Comcast Hints At Plan For Paid Fast Lanes After Net Neutrality Repeal

[nobody's_hero]

I disagree with your idea that there will be no competition because of deregulation, there is no competition because there is still regulation, just not at the FCC. Even with the FCC getting rid of net neutrality you have the AT&T merger getting blocked. Its like when the liberals say that capitalism doesn't work because America is $#@!ting the bed. We don't have capitalism, we don't have deregulation, we have an interventionist economy that is $#@!ting the bed.

Playing devil's advocate . . .

take for example, the street directly in front of your residence. There's probably just one. In a private market for roads, just how many streets would you need to enjoy efficient transportation routes to and from your house? If someone has the right to build a private street in front of your house, then I should have the right to build another one next to it and offer cheaper toll rates. And of course someone else would have the right to build a 3rd street on the other side of mine and try to undercut me.

I'm not trying to be facetious, but, you really didn't need more than one street connected to your driveway. Sure, now there's competition and you have choices, but all that asphalt around your house now looks like a giant parking lot. And now is it really that much more efficient than the one street you had to begin with?

And don't go anywhere near the power poles, because I'm thinking all those competing power company lines so close as to be lying on top of each other would constantly be shooting sparks.

You're right though, that we don't currently have a free market for a lot of utilities and services. If Georgia Power wants to do anything with their business, they have to go get the Georgia General Assembly's blessing, so it's much closer to corporatism than capitalism. I will say though, that I do have power, and the people in Flint Energy's entirely separate areas of coverage also have power. It ain't pretty by libertarian standards, but it works.

HAVING SAID ALL THAT, when government taxes you for roads and fails to fix the pot-holes in the one street you DO have, that's also a failure which you can't do much about because you have no alternatives. Vote harder I guess. I don't know if one is necessarily better than the other but I'm just not sold on privatization being the alpha and omega type of solution to all problems, simply because the government isn't.

 

[nikcers]

privatization being the alpha and omega type of solution to all problems, simply because the government isn't.

Free trade?

 

[kpitcher]

Your team on this is over at Reddit. History shows again and again and again that deregulation always provides better service at lower prices.

If this were actually deregulated that'd be a step in the right direction. However by various state and federal laws the telco landscape actually has the country broken up into regional baby bell areas who run the show. If you want to lay more lines you can't without those incumbent telco's permission. (technically they usually have to get permission from the state but that's basically a rubber stamp) If you want to interconnect you have to have their permission. The government has chosen the winners already. Cable is a whole other beast with local governments protecting those monopolies.

The government already has the best interests of those companies in mind. The feds have given a few hundred billion in tax breaks and other incentives to large telcos for fiber everywhere, with service agreements that were never met, yet they never had to pay back those funds. A prior FCC chairmember has been compiling a running tally in regular reports. "The plan was to have America be the first fiber optic country -- and each phone company went to their state commissions and legislatures and got tax breaks and rate increases to fund these 'utility' network upgrades that were supposed to replace the existing copper wires with fiber optics -- starting in 1992." Do a search for 200 billion broadband scandal and copies of the report come up. The author also has interesting info in this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlik...how_were_isps_able_to_pocket_the_200_billion/

In 1996 the telcos were actually partially deregulated by congress, the incumbent telcos were forced to allow other companies to interconnect with them so a phone call / data call could tie into the full system, at competitive rates. Thousands of ISPs and phone companies opened, new phone services started where you could get a flat rate unlimited long distance, free features like voicemail, all those other various goodies we take for granted now, also Internet in smaller areas. So many companies they had to offer better products and services to get and retain customers. The big telcos hated that!

This was rolled back in the early 2000s by the FCC when the large telcos realized the thousands of startups offering Internet were actually catching on. This led to the large telcos wanting to stop allowing competitors in on their government mandated monopolies. They promised if there was no more competition, they'd finally improve broadband. They got their wish, thousands of ISPs closed up shop because of the law changes, and once again the monopolies didn't do any real improvements.

