7 ms·

Nationalize the internet

59 points by ourmandave 9y ago

jstanley 9y ago
People in countries other than the US might have something to say about that!
shaftoe 9y ago
Generally, when you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, nationalization isn't the way to go.
- jstanley 9y ago
  I strongly disagree. I think if you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, giving it to the government is the last thing you want to do. If you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, decentralisation is the way to go. Edit: Oops! I totally misread your comment ("is" vs "isn't"). Turns out I'm agreeing :)
  - wslh 9y ago
    Governments inflate agency costs ad infinitum without increasing the QoS. This is not a law but based on statistics around the major countries.
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      Not always. Many European countries have nationalized healthcare, yet manage to have better healthcare outcomes than the US even though they spend much less per capita. The question isn't why _government_ leads to inflated cost, the question is why _American government_ leads to inflated cost.
      - mhh__ 9y ago
        Better healthcare outcomes? I think you mean access: For example, the NHS looks very good until you realise that the rankings include access; Based on case-by-case outcome alone, it ranks relatively poorly - certainly less than most people would guess. The US government spends about the same on healthcare as others do, the difference is in the amount of private healthcare spending.
    - jayd16 9y ago
      Is that why America's private healthcare system costs more than any other country and yet we do not have any where near the top outcomes? What statistics are you cherry picking to make your argument?
      - erikpukinskis 9y ago
        Other countries don’t have an entire political party who sees it as their mandate to sabotage all government social services.
      - gonational 9y ago
        Government interference is precisely the cause of our high medical costs (for instance, what do you think would happen to the price of Doritos if the government required everyone to purchase one bag of Doritos every week?). Second to that is the government interference in farming (specifically, corn subsidies, which have led to an increase of corn products our food, resulting in higher inflammation levels in humans and the animals we eat, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc.). IOW, more government == more worse
        jayd16 9y ago
        Medical costs were skyrocketing before the mandate and that growth has slowed since ACA passage. Your Doritos thought experiment isn't based in reality. Edit: because its so silly: A better parallel would be a world where everyone needed Doritos. In this world if you found yourself in a situation where you needed Doritos and didn't have it, you could check into a 7/11 and get a bag at the outrageous price of $5.00 for one of those little lunch ones. Thanks to Reagan, your Doritos needs cannot be turned down by 7/11 even if you can't pay. Everyone else has to pay for your overpriced Doritos. Does it make sense to buy cheap Doritos insurance now instead of the high cost of Emergency Doritos?
        orf 9y ago
        How do you juggle that option with the fact that other countries with much more government intervention (or entirely government led, like the NHS) have much cheaper healthcare, and better outcomes. If everyone mandated that you had to buy dorritos, it's in dorritos interests to put the price up. But if the government produced the dorritos, and the government isn't a for profit business, it's in their interests to keep the prices as low as possible, at cost. There was this great thread I saw on /r/libertarian, where someone posted some images about the NHS. It was supposed to make 'socialised medicine' look terrible by showing an obese guy costing the NHS £200 a day for a bed while refusing to reduce their diet - "hey look with socialised medicine you are paying for this guy! How bad is that!!!" However it backfired when all everyone was talking about was how it only cost £200 a day for a bed.
aristocles 9y ago
I registered just to say this is literally the worst idea I've ever seen.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Hello, friend. Welcome to the site. I see you're new here, so I thought I'd let you know why you're being downvoted. Your post isn't very substantive. You express your opinion, but you don't explain the thought processes behind your opinion. When combined with the snarkiness, it just wasn't a productive comment. If you haven't yet, read up on the Hacker News Guidelines[1], that may help when posting something somewhat controversial. We try hard to avoid forming an echo chamber here. Overly emotional and unsubstantive comments are downvoted, and controversial comments with a lot of substance to them are often(but not always, unfortunately) upvoted. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html edit: The irony of being downvoted for trying to maintain a positive, productive culture on this site is not lost to me. I won't bother to do so in the future.
