While I believe lobbing as practiced is actual corruption, it’s totally legal in the US.
Legality aside, there are a not insignificant number of people who truly believe that private industry is invariably better than government at providing virtually any good or service, and that government involvement in anything that could be done privately is by definition harmful.
I actually had a conversation about this exact subject with a family member just last week. We live in a rural area and have awful service from Spectrum. He opposes plans for better cheaper muni internet because “The county government can only do better because they get to cheat - they don’t need to make a profit, but spectrum does.”
I personally think that a hybrid system is best. The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
> The county government can only do better because they get to cheat - they don’t need to make a profit, but spectrum does.
Amazing... they're so close to realizing. :)
> Legality aside, there are a not insignificant number of people who truly believe that private industry is invariably better than government at providing virtually any good or service, and that government involvement in anything that could be done privately is by definition harmful
Given the type of government service they’re going to get—one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese—are they wrong? Their frame of reference is the MTA (which runs subways that are late 15% of the time), the NYCHA, which runs some of the worst slums in the country, and NYC DOE which has a graduation rate worse than the subway’s on-time performance.
Maybe there’s a reason there is a market for the message “hey, however bad Spectrum is, imagine the city government running your broadband.”
> Given the type of government service they’re going to get—one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese—are they wrong?
You won’t hear me argue the NY state legislature is not deficient and/or corrupt. pushing back against monopolies writing their own legislation to kill competition is definitely a part of how we begin to fix it.
> You won’t hear me argue the NY state legislature is not deficient and/or corrupt.
What makes you think that’s the problem? The NYC school system, for example, spends $38,000 per year per student. Thats about triple what Japan spends per student. What else can the legislature do? And do you think the NY or NYC legislatures are any more corrupt than those in Japan or Germany or Sweden?
To me, the problem seems to be the workers running who are running the system, not how the system is designed on paper or how it’s funded.
> pushing back against monopolies writing their own legislation to kill competition is definitely a part of how we begin to fix it.
How does that follow? Say you defeat this legislation and NYC adopts community broadband. Will that system be fast, affordable, and reliable? That seems like putting hope over experience.
> What makes you think that’s the problem? The NYC school system, for example, spends $38,000 per year per student. Thats about triple what Japan spends per student. What else can the legislature do? And do you think the NY or NYC legislatures are any more corrupt than those in Japan or Germany or Sweden?
I wanted to ask if you were joking, but that wouldn’t be productive.
What else can the legislature do? Figure out why throwing money at a problem isn’t working. This is the point someone above made about private vs public industry. Private can’t operate at a loss. The federal, state, and local governments can, and generally do. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the federal budget deficit.
If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change.
Or - the graduation rate would stay the same, and schools would be asset-stripped so that most of those 38k would flow to shareholders rather than school budgets.
There are plenty of examples of mediocre public services getting privatized and becoming even worse, from a capital-efficiency perspective (e.g. UK railways, UK water...). Private companies are out to make a profit, and efficiency is just a mean to it; if there are other means, even to the detriment of what should be their core mission, they will pursue those means.
The real objective is both empowering, motivating, and holding accountable the middle-management layers of essential public services: administrators, teachers, railway workers, etc. Privatization doesn't magically do that. Creating a competitive system doesn't require corporate profits.
> Given the type of government service they’re going to get—one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese—are they wrong? Their frame of reference is the MTA (which runs subways that are late 15% of the time), the NYCHA, which runs some of the worst slums in the country, and NYC DOE which has a graduation rate worse than the subway’s on-time performance.
FWIW, the MTA is run by the state government, not the municipal one. That being said, as someone who has lived in New York the past 8 years (still don't quite consider myself a "New Yorker", but maybe I never will), I have no strong sense that the city government would make a particularly good internet service, but even a mediocre one would be _miles_ ahead of Spectrum. I have no other option in my apartment building, and we get random outages when there isn't even a storm or anything an average of maybe a few hours a month. Their website never shows an outage when it happens, but after I check the status when our internet is down, I'll get a text in around a half an hour saying "oops, there's an outage". The idea of being in one of the largest cities in the world but not being able to get reasonably consistent internet for literally any cost is mind boggling to me, and having such a terrible service have exclusive access to my market is a much larger failure of municipal regulation than merely having a subpar municipal internet service as an alternative.
