I sorta thought it was explicit that I was talking about the government killing existing businesses by rolling into town, so I would indeed have been talking about Comcast and their ilk.
Who I would believe would survive the introduction of a government competitor, by the way. Their profits would decrease some, but I think they’d make it.
I disagree that this is true in general. There are in fact a lot of different variations and features that you might want for all of these services.
Some people need drinkable water at normal residential pressure. Some people need water for irrigation, which doesn’t necessarily have to be drinkable. Some people have a water tower on their property and would be happy getting lower pressure water because they have their own pumps to provide the pressure they need.
Some people need steady electricity at the same price at all times. Some people would rather have time-based rates. Some people are willing to pay a lower price for electricity service that’s less reliable (they’re the first to have it cut off when the supply is insufficient for all)
Internet is the same. It is absolutely not true that everyone is best served by a dumb pipe.
Not everyone is best served by the same dumb pipe. You can have different rates for different sizes of dumb pipe, or switch between this small dumb pipe and that big dumb pipe at certain times to maximize your price/utility curve.
However, making the pipe smart, having it know where you’re going and change the type of service you’re getting based on your destination, that is where the trouble lies.
This is having to go to the electric company to buy the “GE” package because the refrigerator you want isn’t on your current package, and won’t work if you plug it in. You could save some money by switching to GE lightbulbs so you don’t have to get both the GE and Sylvania packages at the same time, or get an LG refrigerator, since they have a cross honoring agreement with Sylvania, and are serviced in the same package.
The thing about electricity (or water), is that regardless of all the options you suggested, it’s very very dumb, EXACTLY what internet should be.
Except that this is not what I am saying.
I did not say that society can only solve one problem at a time. I’m saying that the government starting a competition with the private sector should be reserved for really big problems, and lack of nutritious foods is a far bigger problem than one’s Internet bill.
If nobody takes seriously that the government should open up businesses to address poor food equity, then it is hard for me to take seriously that government should seek to compete against ISPs, which is a less serious problem.
Plus, keep in mind that we have a system that seeks to address hunger in the U.S., namely by giving direct assistance to those who need help obtaining food. And when Trump proposed the stupid idea to replace credits that can be used at grocery stores with the government taking over the distribution of some basic foodstuffs, this message board generally laughed at what a dumb idea that was. Some of that criticism touched on the importance of leveraging private business to achieve social aims, rather than the government seeking to displace private business that isn’t achieving those goals. I heartily agree with that analysis when it comes to food stamps and Internet access. First, let’s try giving direct assistance to expanding Internet access to underserved areas, and see how that goes.
Oh, excuse me, I didn’t realize that you meant “Food also sucks; you have to worry about every single other problem simultaneously before you can do anything about any problem.”
As you note, there’s already a functioning government assistance plan in place for food that works fine, that Trump-types oppose for the sole reason that it’s not evil and punitive enough.
What would “internet stamps” look like? Well, that would be the government paying people’s internet bills for them. (And avoiding paying for it for people with money for some reason, I guess.)
But before we talk about the government dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the various ISP’s bank accounts, it’s worthwhile to ask what the government would be getting for its money. Regarding food they get the use of a large existing production and distribution system, so that’s worth something. With the internet they get…the wires. Half of which are their own damn phone lines. And some end-of-line hardware, which they could hand out basic versions of and leave higher end models to the private sector.
It makes no sense whatsoever for the government to pay the ISPs to provide the service of giving the ISP corporate officers bonuses.
I agree with you.
I take advantage of two programs from my electric company. One is hourly pricing. It’s almost always higher during the day, when businesses and factories are running, and the afternoon when air conditioning is used more often. The second program I use is “air conditioning cycling” where they have the ability to remotely disable the outdoor unit for 15 minutes in a 1 hour period on the hottest days of the year. It only happens three or four times a year, and I get a small credit on my electric bill for it. Works for me.
Are you deliberately distorting my position?
It is more like a surgeon saying, “Yes, I will do surgery to fix your bad hip problem. No, I’m not going to deal with your sore knee, you need to do other things to try to deal with that before resorting to surgery.” You can’t just go back at the doctor and say, “I didn’t realize you won’t deal with more than one problem at a time! I want to speak to your manager!”