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. They were new. It's important to teach people these things instead of just deleting every comment that is bad. It's on all of us to maintain this site's culture, it's not just the mods' job. > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Noted.
hanklazard 9y ago
I would love for this to work, but im afraid the temptation for the government to control / censor information would be too great.
- mungojelly 9y ago
  How could they, though? Ban all encrypted traffic? Isn't that cat out of the bag?
- astrodust 9y ago
  Either the corporations are going to do it, or the government is going to do it. Pick one.
  - benjohnson 9y ago
    The former please - it's been my experience that switching from Verizon to AT&T is somewhat easier than a bloody revolution.
    - astrodust 9y ago
      What if they merge? Then what?
      - grizzlylabs 9y ago
        Anti-Trust?
        astrodust 9y ago
        What if the government isn't interested in that?
        rhino369 9y ago
        Civil law suits.
aaron-lebo 9y ago
I genuinely struggle to understand proposals like this. The current political system is broken - the FCC is symptomatic of that. In what world does it seem like a good idea to give more power to that broken system?
- astrodust 9y ago
  Then it's equally broken for everyone. Nationalized or quasi-nationalized (heavily regulated) telecom companies used to be dysfunctional and sometimes comically inept but at least they weren't actively hostile against consumers and businesses.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Do you remember the monopoly ATT "ma bell" when a long distance call to friends or family was so expensive that it was reserved for emergencies or very special occasions? Maybe they weren't actively hostile in their pricing but compared to today when you can talk to anyone in the world for no cost, it's not something I'd want to return to.
    - astrodust 9y ago
      Data services back then like frame relay were so slow they could barely carry a single voice conversation over them. Long distance switching involved physically connecting together circuits over vast distances, the equipment involved was fantastically expensive and extremely intricate, in many cases all mechanical. So yeah, it was stupidly expensive to make long distance calls because the equipment itself was stupidly expensive. Now the net cost of adding a phone circuit is almost zero, they just provision it on the digital switch. That today they charge for long distance is the criminal thing: We can video chat to anyone in the world for basically free. The singular reason for declining prices is not deregulation, but the simple fact that as technology improves the cost of data goes down. First it became practical to transmit voice over IP, then later video, and now it's trivial for both cases. The world you don't want to return to is where IP isn't omnipresent and bandwidth is crazy expensive because the equipment to handle it at scale hasn't been invented yet.
zerostar07 9y ago
You mean, like china?
natural219 9y ago
I'm surprisingly sympathetic to idea of nationalizing the internet, but the paragraph about "deregulation in general is bad" seriously baffles me. Not only because taking a principled stance on "regulation as a whole" is abhorrently coarse for me, but they specifically reference the airline industry -- and then links to an article talking about how good deregulation was? -- without blinking an eye or realizing that a vast majority of people view the 1978 airline deregulation as an obviously good thing. I'm now slightly less convinced that nationalizing the internet would be a good thing.
rayiner 9y ago
> Conventional wisdom has been that private industry is better equipped to handle things than the government. Deregulation has been the agenda of baby boomer conservatives. And it has failed. It has failed the environment. It has failed the airline industry. It has failed education. It will fail the internet. The biggest trend in administrative law over the last few decades has been reductions in the degree to which the government micro-manages the economy. In both the U.S. (with bi-partisan support) and the EU, industries have been privatized, invasive regulatory regimes have been replaced with light-touch ones, etc. Germany energy law post-1998, for example, is pretty recognizable to someone familiar with American energy law. There was a time when the government either owned major industries, or micro-managed things like the routes airlines or trucking companies ran and the prices they charged. Pretty much the whole developed world has agreed to get rid of most of that. By and large, these reforms have been overwhelmingly successful. In the U.S. and EU, you can go almost anywhere and get a 4G mobile wireless connection, using networks built almost entirely with private money. UPS and FedEx--and services like Amazon built on them--are the direct outgrowth of the deregulation of air freight. Consumer airline ticket prices are a fraction of what they were a few decades ago (even though airline technology has evolved very little