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They're going to keep doing this too until customers start treating internet as a right and utility until then it's just seen as a commodity. If your local gro

They're going to keep doing this too until customers start treating internet as a right and utility until then it's just seen as a commodity. If your local grocery monopoly started rationing out milk to 250ml sold per day there would be protests, investigations, and 10 minute time blocks for it on the nightly news because the people would demand it. The internet just hasn't had this moment yet and it sucks because the momentum for this moment is building but it hasn't reached critical mass. I don't think this moment will happen for another decade at least.

akira2501 9y ago
> If your local grocery monopoly started rationing out milk to 250ml sold per day there would be protests Not quite.. if they rationed milk to 250mL, but then let you buy an extra 25mL for what the first 250mL costs. They're not only creating scarcity, but then creating a market to profit from this artificial situation.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  They'd literally be lynched.
- hammock 9y ago
  Don't airlines do this too? You can buy the first ten tickets on a given plane for the same price that you would pay for the very last available ticket. Don't see anyone getting lynched in that industry.
  - redial 9y ago
    This is the important part, > They're not only creating scarcity, but then creating a market to profit from this artificial situation. Seats on a plane are a limited resource.
    - hueving 9y ago
      So is bandwidth though. I'm not sure where the idea comes from that ISPs have unlimited bandwidth.
      - revelation 9y ago
        ISPs have profited massively from many many Moore iterations while consumer bandwidth is stuck on below 1990 technology. Make no mistake, the technical side of this has only gotten cheaper. That's before you consider the "investment" necessary to resolve the vast majority of Netflix bandwidth issues is connecting a cable from one router to another in a CIX. Of course when you do that it becomes blatantly obvious that ISPs have oversold and overbooked capacity dramatically as we get closer and closer to the last mile to the customer. Now they don't want to pay up to actually provide what they have sold.
        rdtsc 9y ago
        > ISPs have profited massively from many many Moore iterations while consumer bandwidth is stuck on below 1990 technology. On one hand they don't have to compete in many place so ISPs are close to being a monopoly so they can keep charging $80 for < 1Mpbs if they want. At the same time Moore iterations don't dig trenches and lay fiber between cities. Also frequency spectrum doesn't grow with Moore's law either.And in many instances it is still mostly a shared resource. Cable companies usually have groups of houses share the upstream bandwidth.
        revelation 9y ago
        Plain old copper has seen similar "appreciation": https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1219210/000119312513418723/g586886g15m40.jpg https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1219210/000119312513... Of course none of that ever makes it to the consumer, investment is stagnant or down and all this tech ends up achieving is accommodating higher Internet penetration (and customer counts). Here is the DOCSIS evolution: http://www.cablelabs.com/full-duplex-docsis/ http://www.cablelabs.com/full-duplex-docsis/ All this cable infrastructure previously wasted on free to air crap has turned into a veritable gold mine with no further investment and tech again making up for all the growth so you don't have to spend any. Sure, Moore isn't helping dig trenches but he sure has been tremendously helpful in turning that ole shitty copper wiring financed by Uncle Sam into a lot of green.
wtf_is_up 9y ago
Where is there a local grocery monopoly? I grew up in just about the most rural part of WV and we had several grocery options to choose from within a reasonable area.
- vageli 9y ago
  Does that still hold true now? When I lived in Buckhannon, WV, our local "grocer" was a Walmart, and you needed to drive 15 mins on the interstate to get to it.
tuna-piano 9y ago
A utility is generally considered a monopoly - there is usually only one wire leading to your house. I can choose Sprint, T-mobile, Verizon or ATT. What monopoly are you speaking of?
- ropiku 9y ago
  But if you're in a longer term contract you're out of luck for a while. If they are allowed to change the service then they must allow customers to switch providers without exit fee.
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  Ah yes, a single example is more than enough to override the mountains of evidence that the majority of Americans only have a single choice of internet provider. Power is setup the same way in some states, where multiple companies share the wires. This is only because the government demands the wires be shared fairly. Its an interesting arrangement, essentially a regulated monopoly called a utility.
  - tuna-piano 9y ago
    The article is about wireless providers. Sprint/ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile all cover the vast majority of the population.
- zanny 9y ago