My local electric co-op has been running fiber to their customers as they upgrade their electric lines. It's great that farm houses in rural areas are getting gig fiber, at rates that are better than the big telcos are offering in cities. However that's one of the rare instances where crony capitalism doesn't only offer customers 1 or 2 choices for internet.

Because the government is allowing companies to be defacto monopolies they should have specific rules to make the Internet itself a level playing field. "deregulating" the 'net in this case means the monopolies get to decide on things without customers having a choice for alternatives.

 

[unknown]

Most of us still have choices. We can still choose dial up, DSL, cable, or satellite.

Just an FYI, many people do not have choices.

For example, Comcast or Time Warner (are they still around?), one or the other will be the only provider in a certain area/region.

When I lived in Philadelphia, our only choice was Time Warner. Man, I hated those fuckers. Shit service and over priced.

Cant imagine having to pay them more money for slightly less shitty service.

 

[unknown]

I don't know if one is necessarily better than the other but I'm just not sold on privatization being the alpha and omega type of solution to all problems, simply because the government isn't.

May not be the "best" solution but its better than our current system or government run anything.

 

[devil21]

Enron was trading energy - it had nothing to do with deregulation. And they were committing fraud, which is already illegal. Finally, look at the wonderful job the government did there.

More government is never the answer.

What? ENRON SHUT DOWN THEIR LINES TO CREATE FALSE SCARCITY OF ELECTRICITY! Fraud was legalized by deregulation! But of course the fraud eventually collapsed, the infrastructure was built by theft from investors and then Sarbanes-Oxley sprouted from it, which was MORE REGULATION. That regulation required a lot more work and expense for EVERYONE ELSE! Thesis/antithesis=synthesis. That resulted in MORE GOVERNMENT!

It's the same as how the real estate collapse created Dodd-Frank, more regulation, which has now led to banks being legally able to 'bail-in' depositor's accounts. The 'bail-in' language is what they wanted from the start and will be used in the near future. The old Hegelian Dialectic over and over.

(mucho zippy sockpuppet vibe from this thread)

 

[angelatc]

Just an FYI, many people do not have choices.

For example, Comcast or Time Warner (are they still around?), one or the other will be the only provider in a certain area/region.

When I lived in Philadelphia, our only choice was Time Warner. .

No, you only had once choice for cable. But you had several choices - dial-up satellite and DSL.

 

[angelatc]

Fraud was legalized by deregulation!

Uhm. No. Again, take your big government nonsense somewhere else.

 

[angelatc]

Today I learned that one of the things that led to Enron's demise was the excess of bandwidth created in an unregulated market.

In January 2000 Enron announced its entry into the broadband fiber optic business and created Enron Broadband Services. Enron Online, launched in late 1999, became the largest e-commerce site in the world. Many analysts saw this expansion as a logical extension of Enron's commodity trading and transmission business. However there was an oversupply of capacity, and technological innovation also more than doubled the carrying capacity of fiber already in the ground. Within months of Enron's announcement, there was a glut of "dark fiber" (unused fiber connections) across the country, and numerous Internet startups that had promised to swallow much of the anticipated bandwidth failed, causing prices to fall by fifty percent.

 

[unknown]

No, you only had once choice for cable. But you had several choices - dial-up satellite and DSL.

I see your point but at the time, I was in an apartment. Some people did have satellite dishes but my view faced the wrong direction.

Is dial-up even a thing anymore?

I dont know why I wouldnt have gone with DSL simply because of my hate for Time Warner, if for no other reason. I'm thinking that it may not have been an option at the time.

 

[nikcers]

 

[angelatc]

Yeah but don't you prefer Fiji water?

I have well water.

 

[kpitcher]

I see your point but at the time, I was in an apartment. Some people did have satellite dishes but my view faced the wrong direction.

Is dial-up even a thing anymore?

I dont know why I wouldnt have gone with DSL simply because of my hate for Time Warner, if for no other reason. I'm thinking that it may not have been an option at the time.

Dialup is still a thing, barely. It's also not realistic anymore for anything beyond straight up text email. The web has changed to expect a client to have basic broadband. Even basic web ads are huge compared to a decade ago. Youtube or a basic facebook feed would take ages to load. It's like pagers are still a thing. Or horse and buggies. They exist for niche markets, no one really wants to use them daily.