in that time!). If you look at hiccups like wireless data caps or airline seats getting smaller as signs that deregulation has "failed," frankly you're off the reservation. Just look at areas of the economy that haven't been subject to deregulation. Some of the worst environmental effects are caused by public water utilities, which have for decades failed to make investments to improve their infrastructure. In most places, public water utilities freely dump untreated sewage into rivers when obsolete combined sewer/rainwater systems overflow, they poison kids by pumping water through ancient lead pipes, etc. Re-regulation and nationalization is on peoples' tongues here in the U.S., but I'd suggest looking over the pond to see what they're doing. How did Sweden wire up its country with fiber? It wasn't through massive government investment, or by forcing private companies into the charity business through universal service obligations. Stockholm empowered to municipal operator to lay dark fiber, with no government subsidies and no mandate to cover any particular portion of the population: https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Stockholms%20Stokab%20-%20A%20Blueprint%20for%20Ubiquitous%20Fiber%20Connectivity%20FINAL%20VERSION.pdf https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Stockholms%20Stokab%20-%20A%.... The network was built out not based on "public interest" considerations or trying to fight urban poverty, but simply by building in a demand-driven basis to high-value customers first. And unlike the U.S., Sweden didn't wire up rural areas by forcing private operators to subsidize rural customers. Instead, it simply gave rural residents a 50% tax break on the cost of hooking up their own fiber: http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/Opinions/2013/Rural_FTTH_Nordics_Final.pdf http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/Opinions/2013/Rural_FTTH....
natalyarostova 9y ago
When people want something nationalized, it usually comes with the asterisk *as long as the gov officials managing it are part of my tribe and preferred policy set. This isn't always bad, since sometimes we all are in general agreement, but it's important to ask yourself: in political systems power can shift fast, do you want these policies to be part of this shift? Do you want the internet to be managed by trump appointees?
- rhino369 9y ago
  Even if it isn't caught up in partisan fighting, the average voter isn't going to want to spend money on upgrades. Do you think your grandma wants to increase the price of her internet by 10 bucks a month to get gigabit? Mine wouldn't.
- confounded 9y ago
  Indeed, while I really want to like the proposal, democracy in the US doesn’t seem strong enough (and the judiciary don’t seem interested enough) for it to work. It’s easy to imagine the Internet facing a different class of threats, from a united front of spooks, rights-holders-groups, and moralists. I can’t imagine the open uncensored web surviving long, unless it had some kind of mini constitution of its own. This said, the future under private companies doesn’t look great either. ISPs are uncompetitive, exploitative, and anti-consumer, and the corporations who act as censors (Google, Apple, Facebook) have increasing skin in the rights-holder-group game, and are happy to build censorship machines for lobbyists, spies, and other authoritarians. Maybe it’s worth thinking about what such a “Constitution for the Internet” might be now, before it completely disappears. (And perhaps while TBL and Vint Cerf have some fight left in them for a roadshow)!
AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
So Hillary or Obama or Trump or Cruz can decide what goes on internet? No, thank you. I would rather take the chaos of AT&T/Verizon/Comcast/Charter/TimeWarner. At least those can be defeated, the way AOL went away. Is less regulation the problem today, or is it less competition? Better approach would be let cities and towns compete the way water and gas or electricity is provided. People will vote locally and the best approach will win. People will vote with their wallets, their feet and at the ballet box. Megacorps or MegaGovs are not going be the answer.
rjeli 9y ago
Hm, I’m interested to see a good proposal for this - >Last Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission, led by deregulation zealot Ajit Pai Never mind. Unsubstantiated ad hominem in the first sentence. Move along.
partycoder 9y ago
The problem with making the government larger (in terms of responsibilities and influence) is that the incentive to be corrupt grows. Then, when your government is large, the performance of your country starts depending on having a long interrupted sequence of perfect administrations, something that is very unlikely. The idea of government is to have an entity that represents the best interests of people, to preserve and grow social capital, and achieve balance, not absolute control.
- partycoder 9y ago
  Being a bit more specific, I think the Internet should be regulated to prevent anti-consumer behavior, but not nationalized. Nationalize the Internet means that only the country can act as ISP.
