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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

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.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      Technology has helped bring down the cost, obviously. But a big part of the reason long distance was so expensive was because government regulations forced AT&T to use its long-distance service to subsidize local service: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/1983/7/v7n4-6.pdf https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/r....
      - astrodust 9y ago
        That's just part of the reason. The real question is did deregulation actually decrase prices and increase competition as was promised? Here (Ontario) we had one telephone company and one cable company prior to deregulation. The telephone company (Bell Canada) was very tightly regulated. While telephone service wasn't necessarily the least expensive in the world, it was very reliable and at least ten years ahead of what was being offered in the US. By virtue of their rapid conversion to a fullly digital network, made possible by their partnership with Nortel, services like ISDN, the precursor to DSL, were reltively cheap and readaily available. I knew people in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s that could not, for no amount of money, get anything faster than dial-up. Local telecom providers, of which there were many, were all using obsolete equipment and had terrible infrastructure. At the same time in Ontario anyone could get dual-channel ISDN for around $50/mo. After deregulation here there was a little bit of competition, but then, like the US, the market quickly stabilized into a live and let live state where nobody wants to compete with anyone else for fear of retribution. Cellular service packages are suspiciously identical in terms of features and pricing. Since they're de-regulated there's little we can do. We can't force them to fix their pricing. We can't force them to compete. We can't tell them to do a damned thing they don't already want to do. Now Bell Canada is too busy being a media company, it owns a bunch of television stations, to care about anything other than profit. There was an opportunity there to keep them regulated and have a neutral, non-discriminatory network provider, but that ship has long since sailed.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
mungojelly 9y ago
We all want to move power to the people and away from the system. The question is what path could give the system less power. The existing power structure has plenty of control over the current arrangement, it's not like this is an idyllic state of nature we shouldn't disturb. We currently have state-mandated "private" monopolies, that is, fiefdoms. It'd be hard to do worse than that.
skywhopper 9y ago
If we have to choose between direct government control or government-endorsed cartel control that will just ease towards full monopoly sooner or later, I would rather just skip to nationalization so we can start talking about how we reprivatize it in a new, competitive fashion.
- api 9y ago
  Telecom is like health care. What we have now combines all the worst things about a private system with all the worst things about a state run system.
  - jquery 9y ago
    If you think we have the worst things about a state-run system, you haven't tried using the internet in certain countries which do not need to be named. It's far from as bad as it can get.
- jquery 9y ago
  > skip to nationalization so we can start talking about how we reprivatize it in a new, competitive fashion. Can you give an example of this successfully happening with other industries of comparable size? It seems like a pipe dream to imagine giving our government total China-like power over the internet only for them to benevolently hand it back later.
rayiner 9y ago
> The current political system is broken - the FCC is symptomatic of that. If you look beyond the crisis de jour, the FCC over the last 20 years has largely followed the same path as the other telecom regulators in the developed world. Denmark, for example, deregulated telecom until recently getting rid of its version of the FCC: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/mercatus-layton-alternatives-to-regulation-v1.pdf https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/mercatus-layton-altern... (warning: PDF). The biggest impediment in the U.S. has been state and local governments, which have frustrated Congress's efforts. While Congress, for example, made it illegal to grant local telecom monopolies in 1994/1996, state and local governments responded by imposing such onerous terms on potential new entrants that nobody but incumbents wanted to invest. In Baltimore, for example, Comcast has a de facto monopoly. The press, which is largely ignorant of the nuances of telecom regulation, paints it as Baltimore giving Comcast a monopoly contract: https://baltimorebrew.com/2016/10/18/city-set-to-approve-10-year-renewal-of-comcast-cable-monopoly https://baltimorebrew.com/2016/10/18/city-set-to-approve-10-.... In reality, there is no exclusivity in Comcast's franchise. Rather, the franchise requirements are so onerous that no other company has even applied to build a network in Baltimore. That's despite Baltimore actively trying to solicit Google and other companies to come in and compete with Comcast: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/snubbed-by-google-fiber-mad-at-comcast-baltimore-seeks-its-own-fiber https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/snubb.... What few people in this debate appreciate is that telecom is monumentally capital intensive, and that money has to come from somewhere. Moreover, that money is always the subject of competition from other needs. If we depend on private industry, investing in telecom has to be sufficiently attractive in comparison to other investments. If we depend on the government, money spent on maintenance and upgrading telecom infrastructure is money we don't spend on schools, public transit, etc. There is no "free lunch" where you get private companies to spend tens of billions of dollars a year while simultaneously adhering to a raft of government-set public interest objectives.
JoshTriplett 9y ago
People seem to make proposals to increase government power and control while thinking optimistically of how the best possible government could use that power, rather than thinking about how a much worse government could abuse that power. Even when the current government is one you like, you should always think carefully about agreeing to give them more power, and consider what happens when (not if) that government becomes one that is hostile towards you. If an idea to centralize more power and control suddenly sounds terrible under those circumstances, then it was terrible to begin with. If an idea still sounds good even under those circumstances, and has enough safeguards in place to make it incredibly hard to abuse, then it might be a good idea.
- legulere 9y ago
  The alternative is that big corporations like Facebook and Google will control the internet, which seems way worse.
  - pitaj 9y ago
    There is competition and choices between big corporations, limited as they may be. There's only one government.
  - JoshTriplett 9y ago
    Concentrations of power are problematic no matter where they're concentrated. At least with those, you have options to avoid them or mitigate them, and they don't have the force of law behind them.
mrgordon 9y ago
It’s very similar to the question of whether it’s better for the government to provide healthcare or to get it from a private for-profit megacorp with an army of lobbyists. The government is by no means perfect, but at least their incentives are aligned with mine unlike a corporation with obligations to their shareholders. The FCC was doing fine until Trump in my opinion. The telecom/cable/ISPs have been problematic for a long time due to natural monopolies and too little regulation (in my opinion) but the FCC’s actions have usually been attempts to fix those problems (when the industry lobbyists don’t win out) If we are going to throw the FCC under the bus because it has taken a huge turn for the worse under Trump, then we’ll also end up saying the same thing about nearly every government department. DeVos is making a joke of our education department, science and environmental positions are filled with people who don’t believe in them, the State department has been shedding experienced diplomats as quickly as possible, etc. It’s easy to blame government for these things (and more checks and balances, particularly on executive power, would certainly be welcome) but unregulated private schools and letting companies be stewards of the environment is much worse.

