[stego-tech]

The solution - as always - is regulation. ISPs typically already have very generous business models with widespread monopolies on customers, overwhelming barriers to entry for new companies, and a lack of rate controls allowing then to price arbitrarily - all of which supports immensely profitable businesses without the need for additional extraction of capital from other parties. Regulators and consumers alike should be screaming in rage at the idea that their ISPs are now multi-dipping for revenue, but we’ve done a piss-poor job of explaining how this works to the common man and thus can’t count on them to support the Open Internet as we’d like to see it.

That being said, the threat to the open internet is also more than just ISPs being gigantic assholes: it’s centralization in general. A majority of web traffic passes into or through one of three main cloud compute providers; Cloudflare has such an outsized impact that regional IP blocks can disrupt global traffic; and ISPs have been permitted to consolidate through mergers and acquisitions into expansive monopolies. The internet is fiercely centralized and largely closed already, which is why these ploys by shitty ISPs are likely to work absent Government intervention.

You want to protect the open internet? Regulate the shit out of its major players again. Force them to keep it open, especially when it hinders expanding profit margins.

[danogentili]

The current trend in govt regulation is actually going in the opposite direction, with telecom lobbies in Europe pushing for "fair share" (pretty much an implementation through law of what Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone Germany are doing right now) through the Digital Networks Act.

South Korea pioneered "fair share" govt regulations in 2016 (which caused Twitch to exit the market in 2024 due the exorbitant "fair share" fees).

[stego-tech]

Because western governments (and those whose governments were modeled from western regimes - like post-war South Korea and Japan) have become victim to regulatory capture and corruption. It’s why the FCC has repeatedly killed, blocked, or reversed reforms like net neutrality or “nutrition labels” on ISPs, and why South Korea gave in to “fair share” regulations that deterred further investment. Tech money is hugely influential, and the industry is almost exclusively made up of rent-seeking slumlords at this point, particularly at the top (Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Apple, etc). It’s why DMCA reform is blocked, why pirates get jail time while AI grifts get a hand-wave, and why right-to-repair or data privacy remains a fractured and piecemeal reform instead of a national agenda item.

The problem isn’t regulation, but regulatory capture ensuring companies get the regulations they desire and benefit from.

[tick_tock_tick]

> The problem isn’t regulation, but regulatory capture ensuring companies get the regulations they desire and benefit from.

Aka regulation..... Nearly all regulation is for regulatory capture and if you think of something that isn't it probably just outlived who it was designed to capture for.

[stego-tech]

That’s an incredibly nihilistic and naive way of viewing regulation. Pre-Reagan but post-Depression, much of the regulations passed were beneficial to society and harmful to Capital interests: forcibly dividing investment banking from retail, for instance, to protect consumer deposits; the FDA, for gradually weeding out snake oil “cure-alls” and ensuring the safety of foodstuffs; eliminating child labor, setting livable minimum wages, creating overtime rules, protecting Unions and workers; safety standards for buildings like fire sprinklers, protected evacuation stairwells, engineering rules and sign-off requirements; and on, and on, and on.

Regulation is overwhelmingly positive, but the past fifty years have been a deliberate demonstration of the frailty and abusability of regulations by entrenched capital via regulatory capture, mainly to create people who (often unknowingly) champion a return to flammable mattresses, tainted foodstuffs, and corporate monopolies in the name of deregulation.

Regulations are a tool, a tool that can be wielded for the benefit of society or the benefit of Capital. It’s up to the electorate to be educated enough to advocate for proper use of said tool, rather than ignorantly swallow propaganda to let Capital run roughshod with them.

[port11]

Lobbying amounts have gone up almost everywhere. This issue almost always comes down to regulators allowing Capital to purchase influence, such that regulations end up not being pro-citizen. I don't know how we fix this.

[inemesitaffia]

The "tech" companies are on the other side of Telcos.

See Hivane and HOPUS

[wmf]

Unfortunately you're going to get regulatory capture and extortion when the "bad guys" are local but the "good guys" are foreign.

[kmeisthax]

Regulation isn't good enough. The government needs to make their own competing ISP.

Hell, at least in the US, there's precedent for this: government builds and maintain all the roads; they run most transit and intercity rail operations; and they run physical mail delivery. At one point they even owned most of the railroads[0]. Communications and travel infrastructure are things government is moderately good at.

For some reason, we just decided not to have a government-sponsored telecom company, even when Ma Bell made it patently obvious that having all the country's telecom infrastructure be privately owned by one company was a bad idea. It's obvious that a government-run ISP is about as crucial to life in 2025 as a government-run postal carrier was in the early 1800s.

[0] In the 1970s, all of America's railroads went bankrupt. First, they discharged their passenger rail mandates into Amtrak, then they went bankrupt anyway, and then they got nationalized.