> He opposes plans for better cheaper muni internet because “The county government can only do better because they get to cheat - they don’t need to make a profit, but spectrum does.”
Tell him he needs to be willing to support for the muni internet in order to get Spectrum to offer symmetric fiber in the first place.
Same way he needed to be able to convincingly threaten to cut the cord to DirectTV the umpteen times he's forced them to offer him a discount, or to let XM radio subscription expire in order to get them to drop from $25/mo to $5/mo to get him back.
Dollars to donuts he's had the experience of paying out the ass for those services. Perhaps you're lucky and he's never renegotiated either of those. In that case tell him how to get those cheaper rates, and let him feel what it's like to instantly save an order of magnitude dollars monthly.
Then you'll get a better sense of how deep those beliefs go.
If government is installing and maintaining infrastructure then private industry becomes unnecessary overhead. This is, in effect, requesting government subsidies be directed to the corporate officers and shareholders of major telecoms firms to no obvious benefit to the larger public.
I oppose municipal internet because then the municipality has to hire a staff of network administrators and a staff of people to actually install the service to households and customer service people to manage subscriptions and front-line tech support questions (or pay contractors to do all that). Lots of graft and favoritism will go in on that. Friends will get hired although they are not competent to do those jobs. County government salaries typically aren't market leading so even when those jobs aren't given to friends, they aren't going to get the best people. I have to pay for all of that, so my taxes go up, even if I don't use their service or if I don't have internet service at all.
In my town we have standard Xfinity for cable and now quantum fiber and Ting Internet laying down fiber. It increased our choice from single ISP to multiple ones.
As opposed to the private industry, famously meritocratic and never hiring friends, family, and insiders?
Are you sure your taxes are used to fund the municipal Internet? In my locality they issued a bond to fund the initial trenching, and use the subscription fees to pay back that bond and fund the long term operation. No taxes are paying for it, people who are not using the municipal Internet don't pay anything for it.
Do you still oppose municipal Internet in that case?
Maybe your locality is different, but before we got municipal Internet we had basically 3 choices: Xfinity at $180/mo for ~gig down/120M (something in that ballpark) up, CenturyLink with 40Mbps or less DSL (antiquated infrastructure, they actively blocked CLECs from doing anything that could improve it), or terrestrial wireless (fairly sketchy in our environment).
Once we got municipal broadband, we finally got fiber to the house, gigabit symmetric, great customer support, and latency that was 10x lower, AND Xfinity dropped their prices.
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> I actually had a conversation about this exact subject with a family member just last week. We live in a rural area and have awful service from Spectrum. He opposes plans for better cheaper muni internet because “The county government can only do better because they get to cheat - they don’t need to make a profit, but spectrum does.”
This argument is dumb because it has nothing to do with the government. A non-profit could take out a loan and build an ISP and not have to turn a profit.
The real argument in this nature is if the municipal ISP is being subsidized with tax money their competitors don't get. But you can solve that too: Either they pay for the network by issuing a bond and then have to pay it back from subscription fees, or if there is to be a subsidy then anybody operating an ISP gets the same one.
The actual problem here gets back to the original issue: The ISPs lobby the government to suppress any competitor. If the incumbent sucks and people hate them, why doesn't a non-profit, or any other for-profit business, enter the market and take their customers? Because the incumbent has lobbied for laws to prevent that, or will sue them under whatever pretext they can find to slow them down, try to bankrupt them and deter anyone else from making the attempt.
It's harder to do that to a municipal network because the government workers operating the network will have insider knowledge of how to deal with their own bureaucracy and have the ear of the government officials who approved the network to get any artificial roadblocks cleared away. But the real problem is that none of those impediments should be there to begin with.
> The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
You can do even better than that. Have the government install cable trenches along all the roads, then provide cheap access to anyone who wants to install fiber in them. That reduces the build-out cost dramatically and then you get competition without anybody being able to make any claim of unfairness because access to install cable is available to every individual member of the public. It should be cheap and easy enough that if you want to run fiber from your house to your buddy's on the other side of town, your primary cost should be the two miles of fiber optic cable.
> government involvement in anything that could be done privately is by definition harmful.
They are religious extremists, kind of like the Taliban.
