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Most people have exactly one choice of ISP. If you're lucky, there might be a second one with the same price and 1/10 the speed. Whereas I could go build an au
by _bxg1 8y ago
Most people have exactly one choice of ISP. If you're lucky, there might be a second one with the same price and 1/10 the speed.
Whereas I could go build an auction site myself if I really wanted to. Scaling a business takes work, but the power of software is that it requires no material resources to get started. Laying fiber is not only immensely expensive in and of itself, but ISP's have also lobbied to stack the deck severely against newcomers: https://www.wired.com/2016/09/utility-poles-important-future-internet/ https://www.wired.com/2016/09/utility-poles-important-future...
- deadmik3 8y agoI think the amount of effort and traction you'd get from trying to launch your own auction site to compete with eBay would be about equal to getting a couple shovels and burying some cat5 around your neighborhood to compete with comcast
- _bxg1 8y agoNot if eBay started making extremely anti-consumer choices like Comcast has. At some point it would get to be too much, and competition would step in. We see that starting to happen a bit with Facebook lately, although the network effect there is stronger than with an auction site. But Comcast can do whatever the hell it wants, because nobody can even try to provide a way out.
- komali2 8y agoYou aren't allowed to bury cat5 in your neighborhood without government approval, and they'd tell you to just lease time off Comcast lines. What will you connect your cat5 cable to?
- deadmik3 8y agoPlug your router into your neighbor's, and everyone else that wants to join your new ISP. I don't see the difficulty; it's just as easy as starting a new eBay site and getting people to sign up
- wvenable 8y agoYou can create an ISP and then you have to work to get people to sign up. You can create a eBay site and then you have to work to get people to sign up. And your argument is the hard part of making an eBay site is signing people up and hand-wave over the build part of both these things? Apples to Spaceships comparison.
- deadmik3 8y agoWell, the argument is that if you don't like eBay it's easy to just go make your own. I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just assuming that part of "making your own" is getting the other users to sign up, since an auction site with no one to bid isn't very useful. So it's the same with ISPs: if you don't like it just make your own.
- komali2 8y agoYou cannot make your own ISP. You can make your own eBay. There is no competition for Comcast, there is for eBay. It appears your very premise is flawed but I welcome you to demonstrate why this isn't true.
- deadmik3 8y agoSure I can make my own ISP. It just won't be an international network with billions of people on it. But I'll set up a server in my house with my new ebay on it and connect it to my neighbor running his new facebook. We could even do it wirelessly. It won't be that great, because he wants to share pictures of his kids and I want to sell my funko pops, but it's definitely easy. Unless your definition of an ISP inherently includes a connection to millions of people, in which case I don't understand why your definition of an eBay doesn't as well?
- wvenable 8y agoThat's funny because your eBay clone will have a connection to millions of people. You also seem to forget that the "I" in ISP stands for Internet. Your connection to your neighbor is just a LAN/WAN and by definition is not an ISP.