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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.
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New York State Threatens To Revoke Charter's Cable Franchise For Bullshitting
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(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.