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> no one should be charged more based on their neighborhood Isn't it a fact that it will be more or less costly to roll out service in different neighborhoods?

• lotsofpulp 3y ago
  It is cheaper to make laws like this than to actually help poor people by giving them cash or services, which would cause an increase in taxes. You can lay more of the burden on the upper middle and middle income deciles (since the costs are spread implicitly via costs to comply with regulation and liability avoidance), and avoid taxing the top percentiles, which really would require a broad wealth (or property) tax. Or alternatively, much higher land value taxes which hit the top percentiles too.
  • RHSeeger 3y ago
    > You can lay more of the burden on the upper middle and middle income deciles This seems like it just means everyone will pay whatever the highest cost for anyone is. Doesn't seem like it burden's the middle more than anyone else.
    • bentona 3y ago
      The argument is that the cost of dealing with this legislation will result in the cost of internet service going up slightly, e.g. $10/month. This is irrelevant to the wealthy but impacts the lower classes more.
      • mulmen 3y ago
        It can’t go up an equal amount for everyone because it has to end up equal and it currently isn’t. Since poor neighborhoods already pay more for less they will either get better service for the current price or pay less for existing service.
    • lotsofpulp 3y ago
      The subsidy is a tax, in the form of higher prices. A flat tax is a regressive tax. Lower income/wealth deciles pay proportionately more towards the subsidy than upper income/wealth deciles. This is always the intent when government does not explicitly provide a taxpayer subsidy, because the cash cannot come from the government, otherwise the government’s finances will reflect the higher cash outlay, necessitating higher tax revenue, which could end up with higher tax rates for richer people.
  • umvi 3y ago
    Cash and services just helps the symptoms though. Addressing the root cause involves educating the poor somehow so that they have the skills to be more financially self reliant and the ability to avoid traps (lottery, debt, etc). Being poor (long term, i.e. across generations) actually has little to do with how much money is currently in your bank account and everything to do with how much knowledge is in your mind. That's why you could take a highly paid [insert profession], take every penny and possession of theirs and dump them on the street penniless and homeless, and they wouldn't stay poor for very long if they didn't want to.
    • LoganDark 3y ago
      What?! Being poor has nothing to do with not having skills. Plenty of people have skills they can't even use either because they get outcompeted or there just aren't any opportunities they can access. Not everyone can just magically skill themselves out of poverty.
      • umvi 3y ago
        I disagree. When I look at chronic poverty, a very common, almost guaranteed symptom is lack of skills/education (dropped out of high school, etc). I'm not saying there aren't highly skilled poor people (i.e. starving artists) just that it's more the exception than the rule.
        • LoganDark 3y ago
          Look, my family's in a situation where the living prices are sucking us dry and nearly putting us in debt, all the jobs around here have so many candidates to pick from that we can't get any roles, and because we have no savings we can't afford to move. Maybe what you say can be true for some, but it's hard to survive here if you weren't already born into a privileged position. I finally happen to be in interviews for a potential remote position now, but it took years to get here, it was not easy, and staying in high school for longer would not have helped. Now, I'm still lucky to have access to computers. Try telling someone without that kind of access to just find a remote job if there are no local jobs in their area. All the education and skill in the world still might not help them if they don't have access to employment opportunities at all.
• mulmen 3y ago
  Yes, the deployment cost will vary if you draw enough lines. But higher charges in poor neighborhoods doesn’t mean that’s where the highest costs are. Wealthy neighborhoods with large property and low density could have a higher per-home infrastructure cost. All that trenching adds up. LA is drawing one line at the city limit so there’s only one cost. All customers will pay an equal share of the total cost. This allocation is a matter of perspective but neighborhood boundaries are a classic tool of oppression. Similar to toll roads and bus fares. It costs a lot to be poor. Famously AT&T was required to offer local service at a loss to maintain their monopoly. This seems consistent. Society benefits when everyone has access to basic services.
  • fragmede 3y ago
    Municipal broadband is what needs to happen. Water, electricity, and garbage are considered basic services and are provided by the government, so should Internet access be.
    • CaptainZapp 3y ago
      That's what we have here. Fiber is owned by the city, which rents out access to a number of ISPs and communication providers. They compete on price and product offerings. Works like a charm.
  • oh_sigh 3y ago
    Why would a company choose to charge less to wealthy people, and more to poor people?
    • alistairSH 3y ago
      Because they can. Wealthy customers are more likely* to balk at a price and demand breaking the ISP monopoly in their area. * They have the time and means to hire lawyers
      • gottorf 3y ago
• dogman144 3y ago
  As a presumably technical poster, I have a hard time understanding your comparison between - the internet, through which most of all civil life and beyond flows - grocery stores and gas stations. The internet is a public utility at this point. You’re arguing that poor neighborhoods should pricier or worse water and sewage hah.
  • bigbillheck 3y ago
    > You’re arguing that poor neighborhoods should pricier or worse water and sewage hah. I'm certain there's plenty of people here would agree with that.
    • dogman144 3y ago
      I think that’s the root issue, yes.
      • gottorf 3y ago
        To assume that those who disagree with you is doing so on the basis of wanting to inflict pain on lower-income people is both intellectually lazy as well as in violation of the HN guidelines, which ask you[0] to follow the principle of charity. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        • dogman144 3y ago
          Nowhere did anyone say wanting to inflict pain. Justifying higher prices was what you were doing, what OP noted, and what I agree with as a trend.
