to no competition on quality/service took place in that marketplace. BTW, I'm not saying this is completely and absolutely true for all markets (though, ironically, you chose one where it is pretty much an absolute) - but the more and more regulation you see around a market, the less and less flexibility new competitors have to come in and disrupt. Zenefits is an interesting case that straddles this though - in Utah, there was some regulation that made life difficult for them, and with effective lobbying by A16Z, the regulation was changed to allow Zenefits to compete there. And, of course, we've seen ares where they've discovered they really do need to comply with the law - though in most of those scenarios the requirements were so minimal (and probably reasonable) that they weren't much of a barrier to competition - just a minimal level of qualification (like having a drivers license, background check, and insurance for Uber)

emcrazyone 11y ago

somewhat agree. In 2006, I the co-owner of a PCO (Private Cable Operator) [1]. We ran under the radar for many years using the same loop holes for "right of way" and "inside wiring" laws. There are a couple little known facts or not so well understood laws which is why I slightly disagree with you and seems relevant to the article too. 1. There is right of way in many subdivisions to which the likes of AT&T can't keep me out of. It's illegal and monopolistic. One of my business partners was a home builder which was one of the angles but not the only one. 2. When a cable company or telephone company runs cable from a pedastal to your residence, you legally own that cable run. If it's a single family home, it's your property. The same is nearly true if you live in a Condo or an apartment with the difference being the property own owns the cable from the pedestal to the building and you own what is called the "inside wiring" which is the point of entry of the apartment/condo to your rented space. And these two laws allowed us to compete for a long time against the bigger Cable companies, including going into locations where they were well established and kicking them out in the case of Apartment complexes and Condos. Our typical modus operandi was to go into MDUs (Multi Dwelling Units) and offer the property owner revenue share contract in exchange for exclusive rights to the property; something the incumbents don't do. This only works with MDUs not municipalities. There are a lot of PCOs (Private Cable Operators). Maybe not enough to make a dent just yet, but I firmly believe this can continue. Comcast has good lobby power with FCC. They lobby for strict/stupid laws that attempt to create barriers to entry to try and keep the smaller PCOs from doing what we did... [1] http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20081109/SUB01/811100333/cable-provider-clicks-on-vc-cash-nex3-finds-niche http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20081109/SUB01/81110033...

nostrademons 11y ago
If it's just replacing a telco monopoly with an exclusive contract, isn't that just as bad (from a consumer perspective)? The whole point was that telcos ought to compete based on speed, reliability, and customer service, not on obtaining the favor of property owners & municipalities.
- amazon_not 11y ago
  Yes, it's bad from a consumer perspective. Still, it's better to have a monopoly to be subjected to some kind of competitive pressure than none. In an ideal world we'd have open access to infrastructure.

mtgx 11y ago

It doesn't help that the US is not a real democracy. For instance, the Green Party actually has in its platform many telecom and media reforms, including breaking up the big monopolies. http://www.gp.org/democracy#demFreeSpeech http://www.gp.org/democracy#demFreeSpeech But you wouldn't know it, because apparently US citizens are only allowed to vote for 2 parties - ever. When the US gets proportional representation and takes money out of politics, then we can start discussing real solutions to problems. Until then you're only going to get a "right" and a "left" argument for what benefits Corporate America, the real "People" the government listens to.

CamperBob2 11y ago
Counterpoint: if a third party can't get its act together for the clusterfuck of a Presidential election we're about to experience, it may not be entirely the system's fault.
- 7952 11y ago
  People assumes that the underlying structure of a political party is an effective mechanism for getting power simply because a couple of parties have a lot of power. But at the grass roots political parties are just very pretentious social clubs. Trying to compete on that level seems prone to failure. It is much easier to try and influence the direction of one of the incumbent parties by taking over the leadership (Trump) or just purchasing influence. So you get parties that are completely detached from the underlying ethos that their members naively assume exists. But actually a large party has no more ethos than a golf club or a frat house.
  - douche 11y ago
    Teddy Roosevelt couldn't make a third party work, and that was in a pretty lack-luster field.
- mtgx 11y ago
  You "can't get your act together" as a third party in a First Past the Post system. The winning strategy is always to vote for the 2 biggest parties. And the media not only strongly favors the two parties and cuts everyone else out from the discussion, but they also cut out any "grassroots" activist that is anti-establishment (unless you're already a media celebrity like Trump, which ends up getting them higher ratings). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&app=desktop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&app=desktop 43% of Americans are Independents, and only 29% D and 23% R. And yet most of them still end up voting D or R - do you think that just happens because they end up liking the D or R, or because it's a systemic problem that always forces them to vote for the "lesser evil"? If you don't think this is not just a problem, but a catastrophic one for US democracy, then the media has brainwashed Americans more than I thought. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig

rayiner 11y ago

The fact is that the telecom industry has return on capital among the lowest of any industry: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/a-long-term-look-at-roic http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corp... (Exhibit 2). Software and related services, in contrast, has among the highest returns. So if Google is looking to spend a billion dollars, they can make several times as high a return putting that into their software and services operations than into building fiber. But ultimately, Internet companies are reliant on the physical infrastructure to provide their service. That puts them in an odd situation: they need someone to build those pipes, but they'd rather not do it themselves because that's not an efficient use of their capital. So has it occurred to you that nobody wants to step in and compete, not because of the regulatory hurdles,[1] but because no investor wants to pour billions of dollars into an industry that's about as good at making money as airlines? [1] After all, investors pour tons of money into highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals, because the return on investment justifies it.

waterlesscloud 11y ago
This whole story is about a tech company pouring billions into building infrastructure.
- droopybuns 11y ago
  Nowhere in this story is the number "billions" used. Second, google's strategy is not to invest billions, but seek subsidies or exceptions to municipal access fees by specifically targeting communities that decide to change rules that have existed for decades. Finally, never forget that the new competitor's main monetization tactic is harvesting your usage data & selling your data. I am all for increased competition, but fuck Google. They are the devil.
  - dang 11y ago
    > fuck Google. They are the devil. This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to call names in arguments. The comment would be fine without the last sentence. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html