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Just to note: Sanders 2020 "Internet for All" plan would have given municipalities the blueprints to a) fight Comcast and entrenched providers and b) funding to

• richwater 6y ago
  Government intervention is what gave providers local monopolies in the first place. More legislation from the federal and state level is not needed, unless it's literally "All local agreements are now null and void" which isn't even legal.
  • munk-a 6y ago
    Government intervention is constantly needed to keep a free market in balance - there certainly is poor spirited legislation that's designed to assist in market capture but there is a lot more legislation out there that's protecting small markets. Anarcho-libretarianism isn't the solution here and neither is rejecting balanced legislation out of a force of habit.
    • nickysielicki 6y ago
      > Government intervention is constantly needed to keep a free market in balance "Constant government intervention" is incompatible with the definition (literally) of a free market.
      • pessimizer 6y ago
        Only the kind of free market that has no rules against fraud and robbery.
      • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        This is just daft, is your idea of free markets the drug cartels of columbia? Because thats what you get wuthoit government intervention
        • nickysielicki 6y ago
          Hey, if you don't like free markets, that's fine, I'll respect your opinion. I'm just saying that: Oxford defines a free market as: "an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses." Wikipedia defines it as: "a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market. In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority, and from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities." Investopedia defines it as: "an economic system based on supply and demand with little or no government control." Words have meaning, god damn it.
          • munk-a 6y ago
            But that's just folks giving the benefit of the doubt to your earlier statement - the technical definition of a free market is incompatible with our modern society.
          • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
            Words do have a meaning, so tell me what is "unrestricted competition"? Because columbian cartels think it means murdering your competitor along with his family. Is that too unrestricted for you? Okay, let's leave out murder. How about paying random people to leave bad reviews for your competitors. Or paying shops so they don't stock competitors products. Or agreeing with banks that your competitor should not get a loan. Or making a deal with railroads where they will only transport your product, and not your competitors? Because all of the above have happened. Is that "unrestricted"?
      • smolder 6y ago
        Anarchical, intervention-less markets are where cartels and monopolies form and destroy competition, and then there stops being anything free about it. By that strict definition of free markets, they are ephemeral, self-defeating things.
    • billytetrud 6y ago
      Government intervention is only needed to settle disputes. Governments are already constantly intervening by barring isps other than eg Comcast from building. That government intervention has to stop. Government enacted monopolies are what caused the problem in the first place. Yes government has to act to stop it, but probably at the state level.
      • TameAntelope 6y ago
        That's a fun idea, but we're well past that now. In reality, monopolies do exist, and the government needs to step in to resolve the dispute the people in a given area now have with the monopoly for its anticompetitive practices. Also, infrastructure isn't easy to build and is oftentimes not even profitable. Are you suggesting only places where an ISP can make money should have Internet access?
        • billytetrud 6y ago
          ISPs are government-granted monopolies. It's so disappointing how many people here don't seem to understand that. Look up regulatory capture and then down vote me...
          • TameAntelope 6y ago
            Yes, but the granting of monopoly status already happened, that part is over. You can't unring that bell, is my point.
            • billytetrud 6y ago
              You absolutely can "unring that bell". You outlaw government granted monopolies
              • TameAntelope 6y ago
                Sure, and you could murder all of the executives of ISPs to send a message to other ISPs about anti-competitive behavior. Anything is obviously possible, but no, you can't actually "unring" this bell.
    • SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
      I’m not shitting on your comment, but are you saying “we need government involvement (regulatory oversight) to solve problems made from previous government involvement (poor spirited legislation)?” I don’t think anyone is suggesting no laws at all, but perhaps we can have some foresight and not legislate ourselves into oversight which will only make more legislation which will only make more... I’m happy to see municipal internet IF the service quality and price is competitive. While we’re dealing with the Verizon’s and Comcast’s of the world, this is usually working, what do we do when we’ve destroyed the market and the local service sucks?
  • takeda 6y ago
    Actually government intervention is the only way to solve it. The problem is that in a city there's limited space to run the wires to each home. Also if you want to have 10 competitors is really silly to expect having 10 fiber optic cables going to every home when majority of people wouldn't use more than one ISP at the time. Then 9 fibers will be then unused and degrading. When Internet was reclassified to Title II, Wheeler specifically excluded Title II's provision that required existing ISPs to lease their infrastructure to competitors. Back in late 90s, early 2000s we had tons of ISPs to chose from, exactly because of that provision. This needs to change if we want to get competition back. Or we would need cities to build such infrastructure which is even harder and more expensive thing to do. Either way it requires government intervention.
    • billytetrud 6y ago
      Limited space? For wires? You know how small wires are right?
      • Ekaros 6y ago
        They probably won't share conduits, and probably just in case want more than one pair... So it does add up.
      • zaphar 6y ago
        For wires that need too run out in the elements around a quarter inch or higher, plus you need conduit, and backup wires. So about an inch or more with just naive napkin estimation. I'm probably underestimating it actually.
      • majormajor 6y ago
        Take away the government intervention and you take away the property easements that allow utilities to put up poles and run wires through yards, etc, to get to all the houses. Good luck with your "let everyone run their tiny wires wherever without the government being involved" plan. You've heard of NIMBYism, right? How many times do you think you'll be allowed to rip up the street?
• tgb 6y ago
  Biden's infrastructure plan includes similar verbiage.[1] > support for broadband networks owned, operated by, or affiliated with local governments, non-profits, and co-operatives Anyone know if it would work? Note that this is the bill getting criticized as not being about "real infrastructure" due to daring to have non-transportation infrastructure, like this. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/31/fact-sheet-the-american-jobs-plan/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
  • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    The reasonable scale for a municipal fiber deployment is, as the name says, at the municipal level. There is already a reasonably competitive Tier 1 provider market, because it isn't a natural monopoly, and there is no need for the government to enter a market segment which is already working. Which means the biggest thing you need from the feds (and for that matter the state governments) is to get out of the way and stop actively interfering with cities that want to do this. Which doesn't seem like much to ask, but the incumbents have spent the last hundred years capturing every level of government in the US, and then we got the likes of Ajit Pai running the FCC, which was an impediment. The other thing to watch out for is the classic regulatory capture move where the government is about to spend money on municipal infrastructure to compete with the incumbents and the incumbents lobby instead to give the money to them. In this context here you're looking for money that goes to "5G" instead of fiber. Because "5G" means incumbents who own wireless spectrum and/or want to "buy" it from the taxpayer using tax money and then sit on it to exclude any other competitors from having it. Or have the taxpayer pay for their privately-owned infrastructure, providing a permanent cost advantage so that no one else can ever competitively enter the market in the future. First rule of the game is never give tax money to the incumbents. History has shown that it's a black hole that produces no results, and anybody who doesn't understand this is either captured or not paying attention.
  • notyourwork 6y ago
    If most of society can work from home and conduct business via the internet, I'd argue the internet is clearly infrastructure. There weren't traffic jams and cars all over the highways last year, we were cruising the internet superhighway. Would love it for dinosaurs in politics to get with it and understand the implications of technological investment (or lack thereof).