Recently my internet cable company raised my rates by 30% without prior notice. I have no other option really, as Time Warner and Comcast have pretty much divied up the areas and there is no competition. My access speed is very slow on top of this. I wrote the US and State Attorney General Office to complain about these companies violating anti-trust laws and I was given no response. Same thing occurred when I called. Why is this allowed? We no longer have a democracy or capitalism and noone seems to care. No comments on news media or even on this and other boards> Any ideas?
Are there laws in place preventing competing companies from running a bunch of cable and opening their doors for business?
The fundamental problem is that it’s really not cost effective for everyone to be able to dig up land everywhere and put down their own separate infrastructure for fiber optics and wiring. In theory, it’s a far more costly way of running a society. You need easement rights, use of public lands, costly construction, etc.
So the ideal system would either be to have one set of infrastructure and run them like utilities - just like power and water - and this is so obviously the best course of action. Or at least use the common carrier model like we did after the deregulation of phone companies, where competitors are allowed to lease the infrastructure at market rates to offer different levels of service on the same infrastructure.
Instead, what we actually did was give the cable companies utility-like access to public land, easement, public infrastructure, etc. - even funding them to the tune of tens of billions of dollars to improve access around the country - but we did not put legal demands on them, run them like a utility, or force a common carrier model on them. They largely pocketed the investment money and run their business like the effective monopoly as it is.
Why? Because they - not exxon or goldmach sachs or any of those - are the biggest lobbyists in Congress. They bribe congressmen to keep the status quo, and we all suffer for it. There is no better example of the corruption of our system and the relationship between our legislators and big business than this relationship. It is entirely, and obviously corrupt. It is bad for the country as a whole, for the individual customers being served, for the telecommunications market, and pretty much everyone except the cable companies themselves and the legislators they bribe.
Very few companies have a “monopoly” on high speed Internet access. Cable, DSL, Verizon FiOS, and AT&T U-Verse compete throughout the country. That’s not exactly a huge number of options, but it isn’t a “monopoly” either.
This is in fact often the case.
The cable providers originally often got a leg up in the form of the use of public lands and infrastructure, co-laying infrastructure with other utilities for a dramatically reduced cost, and legal priviledge in easement rights when building in private lands. They also often received public funds under the guise of improving coverage for utilities. It would be very difficult for a new company to come in and lay their own totally independent infrastructure for a reasonable cost. Google isn’t doing it to make a profit, only to prove a point.
Furthermore, these companies generally require the legal permissions of the localities that they want to install in. Often this is blocked because the cable companies bribe the local as well as state representatives. And in fact a locality will often attempt to attract new infrastructure by granting these permissions to an we company, and often the bribed state legislators will come in and put a stop to it.
I believe that here in the UK, British Telecommunications (BT) provide most of the telephone lines. Other Internet companies lease them.
I am currently on-hold with Time Warner Cable (which has been for more than an hour and a half - on my day off). It seems that they have been giving me a slower internet speed rate for many months and charging me the higher price. They have admitted this twice. I am on hold for the fifth or sixth time to speak with a third department in order to change my service to what I should have been getting. On top of that I was told that I would get a reduced rate for the next 12 months. They now are telling me that they cannot give me the reduced rate because the computer won’t let them. They have hung up on my a total of five times while I was on hold. I still have no resolution. This is the worst service I can imagine. This is not capitalism. I have no recourse.
Very few companies have a “monopoly” on high speed Internet access. Cable, DSL, Verizon FiOS, and AT&T U-Verse compete throughout the country. That’s not exactly a huge number of options, but it isn’t a “monopoly” either.
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There is a monopoly when there is only one company providing this service and that is what is happening in my area and most other areas. I truly believe that collusion is occurring.
Isn’t it obvious?
Comcast has a huge lobby in Congress. Our politicians are bought and paid for.
Did you sign up at a promotional rate and now the regular rate is kicking in?
Does your cable company block satellite signals?
Satellite isn’t really a form of high speed internet. I mean, technically sort of, but not really. It’s only viable if you live in the middle of nowhere and it’s the only option you’ve got.
Satellite is viable if you just need a higher than dial-up download rate but don’t need any “real time” services like the ability to play games, do VoIP calls or teleconferencing. Some rural counties have RF-based internet services which can usually get to 5 mbps down or so and can be used for all those real time services because the technology uses much closer base-stations and since we’re talking about radio signals at the speed of light from a tower a few miles away versus a satellite in space.
