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We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

253 points by BravoCo 9y ago

veeragoni 9y ago
I am hoping Elon Musk could rescue us from this. Hopefully with satellite based internet using SpaceX rockets.
bitsnbytes 9y ago
I like their fire to get this done. however , the ISP market is a market hated by its cutomer base for decades. So you got to ask why hasnt this been done before at a reasonable scale or more often? Didnt even google fiber run into epic hurdles due to monopolistic regulations setup by the telcom oligarch? if Google fiber struggled how is a small startup going to be able to play? I'm skeptical in the success of this , but i will be folowing and possibly get involved and hope they succeed.
- betterunix2 9y ago
  It's not just monopolistic regulations. Outside of dense urban areas there is not much room for competition among ISPs. At some point it is never going to be profitable to compete; and in some places it will never be profitable to even build the infrastructure in the first place. The only reason DSL is widely available is that phone companies were forced to build the copper network even in unprofitable places, so adding DSL service was not too hard for them. If we really want a market-based approach we need infrastructure sharing rules. Prior to 2003 we had lots of competition in the DSL market; after the sharing rules were eliminated competition vanished almost overnight and we wound up with the monopoly situation we face today. Infrastructure sharing requirements have worked very well in France, where fiber optic service is more widely available and costs consumers less.
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    > At some point it is never going to be profitable to compete; and in some places it will never be profitable to even build the infrastructure in the first place. If there are no regulations here's how it goes: first ISPs compete in urban areas, this is very profitable with traditional active fiber to the building and ethernet to each apartment. It takes like $50 CAPEX per customer. But at some point as competition increases margins get lower and certain ISPs start looking into rural areas where they can have no real competition, i.e. DSL or radio is not a competition to fiber. New ISPs emerge too as people see an opportunity to profit from temporary geographical monopoly. So they start building in rural areas, enjoying huge margins. Today they'd use something like GPON, which is very cheap compared to the old days. It goes on until at some point the hard part becomes finding areas from where they can profit the most and where there is no real competition. This is when some start competing with other ISPs in rural areas. But as margins start to shrink in some areas due to competition they prioritize investment into areas competition unlikely to reach. There will be far away neglected areas still, but here's a twist, since there is a lot of competition people who are willing to pay will be able to find a whole bunch of ISPs willing to build fiber or at least radio links with them. In other words - it's always profitable, regulations really is the only problem. Forcing to share infrastructure is also not necessary. It helps only if monopolies share it with everyone, not small players. With no regulations market solves this pretty well.
    - iamnotlarry 9y ago
      As a little experiment, I picked a random dot in the middle of Nevada--northern Nevada, far away from Las Vegas. I landed on this house: <deleted out of respect for the owner>. This looks pretty rural to me. Then I went to their telco and the first thing on the homepage was a link to check for fiber availability. Fiber is available for this home. You might have to rethink your plan for competition. I'm guessing the result won't be too different for Mississippi, Texas, Ohio, etc. EDIT: I tried again and landed in Batesville, AR. It seems there are three Fiber ISPs here. Edited for courtesy to individual property owners.
      - kalleboo 9y ago
        It almost seems like semi-rural areas are a better place to start, as they're less regulated (no "cable monopoly", no NIMBYs) and the properties are too far away to have the options of Cable/DSL.
      - equalunique 9y ago
        Verizon's site will say that Fios is available where I used to live in Haymarket VA, but when I call them up and ask for it, they say it was an error on their site.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    > Infrastructure sharing requirements have worked very well in France, where fiber optic service is more widely available and costs consumers less. According to OECD, fiber penetration is 7.9% in France versus 11.2% in the US: http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/1.10-PctFibreToTotalBroadband-2016-12.xls http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/1.10-PctFibreToTotalBroadb.... Average broadband speeds in the US are also almost twice as fast as in France: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-report.pdf https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t....
joeyspn 9y ago
In 2019 SpaceX should start deploying their satellite constellation... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_satellite_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_satellite_constellation
- nautilus12 9y ago
  Round trip to a satellite will never rival fiber. Especially the way modern web apps are built inefficiently
  - vandweller 9y ago
    Could you expand on this? Do you think latency is the limiting factor for a LEO network?
    - vorotato 9y ago
      A geosynchronous orbit is ~36000km 36000 km / speed of light = .12 seconds So thats a ping of 240, minimum. That's assuming everything else in the system happened instantaneously. If you can however manage to solve the whole aiming at a moving target 360 kilometers away then maybe you could do a LEO network, and yeah the ping would be closer to 1.2 assuming again literally everything was instantaneous.
      - jacques_chester 9y ago
        As you note, LEO is very different from geostationary. Moving target doesn't strike me as impossible. A LEO satellite has a very predictable path, a stationary dish has a predictable movement relative to that path and a mobile phone knows where it is at all times.
