7 ms·

They aren't only lying about not making enough money. They are "lobbying" to keep up this charade. Many European nations have much cheaper and faster access to

by avgDev 8y ago

They aren't only lying about not making enough money. They are "lobbying" to keep up this charade. Many European nations have much cheaper and faster access to the internet with many more ISPs. I don't see a logical reason why US can't have the same.

stochastic_monk 8y ago
It’s the same reason we can’t have cheaper, better healthcare. Our government is controlled/lobbied/influenced by people who stand to profit.
- Joeri 8y ago
  Lobbying is a thing in europe also, but if politicians are too blatant about it they get voted out of office. All americans seem to agree the problem with their government is crooked politicians. Why do people keep voting those people into office?
  - cavanasm 8y ago
    The American view on this seems to largely be that the crooked politicians are the ones OTHER people elect. Since our national level laws and policy are set by representatives of much smaller localities, we can love OUR guy, and think everyone else is a no good crook.
  - dasil003 8y ago
    I would suggest that it's not because their crooked per se, but because getting into office requires an extraordinary fundraising and PR effort that takes all their time. With the rise of finance and technology, the systems in our modern civilization are incredibly complex and difficult to understand, and the only thing legislators know about issues is what lobbyists tell them. There are no effective lobbyists for anything that is not making someone a lot of money, because it's really hard to compete with well-paid professionals. So even with the best of intentions, the system conspires against legislators getting an informed yet neutral viewpoint on how policy will affect the myriad systems that make up our society. As if that weren't enough the anti-intellectual streak in America tends punishes anyone who tries to bring in more nuance and public research to difficult questions.
    - rectang 8y ago
      > not because they're crooked per se If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, is it not a duck? The end result in terms of narrow corporate interest winning out over overwhelming public sentiment is indistinguishable from bribery.
      - dasil003 8y ago
        And yet the solution to each is wildly different.
  - jermaustin1 8y ago
    Because the crooked politicians usually bring something back to their constituents. And people vote on their local politician. So the US Senate is usually filled with moderate voices (since they have to appeal to millions of voters) while the House of Representatives is filled with crazies who were elected by an order of magnitude less than senators. Then you have the incumbency effect which makes it pretty hard to lose your next election so long as you have name recognition and a gerrymandered district, unless something really crazy happens with you (sex scandal, fake-news, corruption indictments, going to prison, etc), and even then sometimes the effect is still strong enough to elect you to office before you have to be removed and have the State Governor appoint an UNELECTED replacement who will then have the incumbency effect bestowed upon themselves. All in all, the US makes it hard to elect people who will "progress" and not just "maintain". And don't get me started about off-year elections, special elections, primaries, voter ID laws and various other legalized voter suppression (felons, poor people, minorities), and a plethora of other ways that we use to confuse citizens about voting.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Because the crooked politicians usually bring something back to their constituents. And people vote on their local politician. In the South, all you have to do is show up in a church, professs your love for God (before you sneak off with your mistress) and Guns and claim you are protecting the country from the evil Muslims and illegal immigrants and you are sure to win an election. Yes I know the same is true for liberals - claim that the government will give everyone a job and free college education and "tax the rich" to pay for it.
  - macintux 8y ago
    Among the other reasons provided, there's a huge challenge the US faces that Europe doesn't seem to: a lack of choice. Our two-party system does not lend itself to voting out crooks.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    Everyone who is blaming stupid voters is part of the problem. The news industry colludes with politicians and bureaucrats to ensure that voters never have a real choice. Even fake choices like Trump, Sanders, or Stein are brutalized by the press. (Trump figured out that if he inspired enough ire he could be on TV all the time: expect to see this tactic again.) Our betters conspire at every turn to give us the choice between Coke and Pepsi. If we thirst for anything else we're welcome to move.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    Most European countries have strict campaign finance limits. In the UK, no party can spend more than £19.5m on their national campaign, plus £10,000 to £16,000 for each candidate's local campaign. They're required to provide accounts and receipts for all of their campaign activities and can forfeit the election or face criminal charges if they overspend. That's chump change in American terms - the last presidential election cost about six billion dollars. With strict campaign finance limits, lobbyists are far less influential. Candidates hardly think about fundraising, because any money raised over their spending limit is useless to them. A lobbyist might be persuasive, they might provide a lot of compelling evidence, they might make the case that a particular policy would be popular, but they can't offer a pseudo-bribe in the form of a massive campaign contribution.
