[dmurray]

You can rent cars, houses, computers - what law would normally forbid those financial relationships?

Cable companies and other utility providers need special treatment in the law because they enjoy special advantages as monopolists. Instead of saying "anyone is allowed to dig up the road, bury cables and let the customers choose the provider with the best service" we often allow only one or two cable providers and add some special rules to make them treat their hostage customers better.

[tw25485966]

>Instead of saying "anyone is allowed to dig up the road, bury cables and let the customers choose the provider with the best service" we often allow only one or two cable providers and add some special rules to make them treat their hostage customers better.

Wouldn't installing conduit be a still-better option for consumers? Also, the government-granted ISP monopoly approach prohibits would-be providers that don't need to use cable.

Anyway, your dichotomy ignores the historical reality: local politicians subsidized builds by promising providers they didn't have to worry about competition, subsidies extracted from the future captured customers, subsidies that are in fact the very things people complain about now.

[TheRealSteel]

As far as I understand it, this is about saying a company can't charge you a rental fee for your modem when you're using your own modem you bought yourself. It does seem like a special law just for this shouldn't be necessary.

[zoomablemind]

As a customer we're already paying for "renting" telcos' infrastructure which delivers the service to us. Modem is an essential piece in the infrastructure, without it consumer cannot get the service.

The fact that telcos itemize the modem means it's supposed to be a kind of elective, just as in older days when one could rent a "fancy" phone directly (with a voice-mail indicator!) from the provider. Those were add-ons, with extra fees.

I see no validation for not allowing customers to use own modems. Sure, the techical support fee will be gamed in such case. But at least this will clearly separate the infrastructure from the user equipment.

If modem indeed falls into user equipment category, then the rental must be elective. If it's infrastructure, then it has been already paid for in the delivery fees.

[dmurray]

Companies can generally agree to sell you a product only as part of a package deal. You can't get the Happy Meal toy without paying for the burger and fries. So normally they could insist you can't get the cable service without paying for the modem rental.

Whether they are allowed call it a "meal deal" or a "convenience fee" or a "special discount" or a "rental fee" is more about marketing than economics.

[Talanes]

>You can't get the Happy Meal toy without paying for the burger and fries.

I'm sure your general point stands, but you absolutely can. And in San Francisco, you technically can only buy the toy separately, though for much cheaper when paired with the meal.

[TheRealSteel]

Once again, just like with Covid, we can look to what New Zealand did for the obvious and correct answer:

Have the government lay fibre to every home and business, and allow any ISP to compete for service over that fibre.

Australia tried, and around 10% of homes got connected. But the conservative Liberal government got in power and changed it from fibre to DSL, a move that was universally derided as unfeasible both economically and technologically.

It was known to be a waste of tens of billions of dollars - but Rupert Murdoch doesn't want poor people to have access to information outside his propaganda network, so he handed the election to the Liberals (the conservatives) in exchange for destroying the network and salting the earth so it was hard for even a future government to fix.

Telstra, the big incumbent ISP with a monopoly in many areas, also had alot to do with it. Instead of gigabit fibre, we now have 25mbit DSL, which doesn't work when it's raining even lightly, or in strong winds.

This network was also slower to build, and far more expensive than the fibre.

But as long as it's built with fibre, it works. New Zealand's network is enourmously successful, and now anyone has access to gigabit fibre on their choice of ISP. It works both in theory and in practice, you just must not allow a conservative government to hand it over to monopoly corporations.

The common "government can't be trusted" rubbish is bunk, the government only screwed it up in Australia because that was their goal, the fibre networks have always been a success.

[kaczordon]

So as long as the government does it it’s ok as long as the government doesn’t do it incorrectly? Therein lies the problem, governmental failure is always a possibility as Milton Friedman observed, and if they fail there’s no penalty to failing other than the size of government increasing :) Even in America the issue is that we’ve over-regulated the internet industry to the point where even a company like Google has issues, although one could argue they did it for different reasons i.e. to force the existing companies to lay down fiber faster. Regulatory capture is the real issue.

[bigbob2]

This entire discussion is about privately held organizations systematically charging customers for services they did not receive with no oversight to prevent it. Your argument doesn't even make sense in this context.

[tw25485966]

Some would argue that those "privately held organizations" are able to avoid market pressures via regulatory capture, if not outright grants of monopoly by governments.

If you want to argue that a government-granted public monopoly is better for consumers than a government-granted private monopoly, I'd be inclined to agree. But there are other options that might be better still for consumers, which is what I think the above poster was trying to get at.

[kaczordon]

Yeah you summed it up better than I did.