      - greglindahl 9y ago
        There are several companies building (and a few shipping) flat-panel phased array antennae that can "point" at a moving target 360 km away. They also can switch to a new satellite instantly.
basicplus2 9y ago
All major infrastructure such as roads, power, communications etc needs to be owned and run by government upon which is then a level playing field on which free enterprise can then compete. When you have any major infrastructure essential to running a business in private hands you no longer have a democracy or free enterprise.
- amelius 9y ago
  And before anyone says that the government is probably too inefficient, consider that "own != build+maintain".
- amelius 9y ago
  On a related note, can't a digital platform such as iOS or Android be viewed as major infrastructure? How about Google's search?
  - jedmeyers 9y ago
    Main difference between digital platforms and government owned utilities it that utilities require access to land. No one is stopping you from rolling out your own digital platform, while there is no practical way to get any land to lay your own gas pipeline. Therefore the answer to your question is "no, Google search cannot be considered public infrastructure, and one for the reasons is that it does not require any public land to operate".
- pitaj 9y ago
  Yes, because absolute control of the internet is what we want government to have.
da_n 9y ago
I just loaded this article on my mobile device. An ad on the website triggered with auto playing audio that stopped background media playback of my device. I class these type of ads as a type of vermin, and generally avoid any website that contains them. Why should I trust an organisation that chooses to run user hostile ads on their site line this to make a better internet?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- vorotato 9y ago
  This is a literal ad hominem fallacy. Whether someone is honest or good doesn't have any bearing on any individual statement's veracity. A statement is true or false regardless of who says it. Additionally the article was written by an author who is not responsible for the advertisements, or really any actions of this establishment which are entirely outside of their control. All being said, yeah that sounds horrible, and you probably shouldn't trust them as they are a for profit, but that's not an argument as to whether they are wrong or not.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    > This is a literal ad hominem fallacy. This is rather a problem with the author who is benefiting from the ad-driven Internet while preaching for something else. It's like a weapons reseller advocating for peace.
    - betterunix2 9y ago
      Is there some non-ad-driven web ecosystem that I somehow missed? Just because the web currently depends on ads to pay for things does not mean that it is an OK situation or that we should tolerate every intrusion by advertisers.
      - ekianjo 9y ago
        > non-ad-driven web ecosystem that I somehow missed? Yes there is. Patreon and similar systems.
pmoriarty 9y ago
An Internet that is completely decentralized and independent of gatekeepers is the only long-term hope that I can see, and it's a very remote hope at that. There are too many powerful, vested interests in controlling people and their communication to let that happen. The only reason the Internet was ever as free as it was that it slipped under the radar of those very interests and wasn't taken seriously enough at first. So its users had a decade or two of relative freedom that's now steadily being chipped away.
- zeep 9y ago
  Maybe suing ISPs for blocking content (or slowing down content) could work too? Imagine if they would deliberately block content that would eventually cause loss of life
- gwright 9y ago
  What freedom are you talking about that has been lost? There has always been a problem with the last-mile, layer-2 infrastructure but if you are talking about IP layer services and higher it seems like there is nothing preventing you from providing what ever service you can imagine. IP transit is a bit difficult to compete in because of the layer-2 problem but providing higher level services is much easier now because you don't even have to build a data center, just deploy on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, etc.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  Trouble is nobody's yet figured out how to build a completely decentralized internet that is anywhere near as good as the regular internet. Mostly because wireless technologies still don't scale that far, which means wires in the ground, which means gatekeepers on the other end.
- jason_slack 9y ago
  > An Internet that is completely decentralized and > independent of gatekeepers is the only long-term > hope that I can see, and it's a very remote hope at that. How do you see this happening? Some big interconnected mesh network? At some point there needs to be a backbone connection right? Or do I misunderstand? I, personally, could go to Level 3 and get my own fiber circuit in my house for around $1700/month and act as a gateway for all my neighboring houses but then aren't I subject to laws/rules that big ISP's are?
xkarga00 9y ago
Other related acts: https://www.mail-archive.com/cypherpunks@lists.cpunks.org/msg09156.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cypherpunks@lists.cpunks.org/ms...
martin1975 9y ago
MuniFiber.com. Towns are slowly rolling their own fiber to the home. This is one answer to breaking cable monopolies. edit: Apologies, muninetworks.org is the true website. I've been reading way too much about FTTH obviously and partially substituted the website name :)
- devty 9y ago
  Was interested in learning more, I think the correct website is https://muninetworks.org/content/fiber-optic-network https://muninetworks.org/content/fiber-optic-network
- grahamburger 9y ago
  I'm also working on startyourownisp.com. I've got a ways to go in it but maybe someone will find it useful!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ghthor 9y ago
This is where a new startup isp needs to pair with Artemis networks can create a next gen wireless network that puts these big telecoms to shame.
rayiner 9y ago