  Monopolies are not only formed of one company, they can be a collusion of companies so long as the barrier to entering the market and competing with the colluders is impossibly high. Considering the barrier to entry to becoming a cellular operator is owning spectrum, that is one of the most impossibly high barriers to usurp. Nobody has to sell you any, the owners can set whatever price they want, and there are no mechanisms to mitigate this state-created impossible to overcome monopoly on light. Landline access, by comparison, is macro-harder and micro-easier. It is more likely you can get easement rights to run fiber on a given street than to get the right to use wavelengths of EM, but trying to get easement in an entire city can be similarly impossible.
rayiner 9y ago
How is Verizon wireless a utility? None of the usual arguments (natural monopoly) apply. And there are four major competitors in the market (more than in say search or social media). Also, data caps are just price discrimination, which is pervasive even in highly competitive markets (and not necessarily a bad thing): http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/uploaded/222.pdf http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/uploaded/222.pdf. You walk into Home Depot and they charge you twice as much for the "Best" paint rollers versus the "Good" paint rollers. It's not because there isn't competition in the paint roller market, or because it costs twice as much to make one paint roller versus the other.
- reeddavid 9y ago
  Wireless does have some features of a natural monopoly. In order to compete with Verizon Wireless, you need access to a finite amount of wireless spectrum. The FCC auctions off exclusive access to the wireless spectrum, so you can't just start competing with Verizon on the same spectrum. This is pretty similar to how you can't just freely add your own fiber to a utility pole, or freely build your own utility poles.
  - apatters 9y ago
    That's right - wireless isn't a natural monopoly, but it is a natural oligopoly. Oligopolies tend to be better for consumers than monopolies, but still not great, because the firms involved only have to deal with a few competitors and tend to develop cartel characteristics. Oligopolies also appear to be the future of the American economy, with new business formation on the decline and wealth + market share concentrating under the few largest players in many industries. So perhaps the discussion we should be having is, should we do something about oligopolies, and what? We already have antitrust laws, are they adequate? Are they being enforced?
  - icebraining 9y ago
    How is it "natural" when it's a governmental allocation? The point of the expression "natural monopoly" was to distinguish them for State-granted monopolies like those.
woah 9y ago
Lots of different types of stores limit orders per customer for lots of reasons. We don't need regulations to prevent it.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
It's not just consumers... "Nobody's got to use the Internet." - Sensenbrenner https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/04/15/nobodys-got-to-use-the-internet-a-gop-lawmakers-response-to-concerns-about-web-privacy/?utm_term=.226867dda9a7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/04/15/...
hanspeter 9y ago
Your analogy would be better with fast food, ice cream or candy than with milk. Nobody needs Netflix and ironically the society would probably be better off if people did not waste so much time with their eyes glued to their screens. I see your point but as long as it's services like Netflix I hope people will not claim it as a right.
- pathorn 9y ago
  I think you misunderstood the OP's post. He is saying that the people have a right to access the internet as a utility, regardless of the destination address, be it Netflix or Google. Just like I should have the right to choose which food I eat, be it milk, or as you suggest, candy or fast food. Netflix in particular is indeed not a right, and in fact Netflix charges a monthly subscription that you may or may not be able to afford. But if I pay for Netflix, I should have a right to access it, or any service I want, via my "chosen" internet service provider. Anyway I'm making this post because I think I have a better version of the milk analogy, so here goes... The main problem with the milk analogy is how the transactions are done. I pay the grocery store a fee for access to walk in and out of the market with a certain weight of groceries per second. Separately I pay the milk provider for all-you-can-drink access to milk. (Alternatively, you can imagine the grocery store is one of those stores in a mall that you have to walk through to get to the rest of the mall, but I'm forced to walk in and out through their front door). In this analogy, the grocery store should have no right to limit the amount of milk I can carry through their market, while claiming to offer access to any food by weight.
daveheq 9y ago
If we don't stop this kind of behavior now, it'll become industrialized and infrastuctures will be built on top of it that will become very disruptive to dismantle once we realize how much were getting screwed. We rely on the internet so much for our lives and jobs and economy and banking that it should be a utility and a right, hell, we use the internet more than our phones, and cell phones are more ubiquitous and relied upon than landlines by a longshot!

akira2501 9y ago

> If your local grocery monopoly started rationing out milk to 250ml sold per day there would be protests Not quite.. if they rationed milk to 250mL, but then let you buy an extra 25mL for what the first 250mL costs. They're not only creating scarcity, but then creating a market to profit from this artificial situation.