    - tim333 8y ago
      It used to be like that in the US, eg see "Jimmy Carter says when he ran against Gerald Ford, he didn't raise any money" http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/feb/26/jimmy-carter/jimmy-carter-says-when-he-ran-against-gerald-ford-/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/feb/... It's amazing it's got as messed up as it is. Someone really needs to fix that.
  - glitcher 8y ago
    I often get the feeling that our best minds and potential leaders either don't go into politics, or can't survive the brutal realities and shortcomings of the current political system. So basically we are doomed to constantly repeat all of these problems until something significant changes.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Because we all disagree on who the crooked politicians are. Congress as a whole has abysmal approval ratings, but people don't vote on Congress. They vote for their individual Representative and two Senators. When you ask people about their particular representation, those approval ratings are much higher.
  - arca_vorago 8y ago
    Long story short, it's because of abuse of tribalism by the two parties. I'll give you a good example: the 92 presidential debate. Ross Perot, a third party candidate got almost 19 percent of the vote! So what did the two parties do? They worked together to takeover the debates so they could keep third parties from ever getting that close again! Then couple that with carefully crafted lies, usually based on identity politics, that encourage and foment tribalism and division, add in the corrupt primary system, among other spices like blackmail and three letter surveillance of Congress, and you get what we have. This is why it angers me so much every time someone says "both parties are just as corrupt" and is met with a thousand "ways $theotherone is actually the bad one but $ourparty is the only one looking out for the people" and derision for even stating it out loud. After years of pondering this issue I have come to the conclusion we need to, over multiple election cycles, focus on getting third parties and independents who are fully transparent about funding into office, and enough to take away the majority from both parties, hopefully under a coalition of some sort, which would force both parties to come to the table in a more adult like manner. Make no mistake, all three branches of government have suffered similar corruption, but the legislative is supposed to be the closest to the people, so I think it is the place to start (well really the state congresses are) So many of the unconstitutional things which our gov does that goes unchecked is due to both sides of Congress violating their oaths. If we had a congress worth a damn we could use them to self correct...
    - theonemind 8y ago
      You get two parties naturally out of the winner-take-all system. Some European governments and other governments that got to learn from our mistakes (by forming constitutional republics later in history) have real multi-party systems, which you get much more easily with actual proportional representation.
- scarface74 8y ago
  That's only part of the reason. True, the lobbyists keep the politicians voting for the status quo, but the "we hate socialism, we have the greatest healthcare system in the world" propaganda has enough of the population fooled to keep the politicians in power.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
Even in EU they do things that would be unacceptable for other products: - Year-long locked in contracts. No trial period. - Zero guarantees whatsoever on bandwidth and latency. - No third-party, legally recognized, quality certification/monitoring organizations. - Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on. - In some countries it's legal to sell ADSL as "fiber". - Sharing your uplink with a neighbor can be prohibited by contract. I know it's nothing new, but that's not an acceptable argument. It's about time we raise our expectations.
- ghba66 8y ago
  >- Year-long locked in contracts. No trial period. Here we get a 14-day trial period. >- Zero guarantees whatsoever on bandwidth and latency. Technically impossible to give such a guarantee. >- Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on. How do you guarantee something like this? Let anybody in the datacenters...? >- Sharing your uplink with a neighbor can be prohibited by contract. That's normal, otherwise they'd lose tons of money. I mean here you can get 300/300 really cheap, that's more than enough for, let's say, 10 neighbours. But then how do you expect them to cover the investment?
  - smallbigfish 8y ago
    > >- Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on. > How do you guarantee something like this? Let anybody in the datacenters...? Spell it in the contract and put people in jail if they break it.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > Technically impossible to give such a guarantee. Every other service provides five nines or whatever or your money back…
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    >>- Zero guarantees whatsoever on bandwidth and latency. > Technically impossible to give such a guarantee. Not at all. You pick the right oversubscription ratios, monitor the network and give guarantees on the 95%/99% percentiles. It's done in datacenters all the time. >>- Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on. > How do you guarantee something like this? Let anybody in the datacenters...? Just like in many other fields: external verification, rewards for employee and customers reporting malpractices and so on. Also, encourage your customers to use DNS over HTTPS, VPNs, Tor instead of saying nothing or even discouraging it. >>- Sharing your uplink with a neighbor can be prohibited by contract. > That's normal, otherwise they'd lose tons of money. That's not an argument. The large majority of goods and services in existence can be shared and, very often, even re-sold and there are specific laws against contracts for exclusive use. It's up to the ISPs to find ways to bill people accordingly (and it's easy to look at what carriers and datacenters ISP do...).