> internet infrastructure that is locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people who connect to it In theory our public transit is “locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people” rather than shareholders. Yet public transit is almost uniformly awful in the US. If you live in San Francisco, do you really want your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?
- nerdponx 9y ago
  Either your utilities are run by big businesses who don't care about you, or they're run by local governments, which in turn are beholden to special interest groups who don't care about you, some of which are big businesses. Seems like you can't win.
  - pitaj 9y ago
    At least there is a chance of competition with private operations.
- Can_Not 9y ago
  You can show them Chattanooga as a case study where the results were optimal. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpk77/chattanooga-gigabit-fiber-network https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpk77/chattanoog... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17/how-chattanooga-beat-google-fiber-by-half-a-decade/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17... https://www.thedailybeast.com/chattanooga-has-its-own-broadbandwhy-doesnt-every-city https://www.thedailybeast.com/chattanooga-has-its-own-broadb...
  - rayiner 9y ago
    But are the odds in your favor? I live in the DC area. What are the odds that the public ISP is going to be run better than WMATA, where trains are catching fire on a regular basis? Or the roads, which are chock full of potholes. Or the water system, where the system is full of lead pipe? Or the sewer system that dumps untreated sewage into the local rivers after heavy rains?
Can_Not 9y ago
One thing I've wondered, if the big regional monopoly ISPs actually violate our net neutrality on a large enough scale, can enough new ISPs pop-up who have net neutrality in their company charter (or otherwise are non-profits) to keep the old internet alive? Can municipalities drop existing exclusive contacts citing "loss of net neutrality" as a material change? How will regressive districts take it when other states are keeping NN and prospering? If net neutrality can be restored from the bottom up, has anyone explored strategies and methods to protect ourselves from regional monopoly ISPs and how it will actually roll out over time and regionally? How will the top resist a bottom up change?
- dboreham 9y ago
  No. Because people love cheap and free stuff. Non NN ISPs will be cheaper and consumers couldn’t care less as long as they get their Netflix, which the will.
  - justicezyx 9y ago
    A global internet does not need to be consumer oriented.
    - dboreham 9y ago
      The Internet that serves consumers does.
iamnotlarry 9y ago
The real snag in net neutrality, and "saving the internet" in general is not in getting a bunch of pop-up isps. The real crux of the problem has always been in peering relationships. It's not that hard to start a wISP. It's not that hard to even lease telco copper or fiber and run a local wired ISP. Right up until your local customer wants to access Google, or Netflix, or something in Japan or Europe, or anything that isn't one of your local customers. Then you have to find peers who respect NN. And you have to build some connection to those peers. Peering is expensive. A little ISP running out of a local data center has to find some other little ISP nearby and they have to build a connection between their data centers. Building a worldwide network of such ISPs is very expensive. Sooner or later, the two little guys combine with each other, then with two others. And then you get exactly what we had in the '90s, which leads to what we had in the '00s. Unless you get very luck and get some superpower that builds out the infrastructure without losing sight of all that is good and right in the world, you end up where we are today. Oh, and you have to get the masses to understand the issues and penalize cheaters. Good luck with that.
- gwright 9y ago
  I'm not sure small ISPs are a viable business model like it was in 10-20 years ago, but if you want to build a small regional ISP, I don't think peering relationships are going to be the problem, you can simply purchase transit bandwidth from the big guys. To do that cost effectively you do need to be renting rack space at a carrier hotel though. The really hard part is the layer-2 last-mile infrastructure to end users. For the most part this means dealing with the local incumbent telco (leasing copper/fiber/DSL/ATM backhaul) or building your own wireless infrastructure. Except in rare circumstance I think the regulatory environment is going make it infeasible to build out your own physical infrastructure to compete with the telco or with the local cable franchise. Google Fiber was an attempt to roll out a new last-mile infrastructure and it hasn't faired well. It isn't going to be easy to disrupt the last-mile infrastructure market.
  - iamnotlarry 9y ago
    I visited a location this week where there were 2-4 houses per mile along country roads. The residents had a choice of ISPs. The house I visited had dialtone from a VOIP service. Yes, it costs money to build out last-mile infrastructure. But even in very low density areas, it can pay off. Recurring revenues of $50-100/month per customer can in fact pay for the initial investment. Especially if the investment was a wifi tower. It's the kind of thing one motivated local can pull off. Building a worldwide network of peers who all respect NN is much much more difficult. Even if you could set up some organization like EFF to define some "Bill of Rights" and then certify conformant ISPs with a cool logo of approval, customers will not choose ISPs based on that logo. Average American consumers will not demand NN. So your local ISP--even a well-intentioned one--will do as you suggest: "Simply purchase transit bandwidth from the big guys." There ends NN.
jim_combinator 9y ago
And we need food that isn't grown by big farming. And we need news that isn't reported by big journalism. And we need entertainment that isn't produced by big Hollywood. And we need government that isn't...wait, we need big government. Never mind.
EGreg 9y ago