grizzlylabs 9y ago
The government screws up something simple.... net neutrality... so let's give the whole darn thing to government! The Government screws up the VA Hospitals so let's give them our entire health system! Has there ever been a situation that the government screws up and someone doesn't gets the bright idea to double down?
dailyvijeos 9y ago
Maybe not because it’s a confederation of peers. As for ISP’s, Australia is not a good example because it’s poorly run, which it doesn’t have to be. Instead, perhaps a GSE value-for-money internet, TV and mobile provider that’s a non-profit, customer-first, no-nonsense, doesn’t gouge people no matter their zipcode, and upfront about privacy and pricing. That way, where monopolies / oligopolies form and rural customers miss out, there is an alternative at a reasonable price. It’s like single-payer for connectivity that’s not the only game in town. Less extreme, more practical and better run than the post office... more like a credit-union. Heck, make it partially employee- and/or customer-owned so people care.
monday_ 9y ago
First of all, the way that people on both sides of the political spectrum decry the federal and government as authoritarian and at the same time want to give it more power, is literally Orwellian. Doublethink, to be precise. Second, this article argues that the government should have a try at running the internet since the private sector ostensibly failed. The irony is that the situation today is exactly a product of government mismanagement. A vital infrastructure is underdeveloped, overpriced and operated by a duopoly - where exactly was the US Government when this happened? Where was the antitrust authority? Where was a liberal President of eight years, a man deified by the likes of the Daily Dot, who took on health insurance companies? Did the Congress deign to investigate this issue? And did the voters "vote them out" for failing to do that, as the author suggests? Of course not. People tend to have a job, a life and a hobby - they can only care about a limited set of issues. And an increase in broadband pricing or a change in ISP product set is not one of those. They can get riled up, short term, but probably won't be able to sustain pressure, as is the case with the second amendment or healthcare. This is why the government officials have for so long neglected this issue, and this why the nationalized internet bureaucracy will have the same relationship with third party contractors (that ISPs will become) as FCC does. I am not an expert on broadband legislation, but it seems like a better solution would be encouraging investment into small scale ISPs. A federal legislation that ensures backbone access, major tax cuts for investors, a lot of red tape for ISPs trying to get above city-wide coverage, things like that. If you have 2-3 ISPs per town and tens of those in a large city the net neutrality issue goes away. edit:spelling
heurist 9y ago
Decentralize it! We need better measures of power centralization. When an ISP is effectively able to create its own monopolizing legislation, it might as well be part of the government. The government isn't going to buy them out and improve their architecture, so we need a new internet that is owned and operated by all of us all the time.
notjesse 9y ago
Australia did this. Ask any Australian what they think about the NBN, I doubt any will speak highly of it.
inetsee 9y ago
I don't think creating a government monopoly is the solution to the problem. I think there needs to be more competition rather than less. I think a good first step would be to remove the current barriers to local municipalities setting up their own internet services. There are a lot of small rural communities that have really crappy internet service, because the giant companies are unwilling to invest in the infrastructure required, but they do everything in their power to prevent the local governments from setting up internet service for their communities. Chattanooga is an excellent example of what can be accomplished by local government, including gigabit fiber internet at reasonable rates.
dmfdmf 9y ago
No. "Now observe the practical demonstration of the fact that without property rights, no other rights are possible. If censorship and the suppression of free speech ever get established in this country, they will have originated in [the FCC in] radio and television. The Property Status of Airwaves: http://www.criminalgovernment.com/docs/aynrand.html http://www.criminalgovernment.com/docs/aynrand.html
Avernar 9y ago
This is going in the complete opposite direction than what's needed. You definately don't want a single ISP especially if it's run by the government. You need more ISPs. A lot more. But for that to happen you need to make the last mile neutral and preferably run by an independent third party. The next best thing would be for the last mile ISPs being required to lease the last mile to other ISPs at a fixed rate. This still has problems as the last mile ISP can pull some shenanigans like prioritizing their own customers for repairs, messing with the other ISPs traffic, etc.