xstartup 8y ago
The regions in Europe which have cheaper/faster access have either community managed infra or high population density/cheap power. Does the US have that?
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Swedes in say Stockholm have had quick internet access for ages but high population is a relative term. I am sure cities such as New York and Los Angelos are high population compared to Stockholm or cities in The Netherlands. Also, I wouldn't say we got so much choice here in NL. There's basically one cable company: Ziggo (aka Liberty Global, owned by an American) and basically one DSL company: KPN. You can't even always get both (meaning usually Ziggo has a monopoly), and KPN actively hampers fiber because VDSL2 is "viable". Mobile-wise there's traditionally 3 players, rest are MVNO. Now with 4G, the third player (T-Mobile) is actually the best and there's a fourth player as well (Tele2). And 4G has a relatively low latency (especially on T-Mo's network which I personally don't have though). The two big players are once again KPN and Vodafone (joint venture with Ziggo called VodafoneZiggo). Vodafone just bought Unitymedia in Germany and Eastern Europe from Liberty Global, btw. The problem is that a lot of the cable infrastructure (traditionally owned by the municipalities or small corporations) has been sold very cheap to companies which have all ended up being bought by Liberty Global. The government has done it completely wrong. They should've kept owning the networks, but leasing access to companies. After all, the government owns infrastructure such as roads and rails as well.
sametmax 8y ago
Exactly. But they did the same in France 10 years ago. Then the ISP named "Free" started to sell an offer 3 times cheaper and WOW, suddenly everybody matched the price. So not only competition on price is possible for ISP, it's actually necessary for the clients. It's wont benefit the existing ISP, obviouly, so it must be done no matter what they say.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  Hard to compete when local government is so corrupt they won't let you run physical cables to people's homes.
  - xstartup 8y ago
    Not really. If you are in a democratic but corrupt country. Make local people aware that you want to offer the service and this service can only be offered if the government lets you lay cable. Start laying cable and offer your people service. Offer them a good deal and ask them to protect your cables in return. You'll be amazed how good communities are at protecting their assets, provided they realize the benefit of keeping it in shape. Then bring those people in front of government to vouch for you.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      Yeah, digging holes in roads without a permit. Not hard at all.
      - Declanomous 8y ago
        I assume in most places the cables are put on poles. Have you ever seen poles in some cities? It look like a 200 foot tall bird is using them to build a nest.
        sametmax 8y ago
        Genuine question: can you put fiber on poles ? Since it breaks so easily, I would assume it's buried only.
rectang 8y ago
The supposed "deregulation" of the ISP market by the FCC is merely picking the members of the current telecom oligopoly as winners. Killing net neutrality isn't about choice, it's about enriching telecoms because they have bought our government. Thanks, Citizens United, for making corporate speech so much more powerful than individual speech!
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Congress could pass legislation to override the Citizens United decision but, lol, who am I kidding.
patricius 8y ago
I come from one of those nations. There could be many explanations for why things are the way they are in the US and not in some other nations. Maybe federal or state legislation makes it more expensive for competitors to compete. Maybe there are geographical challenges that make it more expensive. Or one of a thousand other explanations.
gnicholas 8y ago
How do these European nations compare on population density? I live in suburban silicon valley and have been surprised to see how much cheaper internet is for friends of mine who live in cities — even cities like NYC, which are equally expensive otherwise. (i.e., they're not just jacking up the price for folks in Silicon Valley because most people can afford it.) I pay $30 for 12/3 Mbps service; my city friends pay roughly the same for 100/10 Mbps service. This leads me to believe that population density is a big factor here.
- monocasa 8y ago
  Sweden has lower population density than the US, but much better internet. I think population density is a weak signal for competition in the US market, and that's what you're seeing.
  - MrFantastic 8y ago
    95% of Swedes live in the tip. I doubt upper Sweden has good coverage being that it's a barren tundra.
    - monocasa 8y ago
      You'd be wrong. Sweden has a program to essentially guarantee everyone access to broadband coverage, even (and especially) those who live in rural areas.
    - stephengillie 8y ago
      This map is from Finland in 2016, and shows only a few regions have >90% 100mbps availability. https://m.imgur.com/wU5WXBV https://m.imgur.com/wU5WXBV
      - monocasa 8y ago
        To be fair, in the US (which is what we're comparing all of this to), broadband is defined as 25Mbps up/3Mbps down.
briandear 8y ago
In my area of France, I have one provider, Orange, and a top speed of .8mbs up and 10mbs down. “Cheaper and faster” in some places, more expensive and slower in other places. Not everyone lives in Paris.