Those of you who have seen me post over the years know that I am passionate about this topic. I wind up linking to my own project to provide more info but let me know if that's bad form on HN. In 2011 I started a company to decentralize facebook. I thought there was no reason that signals needed to go through server farms in California just to organize a local dinner, have a local marketplace, classes, dating, or a host of other things. I wanted to build a platform like Wordpress that communities could host and then install social apps the same way they install wordpress plugins. The developer model would be pretty cool, too: no gatekeepers to kick you out of the app store or revoke your API keys while they compete with you. Instead, you sell your apps to entire communities. Over time we built apps like: Group rides (uber for friends) Group activities Group chat Collaborative docs Marketplace Pitching in for a gift As time went on, I realized that eventually communities will have their own mesh networks and we would have built the social software they would need to run on them! Right now, they don't really have software uilt to run on the local networks, they still need to connect to centralized services on the global internet. We asked some guys to build router firmware for us, so that we can have local software run on the wifi networks of cruise ships, classrooms etc. It is great for taking attendance for example, as phones automatically connect to the wifi and the cookie does the attendance bit. You can literally have a superfast social network for a university or company or whatever, and signals go over the internet only when they have to. If you want more in depth info I give a talk about it here: https://youtu.be/WzMm7-j7yIY https://youtu.be/WzMm7-j7yIY And we blogged about the details here: https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/centralization-and-open-source/ https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/centralization-and-o... Now we went one step further and made a spinoff company, Intercoin Inc to allow communities to issue and democratically manage their own local currency! (https://intercoin.org https://intercoin.org) IPFS and SAFE a great fit for an even further future where no elites control anything. But that's a little further on. Here is what I would like to see eventually replace the Web: https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0 https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0
- Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
  I'll provide my two cents, in the case of group activities. It seems awfully convenient to have a single site (e.g., meetup) for, say, if I'm traveling to a new city and looking for something to do. It'd seem like an unnecessary barrier to entry to have to find the locally hosted instance of every particular problem, every location I go. Knowing I can use Yelp or Groupon etc to find local restaurants or deals anywhere is actually pretty helpful. To get to the core of your premise: > I thought there was no reason that signals needed to go through server farms in California just to organize a local dinner, have a local marketplace, classes, dating, or a host of other things. You might think there is no reason for this; but users of these services aren't concerned with this problem. If your selling point is "Hey, don't you hate how this one big corporation has a monopoly on <marketplace> <group activities> etc?", you're going to hear crickets. This isn't a customer problem.
emerged 9y ago
I've noticed that when Trump detaches a thing from government control (Paris agreement, net neutrality), the populace and media go full on chicken little sky is falling. Then as the dust settles, people start having conversations like this one. Private and corporate entities, wealthy individuals, organizations, step up and attempt to fill the gap. So. Isn't that the whole point? That society as a whole is better suited to solve these problems than the largest centralized node on the network? Edit: K I'll just absorb downvotes for having an opinion which doesn't actively oppose trump in one particular case.
- mempko 9y ago
  You have it exactly backwards, By privatizing, Trump will increase the size of the government. After the USSR collapsed and Chicago style economists pilfered the place, the size of the government went up! You ended up with more bureaucrats than ever. Why? Because when you add markets to things that didn't have markets, you add regulators and all sorts of other score keeping to make sure the markets function. It is far more efficient not to use markets in most cases. When the Federal government privatized the internet in the late 90s, the regulatory system went up! Also of course corporations love regulations when it benefits them. Don't forget most regulations are written and pushed by the industry that is being regulated.
  - refurb 9y ago
    The only way this could be true is if the number of regulators for a company is larger than the number of total employees. With a few exceptions, I doubt most companies are that small.
  - pitaj 9y ago
    It isn't more efficiently. Command economies don't work. A monopoly has no reason to innovate.
  - malteof 9y ago
    Surely you're the one getting this backwards somehow? You're talking about privatisation, but the OP discusses deregulation. You don't mean to say that deregulation leads to more regulation, do you? EDIT: Also, your thesis that using markets is inefficient due to more regulation, it sounds rather that you mean to say that more regulation is inefficient. How is this a failure of the market and not the state?
mempko 9y ago
What is sad is the internet used to be run by the small time guys. I bought my internet off a guy down the street in the 90s who had a rack of servers and routers in a closet. The future we want is the past we had.
ilaksh 9y ago
Maybe someone can make a FSOC (freespace optical communications) kit that is cheap and safe and we can install them on our rooftops and start beaming our packets all over ourselves. http://ronja.twibright.com/ http://ronja.twibright.com/ I'm sure someone will explain how they believe that is stupid, dangerous and impossible.
StreamBright 9y ago
We need a handcrafted, vegan, artisan internet operated by SF hipsters. Most definitely.

