[protocolture]

There was a pretty decent campaign locally to make it legal to deliver fixed line broadband services.

But once you convince someone that the legislation exists and the penalties exist for supplying fixed line broadband services, the next goal posts slide into place, and they reflexively defend the idea that the government would fine people more for overbuilding the national carrier to a greater extent than importing several kilos of cocaine. They parrot absolutely bonkers shit like "Internet is a natural monopoly" when they literally have to fine people to make it a monopoly.

Most people defend the status quo with extreme vigor. And most people aren't even slightly qualified to analyse the status quo. The supplied alternative doesnt matter. Some person they dont know, doing something they are ambivalent about might find their profession easier. Thats completely verboten.

[autoexec]

Are you sure that the "Internet is a natural monopoly" people were actually people and not just bots and shills? The only reason I could see real people wanting a monopoly would be if they were pushing for the government to handle the infrastructure and then lease out access to whoever wants to offer services over the lines. There's a case that it doesn't make sense to have 50 different companies all running physical cables everywhere. What doesn't make sense is only allowing one private company to do it and leaving yourself at their mercy.

[protocolture]

The australian disease is the great big national thing. The only time this concept has ever worked for us is Medicare, and secretly thats actually managed on the state level with national funding.

>government to handle the infrastructure and then lease out access to whoever wants to offer services over the lines.

We had loosely:

1. Government telco ran copper everywhere, did a shit job of it, they are still replacing faulty gel joints.

2. Government sold said telco, with a monopoly on fixed line internet services.

3. Newly private telco did fuck all and basically existed for a while.

4. The government mandated that they permit ULL resale, basically renting access to their monopolised cabling

5. Australia had its greatest % increase in internet speed as lots of small players started dropping DSLAMS on their exchanges and exchanging peering.

6. That fizzled out, and we reached the limits of what could possibly be done with copper in the short term.

7. Instead of looking at what worked historically (ULL) they decided to build a brand new giant government telco with a fixed line monopoly (ripping it away from the last guys). Average punter has no long term memory and thinks that repeating the original sin with Fibre instead of copper has literally no downside.

8. Because this is a NEW NATIONAL thing, chumps, of which there are plenty, will defend it without any analysis deeper than "My fibre works fine"

9. One of our larger private carriers took the National Carrier to court arguing that the law was anticompetitive. They settled out of court and the law wasnt changed. However, the industry has continued in sort of a grey area where the national carrier hasnt formally complained about any of its competition but it could still do so and fines would be issued.

10. Several government MP's floated the idea, all at once, that the government should compulsorily acquire every other fixed line telco network in the country. 6 weeks later they stopped saying that. Its in policy limbo, largely because their justification was that the National telco was better somehow, but upon reflection they probably realised that the national telco was the only telco excluded from customer protections and things would be worse for customers overall if they lost their private alternatives.

But thats where their brain is at. Rather than the fines, they will probably just use the threat of fines at some stage to forcibly acquire other networks. Which will be a long, expensive, and overall shitty experience for customers. The public will clap and cheer when the evil private networks (many of which are far better in speed and quality than the national carrier) get absorbed.

[autoexec]

It sounds like part of the problem was the national government selling the service instead of just leasing out the lines to private companies to use or better yet letting local government deal with it. A company might be willing to provide a better service than the taxpayers want the government to provide on their dime, but no private company could compete on price and it's a bad thing when the person who you depend on to fix the broken line to your customer belongs to your competitor because they can drag their feet and do shitty work. I've seen that first hand working in the CLEC space.

From a US perspective, private companies aren't any better about installing quality lines, especially the last mile, and won't bother servicing massive numbers of people at all because it's not profitable enough.

Cable companies in the US have been literally handed billions by the government to build out and improve their lines and the cable companies pocketed that money and didn't deliver anything (https://www.vice.com/en/article/study-throwing-taxpayer-mone...). There have been lawsuits and some investigations but mostly that money is just gone and to this day they still get handouts all the time with very little oversight.

We have the worst of both worlds. Corporations take tax payer money and also charge us for everything. The result is that in the US we pay more than the rest of the world does while getting far worse service. Handing the whole game to corporations and letting them dictate the terms (which included keeping out competitors until fiber, wireless, and satellite became options) has not worked out for us.

Basically the theory is that if you give control of infrastructure to the government they are motivated by keeping you happy because they work for you. You have direct control over them, can demand things from them, and in the worst case can vote them out if they aren't doing what you need from them. It's you (the people), choosing to spend your money (taxes), so that your own employees (government workers) can get you the things you want. Everything is transparent in both policy and accounting which means that you can see where every dollar is spent.

The alternative is to let corporation control the infrastructure and their one and only goal is to take as much money from you as they possibly can while delivering as little to you as possible (because that maximizes their profits). However much money it actually costs to deliver something to you, they will charge you 100% of that, plus more because they need to stuff their own pockets with cash in the process.

In fact they need to stuff more and more money into their pockets every quarter because any company that isn't increasing their profits is failing. Endless growth and "line go up" is all that matters to them. They will cut corners and increase prices every chance they get to make that happen. That kind of enshittification is bad enough when it's some company switching to cheap ingredients in your your favorite food, but it's unacceptable when it's a utility you depend on like internet access.

All of their accounting is hidden from you. You have zero control over how they run their operations. You have no power to vote out their CEO. You might have a choice between two or more companies (giving the illusion of voting with your wallet) but they all have the exact same motivation which is to take as much money from you as possible. This results in things like collusion and price fixing. It also causes them to subject their workers to low wages, little to no benefits, and outsourcing (to the extent allowed by law or even in excess of that if the occasional fines are cheaper).

In actual practice you get corporations using their vast amounts of ill-gained money to bribe governments and install their people in regulatory bodies making both options worse. The government option suffers because now they're incentivized to please corporations instead of the public and the company options get worse because companies can pass laws/regulations which further increase their profits at your expense. Either way, it's the companies who are the problem. We'll, the politicians taking bribes sure aren't helping, but companies are expected to exploit everything that they possibly can to increase the amount of money they make.

We still haven't figured out a good way to keep the government from taking bribes, but given the option, I'd choose the option that puts more power in the hands of the voters (and I say that even knowing the sorry state of our voters) because we at least have the option to turn things around. We have a lot of things to overcome (the deliberate dumbing down of the voter, the deliberate misleading of the voter, the efforts to suppress voters, the lack of accountability for government, the lack of consumer protections, the influence of money on politics, etc.), but it's either we try to have a say in how things are run or we bend over and accept whatever we're offered by companies who are explicit about wanting to take as much from us as they possibly can.

I think we'd agree that local government is much better than national. Ideally you'd have national regulations that make sure that everyone in the nation has a minimum standard of service, but leave it up to the locals to manage that and handle the details. We have more direct control over local politicians than national ones. They're more likely to live among us too which helps.