59 points by ourmandave 9y ago

jstanley 9y ago

People in countries other than the US might have something to say about that!

shaftoe 9y ago

Generally, when you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, nationalization isn't the way to go.

jstanley 9y ago
I strongly disagree. I think if you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, giving it to the government is the last thing you want to do. If you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, decentralisation is the way to go. Edit: Oops! I totally misread your comment ("is" vs "isn't"). Turns out I'm agreeing :)
- wslh 9y ago
  Governments inflate agency costs ad infinitum without increasing the QoS. This is not a law but based on statistics around the major countries.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Not always. Many European countries have nationalized healthcare, yet manage to have better healthcare outcomes than the US even though they spend much less per capita. The question isn't why _government_ leads to inflated cost, the question is why _American government_ leads to inflated cost.
    - mhh__ 9y ago
      Better healthcare outcomes? I think you mean access: For example, the NHS looks very good until you realise that the rankings include access; Based on case-by-case outcome alone, it ranks relatively poorly - certainly less than most people would guess. The US government spends about the same on healthcare as others do, the difference is in the amount of private healthcare spending.
  - jayd16 9y ago
    Is that why America's private healthcare system costs more than any other country and yet we do not have any where near the top outcomes? What statistics are you cherry picking to make your argument?
    - erikpukinskis 9y ago
      Other countries don’t have an entire political party who sees it as their mandate to sabotage all government social services.
    - gonational 9y ago
      Government interference is precisely the cause of our high medical costs (for instance, what do you think would happen to the price of Doritos if the government required everyone to purchase one bag of Doritos every week?). Second to that is the government interference in farming (specifically, corn subsidies, which have led to an increase of corn products our food, resulting in higher inflammation levels in humans and the animals we eat, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc.). IOW, more government == more worse
      - jayd16 9y ago
        Medical costs were skyrocketing before the mandate and that growth has slowed since ACA passage. Your Doritos thought experiment isn't based in reality. Edit: because its so silly: A better parallel would be a world where everyone needed Doritos. In this world if you found yourself in a situation where you needed Doritos and didn't have it, you could check into a 7/11 and get a bag at the outrageous price of $5.00 for one of those little lunch ones. Thanks to Reagan, your Doritos needs cannot be turned down by 7/11 even if you can't pay. Everyone else has to pay for your overpriced Doritos. Does it make sense to buy cheap Doritos insurance now instead of the high cost of Emergency Doritos?
      - orf 9y ago
        How do you juggle that option with the fact that other countries with much more government intervention (or entirely government led, like the NHS) have much cheaper healthcare, and better outcomes. If everyone mandated that you had to buy dorritos, it's in dorritos interests to put the price up. But if the government produced the dorritos, and the government isn't a for profit business, it's in their interests to keep the prices as low as possible, at cost. There was this great thread I saw on /r/libertarian, where someone posted some images about the NHS. It was supposed to make 'socialised medicine' look terrible by showing an obese guy costing the NHS £200 a day for a bed while refusing to reduce their diet - "hey look with socialised medicine you are paying for this guy! How bad is that!!!" However it backfired when all everyone was talking about was how it only cost £200 a day for a bed.

aristocles 9y ago

I registered just to say this is literally the worst idea I've ever seen.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
Hello, friend. Welcome to the site. I see you're new here, so I thought I'd let you know why you're being downvoted. Your post isn't very substantive. You express your opinion, but you don't explain the thought processes behind your opinion. When combined with the snarkiness, it just wasn't a productive comment. If you haven't yet, read up on the Hacker News Guidelines[1], that may help when posting something somewhat controversial. We try hard to avoid forming an echo chamber here. Overly emotional and unsubstantive comments are downvoted, and controversial comments with a lot of substance to them are often(but not always, unfortunately) upvoted. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html edit: The irony of being downvoted for trying to maintain a positive, productive culture on this site is not lost to me. I won't bother to do so in the future.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. They were new. It's important to teach people these things instead of just deleting every comment that is bad. It's on all of us to maintain this site's culture, it's not just the mods' job. > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Noted.