253 points by BravoCo 9y ago

I am hoping Elon Musk could rescue us from this. Hopefully with satellite based internet using SpaceX rockets.

I like their fire to get this done. however , the ISP market is a market hated by its cutomer base for decades. So you got to ask why hasnt this been done before at a reasonable scale or more often? Didnt even google fiber run into epic hurdles due to monopolistic regulations setup by the telcom oligarch? if Google fiber struggled how is a small startup going to be able to play? I'm skeptical in the success of this , but i will be folowing and possibly get involved and hope they succeed.

betterunix2 9y ago
It's not just monopolistic regulations. Outside of dense urban areas there is not much room for competition among ISPs. At some point it is never going to be profitable to compete; and in some places it will never be profitable to even build the infrastructure in the first place. The only reason DSL is widely available is that phone companies were forced to build the copper network even in unprofitable places, so adding DSL service was not too hard for them. If we really want a market-based approach we need infrastructure sharing rules. Prior to 2003 we had lots of competition in the DSL market; after the sharing rules were eliminated competition vanished almost overnight and we wound up with the monopoly situation we face today. Infrastructure sharing requirements have worked very well in France, where fiber optic service is more widely available and costs consumers less.
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  > At some point it is never going to be profitable to compete; and in some places it will never be profitable to even build the infrastructure in the first place. If there are no regulations here's how it goes: first ISPs compete in urban areas, this is very profitable with traditional active fiber to the building and ethernet to each apartment. It takes like $50 CAPEX per customer. But at some point as competition increases margins get lower and certain ISPs start looking into rural areas where they can have no real competition, i.e. DSL or radio is not a competition to fiber. New ISPs emerge too as people see an opportunity to profit from temporary geographical monopoly. So they start building in rural areas, enjoying huge margins. Today they'd use something like GPON, which is very cheap compared to the old days. It goes on until at some point the hard part becomes finding areas from where they can profit the most and where there is no real competition. This is when some start competing with other ISPs in rural areas. But as margins start to shrink in some areas due to competition they prioritize investment into areas competition unlikely to reach. There will be far away neglected areas still, but here's a twist, since there is a lot of competition people who are willing to pay will be able to find a whole bunch of ISPs willing to build fiber or at least radio links with them. In other words - it's always profitable, regulations really is the only problem. Forcing to share infrastructure is also not necessary. It helps only if monopolies share it with everyone, not small players. With no regulations market solves this pretty well.
  - iamnotlarry 9y ago
    As a little experiment, I picked a random dot in the middle of Nevada--northern Nevada, far away from Las Vegas. I landed on this house: <deleted out of respect for the owner>. This looks pretty rural to me. Then I went to their telco and the first thing on the homepage was a link to check for fiber availability. Fiber is available for this home. You might have to rethink your plan for competition. I'm guessing the result won't be too different for Mississippi, Texas, Ohio, etc. EDIT: I tried again and landed in Batesville, AR. It seems there are three Fiber ISPs here. Edited for courtesy to individual property owners.
    - kalleboo 9y ago
      It almost seems like semi-rural areas are a better place to start, as they're less regulated (no "cable monopoly", no NIMBYs) and the properties are too far away to have the options of Cable/DSL.
    - equalunique 9y ago
      Verizon's site will say that Fios is available where I used to live in Haymarket VA, but when I call them up and ask for it, they say it was an error on their site.
- rayiner 9y ago
  > Infrastructure sharing requirements have worked very well in France, where fiber optic service is more widely available and costs consumers less. According to OECD, fiber penetration is 7.9% in France versus 11.2% in the US: http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/1.10-PctFibreToTotalBroadband-2016-12.xls http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/1.10-PctFibreToTotalBroadb.... Average broadband speeds in the US are also almost twice as fast as in France: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-report.pdf https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t....

joeyspn 9y ago

In 2019 SpaceX should start deploying their satellite constellation... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_satellite_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_satellite_constellation

nautilus12 9y ago
Round trip to a satellite will never rival fiber. Especially the way modern web apps are built inefficiently
- vandweller 9y ago
  Could you expand on this? Do you think latency is the limiting factor for a LEO network?
  - vorotato 9y ago
    A geosynchronous orbit is ~36000km 36000 km / speed of light = .12 seconds So thats a ping of 240, minimum. That's assuming everything else in the system happened instantaneously. If you can however manage to solve the whole aiming at a moving target 360 kilometers away then maybe you could do a LEO network, and yeah the ping would be closer to 1.2 assuming again literally everything was instantaneous.
    - jacques_chester 9y ago
      As you note, LEO is very different from geostationary. Moving target doesn't strike me as impossible. A LEO satellite has a very predictable path, a stationary dish has a predictable movement relative to that path and a mobile phone knows where it is at all times.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      There are several companies building (and a few shipping) flat-panel phased array antennae that can "point" at a moving target 360 km away. They also can switch to a new satellite instantly.

