4 ms·

> We need far stricter laws around what it means to be an ISP I would argue different - we need those folks to have 4+ viable ISP options that will compete for

> We need far stricter laws around what it means to be an ISP I would argue different - we need those folks to have 4+ viable ISP options that will compete for them ferociously, rather than making double sure no one else (but another telco megacorp that can afford the compliance) comes and they're stuck with 1-2 greedy ISPs forever.

avery17 2y ago
Well one of those things requires interpreting words and the other requires bootstrapping thousands of businesses against monopolies all over the country. Which one is easier to accomplish?
- brigadier132 2y ago
  One actually accomplishes the desired outcome, the other creates another terribly run government mandated monopoly.
  - aaomidi 2y ago
    We can have the interpretation of the words AND competition actually
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      It generally doesn't work out once the regulatory capture laws are written.
      - aaomidi 2y ago
        We've already crossed that point. Building any new infrastructure in the US is practically impossible.
  - denkmoon 2y ago
    What's preventing it from happening then? What needs to change so that more ISP businesses thrive and everyone has multiple ISPs to choose from? It's not clear to me which lever needs to be pulled to make it happen
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      ISP's should be like trucking companies -- the state owns the roads and private companies provide the service.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        In particular, the way you do this is that the state installs conduit (think big empty pipes) in the road and then anyone can string fiber through it. The cost of doing this once the conduit is installed is dramatically lower than each company digging up the street themselves, especially if the government can refrain from charging oppressive fees for access to the conduit, and then you can feasibly have dozens to hundreds of last mile ISPs.
        bryanlarsen 2y ago
        I disagree. The point about the road analogy is that each house only gets one road and the trucking companies aren't responsible for any last mile infrastructure. Multiple trucking companies can share one road by following sensible rules. Multiple ISP's can share fibre infrastructure by following sensible rules. If TCP/IP followed the ISO model I would phrase it as "the city is responsible for layer 2, the ISP for layer 3 and content providers for layer 4 and up".
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The trouble with that is you then involve the government with the technology. Suppose we did as you say 30 years ago. The government would install phone lines and use DSL to carry internet traffic for competing ISPs. The performance of DSL was fine 30 years ago, but now it's slow, and no ISP is allowed to install anything faster because in your system the government has a monopoly. The government could upgrade it, but that costs money and getting the government to spend money upgrading infrastructure has been a recurring problem. So now you're stuck with DSL. Whereas if the government just runs conduit, and then Verizon is using DSL from 30 years ago, Sonic can come in at any time and install fiber. Which spurs Verizon to install fiber because now they have competition. You want the monopoly to be made as narrow as possible. But the natural monopoly isn't layer 2, it's not even the entirety of layer 1. It's the road, and the high cost of digging the trench. Once you have the conduit, the cost of having a hundred ISPs string fiber through it is minor, so doing that should be open to competition.
jachee 2y ago
How expensive is it to simply pass the traffic one’s customers request without fucking with it? That’s all that’s required to be Neutral. What other kind of expensive “compliance” are you talking about?
- drdaeman 2y ago
  Sorry for possible confusion! I should’ve been more clear, as I mean that NN imposes expensive compliance. I heard that there are various barriers to running an ISP (like exclusivity agreements - TIL FCC had actually prohibited those in 2022, hope this stands unturned), different from Net Neutrality, and that they are the real issue, while NN is less relevant long-term. As for the NN itself - I can see the need and even argue in favor of it (as a band-aid), but it’s not a solution and it becomes unnecessary (and possibly even harmful) long-term, if that future has a presence of a really good competition. I’m saying “harmful” only because it may theoretically be weaponized at genuinely benign (or at least honestly meant so) QoS situations (which is crappy, but in such cases the choices are typically between working for most and not working at all - nobody does this stuff for fun).
amelius 2y ago
> will compete for them ferociously Until one ISP wins, and then we're back at square one.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  This doesn't happen in a healthy market. If the barriers to the market are low enough that anyone with some business sense can enter without requirement for a lot of money and lawyers to fight against the incumbent, then demand for a decent ISP simply makes one happen. I've witnessed this multiple times and had been an engineer at such ISP once (to be fair: halfway across the globe, in a different urban environment, but still...) Seriously, I've seen it myself - if some ISP starts to do shitty things to their customers, if the market is healthy (a competition is possible and anti-monopoly agencies watch out for collusions, etc.) - things get fixed just like that. A contender comes, says "hey folks, we have simply decent service with no BS" and people sign up in droves. Please don't get me wrong, though. I totally understand the present-day US-specific issues. Net Neutrality seems to be a necessity, but it must be treated as a temporary measure at best, always mentioned with a large footnote to it. It is not a solution - it's a band-aid until the wound is allowed to heal (if it is allowed, and NN by itself _doesn't_ heal anything), so such solutions should really focus on ensuring that they're not hindering any grassroot competition but rather welcome them. And specifically in the US (which is way less dense than most places) some push towards community fiber projects may be a necessity.
  - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
    The barrier to being an ISP is literally owning a wire that connects to everyone's house. That's the exact opposite of a low barrier to entry. It's a natural monopoly.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      That's not strictly true these days, given that T-Mobile offers home Internet access via 5G and also Starlink, though neither of them are a replacement for a hard line.
ikiris 2y ago
How many different wires would you like to see run to every house in the area? How many of those do you think are going to be profitable?
- drdaeman 2y ago
  Community fiber for the last few miles is the only thing that makes sense - you are correct that there is no point in building redundant wiring. One shouldn't be legally blocked from having alternatives, though, of course. This fiber should be collectively owned by the property owners, with legally required peering and network policy voting rights for whoever lives on the properties (aka ensuring that landlord can't lock their tenant(s) down to any particular ISPs or impose a crappy network policy on them). Then careful planning and relaxed permit processes for running lines between IXes, so ISPs can come and build the actual backbones, offer their own services and so on.
sirmarksalot 2y ago
Unless we want all those ISPs to be digging up all the streets all the time, that means we need strict regulations on sharing of physical infrastructure then, which brings us back to the CLEC/ILEC wars of the late 90s. Having each company maintaining its own last-mile access is an extremely inefficient use of resources.