hanklazard 9y ago

I would love for this to work, but im afraid the temptation for the government to control / censor information would be too great.

mungojelly 9y ago
How could they, though? Ban all encrypted traffic? Isn't that cat out of the bag?
astrodust 9y ago
Either the corporations are going to do it, or the government is going to do it. Pick one.
- benjohnson 9y ago
  The former please - it's been my experience that switching from Verizon to AT&T is somewhat easier than a bloody revolution.
  - astrodust 9y ago
    What if they merge? Then what?
    - grizzlylabs 9y ago
      Anti-Trust?
      - astrodust 9y ago
        What if the government isn't interested in that?
        rhino369 9y ago
        Civil law suits.

aaron-lebo 9y ago

I genuinely struggle to understand proposals like this. The current political system is broken - the FCC is symptomatic of that. In what world does it seem like a good idea to give more power to that broken system?

astrodust 9y ago
Then it's equally broken for everyone. Nationalized or quasi-nationalized (heavily regulated) telecom companies used to be dysfunctional and sometimes comically inept but at least they weren't actively hostile against consumers and businesses.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Do you remember the monopoly ATT "ma bell" when a long distance call to friends or family was so expensive that it was reserved for emergencies or very special occasions? Maybe they weren't actively hostile in their pricing but compared to today when you can talk to anyone in the world for no cost, it's not something I'd want to return to.
  - astrodust 9y ago
    Data services back then like frame relay were so slow they could barely carry a single voice conversation over them. Long distance switching involved physically connecting together circuits over vast distances, the equipment involved was fantastically expensive and extremely intricate, in many cases all mechanical. So yeah, it was stupidly expensive to make long distance calls because the equipment itself was stupidly expensive. Now the net cost of adding a phone circuit is almost zero, they just provision it on the digital switch. That today they charge for long distance is the criminal thing: We can video chat to anyone in the world for basically free. The singular reason for declining prices is not deregulation, but the simple fact that as technology improves the cost of data goes down. First it became practical to transmit voice over IP, then later video, and now it's trivial for both cases. The world you don't want to return to is where IP isn't omnipresent and bandwidth is crazy expensive because the equipment to handle it at scale hasn't been invented yet.

zerostar07 9y ago

You mean, like china?

natural219 9y ago

I'm surprisingly sympathetic to idea of nationalizing the internet, but the paragraph about "deregulation in general is bad" seriously baffles me. Not only because taking a principled stance on "regulation as a whole" is abhorrently coarse for me, but they specifically reference the airline industry -- and then links to an article talking about how good deregulation was? -- without blinking an eye or realizing that a vast majority of people view the 1978 airline deregulation as an obviously good thing. I'm now slightly less convinced that nationalizing the internet would be a good thing.

