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The republican point of view is that if something is government-supported, it's unfair to compete against, as the government option will offer better quality se

• hooande 6y ago
  It's hard to see how this is a negative with something like broadband. as long as they can offer better quality service at lower cost, it's a win for every citizen
• winstonewert 6y ago
  Where it becomes unfair is when municipal broadband is supported by general tax revenues. If the citizens of a city are required to pay for the municipal broadband whether or not they use it, then its going to pretty hard to compete with that.
  • toomuchtodo 6y ago
    I pay for trash pickup, parks, libraries, roads, schools, fire, and police regardless of my usage (all out of property taxes). I can stick 8 kids in my local school system, or none, and I’m charged the same. Even my water and sewer are provided for by local government, with only my electric service being a for profit (yet highly regulated) utility, and yet internet connectivity is put forth as a beacon of capitalism where we expect competition when a natural monopoly exists by way of the last mile. The “unfairness” is simple. You regulate the entity who runs your muni fiber operation, and if they don’t meet your metrics you’re measuring success by, you replace them (whether that’s internal folks or an org contracted to provide services). TLDR Ramp muni fiber deployments with rigorous operational oversight as a requirement.
    • winstonewert 6y ago
      Certainly, you can make a case for cities providing broadband just as they provide trash, sewer, parks, libraries, etc. What you can't do is pretend that private broadband companies would be competing with municipal broadband on equal footing.
      • edmundsauto 6y ago
        Is it a requirement that these common goods and services have private competition that is on equal footing? Private security, trash services, libraries (netflix) all have private competition that seems to be thriving in the spaces that have higher requirements, but the baseline situation appears to be handled for much of the region.
        • winstonewert 6y ago
          It's not a requirement. Or at least: we commonly accept many such services provided by municipalities. What is a requirement is acknowledging the unequal footing.
          • edmundsauto 6y ago
            Public and private will always be on unequal footing, due to the difference in the their objectives. It may also be worthwhile to point out that public infra is designed to serve even people who can’t otherwise afford it, as well as limited by their ability to attract talent. (I’m sure there are others.) I had assumed we all felt comfortable using “public/private” as a shortcut for all of these differences, but am learning that is not necessarily shared. In terms of moving the discussion forward, what were you hoping to achieve by pointing out some of these facts?
            • kgantchev 6y ago
              The difference in footing is not based on objectives but the means by which funding is obtained. In the case of private companies, the funding can only by obtained by providing services that the market demands. The government obtains its funding by taxing people.
    • kortilla 6y ago
      > when a natural monopoly exists by way of the last mile. Given how many people actually have multiple options in the last mile, it’s not a natural monopoly.
      • Mauricebranagh 6y ago
        Only if you have Local Loop Unbundling. For most of the US the completion for the last mine is minuscule or non existent.
      • vel0city 6y ago
        The FCC's listing of multiple broadband providers requires you to read between the lines. For my address they list 5 providers. AT&T is on there twice, there's a cable company, and then Viasat and Hughesnet. Given that Viasat and Hughesnet exist for pretty much the entire contiguous US it makes it super easy to say there's at least two providers serving your area, so the whole 99% of people are served by at least two providers is kind of a worthless statement. Given the high latency involved in their flavor of satellite operations, low data caps (or throttling, technically Viasat says its not a cap) they're not really competitive in just about any market with modern wireline services. So in reality I have a choice of two wired providers. Imagine how great our food would be if the only restaurants available were either Burger King or McDonalds. What a competitive marketplace!
        • kortilla 6y ago
          Two wired providers is not a natural monopoly.
          • vel0city 6y ago
            > A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly It might not be limited to just one for all markets, but two choices isn't very competitive due to the massive infrastructural costs and other barriers of entry (e.g., rights of way). Also, my current residence is an example where there actually is competition. As pointed out above, just because the FCC says there's 2+ broadband providers they're including two satellite providers. So a lot of those 3 provider places are really single wireline providers. Once again, is a market where all restaurants are either McDonalds or Burger King an example good competition?
  • daniellarusso 6y ago
    Same with water and sewer? I have a neighbor that refuses to use running water. Should the infrastructure be routed around their property? Should they be forced to use running water?
    • XorNot 6y ago
      So are they on rainwater or what's the deal exactly?
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • daniellarusso 6y ago
        They refuse to pay to ‘fix’ their pipes in their home. Claim they are all leaking. They have the money to do it, but prefer refilling the 5 gallon jugs.
    • winstonewert 6y ago
      Not the point I was making. If a city provides any service: water, sewer, broadband, from property taxes, its going to be really really hard for any company to compete with that. So you can make the case for municipal broadband, but don't pretend that private ISPs are going to compete with it.
• dcow 6y ago
  It also doesn't even seem accurate. Private industries can compete with public ones on both quality and cost. The problem is that, in the face of municipal broadband, private companies have to compete to actually serve the public not "compete" to gouge consumers of as much money as possible in their comfy government protected monopolies.
  • luckylion 6y ago
    They can, if the public providers let them. It's a choice in that regard, since the government can simply say "we'll offer at 10% of our cost, and subsidize it with taxes", in which case you can't compete unless you're insanely more efficient than the public provider.
• NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
  No, really, that's not a Republican perspective at all. In fact, the Republican perspective is the opposite; that government-provided options will be invariably be worse value for money - this is why Republicans favor privatization. I think the Republican objection is to general revenues being used to operated a subsidized Internet service. If that is what you mean by "government-supported", then there is a reasonable argument to be had about whether forcing everyone to pay for the municipal option through taxes really results in a fair competitive landscape for private providers.
  • EricE 6y ago
    Yes - government supported is just a fancy euphemism for taxpayer funded. It’s easy to champion crap when everyone else is paying for it :p
• jonwachob91 6y ago
  No republican in history has ever uttered those words. Republicans argue that government run programs are filled with waste, excess, and decreased output b/c they don't have a profit motive. That was the case with Soviet manufacturing operations, Chinese farming, and the US Veterans Affairs Hospitals. The Soviets could never get the right products when they were needed b/c manufacturing decisions where made from a centralized location, not by the people that needed certain goods. China used to control farming, until one day they had the bright idea to let the farmers control farm output. Chinese farming production has increased by multiples of it's government mandate levels. The VA Hospital system is the worst healthcare system in US, in terms of quality of car and lead time for an appointment. And the US Government doesn't cover military connected injuries at non-VA Hospitals.
• lolinder 6y ago
  Don't try to describe a viewpoint that you're only familiar with from stereotypes. It doesn't contribute to the discussion in any meaningful way, and only serves to further propagate the stereotype. The problem Republicans (in general) have with government-run businesses is not that they operate at a lower cost and so thwart competition, but that they seem to operate at a lower cost because they run on tax dollars rather than on paying customers. Combine that with the fact that the government is not incentivized to make the business profitable and you have a lot of wasted resources used to provide a service that isn't any good but is so cheap to the end user (not to the taxpayer) that it's impossible to compete. Whether this model of government-run systems is accurate is open to debate, but it's not helpful to set up straw men.
  • LimaBearz 6y ago
    There are a lot of conservative narratives baked into this post. Let’s look at the horrible mismanagement of the USPS. I’m 2004 DHL and UPS wrote a law to increase the pension liabilities of the USPS. It passed in 2005 after being passed by a republican super majority. Prior to it’s passing the USPS use to be the poster child of government done right. Service was excellent and reliable, affordable, revenue neutral or surplus generating. In light of this new budgetary crisis created entirely by private business one of their attempts to generate revenue was to sell merch. For a short time you could buy an Official USPS Outfit Dog Costume for example, and it was actually working. Republicans saw them doing that and passed regulation saying no you can’t sell merch or do anything outside delivering mail. The post master general at the time said fine, if we can’t raise money other ways then we need to raise rates. Guess what republicans did. They told them to piss off. After kneecapping the usps they just pointed at them and used them as an example of bad government which they themselves caused. Classic “starving the beast” The narrative republicans have around government inefficiency is either wrong or entirely self inflicted. The USPS is just my favorite example. And if the republicans actually cared they’d propose alternatives and be active in the legislative process with an intent on servicing the “average” American. Trying to ban municipalities federally does nothing but obstruct and protect their corporate funders. That is unacceptable
    • 6y ago
• kortilla 6y ago
  > as the government option will offer better quality service at lower cost than is economical for a private company, since the government has no profit mo FFS that’s not why republicans have problems with the government services. The issue isn’t that government doesn’t have to make a profit, it’s that it doesn’t have to be sustainable at all (i.e. it doesn’t even have to bring in enough money to support itself unlike a non-profit). Additionally, nobody is afraid the government is going to be “better quality”. That’s not the case in most markets where the government operates. The concern is that the government can operate a service financially unsustainably and and offer a shitty service for so cheap that it destroys the market for better services. A government-funded high-speed deployment of 20mbps to the house that goes out for an hour during the night and occasionally disconnects for a few seconds throughout the day that only costs $2.99/mo will destroy the competition, run a deficit, and people will have worse service because of it.
  • mattmanser 6y ago
    Which is just as stupid as if the republicans are so concerned about sustainablily, why haven't they made a peep about or made attempts to ban the VC model that American startups operate under?
    • jcampbell1 6y ago
      Because they look through their rose tinted glasses and think the US is leading the world in smartphones, electric cars, pharma, and internet companies. They don’t see the problems that you see.
    • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      The money the VCs are swinging around on was put in their care voluntarily (you invest in the VC fund) or voluntarily by proxy (you invest in a fund that invests partially or wholly in vc stuff) whereas public coffers are kept full by threat of violence and therefore need to be treated with more respect. When you take someone's money by threat of violence under the premise that doing so is a net positive for society you have a much greater obligation to pursue that result and sustainability is one of many considerations when it comes to whether or not something is a net positive for society.
• pharmakom 6y ago
  Not quite. The position is that government has an unfair advantage in competition (might be regulatory or being funded by taxation, or maybe free scale by being a government supplier) so they can push out suppliers who would otherwise supply a better / cheaper service. The UK does not have any low cost healthcare providers because you can’t compete with a tax payer funded organisation. Now, do government services tend to be better? That’s another question.