avery17 2y ago

Well one of those things requires interpreting words and the other requires bootstrapping thousands of businesses against monopolies all over the country. Which one is easier to accomplish?

brigadier132 2y ago
One actually accomplishes the desired outcome, the other creates another terribly run government mandated monopoly.
- aaomidi 2y ago
  We can have the interpretation of the words AND competition actually
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    It generally doesn't work out once the regulatory capture laws are written.
    - aaomidi 2y ago
      We've already crossed that point. Building any new infrastructure in the US is practically impossible.
- denkmoon 2y ago
  What's preventing it from happening then? What needs to change so that more ISP businesses thrive and everyone has multiple ISPs to choose from? It's not clear to me which lever needs to be pulled to make it happen
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    ISP's should be like trucking companies -- the state owns the roads and private companies provide the service.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      In particular, the way you do this is that the state installs conduit (think big empty pipes) in the road and then anyone can string fiber through it. The cost of doing this once the conduit is installed is dramatically lower than each company digging up the street themselves, especially if the government can refrain from charging oppressive fees for access to the conduit, and then you can feasibly have dozens to hundreds of last mile ISPs.
      - bryanlarsen 2y ago
        I disagree. The point about the road analogy is that each house only gets one road and the trucking companies aren't responsible for any last mile infrastructure. Multiple trucking companies can share one road by following sensible rules. Multiple ISP's can share fibre infrastructure by following sensible rules. If TCP/IP followed the ISO model I would phrase it as "the city is responsible for layer 2, the ISP for layer 3 and content providers for layer 4 and up".
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The trouble with that is you then involve the government with the technology. Suppose we did as you say 30 years ago. The government would install phone lines and use DSL to carry internet traffic for competing ISPs. The performance of DSL was fine 30 years ago, but now it's slow, and no ISP is allowed to install anything faster because in your system the government has a monopoly. The government could upgrade it, but that costs money and getting the government to spend money upgrading infrastructure has been a recurring problem. So now you're stuck with DSL. Whereas if the government just runs conduit, and then Verizon is using DSL from 30 years ago, Sonic can come in at any time and install fiber. Which spurs Verizon to install fiber because now they have competition. You want the monopoly to be made as narrow as possible. But the natural monopoly isn't layer 2, it's not even the entirety of layer 1. It's the road, and the high cost of digging the trench. Once you have the conduit, the cost of having a hundred ISPs string fiber through it is minor, so doing that should be open to competition.