basicplus2 9y ago

All major infrastructure such as roads, power, communications etc needs to be owned and run by government upon which is then a level playing field on which free enterprise can then compete. When you have any major infrastructure essential to running a business in private hands you no longer have a democracy or free enterprise.

amelius 9y ago
And before anyone says that the government is probably too inefficient, consider that "own != build+maintain".
amelius 9y ago
On a related note, can't a digital platform such as iOS or Android be viewed as major infrastructure? How about Google's search?
- jedmeyers 9y ago
  Main difference between digital platforms and government owned utilities it that utilities require access to land. No one is stopping you from rolling out your own digital platform, while there is no practical way to get any land to lay your own gas pipeline. Therefore the answer to your question is "no, Google search cannot be considered public infrastructure, and one for the reasons is that it does not require any public land to operate".
pitaj 9y ago
Yes, because absolute control of the internet is what we want government to have.

da_n 9y ago

I just loaded this article on my mobile device. An ad on the website triggered with auto playing audio that stopped background media playback of my device. I class these type of ads as a type of vermin, and generally avoid any website that contains them. Why should I trust an organisation that chooses to run user hostile ads on their site line this to make a better internet?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
vorotato 9y ago
This is a literal ad hominem fallacy. Whether someone is honest or good doesn't have any bearing on any individual statement's veracity. A statement is true or false regardless of who says it. Additionally the article was written by an author who is not responsible for the advertisements, or really any actions of this establishment which are entirely outside of their control. All being said, yeah that sounds horrible, and you probably shouldn't trust them as they are a for profit, but that's not an argument as to whether they are wrong or not.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > This is a literal ad hominem fallacy. This is rather a problem with the author who is benefiting from the ad-driven Internet while preaching for something else. It's like a weapons reseller advocating for peace.
  - betterunix2 9y ago
    Is there some non-ad-driven web ecosystem that I somehow missed? Just because the web currently depends on ads to pay for things does not mean that it is an OK situation or that we should tolerate every intrusion by advertisers.
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      > non-ad-driven web ecosystem that I somehow missed? Yes there is. Patreon and similar systems.

pmoriarty 9y ago

An Internet that is completely decentralized and independent of gatekeepers is the only long-term hope that I can see, and it's a very remote hope at that. There are too many powerful, vested interests in controlling people and their communication to let that happen. The only reason the Internet was ever as free as it was that it slipped under the radar of those very interests and wasn't taken seriously enough at first. So its users had a decade or two of relative freedom that's now steadily being chipped away.

zeep 9y ago
Maybe suing ISPs for blocking content (or slowing down content) could work too? Imagine if they would deliberately block content that would eventually cause loss of life
gwright 9y ago
What freedom are you talking about that has been lost? There has always been a problem with the last-mile, layer-2 infrastructure but if you are talking about IP layer services and higher it seems like there is nothing preventing you from providing what ever service you can imagine. IP transit is a bit difficult to compete in because of the layer-2 problem but providing higher level services is much easier now because you don't even have to build a data center, just deploy on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, etc.
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sliverstorm 9y ago
Trouble is nobody's yet figured out how to build a completely decentralized internet that is anywhere near as good as the regular internet. Mostly because wireless technologies still don't scale that far, which means wires in the ground, which means gatekeepers on the other end.
jason_slack 9y ago
> An Internet that is completely decentralized and > independent of gatekeepers is the only long-term > hope that I can see, and it's a very remote hope at that. How do you see this happening? Some big interconnected mesh network? At some point there needs to be a backbone connection right? Or do I misunderstand? I, personally, could go to Level 3 and get my own fiber circuit in my house for around $1700/month and act as a gateway for all my neighboring houses but then aren't I subject to laws/rules that big ISP's are?

xkarga00 9y ago

Other related acts: https://www.mail-archive.com/cypherpunks@lists.cpunks.org/msg09156.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cypherpunks@lists.cpunks.org/ms...

martin1975 9y ago

MuniFiber.com. Towns are slowly rolling their own fiber to the home. This is one answer to breaking cable monopolies. edit: Apologies, muninetworks.org is the true website. I've been reading way too much about FTTH obviously and partially substituted the website name :)

devty 9y ago
Was interested in learning more, I think the correct website is https://muninetworks.org/content/fiber-optic-network https://muninetworks.org/content/fiber-optic-network
grahamburger 9y ago
I'm also working on startyourownisp.com. I've got a ways to go in it but maybe someone will find it useful!