For example, using state regulatory powers to establish that a bare-bones minimum broadband service (say, 10 or 25 Mbps) shall cost no more than $x, which should be low. And then spend billions of dollars to subsidize bringing broadband to rural areas, either by spending money on ground-based or space-based infrastructure/delivery systems.
More people connected to the Internet. Frankly I’m not worried about people who get lathered up that they pay $20 a month too much for 300 Mbps service, or they are all jelly that some city a few states over has 1 gig but they don’t yet. First world problems.
It also makes no sense to start a government run business to compete – and let’s be frank, for the sole reason of undercutting existing businesses – before trying other, more logical policy options.
In your analogy I’m both the doctor and the patient. I’m the one telling you that it’s okay to fix the internet without fixing the food (more). And I’m also the one telling you that you’re full of crap for pretending that the fact we’re not fixing the food (more) means we oughtn’t be fixing the internet either.
Give up, man. We don’t have to fix the food (more) before we fix the internet.
Wow, that doesn’t sound like food stamps at all. It’s almost like you’re trying to analogize things that aren’t at all similar to one another.
:dubious:
I’ll just ignore the deranged rambling there.
Another apples/cables comparison, of course - but which policy options were you thinking of, again?
Let’s suppose the goal is to get everyone who wants it and isn’t in a remote mountain cabin or something internet access of semi-tolerable quality for absolutely goddamn free (as per the topic of the thread). What policy do you think they should adopt?
Why would price controls be preferable to state run competition? That’s the worst of both worlds (command economics and free markets) with hardly the benefit of either.
Nope.
Well, an ISP isn’t a post office. What, it’s okay for you to use imperfect analogies? I can understand that you mean that an ISP can be like the post office in some respects, but not all, and not seek to quibble with it. But if you’re all out of good points, I supposed quibbling is the last arrow in the quiver. (I hope you’ll overlook the fact that one’s arguments are not like arrows in every respect.)
I just gave some in the last post, third paragraph. Be my guest and re-read it.
I disagree with that policy in several respects:
So if you assert the topic of the thread is Warren’s plan to make the Internet “free,” you’ve been misinformed.
I still don’t agree.
You’re basically saying that there can’t be any gains from bundling internet (or other utilities) with other services/devices. And I don’t think that’s true. A counterexample
My mom loves watching stuff on Netflix. So much so that she sometimes goes over her monthly internet data limit. This is a major hassle for her for a few reasons. One reason is that all of a sudden all her internet stuff stops working, which means that she pretty much has to stop whatever she’s doing and call the internet company to fix it. What she’d really like is an internet service that gave her a relatively small amount of “whatever” data and an agreement that all Netflix data was included. That would be great for her. It would be simple, it would do what she wanted, and even if she ended up paying a slightly higher price than average, she would never end up in a weird state where her internet doesn’t work.
Highly technical people who like to parse rate tables and figure out how to optimize their electricity consumption or internet usage or buy some third-party service that handles it for them might prefer dumb pipes. Most people really like bundled services because they’re simple and don’t require coordination or detailed knowledge of how various things work.
Your imaginary example makes bundling a hassle and more complex system, but that’s exactly the opposite of how most people perceive it. The current system where you have to manage multiple services on a dumb pipe is more complicated and confusing than one where you just pay $x more a month and Netflix is covered.
Now: is there opportunity for abuse and monopolistic behavior with these types of bundles? Yes. But that’s not the same thing as saying that people would rather have dumb pipes or that there are no advantages to more specialized service bundles.
It was a dumb idea for the government to get into the food distribution business, because we already have a private-sector food-distribution infrastructure that works just fine, and there’s no need to replace it. It’s a good idea for the government to get into the internet-distribution business, because the private-sector internet-distribution infrastructure we have sucks, and should be replaced.
23 million Americans live in food deserts.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/theweek.com/articles-amp/482588/americas-food-deserts
25 million Americans lacknbroadband access.
So if you want to call the first statistic a smashing success of capitalism and the second a horrible failure of capitalism, I would suggest you’re being overly dramatic.