The Federal government has paid telecom companies a lot of money to build in rural/underserved areas but they’ve typically been offering extremely slow DSL.
The actual reason there are essentially high speed internet monopolies or duopolies (mostly monopolies in the > 30 mbps range of service, with something like 75% of U.S. residents only having one company to choose from at that speed level) isn’t quite as simple as EVIL COMCAST, EVIL LOBBYIST, CORPORATIONS BAD.
There are different models for building out telecommunications infrastructure. Our model for almost everything other than roads has been that we have private industry build the infrastructure, and then the government regulates it. This has advantages and disadvantages. The real advantage is that it costs taxpayers less in tax dollars, a lot of factors go into whether it’s ultimately cheaper because while it does mean a lower tax bill it might mean a higher utility bill. But it may not, it depends on how it gets regulated and what level of profit margin private industry demands.
And “demands” is really the right word there, the biggest disadvantage of this approach is that private industry won’t build unprofitably. Their overall system must be profitable or they have no reason to build, but sometimes infrastructure is required in places where it isn’t ever a good “investment”, think roads way out in the country and rural post office routes (often at addresses where FedEx or UPS couldn’t profitably deliver to, so they use USPS as their “last mile” to complete those orders.) So what this means is that to get say, gas lines, phone lines, and electric wires to unprofitable locations the government either has to give subsidies/incentives to make it worth private industry’s while (this happens sometimes) or it just means some people don’t get access to this type of infrastructure.
We mostly took the position on phone and electricity that you should be able to get it to almost any house that isn’t deliberately off the grid. With internet we’ve never taken that position, instead I’d argue as a matter of policy we do not even really view it as infrastructure (and we should, for economic competitiveness reasons.)
Because we don’t want to pay for the infrastructure ourselves, it ultimately means we are subject to requirements of the private companies that are building it. There are two workable paths forward in my opinion. There is no such thing as a free lunch, we can either have the system we have or we can spend more money to have a different system. There is no solution that doesn’t increase spending at a government level.
That sells short how much public infrastructure and money is used in building internet infrastructure. The lines are often placed alongside city-created electricity and water infrastructure. And often the city exclusively licenses this privilege to certain companies, helping block out competitors at that stage.
You can’t ignore that Comcast and Time Warner have huge lobbyist organizations. What interests are they lobbying? They want to preserve their monopoly or oligopoly, they want to shred what few regulations there are - they can leverage the fact that they’ve got people by the balls to control the content people are able to receive via degraded network neutrality regulations, and they want to keep legislators fighting to keep actual competition into their markets.
This really is a matter of EVIL COMCAST and TWC. Comcast trumps up fraudulent charges to their customers regular as a matter of policy. Comcast pays off legislators at all levels to keep people from offering competition in their territory. Comcast is actively working to destroy net neutrality, one of the necessary components of what makes the internet great. The interest of end users AND businesses on the internet AND the country’s competitiveness and infrastructure AND basic internet freedom go against the interest that Comcast and TWC are trying to push. Literally the only people who benefit from this arrangement are TWC themselves and the legislators they bribe.
I’ll have my answer to this thread ready between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. on Friday.
I agree with most of what you said. There is no way do I believe that internet cable is not profitable at half of what they are charging. In a more perfect world, this service should use leased infrastructure owned by the people (government) and compete with other providers. I am sick and tired of being abused by these all powerful entities and having no recourse but to bend over. I can’t believe that I am the only one concerned enough to complain.
Why do you call them in the first place? An old-fashioned letter asking for help to Robert D Marcus, CEO of Time Warner Cable would probably yield much better results.
I can’t figure it out either. There is no competition in most markets. If you are lucky you get 2 choices, a DSL/Uverse provider or a cable provider.
I have no idea how they get away with such blatant anti-trust activities but they do.
Completely free markets can still create monopolies or companies with limited monopoly pricing power thanks to barriers to entry. Anti-trust laws were created to limit capitalism and produce more efficient outcomes. They generally give a pass or have a harder time dealing with things that are natural monopolies like cable companies and utilities. My electric company is a regional player and my only choice. They get regulated in other ways and I live someplace with relatively cheap rates for the nation. Normal anti-trust is great when there are natural monoply factors.
When there are it’s less clear how to regulate them. Which becomes a political process instead of simple application of the law. …and then come the lobbyists.