QAPereo 9y ago
They'd literally be lynched.
hammock 9y ago
Don't airlines do this too? You can buy the first ten tickets on a given plane for the same price that you would pay for the very last available ticket. Don't see anyone getting lynched in that industry.
- redial 9y ago
  This is the important part, > They're not only creating scarcity, but then creating a market to profit from this artificial situation. Seats on a plane are a limited resource.
  - hueving 9y ago
    So is bandwidth though. I'm not sure where the idea comes from that ISPs have unlimited bandwidth.
    - revelation 9y ago
      ISPs have profited massively from many many Moore iterations while consumer bandwidth is stuck on below 1990 technology. Make no mistake, the technical side of this has only gotten cheaper. That's before you consider the "investment" necessary to resolve the vast majority of Netflix bandwidth issues is connecting a cable from one router to another in a CIX. Of course when you do that it becomes blatantly obvious that ISPs have oversold and overbooked capacity dramatically as we get closer and closer to the last mile to the customer. Now they don't want to pay up to actually provide what they have sold.
      - rdtsc 9y ago
        > ISPs have profited massively from many many Moore iterations while consumer bandwidth is stuck on below 1990 technology. On one hand they don't have to compete in many place so ISPs are close to being a monopoly so they can keep charging $80 for < 1Mpbs if they want. At the same time Moore iterations don't dig trenches and lay fiber between cities. Also frequency spectrum doesn't grow with Moore's law either.And in many instances it is still mostly a shared resource. Cable companies usually have groups of houses share the upstream bandwidth.
        revelation 9y ago
        Plain old copper has seen similar "appreciation": https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1219210/000119312513418723/g586886g15m40.jpg https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1219210/000119312513... Of course none of that ever makes it to the consumer, investment is stagnant or down and all this tech ends up achieving is accommodating higher Internet penetration (and customer counts). Here is the DOCSIS evolution: http://www.cablelabs.com/full-duplex-docsis/ http://www.cablelabs.com/full-duplex-docsis/ All this cable infrastructure previously wasted on free to air crap has turned into a veritable gold mine with no further investment and tech again making up for all the growth so you don't have to spend any. Sure, Moore isn't helping dig trenches but he sure has been tremendously helpful in turning that ole shitty copper wiring financed by Uncle Sam into a lot of green.

wtf_is_up 9y ago

Where is there a local grocery monopoly? I grew up in just about the most rural part of WV and we had several grocery options to choose from within a reasonable area.

vageli 9y ago
Does that still hold true now? When I lived in Buckhannon, WV, our local "grocer" was a Walmart, and you needed to drive 15 mins on the interstate to get to it.

tuna-piano 9y ago

A utility is generally considered a monopoly - there is usually only one wire leading to your house. I can choose Sprint, T-mobile, Verizon or ATT. What monopoly are you speaking of?

ropiku 9y ago
But if you're in a longer term contract you're out of luck for a while. If they are allowed to change the service then they must allow customers to switch providers without exit fee.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
Ah yes, a single example is more than enough to override the mountains of evidence that the majority of Americans only have a single choice of internet provider. Power is setup the same way in some states, where multiple companies share the wires. This is only because the government demands the wires be shared fairly. Its an interesting arrangement, essentially a regulated monopoly called a utility.
- tuna-piano 9y ago
  The article is about wireless providers. Sprint/ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile all cover the vast majority of the population.
zanny 9y ago
Monopolies are not only formed of one company, they can be a collusion of companies so long as the barrier to entering the market and competing with the colluders is impossibly high. Considering the barrier to entry to becoming a cellular operator is owning spectrum, that is one of the most impossibly high barriers to usurp. Nobody has to sell you any, the owners can set whatever price they want, and there are no mechanisms to mitigate this state-created impossible to overcome monopoly on light. Landline access, by comparison, is macro-harder and micro-easier. It is more likely you can get easement rights to run fiber on a given street than to get the right to use wavelengths of EM, but trying to get easement in an entire city can be similarly impossible.