The infrastructure still needs to be built and that is always going to be expensive. The people who know how to do this already work for the cable companies so the government would have to offer some incentive for them to come over to ISP.gov in excess of what they are already making. Once you have the people, you need the fibre and the drops and the amplifiers and the access rights and the right weather because there are some parts of the land that are frozen solid for eight to ten months out of the year. I am not saying it shouldn’t be done, just noting that it will not be easy and it will not be cheap.
Satellite internet makes me laugh. It costs $10,000/pound to shoot something into space. The only reason Elon Musk can do this is because he has more money than common sense.
Yes, there are lots of things Congress could do to regulate and improve Internet access and promote municipal broadband due to it being a means of interstate commerce. Simply decreeing that states must have municipal broadband systems of their own is not obviously one of them. It could, as I said, create federally-owned local broadband systems, or offer lots of money to states in exchange for their allowing it. But I really don’t think it could just mandating that states have to because they say so.
Oops, “could just mandate.”
Actually, the recent launch of the first Starlink smallsats would have a per-pound launch cost of half of that figure, and possibly a third.
And when we are talking about rural broadband, the government grants to run cable to distant places has been averaging about $2,000 per house. That’s about $50 billion in expected infrastructure costs.
In comparison, SpaceX estimates (to be taken with big grain of salt) is $10 billion for 12,000 satellites. For worldwide coverage. Of course that’s an attractive value proposition! The question here isn’t cost, though, it’s technology. There are good questions here on what it’s going to take to get it to work.
That isn’t the question at hand. As you said in the post I was responding to:
There is a vast difference between telling states they cannot bar their individual municipalities from building something, and telling states they must build that something.
If my town, Montclair NJ, believes they can create a municipal broadband service that would offer better service than the current providers, the law in question would guarantee my town’s right to try. The law in question would not require my town to offer municipal broadband, it just prevents the NJ state government from interfering.
And Broadband is Interstate Commerce. It doesn’t take some twisted reading of the Commerce Clause to get the idea that my ability to contact a company in another state, to buy goods or services from that state, to be delivered from that state to my state in exchange for money sent from my state to their state, involves Interstate Commerce. So, it is absolutely constitutional for the Feds to weigh in on any state’s management of internet service.
Emphasis mine.
As Cheesesteak suggest, that is NOT what anyone has been advocating. The question of state involvement in this issue has emerged precisely because some states have been passing laws FORBIDDING local governments from providing a public internet option. Elizabeth Warren’s proposal, as made clear by the quotation that you provided in post #6 of this thread, is to prevent states from getting in the way of municipal decisions on this issue; it is NOT to force states to get involved in the internet business.
The numbers line up in a pleasing way, but I’d say that these statistics are not usefully comparable for a few reasons.
For one, the definition of a food desert is sort of arbitrary. It’s a mile for urban areas, but 10 miles for rural areas. If rural people within 5 miles of a good grocery store manage to eat healthfully, why is the limit for urban people 1 mile? Urban poor are less likely to own a personal vehicle, but not that much less likely. And you can easily carry several days of fresh groceries on a bicycle or bring a handcart on a bus, which should expand the reasonable grocery radius to more than a mile.
I live within a mile of a grocery store, but I almost never go to that grocery store. It doesn’t feel to me like 1 mile is a very good measure of food privation.
And it’s quite possible to eat healthfully using mostly shelf-stable staples and frozen fruits and vegetables and meat. A twice-a-month trip to a farther away grocery store means you get fresh food that spoils more quickly (soft fruits, lettuces, etc.) half the time and more hardy things that will last 2 weeks in the fridge the other half (frozen foods, cabbage, root vegetables, apples). Etc.
I don’t want to gloss over the issues that poverty plays here. Obviously it’s harder to do that if you don’t have a vehicle you can haul things in, or if you don’t have a fridge that works well, or if you have to work 70 hours a week. But the primary problem there is poverty, not the location of grocery stores.
None of that applies to internet. The broadband definition isn’t arbitrary; if you don’t have broadband you simply can’t participate in normal commercial activities on the internet. You can’t do video calls. You can’t create and upload media. You can’t learn math Khan Academy because you can’t get the videos to load in a reasonable time. etc. And you can’t make a weekly trip to stock up on bits, either.