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I feel like the USA is focusing on the wrong thing with net neutrality. The core problem is that individual ISPs have total monopolies on infrastructure (or at

I feel like the USA is focusing on the wrong thing with net neutrality. The core problem is that individual ISPs have total monopolies on infrastructure (or at least on the better infrastructure) in a lot of areas, and so can do all the anti consumer bullshit they want without repercussions. Enforcing net neutrality is just treating a symptom of the monopoly. Other countries fix this by having the shared physical infrastructure controlled by a government entity that rents access to any company that wants to sell service as an ISP.

Uehreka 4y ago
I’d advise not saying “the USA” in conversations like this, but being more specific and saying “US activists” or “US policymakers”. The former are probably who you are referring to, the latter are who people are generally referring to when they say “the USA” in international policy discussions, but US policymakers are deeply divided on this issue and most either don’t have a strong opinion or are actually against net neutrality.
pdonis 4y ago
> Other countries fix this by having the shared physical infrastructure controlled by a government entity that rents access to any company that wants to sell service as an ISP. Yes, and the problem in the US has been that every time a local municipality tries this, they get sued by the ISPs, and since the ISPs have much deeper pockets, the suits never get to the point where they could drive meaningful change with a ruling against the ISPs. That's a big reason why net neutrality has been pushed in the US: because it's the best that can be done given that a better fix has failed.
- postingawayonhn 4y ago
  > every time a local municipality tries this, they get sued by the ISP It's a problem that needs to be dealt with at the state, or ideally federal level. It needs significant regulatory change and a large investment.
  - pdonis 4y ago
    > It's a problem that needs to be dealt with at the state, or ideally federal level. You mean the levels that produced all the sweetheart deals the ISPs currently have? The ISP monopolies are products of state and federal (mostly state) intervention in the name of supposedly necessary things like "enabling internet access".
    - postingawayonhn 4y ago
      All the more reason the issue needs to be fixed at the level.
- jcampbell1 4y ago
  Using power to tax to directly compete with private investments is a slippery slope and rightly deserves a day in court.
  - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
    You say that like it's unprecedented. That's basically any government spending program that isn't cash payments.
    - jcampbell1 4y ago
      No, the municipality agreed to terms with internet provider which included no tax financed competition. Then some politician needs to get elected and sells the public on a not possible idea of muni internet. Sort of like Biden canceling student debt by executive order when the constitution says congress has the power of the purse. You can assign the blame to Biden, Republican AGs, the Supreme Court, or the authors of the constitution. Doesn’t make much difference, so long as the issue is correctly understood. A day in court makes sense.
      - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
        > No, the municipality agreed to terms with internet provider which included no tax financed competition. There was a contract between every municipality and ISP with an explicit term that the municipality couldn't finance a competitor? That seems unlikely.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I’m surprised none of the good states, like maybe NY or one of the New England states, hasn’t decided to help out in this sort of situation. Couldn’t the state say “we’ll step in to do the defense, for our municipalities.”
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    There aren't really any states in the US that are pro public-ownership at the expense of private profit. The so-called big govt states subcontract to private companies and let them make large profits.
chroma 4y ago
Back when net neutrality was a big deal, there wasn’t nearly as much competition between ISPs. Now that cell data has improved and Starlink has launched, there is a floor on how bad a wired ISP can be.
rektide 4y ago
300%. Heck yeah. "Local loop unbundling" to decouple the (physical-/natural-monopoly) service from the information service! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling Alas the US is fucked. In 2004 the FCC agree to Verizon's ask, that FCC exclude fiber to the home because it was expensive to build out. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/technology/fcc-shields-fiber-lines.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/technology/fcc-shields-fi... It keeps getting worse. In 2020 the FCC exclude a variety of dark fiber & ds3 owners from unbundling regulations, phased in over 8 years. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/08/2020-25254/modernizing-unbundling-and-resale-requirements-in-an-era-of-next-generation-networks-and-services https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/08/2020-25... Monstrous behavior. Society needs some safeguards. Letting old incumnents do what they want forever is an filthy disgraceful low place to be, especially for such a core utility. Living under this degrading pro-monopoly regulatory environment has been a major heartbreak of my life, and the people who should be doing something to protect one of our most prized embodiments of democracy- our ability to communicate with each other- keep making the situation worse. This is 100x worse than Chicago selling the parking meter system to private interests for 100 years, which they recouped in 6. At least that was a limited area, at least that doesnt control speech & access (there are alternatives to driving then street parking). https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2022/5/26/23143356/chicago-parking-meters-75-year-lease-daley-city-council-audit-skyway-loop-garages-krislov https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2022/5/26/23143356/ch... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988984 Absolute travesty. Humanity getting beatten in the face with a stick by shitty corporations forever. The FCC backing them up. I dont even know if it's possible to get these decisions changed.
postingawayonhn 4y ago
The infrastructure can be privately owned too. In New Zealand we have a national fibre network covering about 90% of the population. That was built by four private entities to a set of minimum specifications and with some government subsidies. These companies are not allowed to sell retail services, must offer wholesale access to all ISPs, and have their wholesale pricing regulated.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  It seems like new zealand has slower internet speeds than the US, though. It ranks 19th versus 8th for the US. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed Other rankings seem to more or less agree on that too.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Median internet speeds is a terrible metric when comparing infrastructure because it effectively only measures the cheapest to deploy urban populations internet speeds which is basically meaningless now days. 50 Mbps or 500 Mbps all are basically running on the same back haul which is why things fell apart during the pandemic when people tried to actually use their hypothetical home bandwidth. Meanwhile millions of Americans are stuck with 1.5 Mbps DSL or really expensive Satellite internet.
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      I don't disagree with your point! But it seems like the same pattern is true for average speeds too (sort by average): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_Internet_connection_speeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_In...
      - Retric 4y ago
        It’s a valid point, on the other hand average is much worse. 1 person at 1GBps makes up for huge numbers of people at 1.5Mbps vs 20 Mbps. Not that all speeds above 20 Mbps are equal, but there are heavy diminishing returns. IMO, I would rank countries by percentage of 50+Mbps internet connections.
holmesworcester 4y ago
This is a common misconception. Competition itself can't protect against net neutrality violations, because even small-marketshare ISPs can break your startup's product for some customers. Almost none of these customers will ever even learn that the failure is the ISP's fault. And even if they do, who will switch ISPs just to use some not-yet-proven product by a new startup? Meanwhile your competitor's product will work well, either because they were too big to mess with or because they paid whatever the ISP was demanding. Maybe you should too! This is why Europe needed net neutrality rules, and actually passed stronger rules than the U.S., even though the system you describe was prevalent there. Amusingly, before the rules existed, the increased competition in Europe had actually led to more net neutrality violations there (specifically, blocking or throttling things like VOIP and BitTorrent) because ISPs in that competitive landscape were under more pressure to cut costs! My source on this is Stanford's Barbara van Schewick, who is a leading expert on net neutrality policy and whose work informed both the U.S. and E.U. rules.
- holmesworcester 4y ago
  For example, which video conferencing solution would you choose: the one that always works for everyone you invite, or the one that works only for 90% of the people you invite, because the other 10% are on an ISP that blocks it? You'd be under a lot of pressure to choose the solution that you know will just work for everyone. The ISP doesn't need to be anything close to a monopoly to get leverage for extortion and (in the process) mess up competition at the application layer. Yes, we need more competition, but we still need net neutrality rules. Competition improves prices and service. Net neutrality rules protect competition at the application layer, and they ensure that ISPs are really competing on how good they are at moving data, not just on how good they can get at shaking down the application layer.
  - vishal0123 4y ago
    If there is competition, which ISP would you select? One that works with most of the sites or one that works with all sites? And if enough people selects the latter, and assuming blocking small percentage of site doesn't give big monetary gain to the ISP, there is no reason for ISP to behave the way you said in the example.
themusicgod1 4y ago
No they haven't. Kiwifarms experience. shows that they were focusing on the right thing the whole time.
a-user-you-like 4y ago
