Politics isn't the sole problem, lobbying in the company interests instead of the customers is the other problem.

There has to be strict federal laws to outlaw lobbying and any type of incentives for all federal employees including the politicians. No gifting, no promises for the future (job), and so on. If such an occasion has occurred, both sides must be punished and the company must be stripped of its ability to do business in the country. The politician must be banned from holding the office and any company that they were involved with for life.

How about we start with removing all free healthcare from the congress, they pay the same as the rest of us and they must go through the healthcare system just like us. If they have a problem, fracking fix it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556

If you have more interest in understanding the issue, there's plenty of good assessments. Everything from the explosion of wireless, to hdtv, to local municipalities, to mergers, and technological limitations are to blame.

That does not mean I am opposed to or deny the value of markets.

As a matter of personal ideology, I'd say: let's build a nationwide public system with a federal/state partnership, and import regulators from Scandinavia to run it. But that's not one of the choices.

I don't want to oversimplify the issue and don't disagree that everyone in politics would prefer if better broadband infrastructure just happened and all they had to do was show up and cut a few ribbons without investing any political capital. But I think you're being a tad disingenuous here. You are too smart and well-informed to buy this argument if I were to make it to you.

At the same time, I inserted the caveat of importing regulators from Scandinavia for a reason. Public infrastructure in the U.S. (outside of NYC/Chicago) mostly sucks and is poorly run. I say this because I've walked the walk: I used to commute on Metro North every day from Westchester to Manhattan, then on SEPTA from Wilmington to Philadelphia, then on Amtrak from Baltimore to DC, then (briefly) on the D.C. Metro. Metro North was fantastic, but the others are worse than Comcast.

The basic problem is that I don't have the choice to vote for Stockholm's fiber system run by Swedes. My only choice is between Verizon (which is actually pretty damn good in Maryland), or the same folks who run the D.C. Metro.

For example, in a lot of areas, the issue was simply local regulations and getting approvals from the local governments. It's hard to build a large metro ring when 1 of the 5 towns you need to go through won't approve the easement expansions necessary.

Or, as another example, should you continue to plow ahead with your fiber to the curb strategy when market forecasts are showing internet connected phone usage growing by multiple thousands of percent within the next 10 years?

I don't believe it to be wrong, I have parroted this fact many times myself. But I just realised that I don't have any evidence of it either.

All these agreements are public. Go down to your local city hall or courthouse and ask for a copy of the franchise agreement.

Point being, part of the evil is Comcast. The other part is your elected local politicians...

It specifically noted it was non-exclusive, but I assumed that was the exception rather than the rule.

No, it's a popular uban legend based on a misunderstanding of agreements between telecoms and the government. A telecom, IIRC Verizon, promised to upgrade their network to 45mbps access across their footprint.

People are now interpreting that to mean they promised to build build a FTTH residential network (capable of 45mbps) to each home for prices similar to what you pay for DSL or cable internet.

But that is a total misread.

Really, Verizon was promising to upgrade their Trunk lines (T-Carrier) from T1 to T3. A T3 line is 44.736 Mbit/s. And they weren't promising to deliver a trunk line to each house for 60 bucks a month. They were expecting to charge thousands a month. This was basically a service for businesses and datacenters. Not for residential use.

And they actually did do that upgrade.

I believe the following must be true for every ISP on the planet. Hardware crashes and/or dies - power surges, thunderstorms, vandalism, firmware bugs, old age, human errors - all sorts of stuff happen almost daily. It also has to be updated to match with ever-growing bandwidth and latency requirements. The same goes about the software parts as well, although when designed right and working solid it normally doesn't need updates - except for new features - for quite a while. Either way, all that stuff normally requires a reasonably big number of engineers and technicians, always busy either fixing things or building new stuff without introducing any actual innovation (just connecting new customers).

I'm not justifying $50/mo tag (honestly, I have no idea how overpriced it is, although I guess with a proper competition it would be significantly less), just saying that maintaining the real-world (=a world where all sort of stuff that shouldn't be happens on a regular basis) network must cost significant amount.

I will keep saying it until people believe me: you can't separate out "politics". Overwhelmingly, whether people think something is "politics" (or "political" or "politicized") is reliably predicted solely by whether it affects them or people they identify with, rather than any kind of Platonically-ideal classification of topics.

Alphabet's net income in 2016 was $19.5 billion, as much as Comcast and Verizon put together. Alphabet's return on invested capital and operating margins were significantly higher than either. There are various reasons to regulate ISPs, but "they make too much money" isn't a particularly good one: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corp... (telecom ROIC is among the lowest of any industry).

> If there was proper competition, would we be spending such ridiculously high fees on the internet access we get?

Is Google in a market with "proper competition?"

An enormous difference, and one of which you are definitely aware, is the existence of legal monopolies for many network infrastructure providers, as well as lobbying of state governments to limit or prevent the building of publicly-owned network infrastructure in many jurisdictions.

I'm not locked in to using Google in any way other than by consumer preference. I use Bing as well but frankly I find it an inferior product.

My point is that we pay ISPs as much as we pay for the rest of the computing infrastructure, that they are a major player, with tons of money and high profits, and terrible service. That they aren't acting like the big boys, even though they have the cash to.

ISPs are currently entrenched without competition. The current FCC fudges stats to wrongly state that there is competition in the ISP space, whereas in reality almost nobody has more than one broadband option.

I signed up with my internet provider on the assumption that all traffic would be treated equally, and I will be very upset if I notice degradation in service because I'm not using my connection in a preferred way.

Common myth. - Comcast made merely $2B in profits last year.[verified] - ATT made around $5B from wireline data last year. [unverified]

A lot of people think these are monopolies with the help of government without realising that a lot of companies including Google tried to bring disruption and have failed. Part of the reason why not many people are wasting their capital on wireline is because it is unlikely to give better results.

ISPs have terrible customer service because most of their efforts are going into keeping those wires and fibres intact. I would rather have a good working internet service and a bad call center rep than opposite.

Not to mention when you don't allow companies like Comcast etc. to bring cheaper labor from India, they will be forced to spend more hiring American college grads and spend more cash on their training etc. We have to pay for it in the bill.

I've never seen billions of dollars in profits dismissed so casually.

>ISPs have terrible customer service because most of their efforts are going into keeping those wires and fibres intact.

ISP's in other countries, even ones of similar scale to the US, don't have to chose between quality customer service and quality internet service. To call your argument facile would be overly generous.

Comcast has around 25 million customers [0], so that's around $65/year/customer. So if you cut that profit to $0, you can return $5/month on combined TV and internet to each customer. When people say "cable and internet are so expensive," they don't generally mean "if I got a $5 price cut I would be happy."

[0]: http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/comcast-statistics/

But that wasn't even my main point. My point is that Comcast is more interested in providing a return to their shareholders than they in providing effective and satisfying customer service.

What makes you think that? A huge chunk of an ISPs' operating expenses go to paying people to move dirt around, and the metal and plastic they put in the dirt. How do you expect to disrupt that?

The math is for you to see.

> It's also because they are really bad at providing it.

And how many ISP companies do you have experience running ?

> My point is that Comcast is more interested in providing a return to their shareholders than they in providing effective and satisfying customer service.

What is wrong with it ? Has worked well for Google.

It's not math.

>And how many ISP companies do you have experience running ?

Indirectly, 2. I worked for both my father's and my uncle's ISP's, both of which they owned and operated.

>What is wrong with it ? Has worked well for Google.

Alright, fair, you got me there.

Which are those countries ? India, China?