"Public option" for internet.

AT&T wasn’t the government. It was a legal monopoly. Disruptive competition against AT&T is what spurred the advancement of cellular technology. AT&T continued to develop and innovate as they knew their position as a monopoly wasn’t assured.

Look at the USPS, that’s not the model for an ISP.

Wait, you’re going to pick the USPS as an example of a public service that stifled competition such that “we’d still all be on dial-up”?

What a fucking tedious question. His point makes total sense.

His point was that the existence of the USPS has prevented private businesses like UPS, FedEx, and Amazon from shipping things separate from the national service, apparently. His point is completely delusional.

He’s namedropped two examples: One where the governement gives a highly controlled exclusive contract to a company and comes this close to privatizing them, and it doesn’t stifle development or competition, and a case where the services is straight-up run by the government and it also didn’t stifle development or competition. If he wanted to disprove his own point I’m not sure he could have done a better job.

So prove him wrong: name the government monopolies that you view as innovative success stories.

:dubious: You do realize that this thread isn’t about government monopolies, right? It’s about services. There’s nothing about the power company that says you can’t run a generator. There’s nothing about USPS that says you can’t start a shipping company. There’s nothing about the library system that says you can’t lend out your own books.

But yeah, I’d say that both USPS and the library system were both innovative success stories. Since you asked about something unrelated, and all.

There should be a public sector option as well as anti trust legislation against the Telecom companies who agreed not to compete in geographic areas.

My understanding is that a public sector fiber network is about $70/month for 1Gbps internet. Lots of people would love that as an alternative to private sector internet.

As was mentioned earlier, I wonder if satellite internet or low altitude balloons will add new competition, forcing quality to go up anyway.

SenorBeef raised the idea that commercial ISPs are unneeded, because all people need are “pure” services that could be better provided through the government.

He didn’t actually use the term “government monopoly” in that post, but you can’t pretend that the concept of a “public no-option” hasn’t been raised.

Yes, Ravenman, the concept of a government monopoly has been raised. By you. Nothing anyone said in this thread before that could by any reasonable measure be construed as advocating for a public monopoly. Yes, SenorBeef says that the government should run a pure ISP. That doesn’t say anything at all about whether non-governmental ISPs (pure or impure) should exist.

Fire departments.

Nobody mentioned commercial space-based ISPs addressing the problems of cost and availability until I did; but nobody seems so upset about that. I wonder why.

Honestly, I feel like the important thing about a public option existing is that it sets a clear baseline - “you must be this fundamentally not-shit to exist as a valid competitor”. It ensures that there can be no case where your options are “Comcast” and “eat shit” - at worst, your options are “government” and “eat shit”, and that’s a better setup, because the government is incentivized not by profit but by the public will (and let’s be honest, Comcast is just gonna tell you to eat shit anyways). It forces private providers to up their game - and that’s sorely needed at this point, given how shit private providers are.

Same applies to health insurance, mail, and any other given service - the government program exists as the baseline, “you-must-be-this-good-to-compete” rule. Is your service substantially better? Great! Good for you, you’re probably competitive in this market. Is your name “AT&T”, “Comcast”, “Verizon”, or similar, and do you suck more dicks than a glory hole quality assurance team? Good luck competing with someone who actually has a reason to care about their customers, you bloated, unhelpful shits.

Also re: innovative, successful government monopolies: the military, the space program, the interstate highway system…

I’m getting tired of that argument. We can change the constitution and we SHOULD change it when it’s current form gets in the way of the public good.

Actually, I think that the interstate commerce clause argument is pretty strong, given that the Internet is a major venue for interstate commerce.

What’s interesting in this scenario is that, in areas where there is some competition, the market actually works pretty much like you would expect.

I recently moved from San Diego, California, to a smallish town in coastal eastern Connecticut, and I’ve seen different internet options in action.

In San Diego, I lived in a relatively new building (<20 years old) in a vibrant city neighborhood, one with above-average median income, and with dozens of restaurants and bars and other attractions a relatively short walk from my front door. I was less than 4 miles as the crow flies from downtown, and a 12-minute drive from the airport, and two city bus lines went straight past my building. And yet, in this pretty prosperous and thriving and desirable neighborhood, in the 8th-largest city and 17th-largest metro area in the richest country in the world, I had one choice for internet: it was Cox, or nothing.

Time-Warner operates in San Diego, but T-W and Cox basically split the city between them and agreed not to compete, leaving people south of the river with Cox, and people north of it with T-W. AT&T offers service in San Diego, but only some neighborhoods have their high-speed UVerse service. I would check with AT&T about once a year, to see if they were an option, but the last time I checked (2018), the fastest service they provided to my building was 1.5Mbps. These days, that might as well be dial-up.

Luckily, in the 11 years I was with Cox, they were great. Consistent connections, with very little downtime. But if their service had sucked, there was nothing I could have done about it, and when their prices kept creeping up I had to just bend over and take whatever increase they wanted to give me.

Here in eastern Connecticut, I have three options for internet: Comcast XFinity, Frontier, and Thames Valley Communication.

I ended up going with XFinity, and so far the service has been fine. What was really striking, though, was that when I started shopping for service, it was immediately clear that the presence of competing companies helps to keep prices down. I ended up with an internet and basic TV package that is identical to the package that I had in San Diego, and I pay exactly half what I was paying in San Diego.