Wireless tech should help mitigate the natural monopoly that crops up when it’s difficult to build physical infrastructure to someone’s home. Though it would be nice if multiple companies were allowed to lay fiber. It seems existing govt regulation prevents that, thereby creating the monopoly people complain of.
- iptrans 4y ago
  There is only so much wireless spectrum. Multiple companies are allowed to lay fiver. It’s not regulation that prevents overbuilding but economics.
  - a-user-you-like 4y ago
    Tell that to Google fiber who got stonewalled on multiple cities even after they offered to pay for everything, front to back. It’s regulation causing the monopoly.
    - iptrans 4y ago
      Google fiber had very specific requirements for their build-out. Not all locations were able or equipped to meet those demands. Other than that, what specific regulation are you referring to? More often than not it’s the economics that prevent overbuilding an existing monopoly rather than regulatory barriers.
- naasking 4y ago
  Wireless can't make a real dent in high speed competition due to congestion issues. It's only competitive in rural/less dense areas.
majormajor 4y ago
It's not just the US, Europe saw a need for net neutrality rules and has them. The problems of infrastructure monopolies and the problems of ISPs messing with certain service providers are not completely the same sets of problems.
tshaddox 4y ago
I mean, having the government own the infrastructure is the ultimate extent of regulation, and strictly a superset of regulating net neutrality specifically. Surely the infrastructure is by far the most expensive part of an ISP, so this is basically just saying “because internet infrastructure is a natural monopoly, we’ll have the government be the only ISP.” I guess other countries set it up so that private companies are technically “the ISPs,” but what do they actually do?
- pabs3 4y ago
  See the sibling comment about NZ's infra: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35064344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35064344
EarlKing 4y ago
Honestly this is a problem that was solved 40 years ago with the breakup of AT&T: the Equal Access mandate.... and it worked right up until institutional capture ensured that it didn't. Now here we are 40 years later and AT&T has virtually reassembled itself and the Equal Access laws have been completely obliterated. I wonder if there's a correlation?
ROTMetro 4y ago
No thank you. I live in a small mountain town in the Pacific North West and I have the choice of high speed cable and multiple fiber providers up to 1Gb. I do not want a non-responsive government entity/goverment observer over everything.
- iptrans 4y ago
  Oh, sweet summer child, do you think you can escape the NSA? :) More seriously, private ISPs in a (local) government owned open access network does not mean the (local) government controls and observes everything. If you are afraid of the local government, run for office.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    I did 5 years in federal prison and was a jailhouse lawyer, I know reality. Doesn't mean I need to volunteer to expand that. But you just give up and give in, that's your right. Personally I relate to the American route of the last 200 years and believe in limited government power (you know, the same government power that abused it's authority when it gave out monopiles on communication infrastructure. I don't see how it's abusing power should result in...giving it more power?????). I posted above about how my house is denied US mail delivery because when my mother was dying of cancer she couldn't get to the mailbox in a timely manner and she dared appeal. Petty tyrants gonna tyrant and there are limited battles one person can fight.
nichos 4y ago
Unfortunately, the solution that comes up to fix bad government policies is more government policies. The intentions is usually good, but the consequences are always bad.
scarface74 4y ago
So it’s “fixed” by giving the government control over physical infrastructure? What could possibly go wrong?
- iptrans 4y ago
  What could possibly go right? Read the comment about NZ. Or refer to Sweden.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  If having critical infrastructure under democratic control is too scary for you?
  - scarface74 4y ago
    There is nothing “democratic” about how the US works if you define “democratic” as “one person one vote”. Because of gerrymandering, the electoral college, 2 Senators per state etc, you have less voting power if you live in California than if you live in Nebraska. Besides, a government run by the “majority” tends to trample on the rights of the minority. I don’t just mean racial minorities. I mean anyone who holds minority viewpoints.
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      > There is nothing “democratic” about how the US works So it seems. Then let's not blame governments and democracies in general.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    I am currently denied mail service by my local post master because when my mother was in this house (and I was in prison) and dying of cancer she could not get to the mailboxes (at the end of the street and requiring crossing the street using curbs with no handicap ramps) in a timely enough manner. She had the nerve to appeal her mail service being turned off, and so now the post master has a personal grudge with my family. So yes, having government control of essential services is scary to me.

