[Zeing0Ch]

This should be illegal, how could private enterprises possibly compete with community organized ISPs? You have to take into account the increase in profit every ISP has to make every year. How is the industry going to survive if you allow competition from ISP's that do not need to make profit?

Many cities are already making this illegal, hopefully Baltimore realizes how damaging this truly is for business.

[IggleSniggle]

I get this is satire, but for anyone who doesn’t:

I live in Baltimore. I pay $130 a month for an extremely unreliable high latency “DSL” connection from Comcast. There is no other reasonable option at my home. When I need a strong and reliable connection with low latency, I switch to tethering from my phone. The only thing that makes a wired connection preferable to the cell network is data quantity.

The number of hours I’ve spent on the phone with Comcast and with incompetent technicians is staggering. I am using my own modem, but am now also “renting” a modem from Comcast for $30/mo because they will not even attempt to provide any support for fixing their own network if you don’t use their spyware modem. So I plug it in whenever I decide to give it another go-around with their tech support in a futile attempt to get reliable service.

[elliebike]

Is this satire? I'm genuinely confused.

[abdullahkhalids]

It clearly is with this line:

> You have to take into account the increase in profit every ISP has to make every year

Not profit every year, but _increase_ in profit every year.

[Zeing0Ch]

I actually am a shareholder of CenturyLink, I really don't care if you think that's satire, as long as the people we put in charge do everything they can to make it happen.

[drivingmenuts]

Commercial ISPs will do fine - in the coming age of work-from-home there are always going to be those who need/desire more bandwidth than that provided by community ISPs. Most basic access doesn’t require the kind of high bandwidth that commercial providers are supposed to be capable of.

A threat to commercial providers is a very good thing as it might force them to step up their game and provide even better access, if people realize they don’t need continuous access to streaming media to get by. More likely, they’ll just throw money at lawyers and politicians to get any competition shut down, but hope remains.

[Zeing0Ch]

The market already makes commercial ISPs "step up their game and provide even better access" exactly as you say, it works perfectly. If you have every community suddenly owning their own fibre in the streets they live on, what are commercial ISPs supposed to do? No there has to be legislation to stop this, many cities are already doing this which is a good thing.

[ashneo76]

Access to information shouldn't be a price gouging business. This is amazing. Comcast, Verizon and ATT can go rot in hell

[jxf]

This doesn't seem like a very compelling argument to me. They serve different purposes.

Do Habitat for Humanity stores put Home Depot out of business?

Do food banks put grocery stores out of business?

Does offering free water as a drink put bars out of business?

Same product category, very different markets.

[Zeing0Ch]

I think your comparisons are terrible, they are either not the same product at all or exactly the same argument applies. Of course food banks should (and are in many places) be means tested, so as not to compete with grocery stores. You can't compare water with booze, there may be an argument of tab water competing unfairly with bottled water though.

In this case, 25 MBit/s is 25 Mbit/s there is no difference in service between a community ISP and a commercial/public company ISP except the price.

[jxf]

> 25 MBit/s is 25 Mbit/s there is no difference in service between a community ISP and a commercial/public company ISP except the price

No difference except the price, really? So, you don't think any of the following are differences?

* What the provider is permitted to do with your data

* Whether there is a soft cap on usage before throttling begins

* How aggressively they do traffic shaping

* What you're allowed or not allowed to do as per the terms of service (e.g. run a server)

and so on.

It seems like you're hand-waving away a ton of stuff and dismissing it as unimportant.

[Olreich]

Considering how much the world relies on internet, maybe it’s a good thing that current ISPs get out-competed by non-profit, community owned ones.

[jancsika]

+1

My uncle worked for a community organized ISP and you cannot imagine the amount of corruption. Basically a race to the bottom with slave laborer (ehm, volunteers) who don't even know how to provide proper service with trivial things like data caps, etc.

States like Maryland really need to pass right to assemble laws so that citizens can organize on commercial ISPs without fear of their internet being collectivized by a bunch of cultural marxists.