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ghthor 9y ago

This is where a new startup isp needs to pair with Artemis networks can create a next gen wireless network that puts these big telecoms to shame.

rayiner 9y ago

> internet infrastructure that is locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people who connect to it In theory our public transit is “locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people” rather than shareholders. Yet public transit is almost uniformly awful in the US. If you live in San Francisco, do you really want your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?

nerdponx 9y ago
Either your utilities are run by big businesses who don't care about you, or they're run by local governments, which in turn are beholden to special interest groups who don't care about you, some of which are big businesses. Seems like you can't win.
- pitaj 9y ago
  At least there is a chance of competition with private operations.
Can_Not 9y ago
You can show them Chattanooga as a case study where the results were optimal. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpk77/chattanooga-gigabit-fiber-network https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpk77/chattanoog... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17/how-chattanooga-beat-google-fiber-by-half-a-decade/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17... https://www.thedailybeast.com/chattanooga-has-its-own-broadbandwhy-doesnt-every-city https://www.thedailybeast.com/chattanooga-has-its-own-broadb...
- rayiner 9y ago
  But are the odds in your favor? I live in the DC area. What are the odds that the public ISP is going to be run better than WMATA, where trains are catching fire on a regular basis? Or the roads, which are chock full of potholes. Or the water system, where the system is full of lead pipe? Or the sewer system that dumps untreated sewage into the local rivers after heavy rains?

Can_Not 9y ago

One thing I've wondered, if the big regional monopoly ISPs actually violate our net neutrality on a large enough scale, can enough new ISPs pop-up who have net neutrality in their company charter (or otherwise are non-profits) to keep the old internet alive? Can municipalities drop existing exclusive contacts citing "loss of net neutrality" as a material change? How will regressive districts take it when other states are keeping NN and prospering? If net neutrality can be restored from the bottom up, has anyone explored strategies and methods to protect ourselves from regional monopoly ISPs and how it will actually roll out over time and regionally? How will the top resist a bottom up change?

dboreham 9y ago
No. Because people love cheap and free stuff. Non NN ISPs will be cheaper and consumers couldn’t care less as long as they get their Netflix, which the will.
- justicezyx 9y ago
  A global internet does not need to be consumer oriented.
  - dboreham 9y ago
    The Internet that serves consumers does.

iamnotlarry 9y ago

The real snag in net neutrality, and "saving the internet" in general is not in getting a bunch of pop-up isps. The real crux of the problem has always been in peering relationships. It's not that hard to start a wISP. It's not that hard to even lease telco copper or fiber and run a local wired ISP. Right up until your local customer wants to access Google, or Netflix, or something in Japan or Europe, or anything that isn't one of your local customers. Then you have to find peers who respect NN. And you have to build some connection to those peers. Peering is expensive. A little ISP running out of a local data center has to find some other little ISP nearby and they have to build a connection between their data centers. Building a worldwide network of such ISPs is very expensive. Sooner or later, the two little guys combine with each other, then with two others. And then you get exactly what we had in the '90s, which leads to what we had in the '00s. Unless you get very luck and get some superpower that builds out the infrastructure without losing sight of all that is good and right in the world, you end up where we are today. Oh, and you have to get the masses to understand the issues and penalize cheaters. Good luck with that.

gwright 9y ago
I'm not sure small ISPs are a viable business model like it was in 10-20 years ago, but if you want to build a small regional ISP, I don't think peering relationships are going to be the problem, you can simply purchase transit bandwidth from the big guys. To do that cost effectively you do need to be renting rack space at a carrier hotel though. The really hard part is the layer-2 last-mile infrastructure to end users. For the most part this means dealing with the local incumbent telco (leasing copper/fiber/DSL/ATM backhaul) or building your own wireless infrastructure. Except in rare circumstance I think the regulatory environment is going make it infeasible to build out your own physical infrastructure to compete with the telco or with the local cable franchise. Google Fiber was an attempt to roll out a new last-mile infrastructure and it hasn't faired well. It isn't going to be easy to disrupt the last-mile infrastructure market.
- iamnotlarry 9y ago
  I visited a location this week where there were 2-4 houses per mile along country roads. The residents had a choice of ISPs. The house I visited had dialtone from a VOIP service. Yes, it costs money to build out last-mile infrastructure. But even in very low density areas, it can pay off. Recurring revenues of $50-100/month per customer can in fact pay for the initial investment. Especially if the investment was a wifi tower. It's the kind of thing one motivated local can pull off. Building a worldwide network of peers who all respect NN is much much more difficult. Even if you could set up some organization like EFF to define some "Bill of Rights" and then certify conformant ISPs with a cool logo of approval, customers will not choose ISPs based on that logo. Average American consumers will not demand NN. So your local ISP--even a well-intentioned one--will do as you suggest: "Simply purchase transit bandwidth from the big guys." There ends NN.

jim_combinator 9y ago

And we need food that isn't grown by big farming. And we need news that isn't reported by big journalism. And we need entertainment that isn't produced by big Hollywood. And we need government that isn't...wait, we need big government. Never mind.

