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A few months ago there was a story about starting an ISP on Hacker News [1] and the comments section was about how hard it is to start one. What if these rules

A few months ago there was a story about starting an ISP on Hacker News [1] and the comments section was about how hard it is to start one. What if these rules allow someone to build a new ISP and take some of the advertising profit from some of the big companies like Google ? Google can afford to lose some money and perhaps it could improve the ISP competition in the US. Also reading about the general history of the Internet, even though initial work was done by DARPA, it did not become the world wide network until commercial interests ( and free market capitalism ) took over [2]. This is not the narrative in the featured article. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13688595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13688595 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Revolution

AnthonyMouse 9y ago
> Google can afford to lose some money and perhaps it could improve the ISP competition in the US. Comcast revenue per user is >$1500/year, Google revenue per user is <$100/year. No amount of transferring money from Google to ISPs is going to change the way the ISP market works. But it would certainly change how the markets for over-the-top services work -- and not in a good way.
hackuser 9y ago
> it did not become the world wide network until commercial interests ( and free market capitalism ) took over It was literally world-wide before that, but if you mean that it boomed: Yes, commercial businesses helped a lot, and so did others: Free, open source software such as the World Wide Web, the entire protocol stack (IP, TCP/UDP, DNS, etc.), SMTP, POP, IRC, *nix/BSD, Mosaic ... let's give credit where it's due! The personal computer revolution and all that went into it. Normal people were just getting their first computers in the 1990s. No point in Internet access without a client machine. Telecommunications innovations such as PPP, modems, etc, which allowed data connections over phone lines. Also, not all the commercial business was 'free market capitalism'; one big one that helped the Internet starting in 1995 was a predatory monopoly.

AnthonyMouse 9y ago

> Google can afford to lose some money and perhaps it could improve the ISP competition in the US. Comcast revenue per user is >$1500/year, Google revenue per user is <$100/year. No amount of transferring money from Google to ISPs is going to change the way the ISP market works. But it would certainly change how the markets for over-the-top services work -- and not in a good way.

hackuser 9y ago

> it did not become the world wide network until commercial interests ( and free market capitalism ) took over It was literally world-wide before that, but if you mean that it boomed: Yes, commercial businesses helped a lot, and so did others: Free, open source software such as the World Wide Web, the entire protocol stack (IP, TCP/UDP, DNS, etc.), SMTP, POP, IRC, *nix/BSD, Mosaic ... let's give credit where it's due! The personal computer revolution and all that went into it. Normal people were just getting their first computers in the 1990s. No point in Internet access without a client machine. Telecommunications innovations such as PPP, modems, etc, which allowed data connections over phone lines. Also, not all the commercial business was 'free market capitalism'; one big one that helped the Internet starting in 1995 was a predatory monopoly.