[stego-tech]

As I’ve stated in other comments, the reason western governments don’t do this more often boils down largely to regulatory capture. Every single time there’s been a large mobilization of efforts to regulate some aspect of tech - municipal broadband expansion, cable box standardization and openness, right to repair, DMCA reform, privacy reforms, mandatory binding arbitration clauses, EULA’s, provider monopolies, etc - tech money floods into regulators and political races to counter the will of the mobilizers and their supporters. Then those same ghouls repeat mantras like “disrupt” and “deregulate” to convince people that actually it’s a good thing you only have three cellular networks, one cable provider, one telephone provider, two operating systems, and four media conglomerates to choose from. At one point these slimeballs claimed anyone who used anything else (like Linux, or GrapheneOS, or FOSS) was obviously a criminal who wanted something for nothing, such was their fear of an open ecosystem.

Regulations get a bad rap because for decades the only ones to really get passed have only entrenched existing players and (rent-seeking) business models while blocking new entrants or competitors. I’m 100% in agreement with you that every single state and country should have an internet network that’s open access and governed solely by that country’s constitutional law - a sort of digital state, if you will, with which they can court business and interest groups alike to represent their interests globally. Instead, we’re presently stuck with a “whoever donates the most money to politicians wins” model, and that means the open internet exists in spite of the interests of Capital, not because of their good graces.

[coredev_]

What you are describing sounds mostly like a US-problem, not sure it's a western gov problem in general?

In my city, the municipality owns much of the fibre. The country I live in owns a bank where you can get a mortgage pretty cheap. The good parts of GDPR or CRA are very good and was not disrupted by large corporations?

[kmeisthax]

Even in America, there are plenty of places that have municipal ISPs. But it has some... interesting political dynamics.

Basically, because people move out of cities that don't have good Internet connectivity, and it's unprofitable for private industry to serve rural America, rural America's towns and cities wound up just building their own ISPs. However, since a lot of these cities tend to be in blood-red states, a lot of these networks get kneecapped by state legislatures who are bought and paid for by cable companies worried that the government will subsidize Internet service into oblivion.

For example, in Utah we have a municipal fiber network, but because our state politicians are bought and paid for by Comcast, the UTOPIA[0] network is wholesale-only. That is, the towns in UTOPIA can lay the fiber, but they can't sell you Internet. At least, not without doing a shitton of accounting work to prevent subsidization by making sure they're accounting for costs that a fully private system would theoretically[1] incur. So, because of these stupid accounting rules, you have to buy Internet from someone else who is then paying UTOPIA for last-mile access, which makes it very difficult for UTOPIA to actually break even on their build-out. Other states have even more onerous laws[2] regarding municipal ISPs.

The thing about regulation is that it can either be constructed to improve competition and market freedom (i.e. antitrust) or it can be constructed to build moats around existing competitors. The state is the root of almost[3] all monopoly, after all. Additionally, it's difficult to write competent regulation without expert opinion; and if all the experts work for 2 companies, it's very easy for those companies to 'keep the story straight' and hoodwink the public. If you have a public option, then you can 'prove them wrong', so to speak.

[0] Utah Telecommunications OPen Infrastructure Agency.

For what it's worth, I'm not in the UTOPIA coverage area, but they did also have a Google Fiber buildout in my neighborhood. I jumped off Comcast almost immediately.

[1] To be clear here, almost no telecom last-mile is actually fully private, that's why Ronald "Fuck Antitrust" Reagan was willing to break up AT&T. This is just to make UTOPIA's life harder.

[2] https://www.baller.com/wp-content/uploads/BallerStokesLideSt...

[3] Strictly speaking, in a perfect ancap world of perfect competition with no aggression on homesteaded virgin land, you'd still see monopolies develop. Both because certain companies have value as infrastructure and because someone will break the whole 'no aggression' thing pretty damned quick and make themselves the state.

[toast0]

> So, because of these stupid accounting rules, you have to buy Internet from someone else who is then paying UTOPIA for last-mile access, which makes it very difficult for UTOPIA to actually break even on their build-out

Washington state just makes the customers pay the costs for build-out. Then the municipal utility district always breaks even. You can finance it through a utility lien, but either way, build out is expensive; less so if someone else already paid to get fiber to pass your lot, but still pretty spendy.

[panick21_]

> Hell, at least in the US, there's precedent for this: government builds and maintain all the roads; they run most transit and intercity rail operations; and they run physical mail delivery.

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me the US government is doing a terrible job at all of these.

[kmeisthax]

Yes, but most of those problems aren't inherent limitations of government. They're specific missteps that could have been avoided, like:

1. The suburbanization of cities turning road-building into a Ponzi scheme and transit into a guaranteed money-loser. Lowering the density of cities dilutes the tax base while increasing the need for roads and cars to carry people on them.

2. America's absolutely stupid decision to privatize Conrail without retaining ownership over the trackage. Wall Street infected all of the Class I railroads and convinced them to downgrade their own infrastructure. Imagine if your local city had sold all the roads to a private company.

[panick21_]

Ok, but if something has gone on for 70+ years its not a 'misstep' that something else.

And doing all these things very well is not easy even in the nations that do it 'best' and most nations are not in that class.

In terms of the Post Office for example, they had to kill their commercial competitor to establish a monopoly and held back more advanced competitors like FedEx with their monopoly. Thus useful services didn't exist for many decades where they could have existed.