Satellite is a thing, a very slow thing. The current tech has geo sync sats that are so far away the speed of light becomes a noticeable issue. You have a 1/2 second delay round trip at the best, realistically it's longer than that. The average consumer hates this. This is why it's normally only used in areas where there is nothing else as it's better than dialup but not much else. If you're only pulling data then a second delay between clicking play on a video and getting video isn't so horrid. Forget anything interactive. If you try to do a skype call it doesn't work so well. Games, forget it.

You may not have had DSL as an option. It's not universal even in cities depending on the lines.

There have been various tech discussions and work on solar flying drones, blimps, balloons, low earth orbit micro sats, and the like. AFAIK this is how Facebook, google, and others want to hit Africa and other undeveloped areas. Neat in theory, I don't see this being allowed in the US as the telco lobby is strong.

Most people have the duopoly of cable or DSL, typically 2 choices at best.

The US has finally moved into the top 10 countries for broadband speeds of fixed broadband. We're still in the 40s for mobile broadband.

 

[nobody's_hero]

No, you only had once choice for cable. But you had several choices - dial-up satellite and DSL.

Those aren't really choices considering the differences in technology. That's like saying "there are many methods of transportation to choose from. You can go with Delta Airlines or even ride a horse." No dial-up service is in any real competition with cable. They might compete with other dial-up providers if any exist any more.

 

[angelatc]

Those aren't really choices considering the differences in technology. That's like saying "there are many airline industries to choose from. You can go with Delta Airlines or even ride a horse."

You are sort of correct. It's exactly like saying there are many ways to travel from point A to point B. You can walk, you can ride, you can fly.

 

[nobody's_hero]

Free trade?

You gotta be more in-depth with that explanation. Simply saying one or two-word phrases like 'free trade' or 'competition' or 'free enterprise' doesn't lay out how competition works in a utility industry.

Do they get to use the same poles? How many lines do they put on one pole before they have to add more poles? How many lines are too many? Do the lines just zig-zag all over the terrain, telephone poles everywhere? At what point does it become impractical? Are they even allowed to use the same poles since I assume they would be privately owned, or does a separate chain of telephone poles have to be built running right alongside the first one so the competing company can hang their lines to access your home? Then another row of poles for the next competitor?

Swordsmith may be right. 2 or 3 competitors is better than one monopoly, but now you've simply gone from who gets to be the lucky one to the lucky three providers.

 

[kpitcher]

You gotta be more in-depth with that explanation. Simply saying one or two-word phrases like 'free trade' or 'competition' or 'free enterprise' doesn't lay out how competition works in a utility industry.

Do they get to use the same poles? How many lines do they put on one pole before they have to add more poles? How many lines are too many? Do the lines just zig-zag all over the terrain, telephone poles everywhere? At what point does it become impractical? Are they even allowed to use the same poles since I assume they would be privately owned, or does a separate chain of telephone poles have to be built running right alongside the first one so the competing company can hang their lines to access your home? Then another row of poles for the next competitor?

Swordsmith may be right. 2 or 3 competitors is better than one monopoly, but now you've simply gone from who gets to be the lucky one to the lucky three providers.

A few municipalities own their own lines and have fixed interconnect rates. Anyone can connect to them, the providers can then be differentiated with service. I've been out of the connection industry for awhile but from what I know they're well liked services.

There was talk about turning the government paid telephone lines into the same sort of arrangement in the 90s but that didn't get far. I could almost get behind this sort of thing. Since the companies with the mandated agreements broke their contracts multiple times, in huge ways, taking over the infrastructure isn't such a bad idea. Make the lines an actual utility that anyone can use. There's no other way we'll ever get 400 billion + back.

Of course realistically this wouldn't turn out well. The lobbyists would get their way to turn things basically back to what we have now under a different name. For awhile, while things were still forcefully deregulated, companies were selling wholesale DSL higher than retail DSL.