          • deleted 3y ago
            [deleted]
          • gottorf 3y ago
            I'm not justifying higher prices; I'm justifying different prices. There seemed to be an implication that some people wanted higher prices in poorer neighborhoods just to stick it to the poor in wording like this: > You’re arguing that poor neighborhoods should pricier or worse water and sewage hah. I apologize if I read into something that wasn't there. To clarify, I won't be upset if some poor neighborhoods happen to pay less for internet service than wealthy neighborhoods, either. And I fully understand your argument made elsewhere that you consider internet access to be a public utility that should be equally priced within the area, much like power or water.
• ineptech 3y ago
  This is a kludge because we don't have the actual solution to keeping prices low, which is market competition. No one wants the government to tell big companies what to do, but when you let a monopolist take over you're stuck with either consumers getting screwed or burdensome regulation, which are both bad. Same deal with net neutrality. In a healthy market we'd have it naturally, without laws prescribing it. We don't have a healthy market, so here we are. And there's no greater gift to the monopolists than the position you're taking.
  • Snowfield9571 3y ago
    So the "real" solution is market competition right to make a healthy market- how do we get that? History has repeatedly shown that large corporations hate competition because it means they have to do something to make money. Anyone who comes up with a new idea is just copied or consumed. Sounds to me like the idea that a "free market" is a healthy market is only healthy for the owners of large corporations.
    • ineptech 3y ago
      It's a complex topic but a popular answer is requiring the owner of the last-mile infrastructure to make it available to competitors at cost. I think that is (roughly) what places with good/cheap broadband do, e.g. South Korea.
• mplewis 3y ago
  It doesn’t matter what it costs. The internet is so fundamental to daily life that it should be considered a basic right. Access should be provided for free to everyone.
  • gottorf 3y ago
    > It doesn’t matter what it costs Everything has diminishing returns. Of course it matters what it costs, no matter what "it" is. > it should be considered a basic right Many people disagree that positive rights (that require something to be provided to the right-bearer by the state at the expense of others) are on the same level as negative rights (that forbid the state from imposing some restriction or penalty on the right-bearer), or should indeed even be considered "rights".
  • dogman144 3y ago
    Not sure on the free part but yes, it’s a public utility no matter how tech hems and haws- good luck navigating civil life without a smart phone, for instance. And on top of that originally developed by the govt, then handed over private sector, and then 20 yrs of effort forced everyone to run their lives through it. But definitely not like a utility, at all. The audacity to treat it like a market good vs as a public utility astounds me.
• LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  One of the things that causes disparate impact is the fact that as little as 50 years ago, my white parents bought a house in a white neighborhood that my black coworker's parents were prohibited from buying by racist redlining policies. Today, in 2023, my mother can do WFH consulting in her retirement in part because she can reliably run an HD low-latency video stream, because their neighborhood has fiber and cheap, high-bandwidth service. But my coworker's parents have hugely oversubscribed cable and no fiber options and can't make a video call out because they have negligible upload. Removing the policy, even all these years later, doesn't change the fact that the policy still has a hugely disparate impact. The red lines are still there in the exact same places, it's just not on an FHA insurance map denoted by "white" or "not white", it's on a fiber coverage map and says "fiber" or "no fiber".
  • gottorf 3y ago
    I do not dispute the past existence of actual race-based discrimination on the part of the government, but it doesn't change my argument. My broader point re: "disparate impact" is that it's virtually impossible, in this country or elsewhere (even in places that have been historically monoethnic), to not have any action, whether public or private, that impacts different subgroups within that population differently. The FCC's ruling (mentioned in the article) piggybacks off of the disparate impact clauses of the various civil rights legislation[0], which says that even when there is no intent to discriminate, any action taken by any entity that results in a difference of outcome along protected lines (whether it be race, sex, etc.) is considered to be a discriminatory action. Which, upon examination of available evidence, ends up meaning that every action taken by every entity can be considered discriminatory, since nothing in life affects every subgroup of a population in equal proportion to their composition of the population. But back to the point of internet access: I submit that it's a better solution to remove the impediments (of which there are many, in this highly-regulated sector of the economy) to some enterprising person coming along and rolling out fiber service in your coworker's neighborhood, than to order private businesses to essentially ignore economic realities on the ground. Heck, I would consider a publicly-funded ISP in LA to be a vastly lesser evil, because to routinely ignore economic realities eventually leads to famine and ruin. As I noted in another thread, you can have the USPS mail a letter for you for the price of one stamp, whether it goes from your house to your neighbor's house or from Florida all the way to Alaska. That's an example of something that explicitly ignores the underlying economic reality (that it costs way, way more to do the latter than the former) because A) the USPS is a government agency that B) has a government-granted monopoly on letters and C) serves the public good. UPS or FedEx, on the other hand, will charge you vastly different sums depending on (among other things) how far your package is going. I find ISPs to be more like UPS and FedEx than USPS. They're for the most part not government agencies and are generally not monopolies[1]. [0]: https://ballotpedia.org/Disparate_impact https://ballotpedia.org/Disparate_impact [1]: Of course, a duopoly can be as bad as a monopoly in terms of internet access. I'd be in favor of something like a public utility that owns the lines, and have competing providers serve access over those lines.