rayiner 9y ago

How is Verizon wireless a utility? None of the usual arguments (natural monopoly) apply. And there are four major competitors in the market (more than in say search or social media). Also, data caps are just price discrimination, which is pervasive even in highly competitive markets (and not necessarily a bad thing): http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/uploaded/222.pdf http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/uploaded/222.pdf. You walk into Home Depot and they charge you twice as much for the "Best" paint rollers versus the "Good" paint rollers. It's not because there isn't competition in the paint roller market, or because it costs twice as much to make one paint roller versus the other.

reeddavid 9y ago
Wireless does have some features of a natural monopoly. In order to compete with Verizon Wireless, you need access to a finite amount of wireless spectrum. The FCC auctions off exclusive access to the wireless spectrum, so you can't just start competing with Verizon on the same spectrum. This is pretty similar to how you can't just freely add your own fiber to a utility pole, or freely build your own utility poles.
- apatters 9y ago
  That's right - wireless isn't a natural monopoly, but it is a natural oligopoly. Oligopolies tend to be better for consumers than monopolies, but still not great, because the firms involved only have to deal with a few competitors and tend to develop cartel characteristics. Oligopolies also appear to be the future of the American economy, with new business formation on the decline and wealth + market share concentrating under the few largest players in many industries. So perhaps the discussion we should be having is, should we do something about oligopolies, and what? We already have antitrust laws, are they adequate? Are they being enforced?
- icebraining 9y ago
  How is it "natural" when it's a governmental allocation? The point of the expression "natural monopoly" was to distinguish them for State-granted monopolies like those.

woah 9y ago

Lots of different types of stores limit orders per customer for lots of reasons. We don't need regulations to prevent it.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago

It's not just consumers... "Nobody's got to use the Internet." - Sensenbrenner https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/04/15/nobodys-got-to-use-the-internet-a-gop-lawmakers-response-to-concerns-about-web-privacy/?utm_term=.226867dda9a7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/04/15/...

hanspeter 9y ago

Your analogy would be better with fast food, ice cream or candy than with milk. Nobody needs Netflix and ironically the society would probably be better off if people did not waste so much time with their eyes glued to their screens. I see your point but as long as it's services like Netflix I hope people will not claim it as a right.

pathorn 9y ago
I think you misunderstood the OP's post. He is saying that the people have a right to access the internet as a utility, regardless of the destination address, be it Netflix or Google. Just like I should have the right to choose which food I eat, be it milk, or as you suggest, candy or fast food. Netflix in particular is indeed not a right, and in fact Netflix charges a monthly subscription that you may or may not be able to afford. But if I pay for Netflix, I should have a right to access it, or any service I want, via my "chosen" internet service provider. Anyway I'm making this post because I think I have a better version of the milk analogy, so here goes... The main problem with the milk analogy is how the transactions are done. I pay the grocery store a fee for access to walk in and out of the market with a certain weight of groceries per second. Separately I pay the milk provider for all-you-can-drink access to milk. (Alternatively, you can imagine the grocery store is one of those stores in a mall that you have to walk through to get to the rest of the mall, but I'm forced to walk in and out through their front door). In this analogy, the grocery store should have no right to limit the amount of milk I can carry through their market, while claiming to offer access to any food by weight.

daveheq 9y ago

If we don't stop this kind of behavior now, it'll become industrialized and infrastuctures will be built on top of it that will become very disruptive to dismantle once we realize how much were getting screwed. We rely on the internet so much for our lives and jobs and economy and banking that it should be a utility and a right, hell, we use the internet more than our phones, and cell phones are more ubiquitous and relied upon than landlines by a longshot!