Uehreka 4y ago

I’d advise not saying “the USA” in conversations like this, but being more specific and saying “US activists” or “US policymakers”. The former are probably who you are referring to, the latter are who people are generally referring to when they say “the USA” in international policy discussions, but US policymakers are deeply divided on this issue and most either don’t have a strong opinion or are actually against net neutrality.

pdonis 4y ago

> Other countries fix this by having the shared physical infrastructure controlled by a government entity that rents access to any company that wants to sell service as an ISP. Yes, and the problem in the US has been that every time a local municipality tries this, they get sued by the ISPs, and since the ISPs have much deeper pockets, the suits never get to the point where they could drive meaningful change with a ruling against the ISPs. That's a big reason why net neutrality has been pushed in the US: because it's the best that can be done given that a better fix has failed.

postingawayonhn 4y ago
> every time a local municipality tries this, they get sued by the ISP It's a problem that needs to be dealt with at the state, or ideally federal level. It needs significant regulatory change and a large investment.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > It's a problem that needs to be dealt with at the state, or ideally federal level. You mean the levels that produced all the sweetheart deals the ISPs currently have? The ISP monopolies are products of state and federal (mostly state) intervention in the name of supposedly necessary things like "enabling internet access".
  - postingawayonhn 4y ago
    All the more reason the issue needs to be fixed at the level.
jcampbell1 4y ago
Using power to tax to directly compete with private investments is a slippery slope and rightly deserves a day in court.
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  You say that like it's unprecedented. That's basically any government spending program that isn't cash payments.
  - jcampbell1 4y ago
    No, the municipality agreed to terms with internet provider which included no tax financed competition. Then some politician needs to get elected and sells the public on a not possible idea of muni internet. Sort of like Biden canceling student debt by executive order when the constitution says congress has the power of the purse. You can assign the blame to Biden, Republican AGs, the Supreme Court, or the authors of the constitution. Doesn’t make much difference, so long as the issue is correctly understood. A day in court makes sense.
    - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
      > No, the municipality agreed to terms with internet provider which included no tax financed competition. There was a contract between every municipality and ISP with an explicit term that the municipality couldn't finance a competitor? That seems unlikely.
bee_rider 4y ago
I’m surprised none of the good states, like maybe NY or one of the New England states, hasn’t decided to help out in this sort of situation. Couldn’t the state say “we’ll step in to do the defense, for our municipalities.”
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  There aren't really any states in the US that are pro public-ownership at the expense of private profit. The so-called big govt states subcontract to private companies and let them make large profits.

chroma 4y ago

Back when net neutrality was a big deal, there wasn’t nearly as much competition between ISPs. Now that cell data has improved and Starlink has launched, there is a floor on how bad a wired ISP can be.

rektide 4y ago

300%. Heck yeah. "Local loop unbundling" to decouple the (physical-/natural-monopoly) service from the information service! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling Alas the US is fucked. In 2004 the FCC agree to Verizon's ask, that FCC exclude fiber to the home because it was expensive to build out. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/technology/fcc-shields-fiber-lines.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/technology/fcc-shields-fi... It keeps getting worse. In 2020 the FCC exclude a variety of dark fiber & ds3 owners from unbundling regulations, phased in over 8 years. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/08/2020-25254/modernizing-unbundling-and-resale-requirements-in-an-era-of-next-generation-networks-and-services https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/08/2020-25... Monstrous behavior. Society needs some safeguards. Letting old incumnents do what they want forever is an filthy disgraceful low place to be, especially for such a core utility. Living under this degrading pro-monopoly regulatory environment has been a major heartbreak of my life, and the people who should be doing something to protect one of our most prized embodiments of democracy- our ability to communicate with each other- keep making the situation worse. This is 100x worse than Chicago selling the parking meter system to private interests for 100 years, which they recouped in 6. At least that was a limited area, at least that doesnt control speech & access (there are alternatives to driving then street parking). https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2022/5/26/23143356/chicago-parking-meters-75-year-lease-daley-city-council-audit-skyway-loop-garages-krislov https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2022/5/26/23143356/ch... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988984 Absolute travesty. Humanity getting beatten in the face with a stick by shitty corporations forever. The FCC backing them up. I dont even know if it's possible to get these decisions changed.