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.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Technology has helped bring down the cost, obviously. But a big part of the reason long distance was so expensive was because government regulations forced AT&T to use its long-distance service to subsidize local service: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/1983/7/v7n4-6.pdf https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/r....
    - astrodust 9y ago
      That's just part of the reason. The real question is did deregulation actually decrase prices and increase competition as was promised? Here (Ontario) we had one telephone company and one cable company prior to deregulation. The telephone company (Bell Canada) was very tightly regulated. While telephone service wasn't necessarily the least expensive in the world, it was very reliable and at least ten years ahead of what was being offered in the US. By virtue of their rapid conversion to a fullly digital network, made possible by their partnership with Nortel, services like ISDN, the precursor to DSL, were reltively cheap and readaily available. I knew people in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s that could not, for no amount of money, get anything faster than dial-up. Local telecom providers, of which there were many, were all using obsolete equipment and had terrible infrastructure. At the same time in Ontario anyone could get dual-channel ISDN for around $50/mo. After deregulation here there was a little bit of competition, but then, like the US, the market quickly stabilized into a live and let live state where nobody wants to compete with anyone else for fear of retribution. Cellular service packages are suspiciously identical in terms of features and pricing. Since they're de-regulated there's little we can do. We can't force them to fix their pricing. We can't force them to compete. We can't tell them to do a damned thing they don't already want to do. Now Bell Canada is too busy being a media company, it owns a bunch of television stations, to care about anything other than profit. There was an opportunity there to keep them regulated and have a neutral, non-discriminatory network provider, but that ship has long since sailed.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

mungojelly 9y ago

We all want to move power to the people and away from the system. The question is what path could give the system less power. The existing power structure has plenty of control over the current arrangement, it's not like this is an idyllic state of nature we shouldn't disturb. We currently have state-mandated "private" monopolies, that is, fiefdoms. It'd be hard to do worse than that.

skywhopper 9y ago

If we have to choose between direct government control or government-endorsed cartel control that will just ease towards full monopoly sooner or later, I would rather just skip to nationalization so we can start talking about how we reprivatize it in a new, competitive fashion.

