SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
Fnord666
on Friday July 27 2018, @06:41AM
from the revoke-every-politician-in-office dept.
from the revoke-every-politician-in-office dept.
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
New York State and the nation's second biggest cable provider (Charter Spectrum) aren't getting along particularly well. Early last year, Charter Spectrum was sued by New York State for selling broadband speeds the company knew it couldn't deliver. According to the original complaint (pdf), Charter routinely misled consumers, refused to seriously upgrade its networks, and manipulated a system the FCC used to determine whether the company was delivering advertised broadband speeds to the company's subscribers (it wasn't). Charter has tried to use the FCC's net neutrality repeal to claim that states can't hold it accountable for terrible service, but that hasn't been going particularly well.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
New York State Threatens To Revoke Charter's Cable Franchise For Bullshitting
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 19 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Remember Darwin; building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Friday July 27 2018, @08:23AM (9 children)
This is just the kind of thing we get when we interfere with free enterprise, polluting it to a useless crony capitalism by legally enforcing artificial monopoly.
We would have the same predicament with, say, car repair - if one business was granted exclusive rights to repair cars in a town; anyone else opening a car repair business being in violation of that town's law.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 27 2018, @08:43AM (6 children)
Were there no natural monopoly, whoever was first to market with a profoundly crappy service would own the entire industry.
Consider Microsoft's security. Despite that they began to take security seriously after Code Red cost the entire planet's economy ten billion dollars, there is so very much legacy code left not just in windows but in most of MS' other products that no amount of Windows Update reboots have any hope of patching them all.
Now consider for a moment, what your cable Internet service would be like had Microsoft been first to market.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by anubi on Friday July 27 2018, @09:08AM (5 children)
I would think a "natural monopoly" is the only kind of monopoly that should exist. Protected not by law but by the economy of scale.
If they get so damned inefficient that all the freeloaders burden the system so much that someone else can do it better, faster, cheaper... the apple cart upsets big time for the ones who once had the world on a string.
Example... a light bulb plant turning out billions of flashlight bulbs... who can compete? The machine is making enough light bulbs to meet the needs of the entire world. As long as the owners don't load the thing down so much that people start building competing plants, they've got the whole world market - everyone gets bulbs from them, brands them, and retails them. If the government just keeps their hands out of the system, things will run just fine. If the guys who have the monopoly get too exploitive with their monopoly, the resellers will gang up and fund a replacement machine, and you will suddenly find yourself trying to sell half the light bulbs you used to sell - if that.
Can you imagine the havoc in a town where one grocer gets the government to keep all his competition out of town?
This is a problem in a system where the public elects representatives, and the representatives prostitute themselves out by using the authority the public vested in them to enforce crony capitalism.
If its that much of a physical monopoly, that is only have space for one player, then call it a utility and manage it as such.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Informative) by danaris on Friday July 27 2018, @01:03PM (1 child)
I think you have a misconception as to what a "natural monopoly" is. What you've described is just a regular-type monopoly. The only thing preventing someone else from entering is the economy of scale, which is a pretty low bar.
Natural monopolies are those in a market where the barriers to entry are naturally (as opposed to artificially) high. The most obvious and salient examples are markets that require infrastructure running to your home—water, sewage, power...and internet. Not only do these require a massive capital investment before they can actually deliver service (an investment which often also requires negotiation of easements and rights-of-way so they can actually lay the cables or pipes across/under your land and the municipality's land), but connecting a home to separate infrastructure of more than one company is both silly and, generally, prohibitively expensive.
So you end up with the first company to build there owning the pipes, and then what do you do? How are you going to have competition? Just let anyone build pipes to your house?
This is why water, power, and sewer are utilities, in many cases publicly owned, and even where they're not, they're heavily regulated. Wired internet service is really no different, and the fact that we treat it differently is basically because it came along well after the antitrust sentiment of the early part of the 20th century had died down (because they'd already busted the trusts, and things were more or less OK for a while on that front).
It's also why, in many places, the physical infrastructure of the internet—particularly the "last mile" running into residential areas and connecting homes—is owned either publicly, or by a heavily regulated utility, which then rents access to it to all comers at fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory rates.
