Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tw25485966 2005 days ago
> Classifying ISPs as the utility companies they are is the only way to end the gouging and systematic fraud.

This would further entrench them as government-chartered monopolies. Heck, most of the current anti-competitive forces extend from either explicit government monopoly grants or regulatory capture.

Or continue to beg the political process to solve the problems they created when they interfered with the market process.

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
1 comments
II2II 2005 days ago
> This would further entrench them as government-chartered monopolies.

They are going to be entrenched as government-chartered monopolies any way you look at it. ISPs either need a right of way to lay cable or a license to use RF spectrum. Even if you could magically overcome those problems, or are willing to deal with the chaos of removing the applicable regulations, the Internet would become fragmented since the dominant players would freeze competition out of the market. (Recall the olden days of online service providers when everyone's network was independent of everyone else's, and even then it was only regulation of the telephone companies that allowed those service providers to exist.)

link
tw25485966 2005 days ago
> ISPs either need a right of way to lay cable or a license to use RF spectrum.

As I understand it, both of those can (and do) support multiple competing services. Further, regulation dealing with scarce (ostensibly government-owned) resources is significantly less anti-competitive than, say, regulation requiring all would-be ISPs to also serve cost-prohibitive rural areas.

Look, I can appreciate the position that a government-granted public monopoly might be better for consumers than a government-granted private monopoly, but consumers might still be better served by removing those government-created barriers to competition.

> the dominant players would freeze competition out of the market

How do you imagine they would achieve that using only market forces?

> it was only regulation of the telephone companies that allowed those service providers to exist

I'm not grasping your argument. Perhaps unrelated to your point, but telephone service was (and largely still is) a government-granted monopoly. And there too, rather than removing those regulatory barriers to competition, the illusion of competition was created by adding more regulations.

link