Yeah, given the amount of leeway that the federal courts have given to the interstate commerce clause in some of their rulings, I don’t see how they could, with any consistency at all, deny the federal government the power to regulate a service that is, by its very nature, not only interstate, but international. Here’s a piece from the economically conservative American Enterprise Institute titled “If any economic activity meets the definition of interstate commerce, it’s the internet”.

I’m not completely sure about the UK, but my bet is that it’s both, depending on where you are in the country. Some areas probably have sufficient density to justify building out more than one cable system, while others probably have multiple companies using a single set of infrastructure. Quite a few European countries (I know that France is one) have laws in place that require the legacy telecom providers to lease their infrastructure to other companies, which then resell directly to consumers. The idea of these sorts of rules was precisely to curtail the monopoly power of the established telephone companies, and promote competition, as internet became more and more popular.

Sorry, but this argument is much more tiring and stupid than the argument about things being unconstitutional.

Do you realize how hard it is to amend the US Constitution under even the best of circumstances? It requires a two-thirds majority of BOTH houses of Congress, and then the approval of 38 out of the 50 states. (It can also be changed by a Constitutional Convention.) Think about the state of American politics right now. How likely is it, do you think, that two-thirds of the Representatives, and two-thirds of the Senators, and then three-quarters of the states, could come to an agreement on something? Given the current polarization of our political landscape, we’d have trouble amending the Constitution to make apple pie the national dessert right now, let alone for anything that significantly changed the relationship between the federal and state governments.

I agree with you that there are probably areas where we would, as a country, benefit from some changes to the Constitution. But to argue that a concern with constitutionality is tiresome because we can just change the constitution is, quite frankly, an incredibly silly way to approach a political issue.

Yeah, this. A public option would essentially serve as a standardized competitor, whose purpose would literally be to provide some competition that the telecom companies have managed to eliminate (doubtlessly through illegal collusion), with an eye to actually providing a service rather than fucking over people. Companies that actually provide better service would continue to function just fine - presuming their services were worth the money. Anybody who believes in free market forces should be all for this, because the introduction of currently-absent competition will kick the market into gear.

(The fact that it would provide service to people who currently can’t afford it is a bonus, though admittedly not one that free-market types should be expected to care about. Supply/demand models explicitly operate on the principle of people being priced out of the market and that being totally awesome.)

Don’t make me laugh.

I think the government absolutely has a role to regulate business in the name of the public interest, and in some cases where competition is lacking, provide incentives for new entrants (like maybe sharing the cost of whatever new infrastructure is needed to have other businesses compete against entrenched and poorly performing ones.

But the government starting up ventures in order to undercut private business? That’s a last resort. For example, having the government guarantee affordable education and health care? 100% yes. Work to undercut Comcast because some people have to stay on hold for too long? No. Access to healthy food is a way bigger problem than your Internet bill, but nobody is suggesting that Massachusetts needs commonwealth-run grocery stores.

And as has been mentioned, public ISPs are probably at higher risk of coming with garbage restrictions, like you can’t google “abortion doctors near me” in certain states. Forget it, terrible idea.

I suppose I should have said “Anybody who ACTUALLY believes in free market forces should be all for this.”

As has been noted, in America competition between internet providers has been largely eliminated, likely (in my opinion) due to illegal collusion. This means that the “free market” has been essentially destroyed. If the type of internet that the government came up with managed to “undercut” private business, that means that the private businesses in question are hot garbage that are completely unfit for the marketplace and which would have been eradicated had the market been actually functioning.

And, as has been repeated stated and ignored, if the public ISP starts implementing bullshit restrictions, then private companies can certainly rise up and fill the gap. Similarly if people just think the public option is slow private companies can step up. Happened with USPS, can happen here.

As for arguments like “Food also sucks; you have to worry about every single other problem simultaneously before you can do anything about any problem,” I would give them the response they deserves, but this forum doesn’t have a poop emoji.

Any site that supports Unicode has the poop emoji: ������

And the bit about food would be a good counterargument if there were a monopoly on food in Massachusetts. So far as I know, that’s not the case: There are still multiple grocery stores serving the same areas, and people can choose which one to shop at.

EDIT: Hm, maybe this board doesn’t fully support Unicode, after all.

While I am 100% on your side, I have to nitpick this point. The government is a giant in terms of negotiations and can leverage all sorts of facilities that agents in the free market can’t. Absolutely, massive corporations can achieve similar resource levels compared to what the government would allocate to what is effectively a pet project, but tiny startups could not. It’s definitely possible for a perfectly valid business to be unable to compete against the government just because of economies of scale.

In this specific example, a startup internet company might be able to find the funding to build infrastructure for a neighborhood and, absent any giant competitor, charge a high fee that allows them to funnel funds towards expanding said infrastructure to reach more customers, gradually expanding across the nation and lowering the costs to each individual customer and making up the necessary funding on volume. Conversely, the government could easily just borrow enough to build the whole network and repay the costs later, all while charging each customer pennies on the dollar since government debt is “safer” and therefore less expensive to repay.

Again, I don’t think that applies to Comcast and their anticompetitive bullshit, but I have to nitpick the principle that appears to underline your statement. The government can kill legitimate business, but I totally grant that in this particular case said business ought to be long dead.