postingawayonhn 4y ago

The infrastructure can be privately owned too. In New Zealand we have a national fibre network covering about 90% of the population. That was built by four private entities to a set of minimum specifications and with some government subsidies. These companies are not allowed to sell retail services, must offer wholesale access to all ISPs, and have their wholesale pricing regulated.

mardifoufs 4y ago
It seems like new zealand has slower internet speeds than the US, though. It ranks 19th versus 8th for the US. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed Other rankings seem to more or less agree on that too.
- Retric 4y ago
  Median internet speeds is a terrible metric when comparing infrastructure because it effectively only measures the cheapest to deploy urban populations internet speeds which is basically meaningless now days. 50 Mbps or 500 Mbps all are basically running on the same back haul which is why things fell apart during the pandemic when people tried to actually use their hypothetical home bandwidth. Meanwhile millions of Americans are stuck with 1.5 Mbps DSL or really expensive Satellite internet.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    I don't disagree with your point! But it seems like the same pattern is true for average speeds too (sort by average): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_Internet_connection_speeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_In...
    - Retric 4y ago
      It’s a valid point, on the other hand average is much worse. 1 person at 1GBps makes up for huge numbers of people at 1.5Mbps vs 20 Mbps. Not that all speeds above 20 Mbps are equal, but there are heavy diminishing returns. IMO, I would rank countries by percentage of 50+Mbps internet connections.

holmesworcester 4y ago

This is a common misconception. Competition itself can't protect against net neutrality violations, because even small-marketshare ISPs can break your startup's product for some customers. Almost none of these customers will ever even learn that the failure is the ISP's fault. And even if they do, who will switch ISPs just to use some not-yet-proven product by a new startup? Meanwhile your competitor's product will work well, either because they were too big to mess with or because they paid whatever the ISP was demanding. Maybe you should too! This is why Europe needed net neutrality rules, and actually passed stronger rules than the U.S., even though the system you describe was prevalent there. Amusingly, before the rules existed, the increased competition in Europe had actually led to more net neutrality violations there (specifically, blocking or throttling things like VOIP and BitTorrent) because ISPs in that competitive landscape were under more pressure to cut costs! My source on this is Stanford's Barbara van Schewick, who is a leading expert on net neutrality policy and whose work informed both the U.S. and E.U. rules.

holmesworcester 4y ago
For example, which video conferencing solution would you choose: the one that always works for everyone you invite, or the one that works only for 90% of the people you invite, because the other 10% are on an ISP that blocks it? You'd be under a lot of pressure to choose the solution that you know will just work for everyone. The ISP doesn't need to be anything close to a monopoly to get leverage for extortion and (in the process) mess up competition at the application layer. Yes, we need more competition, but we still need net neutrality rules. Competition improves prices and service. Net neutrality rules protect competition at the application layer, and they ensure that ISPs are really competing on how good they are at moving data, not just on how good they can get at shaking down the application layer.
- vishal0123 4y ago
  If there is competition, which ISP would you select? One that works with most of the sites or one that works with all sites? And if enough people selects the latter, and assuming blocking small percentage of site doesn't give big monetary gain to the ISP, there is no reason for ISP to behave the way you said in the example.

themusicgod1 4y ago

No they haven't. Kiwifarms experience. shows that they were focusing on the right thing the whole time.

a-user-you-like 4y ago

Wireless tech should help mitigate the natural monopoly that crops up when it’s difficult to build physical infrastructure to someone’s home. Though it would be nice if multiple companies were allowed to lay fiber. It seems existing govt regulation prevents that, thereby creating the monopoly people complain of.