by avgDev 8y ago

stochastic_monk 8y ago

It’s the same reason we can’t have cheaper, better healthcare. Our government is controlled/lobbied/influenced by people who stand to profit.

Joeri 8y ago
Lobbying is a thing in europe also, but if politicians are too blatant about it they get voted out of office. All americans seem to agree the problem with their government is crooked politicians. Why do people keep voting those people into office?
- cavanasm 8y ago
  The American view on this seems to largely be that the crooked politicians are the ones OTHER people elect. Since our national level laws and policy are set by representatives of much smaller localities, we can love OUR guy, and think everyone else is a no good crook.
- dasil003 8y ago
  I would suggest that it's not because their crooked per se, but because getting into office requires an extraordinary fundraising and PR effort that takes all their time. With the rise of finance and technology, the systems in our modern civilization are incredibly complex and difficult to understand, and the only thing legislators know about issues is what lobbyists tell them. There are no effective lobbyists for anything that is not making someone a lot of money, because it's really hard to compete with well-paid professionals. So even with the best of intentions, the system conspires against legislators getting an informed yet neutral viewpoint on how policy will affect the myriad systems that make up our society. As if that weren't enough the anti-intellectual streak in America tends punishes anyone who tries to bring in more nuance and public research to difficult questions.
  - rectang 8y ago
    > not because they're crooked per se If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, is it not a duck? The end result in terms of narrow corporate interest winning out over overwhelming public sentiment is indistinguishable from bribery.
    - dasil003 8y ago
      And yet the solution to each is wildly different.
- jermaustin1 8y ago
  Because the crooked politicians usually bring something back to their constituents. And people vote on their local politician. So the US Senate is usually filled with moderate voices (since they have to appeal to millions of voters) while the House of Representatives is filled with crazies who were elected by an order of magnitude less than senators. Then you have the incumbency effect which makes it pretty hard to lose your next election so long as you have name recognition and a gerrymandered district, unless something really crazy happens with you (sex scandal, fake-news, corruption indictments, going to prison, etc), and even then sometimes the effect is still strong enough to elect you to office before you have to be removed and have the State Governor appoint an UNELECTED replacement who will then have the incumbency effect bestowed upon themselves. All in all, the US makes it hard to elect people who will "progress" and not just "maintain". And don't get me started about off-year elections, special elections, primaries, voter ID laws and various other legalized voter suppression (felons, poor people, minorities), and a plethora of other ways that we use to confuse citizens about voting.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Because the crooked politicians usually bring something back to their constituents. And people vote on their local politician. In the South, all you have to do is show up in a church, professs your love for God (before you sneak off with your mistress) and Guns and claim you are protecting the country from the evil Muslims and illegal immigrants and you are sure to win an election. Yes I know the same is true for liberals - claim that the government will give everyone a job and free college education and "tax the rich" to pay for it.
- macintux 8y ago
  Among the other reasons provided, there's a huge challenge the US faces that Europe doesn't seem to: a lack of choice. Our two-party system does not lend itself to voting out crooks.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  Everyone who is blaming stupid voters is part of the problem. The news industry colludes with politicians and bureaucrats to ensure that voters never have a real choice. Even fake choices like Trump, Sanders, or Stein are brutalized by the press. (Trump figured out that if he inspired enough ire he could be on TV all the time: expect to see this tactic again.) Our betters conspire at every turn to give us the choice between Coke and Pepsi. If we thirst for anything else we're welcome to move.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Most European countries have strict campaign finance limits. In the UK, no party can spend more than £19.5m on their national campaign, plus £10,000 to £16,000 for each candidate's local campaign. They're required to provide accounts and receipts for all of their campaign activities and can forfeit the election or face criminal charges if they overspend. That's chump change in American terms - the last presidential election cost about six billion dollars. With strict campaign finance limits, lobbyists are far less influential. Candidates hardly think about fundraising, because any money raised over their spending limit is useless to them. A lobbyist might be persuasive, they might provide a lot of compelling evidence, they might make the case that a particular policy would be popular, but they can't offer a pseudo-bribe in the form of a massive campaign contribution.
  - tim333 8y ago
    It used to be like that in the US, eg see "Jimmy Carter says when he ran against Gerald Ford, he didn't raise any money" http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/feb/26/jimmy-carter/jimmy-carter-says-when-he-ran-against-gerald-ford-/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/feb/... It's amazing it's got as messed up as it is. Someone really needs to fix that.
- glitcher 8y ago
  I often get the feeling that our best minds and potential leaders either don't go into politics, or can't survive the brutal realities and shortcomings of the current political system. So basically we are doomed to constantly repeat all of these problems until something significant changes.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Because we all disagree on who the crooked politicians are. Congress as a whole has abysmal approval ratings, but people don't vote on Congress. They vote for their individual Representative and two Senators. When you ask people about their particular representation, those approval ratings are much higher.
- arca_vorago 8y ago
  Long story short, it's because of abuse of tribalism by the two parties. I'll give you a good example: the 92 presidential debate. Ross Perot, a third party candidate got almost 19 percent of the vote! So what did the two parties do? They worked together to takeover the debates so they could keep third parties from ever getting that close again! Then couple that with carefully crafted lies, usually based on identity politics, that encourage and foment tribalism and division, add in the corrupt primary system, among other spices like blackmail and three letter surveillance of Congress, and you get what we have. This is why it angers me so much every time someone says "both parties are just as corrupt" and is met with a thousand "ways $theotherone is actually the bad one but $ourparty is the only one looking out for the people" and derision for even stating it out loud. After years of pondering this issue I have come to the conclusion we need to, over multiple election cycles, focus on getting third parties and independents who are fully transparent about funding into office, and enough to take away the majority from both parties, hopefully under a coalition of some sort, which would force both parties to come to the table in a more adult like manner. Make no mistake, all three branches of government have suffered similar corruption, but the legislative is supposed to be the closest to the people, so I think it is the place to start (well really the state congresses are) So many of the unconstitutional things which our gov does that goes unchecked is due to both sides of Congress violating their oaths. If we had a congress worth a damn we could use them to self correct...
  - theonemind 8y ago
    You get two parties naturally out of the winner-take-all system. Some European governments and other governments that got to learn from our mistakes (by forming constitutional republics later in history) have real multi-party systems, which you get much more easily with actual proportional representation.
scarface74 8y ago
That's only part of the reason. True, the lobbyists keep the politicians voting for the status quo, but the "we hate socialism, we have the greatest healthcare system in the world" propaganda has enough of the population fooled to keep the politicians in power.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

