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> When reading about Comcast I was always wondering why they have no competition when everyone who comments is complaining. Suppose you were a major company wi

by mcherm 9y ago

> When reading about Comcast I was always wondering why they have no competition when everyone who comments is complaining. Suppose you were a major company with big dollars to spend on offering internet service... someone like Google, for example. Then suppose you wanted to provide service in Louisville, Kentucky. How many years do you think it would take to get permission to attach your lines to the existing telephone poles (owned by the city) if the local telephone and cable providers try to tie you up in lawsuits? What if the city's mayor was enthusiastically supportive, and willing to pass new laws and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of the city's money going to court to permit Google to start offering service. It would still take years to get permission. Fortunately, this isn't one of the many cases where state or local laws prohibit other companies from competing with the one local cable company, or it couldn't happen at all. Now imagine it is anyone OTHER than Google with their huge warchest, legal department, public support, and local government support. It wouldn't get anywhere at all. If it did, the cable company would drop rates for a few years until the competitor went out of business, then raise them afterward. The United States pays lip service to the idea of competition, but most of our politicians have gotten "competition" confused with "supporting big corporations". This is why internet service providing is a monopoly or oligopoly in nearly all US locations.

cookiecaper 9y ago
I think this is really a critical thing to get integrated into the American public dialogue. Pro-business and pro-competition does not mean zero governmental oversight or regulation. My opinion is that if there isn't substantial churn or upheaval in the market at least a couple of times per decade, there is something broken in the market, and we should be looking at what kind of actions would be useful to allow fresh, new entrants to make an impact (without explicitly picking winners or issuing subsidies). Example: the online marketplace for social, search, and email is stagnant for obscure legal reasons. We should identify these (copyright and the CFAA) and remove the barriers. Megacorps have exploited core conservative values to guilt people into believing that they're commies if they refuse to write a blank check for any big company that wants one. We can make real progress, and it's important progress, by highlighting to Republican/conservative-leaning voters that selling their country to corporate raiders is not a pre-requisite for being pro-business or pro-small-government.
- TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
  You correctly call out "copyright" as a problem in the free market, then go on to blame Republicans for the status quo, when it was the entertainment industry and THEIR captured legislators -- the Democrats -- which gave us the DMCA, which has been used as one of the biggest hammers to prevent competition ever conceived. So please don't single out conservatives for giving us the monopolized internet we have now. Both sides are to blame, in their own ways. Unless we, as a country, stop making these sorts of issues tribal, we're never going to fix them.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    I'm not trying to blame anyone specifically. This is just a major rhetorical exploit that works on Republican-leaning voters. I know because I and many of my associates are Republican-leaning and very conservative, at least by HN standards. We need to call out these divisive rhetorical exploits because they're used by nefarious groups to subvert actual dialogue and keep people at the extremes. By no means do I believe that Democrats or liberals have clean hands on this. All sides deliberately ignore and subvert intellectual property matters because it is so dang profitable, and this affects "liberal" industries much more deeply than "conservative" ones. Copyright is fundamentally "big government", which more conservatives would recognize if the narrative around this issue wasn't so tightly controlled. And that's not to say that copyright doesn't serve a useful purpose at all, just that we should be cautious and wary about it. Since bad political actors and profiteers actively and successfully cultivate tribal dynamics for their benefit, the tribal context and instinct can't be ignored. It must be worked within. Approaching a tribe as an outsider just causes them to raise their shields and ignore anything you say. Good principles and values drive most actors on both sides of the aisle. Political alignment basically seems to just come down to which principles we prefer to favor/bias. Under that context, the need for balanced, inclusive dialogue is clear, and we should all be grateful for the diversity of opinion that keeps everything in balance. Maintaining that diversity means working within the structures of human association to create authentic, grateful alliances built on that recognized need, instead of allowing others to abuse those same structures to provoke destructive animosities.

by mcherm 9y ago

cookiecaper 9y ago

I think this is really a critical thing to get integrated into the American public dialogue. Pro-business and pro-competition does not mean zero governmental oversight or regulation. My opinion is that if there isn't substantial churn or upheaval in the market at least a couple of times per decade, there is something broken in the market, and we should be looking at what kind of actions would be useful to allow fresh, new entrants to make an impact (without explicitly picking winners or issuing subsidies). Example: the online marketplace for social, search, and email is stagnant for obscure legal reasons. We should identify these (copyright and the CFAA) and remove the barriers. Megacorps have exploited core conservative values to guilt people into believing that they're commies if they refuse to write a blank check for any big company that wants one. We can make real progress, and it's important progress, by highlighting to Republican/conservative-leaning voters that selling their country to corporate raiders is not a pre-requisite for being pro-business or pro-small-government.

TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
You correctly call out "copyright" as a problem in the free market, then go on to blame Republicans for the status quo, when it was the entertainment industry and THEIR captured legislators -- the Democrats -- which gave us the DMCA, which has been used as one of the biggest hammers to prevent competition ever conceived. So please don't single out conservatives for giving us the monopolized internet we have now. Both sides are to blame, in their own ways. Unless we, as a country, stop making these sorts of issues tribal, we're never going to fix them.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  I'm not trying to blame anyone specifically. This is just a major rhetorical exploit that works on Republican-leaning voters. I know because I and many of my associates are Republican-leaning and very conservative, at least by HN standards. We need to call out these divisive rhetorical exploits because they're used by nefarious groups to subvert actual dialogue and keep people at the extremes. By no means do I believe that Democrats or liberals have clean hands on this. All sides deliberately ignore and subvert intellectual property matters because it is so dang profitable, and this affects "liberal" industries much more deeply than "conservative" ones. Copyright is fundamentally "big government", which more conservatives would recognize if the narrative around this issue wasn't so tightly controlled. And that's not to say that copyright doesn't serve a useful purpose at all, just that we should be cautious and wary about it. Since bad political actors and profiteers actively and successfully cultivate tribal dynamics for their benefit, the tribal context and instinct can't be ignored. It must be worked within. Approaching a tribe as an outsider just causes them to raise their shields and ignore anything you say. Good principles and values drive most actors on both sides of the aisle. Political alignment basically seems to just come down to which principles we prefer to favor/bias. Under that context, the need for balanced, inclusive dialogue is clear, and we should all be grateful for the diversity of opinion that keeps everything in balance. Maintaining that diversity means working within the structures of human association to create authentic, grateful alliances built on that recognized need, instead of allowing others to abuse those same structures to provoke destructive animosities.