In my experience, they are not actually looking at data and are not ready to be convinced by deeper analysis, examination of natural monopolies, or examples of government successfully delivering something. There are a few in this very comment section
> I personally think that a hybrid system is best. The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
I fully agree and am on board with this. I liken this to a “public roads” approach and (in applicable countries) a nationalized rail system. So many businesses are successful operating on publicly-owned infrastructure without the burden of maintenance. However, if everyone had to maintain their own infra like that, this same burden creates a high barrier to entry for new companies, promoting a monopoly, which leads to a situation where there is non need to compete or innovate: Build once, bill forever.
In my city, Sacramento, the collectively owned power company (SMUD) owns all the power poles and regularly sells space on them for telecom with little restriction. For internet service, I have the option of 2 different FTTH ISPs, 2 DOCSIS ISPs, and 1 DSL ISP (which is 2-3 more options than many people have). Not perfect, but it does mean there is healthy competition and customer choice. I just wish SMUD would run their own PON and sell bandwidth on it, we would then see a number of ISPs pop up and ISP-adjacent innovation utilizing this (hypothetical) city-wide PON as a platform.
UK has a national grid serving 67m people! That should be how it is done. I think they might own the last mile.
I think Australia might be the same or at least per state. They do own the last mile, AusGrid comes and repairs power poles and has a map of outages online.
Lebanon is the other extreme where you just need your own generator because the infra is localized and unreliable.
Australia has traditionally had government led national infrastructure to achieve span and system uniformity, followed on by waves of privatisation to varying degrees - for roads, power, telecommunications, etc.
It's a large (mainland USA in area equivilant) area with sparse dense pockets of population.
W.Australia has a fully independent power grid, I suspect the Northern Territory is the same. The East Coast (where the vast majority of population resides) has inter connected State grids .. including (recently) Tasmania, an island state with a great deal of hydro electricity and gas reserves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink
There's a federal road network, lesser roads are state roads, smaller roads are managed by local councils.
Reporting on lobbying is also legal in the US ;)
> I personally think that a hybrid system is best. The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
The problem that I often see with these approaches is that the companies making the profits often lobby extensively to reduce the "fees, costs..." or have the infrastructure being continously funded by society via e.g. taxes (I actually don't have an issue with initial construction being taxpayer funded). This typically results in infrastructure getting into worse and worse condition because the funds to maintain are not there. Then the lobbying calls for public/private partnership investments (where the private partner reaps the profits and the public is left with the costs). Road infrastructure is a good example, a single truck causes 10000 times more damage then a car [1], but trucks pay only a miniscule proportion of road taxes.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
That's such a ridiculous argument on its face. If the government can "cheat" and give you a better service, in what way do you care if they don't turn a profit doing it?
> I personally think that a hybrid system is best. The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
Adam Smith would agree. So do I.
It's true, we tried. At some point congressmen and senators decided to start handing billions to huge companies based on promises rather than creating public infrastructure. Now we give money to companies who say they will make the infrastructure, they don't, they legally eliminate competition, then consume more public resources when the public sues because they never created the infrastructure.
This is America. Give companies our tax dollars to be legal monopolies and make our lives suck.
Im in a rural area and couldn't even get DSL at any point, best available was a fixed wireless LTE connection until about 6 months ago, and this is a low swampy area with tons of tall trees and the network was consistently overloaded, so it was garbage service.
Finally though there was a cooperative formed with the local power company and they hung fiber up on the power poles and brought drops down right into the home and now we get 1 gig for less than the wireless cost and completely sidestepped the garbage local telecom company who had been promising internet and not delivering for near two decades. And it didn't take them long at all to string it up down all the roads around here and then drops to peoples homes.
That's interesting to me. I had been previously told that fiber couldn't be hung on poles because the movement on the line breaks the glass fibers.
Similar story for me in rural Mississippi. AT&T laid fiber years ago with government money but never lit it up. We were able to get 3mbps DSL though which was almost not worth it. Power company coop spun out a ISP and started hanging fiber from the power poles and now I get gigabit fiber for less than I was paying AT&T when I lived in town.
Sorry but your family members argument does not make any sense. In an effort to make profits, spectrum will desperately avoid spending any money on upgrading the existing network.