Even in EU they do things that would be unacceptable for other products: - Year-long locked in contracts. No trial period. - Zero guarantees whatsoever on bandwidth and latency. - No third-party, legally recognized, quality certification/monitoring organizations. - Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on. - In some countries it's legal to sell ADSL as "fiber". - Sharing your uplink with a neighbor can be prohibited by contract. I know it's nothing new, but that's not an acceptable argument. It's about time we raise our expectations.

ghba66 8y ago
>- Year-long locked in contracts. No trial period. Here we get a 14-day trial period. >- Zero guarantees whatsoever on bandwidth and latency. Technically impossible to give such a guarantee. >- Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on. How do you guarantee something like this? Let anybody in the datacenters...? >- Sharing your uplink with a neighbor can be prohibited by contract. That's normal, otherwise they'd lose tons of money. I mean here you can get 300/300 really cheap, that's more than enough for, let's say, 10 neighbours. But then how do you expect them to cover the investment?
- smallbigfish 8y ago
  > >- Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on. > How do you guarantee something like this? Let anybody in the datacenters...? Spell it in the contract and put people in jail if they break it.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > Technically impossible to give such a guarantee. Every other service provides five nines or whatever or your money back…
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  >>- Zero guarantees whatsoever on bandwidth and latency. > Technically impossible to give such a guarantee. Not at all. You pick the right oversubscription ratios, monitor the network and give guarantees on the 95%/99% percentiles. It's done in datacenters all the time. >>- Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on. > How do you guarantee something like this? Let anybody in the datacenters...? Just like in many other fields: external verification, rewards for employee and customers reporting malpractices and so on. Also, encourage your customers to use DNS over HTTPS, VPNs, Tor instead of saying nothing or even discouraging it. >>- Sharing your uplink with a neighbor can be prohibited by contract. > That's normal, otherwise they'd lose tons of money. That's not an argument. The large majority of goods and services in existence can be shared and, very often, even re-sold and there are specific laws against contracts for exclusive use. It's up to the ISPs to find ways to bill people accordingly (and it's easy to look at what carriers and datacenters ISP do...).

xstartup 8y ago

The regions in Europe which have cheaper/faster access have either community managed infra or high population density/cheap power. Does the US have that?