iptrans 4y ago
There is only so much wireless spectrum. Multiple companies are allowed to lay fiver. It’s not regulation that prevents overbuilding but economics.
- a-user-you-like 4y ago
  Tell that to Google fiber who got stonewalled on multiple cities even after they offered to pay for everything, front to back. It’s regulation causing the monopoly.
  - iptrans 4y ago
    Google fiber had very specific requirements for their build-out. Not all locations were able or equipped to meet those demands. Other than that, what specific regulation are you referring to? More often than not it’s the economics that prevent overbuilding an existing monopoly rather than regulatory barriers.
naasking 4y ago
Wireless can't make a real dent in high speed competition due to congestion issues. It's only competitive in rural/less dense areas.

majormajor 4y ago

It's not just the US, Europe saw a need for net neutrality rules and has them. The problems of infrastructure monopolies and the problems of ISPs messing with certain service providers are not completely the same sets of problems.

tshaddox 4y ago

I mean, having the government own the infrastructure is the ultimate extent of regulation, and strictly a superset of regulating net neutrality specifically. Surely the infrastructure is by far the most expensive part of an ISP, so this is basically just saying “because internet infrastructure is a natural monopoly, we’ll have the government be the only ISP.” I guess other countries set it up so that private companies are technically “the ISPs,” but what do they actually do?

pabs3 4y ago
See the sibling comment about NZ's infra: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35064344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35064344

EarlKing 4y ago

Honestly this is a problem that was solved 40 years ago with the breakup of AT&T: the Equal Access mandate.... and it worked right up until institutional capture ensured that it didn't. Now here we are 40 years later and AT&T has virtually reassembled itself and the Equal Access laws have been completely obliterated. I wonder if there's a correlation?

ROTMetro 4y ago

No thank you. I live in a small mountain town in the Pacific North West and I have the choice of high speed cable and multiple fiber providers up to 1Gb. I do not want a non-responsive government entity/goverment observer over everything.

iptrans 4y ago
Oh, sweet summer child, do you think you can escape the NSA? :) More seriously, private ISPs in a (local) government owned open access network does not mean the (local) government controls and observes everything. If you are afraid of the local government, run for office.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  I did 5 years in federal prison and was a jailhouse lawyer, I know reality. Doesn't mean I need to volunteer to expand that. But you just give up and give in, that's your right. Personally I relate to the American route of the last 200 years and believe in limited government power (you know, the same government power that abused it's authority when it gave out monopiles on communication infrastructure. I don't see how it's abusing power should result in...giving it more power?????). I posted above about how my house is denied US mail delivery because when my mother was dying of cancer she couldn't get to the mailbox in a timely manner and she dared appeal. Petty tyrants gonna tyrant and there are limited battles one person can fight.

nichos 4y ago

Unfortunately, the solution that comes up to fix bad government policies is more government policies. The intentions is usually good, but the consequences are always bad.

scarface74 4y ago

So it’s “fixed” by giving the government control over physical infrastructure? What could possibly go wrong?

iptrans 4y ago
What could possibly go right? Read the comment about NZ. Or refer to Sweden.
goodpoint 4y ago
If having critical infrastructure under democratic control is too scary for you?
- scarface74 4y ago
  There is nothing “democratic” about how the US works if you define “democratic” as “one person one vote”. Because of gerrymandering, the electoral college, 2 Senators per state etc, you have less voting power if you live in California than if you live in Nebraska. Besides, a government run by the “majority” tends to trample on the rights of the minority. I don’t just mean racial minorities. I mean anyone who holds minority viewpoints.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > There is nothing “democratic” about how the US works So it seems. Then let's not blame governments and democracies in general.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  I am currently denied mail service by my local post master because when my mother was in this house (and I was in prison) and dying of cancer she could not get to the mailboxes (at the end of the street and requiring crossing the street using curbs with no handicap ramps) in a timely enough manner. She had the nerve to appeal her mail service being turned off, and so now the post master has a personal grudge with my family. So yes, having government control of essential services is scary to me.