rayiner 9y ago

> Conventional wisdom has been that private industry is better equipped to handle things than the government. Deregulation has been the agenda of baby boomer conservatives. And it has failed. It has failed the environment. It has failed the airline industry. It has failed education. It will fail the internet. The biggest trend in administrative law over the last few decades has been reductions in the degree to which the government micro-manages the economy. In both the U.S. (with bi-partisan support) and the EU, industries have been privatized, invasive regulatory regimes have been replaced with light-touch ones, etc. Germany energy law post-1998, for example, is pretty recognizable to someone familiar with American energy law. There was a time when the government either owned major industries, or micro-managed things like the routes airlines or trucking companies ran and the prices they charged. Pretty much the whole developed world has agreed to get rid of most of that. By and large, these reforms have been overwhelmingly successful. In the U.S. and EU, you can go almost anywhere and get a 4G mobile wireless connection, using networks built almost entirely with private money. UPS and FedEx--and services like Amazon built on them--are the direct outgrowth of the deregulation of air freight. Consumer airline ticket prices are a fraction of what they were a few decades ago (even though airline technology has evolved very little in that time!). If you look at hiccups like wireless data caps or airline seats getting smaller as signs that deregulation has "failed," frankly you're off the reservation. Just look at areas of the economy that haven't been subject to deregulation. Some of the worst environmental effects are caused by public water utilities, which have for decades failed to make investments to improve their infrastructure. In most places, public water utilities freely dump untreated sewage into rivers when obsolete combined sewer/rainwater systems overflow, they poison kids by pumping water through ancient lead pipes, etc. Re-regulation and nationalization is on peoples' tongues here in the U.S., but I'd suggest looking over the pond to see what they're doing. How did Sweden wire up its country with fiber? It wasn't through massive government investment, or by forcing private companies into the charity business through universal service obligations. Stockholm empowered to municipal operator to lay dark fiber, with no government subsidies and no mandate to cover any particular portion of the population: https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Stockholms%20Stokab%20-%20A%20Blueprint%20for%20Ubiquitous%20Fiber%20Connectivity%20FINAL%20VERSION.pdf https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Stockholms%20Stokab%20-%20A%.... The network was built out not based on "public interest" considerations or trying to fight urban poverty, but simply by building in a demand-driven basis to high-value customers first. And unlike the U.S., Sweden didn't wire up rural areas by forcing private operators to subsidize rural customers. Instead, it simply gave rural residents a 50% tax break on the cost of hooking up their own fiber: http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/Opinions/2013/Rural_FTTH_Nordics_Final.pdf http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/Opinions/2013/Rural_FTTH....

natalyarostova 9y ago

When people want something nationalized, it usually comes with the asterisk *as long as the gov officials managing it are part of my tribe and preferred policy set. This isn't always bad, since sometimes we all are in general agreement, but it's important to ask yourself: in political systems power can shift fast, do you want these policies to be part of this shift? Do you want the internet to be managed by trump appointees?

rhino369 9y ago
Even if it isn't caught up in partisan fighting, the average voter isn't going to want to spend money on upgrades. Do you think your grandma wants to increase the price of her internet by 10 bucks a month to get gigabit? Mine wouldn't.
confounded 9y ago
Indeed, while I really want to like the proposal, democracy in the US doesn’t seem strong enough (and the judiciary don’t seem interested enough) for it to work. It’s easy to imagine the Internet facing a different class of threats, from a united front of spooks, rights-holders-groups, and moralists. I can’t imagine the open uncensored web surviving long, unless it had some kind of mini constitution of its own. This said, the future under private companies doesn’t look great either. ISPs are uncompetitive, exploitative, and anti-consumer, and the corporations who act as censors (Google, Apple, Facebook) have increasing skin in the rights-holder-group game, and are happy to build censorship machines for lobbyists, spies, and other authoritarians. Maybe it’s worth thinking about what such a “Constitution for the Internet” might be now, before it completely disappears. (And perhaps while TBL and Vint Cerf have some fight left in them for a roadshow)!

AmIFirstToThink 9y ago

So Hillary or Obama or Trump or Cruz can decide what goes on internet? No, thank you. I would rather take the chaos of AT&T/Verizon/Comcast/Charter/TimeWarner. At least those can be defeated, the way AOL went away. Is less regulation the problem today, or is it less competition? Better approach would be let cities and towns compete the way water and gas or electricity is provided. People will vote locally and the best approach will win. People will vote with their wallets, their feet and at the ballet box. Megacorps or MegaGovs are not going be the answer.

rjeli 9y ago

Hm, I’m interested to see a good proposal for this - >Last Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission, led by deregulation zealot Ajit Pai Never mind. Unsubstantiated ad hominem in the first sentence. Move along.

partycoder 9y ago

The problem with making the government larger (in terms of responsibilities and influence) is that the incentive to be corrupt grows. Then, when your government is large, the performance of your country starts depending on having a long interrupted sequence of perfect administrations, something that is very unlikely. The idea of government is to have an entity that represents the best interests of people, to preserve and grow social capital, and achieve balance, not absolute control.

partycoder 9y ago
Being a bit more specific, I think the Internet should be regulated to prevent anti-consumer behavior, but not nationalized. Nationalize the Internet means that only the country can act as ISP.