Fnoord 8y ago
Swedes in say Stockholm have had quick internet access for ages but high population is a relative term. I am sure cities such as New York and Los Angelos are high population compared to Stockholm or cities in The Netherlands. Also, I wouldn't say we got so much choice here in NL. There's basically one cable company: Ziggo (aka Liberty Global, owned by an American) and basically one DSL company: KPN. You can't even always get both (meaning usually Ziggo has a monopoly), and KPN actively hampers fiber because VDSL2 is "viable". Mobile-wise there's traditionally 3 players, rest are MVNO. Now with 4G, the third player (T-Mobile) is actually the best and there's a fourth player as well (Tele2). And 4G has a relatively low latency (especially on T-Mo's network which I personally don't have though). The two big players are once again KPN and Vodafone (joint venture with Ziggo called VodafoneZiggo). Vodafone just bought Unitymedia in Germany and Eastern Europe from Liberty Global, btw. The problem is that a lot of the cable infrastructure (traditionally owned by the municipalities or small corporations) has been sold very cheap to companies which have all ended up being bought by Liberty Global. The government has done it completely wrong. They should've kept owning the networks, but leasing access to companies. After all, the government owns infrastructure such as roads and rails as well.

sametmax 8y ago

Exactly. But they did the same in France 10 years ago. Then the ISP named "Free" started to sell an offer 3 times cheaper and WOW, suddenly everybody matched the price. So not only competition on price is possible for ISP, it's actually necessary for the clients. It's wont benefit the existing ISP, obviouly, so it must be done no matter what they say.

Someone1234 8y ago
Hard to compete when local government is so corrupt they won't let you run physical cables to people's homes.
- xstartup 8y ago
  Not really. If you are in a democratic but corrupt country. Make local people aware that you want to offer the service and this service can only be offered if the government lets you lay cable. Start laying cable and offer your people service. Offer them a good deal and ask them to protect your cables in return. You'll be amazed how good communities are at protecting their assets, provided they realize the benefit of keeping it in shape. Then bring those people in front of government to vouch for you.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Yeah, digging holes in roads without a permit. Not hard at all.
    - Declanomous 8y ago
      I assume in most places the cables are put on poles. Have you ever seen poles in some cities? It look like a 200 foot tall bird is using them to build a nest.
      - sametmax 8y ago
        Genuine question: can you put fiber on poles ? Since it breaks so easily, I would assume it's buried only.

rectang 8y ago

The supposed "deregulation" of the ISP market by the FCC is merely picking the members of the current telecom oligopoly as winners. Killing net neutrality isn't about choice, it's about enriching telecoms because they have bought our government. Thanks, Citizens United, for making corporate speech so much more powerful than individual speech!

craftyguy 8y ago
Congress could pass legislation to override the Citizens United decision but, lol, who am I kidding.

patricius 8y ago

I come from one of those nations. There could be many explanations for why things are the way they are in the US and not in some other nations. Maybe federal or state legislation makes it more expensive for competitors to compete. Maybe there are geographical challenges that make it more expensive. Or one of a thousand other explanations.

gnicholas 8y ago

How do these European nations compare on population density? I live in suburban silicon valley and have been surprised to see how much cheaper internet is for friends of mine who live in cities — even cities like NYC, which are equally expensive otherwise. (i.e., they're not just jacking up the price for folks in Silicon Valley because most people can afford it.) I pay $30 for 12/3 Mbps service; my city friends pay roughly the same for 100/10 Mbps service. This leads me to believe that population density is a big factor here.

monocasa 8y ago
Sweden has lower population density than the US, but much better internet. I think population density is a weak signal for competition in the US market, and that's what you're seeing.
- MrFantastic 8y ago
  95% of Swedes live in the tip. I doubt upper Sweden has good coverage being that it's a barren tundra.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    You'd be wrong. Sweden has a program to essentially guarantee everyone access to broadband coverage, even (and especially) those who live in rural areas.
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    This map is from Finland in 2016, and shows only a few regions have >90% 100mbps availability. https://m.imgur.com/wU5WXBV https://m.imgur.com/wU5WXBV
    - monocasa 8y ago
      To be fair, in the US (which is what we're comparing all of this to), broadband is defined as 25Mbps up/3Mbps down.

briandear 8y ago

In my area of France, I have one provider, Orange, and a top speed of .8mbs up and 10mbs down. “Cheaper and faster” in some places, more expensive and slower in other places. Not everyone lives in Paris.