jachee 2y ago

How expensive is it to simply pass the traffic one’s customers request without fucking with it? That’s all that’s required to be Neutral. What other kind of expensive “compliance” are you talking about?

drdaeman 2y ago
Sorry for possible confusion! I should’ve been more clear, as I mean that NN imposes expensive compliance. I heard that there are various barriers to running an ISP (like exclusivity agreements - TIL FCC had actually prohibited those in 2022, hope this stands unturned), different from Net Neutrality, and that they are the real issue, while NN is less relevant long-term. As for the NN itself - I can see the need and even argue in favor of it (as a band-aid), but it’s not a solution and it becomes unnecessary (and possibly even harmful) long-term, if that future has a presence of a really good competition. I’m saying “harmful” only because it may theoretically be weaponized at genuinely benign (or at least honestly meant so) QoS situations (which is crappy, but in such cases the choices are typically between working for most and not working at all - nobody does this stuff for fun).

amelius 2y ago

> will compete for them ferociously Until one ISP wins, and then we're back at square one.

drdaeman 2y ago
This doesn't happen in a healthy market. If the barriers to the market are low enough that anyone with some business sense can enter without requirement for a lot of money and lawyers to fight against the incumbent, then demand for a decent ISP simply makes one happen. I've witnessed this multiple times and had been an engineer at such ISP once (to be fair: halfway across the globe, in a different urban environment, but still...) Seriously, I've seen it myself - if some ISP starts to do shitty things to their customers, if the market is healthy (a competition is possible and anti-monopoly agencies watch out for collusions, etc.) - things get fixed just like that. A contender comes, says "hey folks, we have simply decent service with no BS" and people sign up in droves. Please don't get me wrong, though. I totally understand the present-day US-specific issues. Net Neutrality seems to be a necessity, but it must be treated as a temporary measure at best, always mentioned with a large footnote to it. It is not a solution - it's a band-aid until the wound is allowed to heal (if it is allowed, and NN by itself _doesn't_ heal anything), so such solutions should really focus on ensuring that they're not hindering any grassroot competition but rather welcome them. And specifically in the US (which is way less dense than most places) some push towards community fiber projects may be a necessity.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  The barrier to being an ISP is literally owning a wire that connects to everyone's house. That's the exact opposite of a low barrier to entry. It's a natural monopoly.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    That's not strictly true these days, given that T-Mobile offers home Internet access via 5G and also Starlink, though neither of them are a replacement for a hard line.

ikiris 2y ago

How many different wires would you like to see run to every house in the area? How many of those do you think are going to be profitable?

drdaeman 2y ago
Community fiber for the last few miles is the only thing that makes sense - you are correct that there is no point in building redundant wiring. One shouldn't be legally blocked from having alternatives, though, of course. This fiber should be collectively owned by the property owners, with legally required peering and network policy voting rights for whoever lives on the properties (aka ensuring that landlord can't lock their tenant(s) down to any particular ISPs or impose a crappy network policy on them). Then careful planning and relaxed permit processes for running lines between IXes, so ISPs can come and build the actual backbones, offer their own services and so on.

sirmarksalot 2y ago

Unless we want all those ISPs to be digging up all the streets all the time, that means we need strict regulations on sharing of physical infrastructure then, which brings us back to the CLEC/ILEC wars of the late 90s. Having each company maintaining its own last-mile access is an extremely inefficient use of resources.