grizzlylabs 9y ago

The government screws up something simple.... net neutrality... so let's give the whole darn thing to government! The Government screws up the VA Hospitals so let's give them our entire health system! Has there ever been a situation that the government screws up and someone doesn't gets the bright idea to double down?

dailyvijeos 9y ago

Maybe not because it’s a confederation of peers. As for ISP’s, Australia is not a good example because it’s poorly run, which it doesn’t have to be. Instead, perhaps a GSE value-for-money internet, TV and mobile provider that’s a non-profit, customer-first, no-nonsense, doesn’t gouge people no matter their zipcode, and upfront about privacy and pricing. That way, where monopolies / oligopolies form and rural customers miss out, there is an alternative at a reasonable price. It’s like single-payer for connectivity that’s not the only game in town. Less extreme, more practical and better run than the post office... more like a credit-union. Heck, make it partially employee- and/or customer-owned so people care.

monday_ 9y ago

First of all, the way that people on both sides of the political spectrum decry the federal and government as authoritarian and at the same time want to give it more power, is literally Orwellian. Doublethink, to be precise. Second, this article argues that the government should have a try at running the internet since the private sector ostensibly failed. The irony is that the situation today is exactly a product of government mismanagement. A vital infrastructure is underdeveloped, overpriced and operated by a duopoly - where exactly was the US Government when this happened? Where was the antitrust authority? Where was a liberal President of eight years, a man deified by the likes of the Daily Dot, who took on health insurance companies? Did the Congress deign to investigate this issue? And did the voters "vote them out" for failing to do that, as the author suggests? Of course not. People tend to have a job, a life and a hobby - they can only care about a limited set of issues. And an increase in broadband pricing or a change in ISP product set is not one of those. They can get riled up, short term, but probably won't be able to sustain pressure, as is the case with the second amendment or healthcare. This is why the government officials have for so long neglected this issue, and this why the nationalized internet bureaucracy will have the same relationship with third party contractors (that ISPs will become) as FCC does. I am not an expert on broadband legislation, but it seems like a better solution would be encouraging investment into small scale ISPs. A federal legislation that ensures backbone access, major tax cuts for investors, a lot of red tape for ISPs trying to get above city-wide coverage, things like that. If you have 2-3 ISPs per town and tens of those in a large city the net neutrality issue goes away. edit:spelling

heurist 9y ago

Decentralize it! We need better measures of power centralization. When an ISP is effectively able to create its own monopolizing legislation, it might as well be part of the government. The government isn't going to buy them out and improve their architecture, so we need a new internet that is owned and operated by all of us all the time.

notjesse 9y ago

Australia did this. Ask any Australian what they think about the NBN, I doubt any will speak highly of it.

inetsee 9y ago

I don't think creating a government monopoly is the solution to the problem. I think there needs to be more competition rather than less. I think a good first step would be to remove the current barriers to local municipalities setting up their own internet services. There are a lot of small rural communities that have really crappy internet service, because the giant companies are unwilling to invest in the infrastructure required, but they do everything in their power to prevent the local governments from setting up internet service for their communities. Chattanooga is an excellent example of what can be accomplished by local government, including gigabit fiber internet at reasonable rates.

dmfdmf 9y ago

No. "Now observe the practical demonstration of the fact that without property rights, no other rights are possible. If censorship and the suppression of free speech ever get established in this country, they will have originated in [the FCC in] radio and television. The Property Status of Airwaves: http://www.criminalgovernment.com/docs/aynrand.html http://www.criminalgovernment.com/docs/aynrand.html

Avernar 9y ago

This is going in the complete opposite direction than what's needed. You definately don't want a single ISP especially if it's run by the government. You need more ISPs. A lot more. But for that to happen you need to make the last mile neutral and preferably run by an independent third party. The next best thing would be for the last mile ISPs being required to lease the last mile to other ISPs at a fixed rate. This still has problems as the last mile ISP can pull some shenanigans like prioritizing their own customers for repairs, messing with the other ISPs traffic, etc.