 

[nobody's_hero]

You are sort of correct. It's exactly like saying there are many ways to travel from point A to point B. You can walk, you can ride, you can fly.

Re-phrased it.

I'm not trying to be dense. Honestly. But I see too many people who just scream "free market!" without actually laying out how the free market would lead to efficiency in certain industries out there. To their credit, I've actually seen some well-laid out plans for privatization of police forces in some of these threads but that's about it. I'm not sure if they actually visualize competing private police forces, though, because when I picture how it would operate, it still seems somewhat impractical to me. And if something is impractical, it will typically fail in a private sector and give way to something else that is more efficient.

Basically my question to the libertarians on the forum is: Can everything exist in a state of competition? (and you gotta be more specific than simply 'yes' for an answer)

My county's fire department, which is government-operated and manned largely by volunteers, is fairly efficient, but it's far from a money-making enterprise (if anything it loses money). When a call goes out, there's no confusion over who responds, or who has the 'right' to fight the fire. If one local county or municipal govt's fire dept. needs help from another, they ask for mutual aid. There's no competition to race to the same fires. No shrugged shoulders and disappointment if someone else gets there first, pack up and go home. No competing command structures (speaking from experience of my time in the fire service, one fire chief on scene is already one too many, lol, C.H.A.O.S. = Chief Has Arrived On Scene). You go there, do your best to put the fire out, save what you can, and go back to station to clean up. Okay, so it's more than fairly efficient, it *IS* efficient.

Now imagine five separate competing companies trying to get to the same fire in order to make a buck. . .

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smit...refighters-fought-fires-each-other-180960391/

Does competition always lead to the greatest efficiency?

 

[angelatc]

Does competition always lead to the greatest efficiency?

Yes. In your fire department example if the first company that arrived was the one that would get paid, most of the slower companies would soon be financially starved out of the sector. The 2 or 3 that remained would be driven to constantly improve their performance metrics.

Now, mandate governors on fire trucks, ensuring nobody is allowed to drive faster than 45 mph, therefore giving their competitors an even break. Where's the incentive to improve?

 

[nobody's_hero]

A few municipalities own their own lines and have fixed interconnect rates. Anyone can connect to them, the providers can then be differentiated with service. I've been out of the connection industry for awhile but from what I know they're well liked services.

There was talk about turning the government paid telephone lines into the same sort of arrangement in the 90s but that didn't get far. I could almost get behind this sort of thing. Since the companies with the mandated agreements broke their contracts multiple times, in huge ways, taking over the infrastructure isn't such a bad idea. Make the lines an actual utility that anyone can use. There's no other way we'll ever get 400 billion + back.

Of course realistically this wouldn't turn out well. The lobbyists would get their way to turn things basically back to what we have now under a different name. For awhile, while things were still forcefully deregulated, companies were selling wholesale DSL higher than retail DSL.

It's a complex issue, indeed. Ideally something either needs to be 100% gov't run or 100% private, otherwise you run into the problem of corporatism. Not everything out there is so cut-and-dry, obviously. Deregulating while leaving the government's (taxpayer's) wallet open for well-connected private industries to use is a TERRIBLE idea, but people with knee-jerk attitudes jump on the opportunity to deregulate just because of the word 'deregulate', as if to automatically assume that it makes things better.

I fear that is where libertarians are falling on the issue of net-neutrality. If you are gonna deregulate without a plan to change over to 100% private simultaneously, it's probably better to just leave things the way they are. Otherwise you've created a corporatist monster.

Even Ron Paul had to admit that Glass-Steagall had some usefulness (he even voted "no" to repeal it in '99). Again, it wasn't ideal by libertarian standards because it was government-initiated regulation, but getting rid of it didn't make everything better simply because 'free-market'.

I'd post a video on Ron Paul's explanation for why he voted no, but . . .



^^^^Apparently some corporations didn't want people to know what Glass Steagall was, and they probably will be relieved when no one remembers what Net-Neutrality was.

Libertarians, this is a bad idea (edit: at least at this particular point-in-time). Please re-evaluate your stances. That's all I've got to say, I cede the floor.