I recognize that the general sentiment on SoylentNews is in favour of the "free market," and so there will be many who see advocating for such a nationalization of currently-private property as anathema, but as a natural monopoly, this is, by definition, not a free market. And if you want competition, then...again, do you just let a whole bunch of different companies send cables to your house—underground, in many areas?
Dan Aris
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 28 2018, @02:25PM
"t's also why, in many places, the physical infrastructure of the internet—particularly the "last mile" running into residential areas and connecting homes—is owned either publicly, or by a heavily regulated utility"
Putting "owned publicly" and "heavily regulated utility" in the same sentence is a hedge. I don't know of any cases where the former is true in the U.S. Perhaps in some Vermont village somewhere. But certainly not in the majority of the states. and "heavily regulated" is totally subjective.IOW, your using two sixteenth truths to imply a whole truth. Nope, it doesn't work that way.
The market can be fractured to create competition in a variety of ways. For example "dig once" regulations open up fiber markets to competition, and reduce costs for ALL carriers at the same time. With just a modicum of ISO standardization, it is practical to have competing telecoms. The states don't compel standardization because high market entry expense favors established players.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Friday July 27 2018, @02:07PM (2 children)
You have an idealistic view of how natural monopolies work. What actually happens when somebody builds a competing plant is that the monopoly lowers their prices, even selling at a substantial loss (subsidized by all those excess profits from years past), until the competitors are driven out of business, and their investors lose their shirts. After that happens once or twice, people stop investing in building competition. Happens all the time - that's how China has cornered the market on a lot of rare earth mining for example.
Resellers refuse to buy the ultra-cheap bulbs? Firstly, you need unanimous market collusion to pull that off - all it takes is one reseller breaking ranks and they can get a huge advantage over their fellows. And even if you can manage complete collusion - you've just opened the door for the monopolist to get a strong foothold in the reseller business, and now they have a vertical monopoly as well, and your reselling business is facing an existential threat.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 27 2018, @02:26PM (1 child)
> You have an idealistic view of how natural monopolies work.
I think this would be more correct if it read:
"You have an idealistic view of how normal monopolies work."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly [wikipedia.org] [example is utilities]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly [wikipedia.org]
For example, even with their first mover advantage, General Electric (USA) was never the only maker of light bulbs, I seem to remember Sylvania bulbs being widely available when I was a young kid (early 60s).
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 27 2018, @02:56PM
Fair enough. I'd actually drop the "normal" as well.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Weasley on Friday July 27 2018, @02:42PM
Free enterprise can't actually exist. It's delusional to think that those entrusted to govern won't be swayed by the money and power of capitalists.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Friday July 27 2018, @04:05PM
Its also worth pointing out we're talking about vertical monopolies, USUALLY entire utility companies are not natural monopolies, merely a small segment of the company is a natural monopoly.
So there is a natural monopoly marketplace in running coaxial cables to every house; there is no natural monopoly in customer support, internet routing, billing, individual customer and plant installation and repair work (which is often done by contractors right now), network monitoring troubleshooting and dispatching, engineering services, blah blah. Most of the complaints come from the 90% of employees not working in a natural monopoly freeloading and not doing their jobs because the 10% of employees working in the natural monopoly field protect them.
A truly excellent automobile analogy would be imagine your roads, road signs, dealerships, gas stations, and manufacturing plants are ALL owned by either GM Ford or Toyota and they charge you whatever the they want (and it won't be cheap...) to repair potholes and if anyone complains you get both barrels of "well, roads are a natural monopoly so thats why you have to put up with terrible product from the factory; I mean, naturally, the same company that tightens bolts on the car assembly line "must" be in charge of filling (or not filling) potholes in front of your house, so I guess we can never change the industry, oh well its just so sad.
Medical care has some of this going on; also dentistry. In theory there's no reason the emergency room and preventative care have to be connected at any level of the corporate hierarchy at all. In fact my kids pediatrician works some miles away from my closest emergency room. However, for whatever reason they're all in one hyper-large corporation that oddly enough screws everyone over with ever higher bills, mostly because they can, no other reason.