api 9y ago
Telecom is like health care. What we have now combines all the worst things about a private system with all the worst things about a state run system.
- jquery 9y ago
  If you think we have the worst things about a state-run system, you haven't tried using the internet in certain countries which do not need to be named. It's far from as bad as it can get.
jquery 9y ago
> skip to nationalization so we can start talking about how we reprivatize it in a new, competitive fashion. Can you give an example of this successfully happening with other industries of comparable size? It seems like a pipe dream to imagine giving our government total China-like power over the internet only for them to benevolently hand it back later.

rayiner 9y ago

> The current political system is broken - the FCC is symptomatic of that. If you look beyond the crisis de jour, the FCC over the last 20 years has largely followed the same path as the other telecom regulators in the developed world. Denmark, for example, deregulated telecom until recently getting rid of its version of the FCC: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/mercatus-layton-alternatives-to-regulation-v1.pdf https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/mercatus-layton-altern... (warning: PDF). The biggest impediment in the U.S. has been state and local governments, which have frustrated Congress's efforts. While Congress, for example, made it illegal to grant local telecom monopolies in 1994/1996, state and local governments responded by imposing such onerous terms on potential new entrants that nobody but incumbents wanted to invest. In Baltimore, for example, Comcast has a de facto monopoly. The press, which is largely ignorant of the nuances of telecom regulation, paints it as Baltimore giving Comcast a monopoly contract: https://baltimorebrew.com/2016/10/18/city-set-to-approve-10-year-renewal-of-comcast-cable-monopoly https://baltimorebrew.com/2016/10/18/city-set-to-approve-10-.... In reality, there is no exclusivity in Comcast's franchise. Rather, the franchise requirements are so onerous that no other company has even applied to build a network in Baltimore. That's despite Baltimore actively trying to solicit Google and other companies to come in and compete with Comcast: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/snubbed-by-google-fiber-mad-at-comcast-baltimore-seeks-its-own-fiber https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/snubb.... What few people in this debate appreciate is that telecom is monumentally capital intensive, and that money has to come from somewhere. Moreover, that money is always the subject of competition from other needs. If we depend on private industry, investing in telecom has to be sufficiently attractive in comparison to other investments. If we depend on the government, money spent on maintenance and upgrading telecom infrastructure is money we don't spend on schools, public transit, etc. There is no "free lunch" where you get private companies to spend tens of billions of dollars a year while simultaneously adhering to a raft of government-set public interest objectives.

JoshTriplett 9y ago

People seem to make proposals to increase government power and control while thinking optimistically of how the best possible government could use that power, rather than thinking about how a much worse government could abuse that power. Even when the current government is one you like, you should always think carefully about agreeing to give them more power, and consider what happens when (not if) that government becomes one that is hostile towards you. If an idea to centralize more power and control suddenly sounds terrible under those circumstances, then it was terrible to begin with. If an idea still sounds good even under those circumstances, and has enough safeguards in place to make it incredibly hard to abuse, then it might be a good idea.

legulere 9y ago
The alternative is that big corporations like Facebook and Google will control the internet, which seems way worse.
- pitaj 9y ago
  There is competition and choices between big corporations, limited as they may be. There's only one government.
- JoshTriplett 9y ago
  Concentrations of power are problematic no matter where they're concentrated. At least with those, you have options to avoid them or mitigate them, and they don't have the force of law behind them.

mrgordon 9y ago

It’s very similar to the question of whether it’s better for the government to provide healthcare or to get it from a private for-profit megacorp with an army of lobbyists. The government is by no means perfect, but at least their incentives are aligned with mine unlike a corporation with obligations to their shareholders. The FCC was doing fine until Trump in my opinion. The telecom/cable/ISPs have been problematic for a long time due to natural monopolies and too little regulation (in my opinion) but the FCC’s actions have usually been attempts to fix those problems (when the industry lobbyists don’t win out) If we are going to throw the FCC under the bus because it has taken a huge turn for the worse under Trump, then we’ll also end up saying the same thing about nearly every government department. DeVos is making a joke of our education department, science and environmental positions are filled with people who don’t believe in them, the State department has been shedding experienced diplomats as quickly as possible, etc. It’s easy to blame government for these things (and more checks and balances, particularly on executive power, would certainly be welcome) but unregulated private schools and letting companies be stewards of the environment is much worse.