EGreg 9y ago

Those of you who have seen me post over the years know that I am passionate about this topic. I wind up linking to my own project to provide more info but let me know if that's bad form on HN. In 2011 I started a company to decentralize facebook. I thought there was no reason that signals needed to go through server farms in California just to organize a local dinner, have a local marketplace, classes, dating, or a host of other things. I wanted to build a platform like Wordpress that communities could host and then install social apps the same way they install wordpress plugins. The developer model would be pretty cool, too: no gatekeepers to kick you out of the app store or revoke your API keys while they compete with you. Instead, you sell your apps to entire communities. Over time we built apps like: Group rides (uber for friends) Group activities Group chat Collaborative docs Marketplace Pitching in for a gift As time went on, I realized that eventually communities will have their own mesh networks and we would have built the social software they would need to run on them! Right now, they don't really have software uilt to run on the local networks, they still need to connect to centralized services on the global internet. We asked some guys to build router firmware for us, so that we can have local software run on the wifi networks of cruise ships, classrooms etc. It is great for taking attendance for example, as phones automatically connect to the wifi and the cookie does the attendance bit. You can literally have a superfast social network for a university or company or whatever, and signals go over the internet only when they have to. If you want more in depth info I give a talk about it here: https://youtu.be/WzMm7-j7yIY https://youtu.be/WzMm7-j7yIY And we blogged about the details here: https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/centralization-and-open-source/ https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/centralization-and-o... Now we went one step further and made a spinoff company, Intercoin Inc to allow communities to issue and democratically manage their own local currency! (https://intercoin.org https://intercoin.org) IPFS and SAFE a great fit for an even further future where no elites control anything. But that's a little further on. Here is what I would like to see eventually replace the Web: https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0 https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0

Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
I'll provide my two cents, in the case of group activities. It seems awfully convenient to have a single site (e.g., meetup) for, say, if I'm traveling to a new city and looking for something to do. It'd seem like an unnecessary barrier to entry to have to find the locally hosted instance of every particular problem, every location I go. Knowing I can use Yelp or Groupon etc to find local restaurants or deals anywhere is actually pretty helpful. To get to the core of your premise: > I thought there was no reason that signals needed to go through server farms in California just to organize a local dinner, have a local marketplace, classes, dating, or a host of other things. You might think there is no reason for this; but users of these services aren't concerned with this problem. If your selling point is "Hey, don't you hate how this one big corporation has a monopoly on <marketplace> <group activities> etc?", you're going to hear crickets. This isn't a customer problem.

emerged 9y ago

I've noticed that when Trump detaches a thing from government control (Paris agreement, net neutrality), the populace and media go full on chicken little sky is falling. Then as the dust settles, people start having conversations like this one. Private and corporate entities, wealthy individuals, organizations, step up and attempt to fill the gap. So. Isn't that the whole point? That society as a whole is better suited to solve these problems than the largest centralized node on the network? Edit: K I'll just absorb downvotes for having an opinion which doesn't actively oppose trump in one particular case.

mempko 9y ago
You have it exactly backwards, By privatizing, Trump will increase the size of the government. After the USSR collapsed and Chicago style economists pilfered the place, the size of the government went up! You ended up with more bureaucrats than ever. Why? Because when you add markets to things that didn't have markets, you add regulators and all sorts of other score keeping to make sure the markets function. It is far more efficient not to use markets in most cases. When the Federal government privatized the internet in the late 90s, the regulatory system went up! Also of course corporations love regulations when it benefits them. Don't forget most regulations are written and pushed by the industry that is being regulated.
- refurb 9y ago
  The only way this could be true is if the number of regulators for a company is larger than the number of total employees. With a few exceptions, I doubt most companies are that small.
- pitaj 9y ago
  It isn't more efficiently. Command economies don't work. A monopoly has no reason to innovate.
- malteof 9y ago
  Surely you're the one getting this backwards somehow? You're talking about privatisation, but the OP discusses deregulation. You don't mean to say that deregulation leads to more regulation, do you? EDIT: Also, your thesis that using markets is inefficient due to more regulation, it sounds rather that you mean to say that more regulation is inefficient. How is this a failure of the market and not the state?

mempko 9y ago

What is sad is the internet used to be run by the small time guys. I bought my internet off a guy down the street in the 90s who had a rack of servers and routers in a closet. The future we want is the past we had.

ilaksh 9y ago

Maybe someone can make a FSOC (freespace optical communications) kit that is cheap and safe and we can install them on our rooftops and start beaming our packets all over ourselves. http://ronja.twibright.com/ http://ronja.twibright.com/ I'm sure someone will explain how they believe that is stupid, dangerous and impossible.

StreamBright 9y ago

We need a handcrafted, vegan, artisan internet operated by SF hipsters. Most definitely.