Re:Nationalize the internet
by rayiner on Saturday November 25, 2017 @02:23PM
(#15777466)
> The current political system is broken - the FCC is symptomatic of that.
If you look beyond the crisis de jour, the FCC over the last 20 years has largely followed the same path as the other telecom regulators in the developed world. Denmark, for example, deregulated telecom until recently getting rid of its version of the FCC: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/mercatus-layton-altern... (warning: PDF).
The biggest impediment in the U.S. has been state and local governments, which have frustrated Congress's efforts. While Congress, for example, made it illegal to grant local telecom monopolies in 1994/1996, state and local governments responded by imposing such onerous terms on potential new entrants that nobody but incumbents wanted to invest. In Baltimore, for example, Comcast has a de facto monopoly. The press, which is largely ignorant of the nuances of telecom regulation, paints it as Baltimore giving Comcast a monopoly contract: https://baltimorebrew.com/2016/10/18/city-set-to-approve-10-....
In reality, there is no exclusivity in Comcast's franchise. Rather, the franchise requirements are so onerous that no other company has even applied to build a network in Baltimore. That's despite Baltimore actively trying to solicit Google and other companies to come in and compete with Comcast: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/snubb....
What few people in this debate appreciate is that telecom is monumentally capital intensive, and that money has to come from somewhere. Moreover, that money is always the subject of competition from other needs. If we depend on private industry, investing in telecom has to be sufficiently attractive in comparison to other investments. If we depend on the government, money spent on maintenance and upgrading telecom infrastructure is money we don't spend on schools, public transit, etc. There is no "free lunch" where you get private companies to spend tens of billions of dollars a year while simultaneously adhering to a raft of government-set public interest objectives.
If you look beyond the crisis de jour, the FCC over the last 20 years has largely followed the same path as the other telecom regulators in the developed world. Denmark, for example, deregulated telecom until recently getting rid of its version of the FCC: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/mercatus-layton-altern... (warning: PDF).
The biggest impediment in the U.S. has been state and local governments, which have frustrated Congress's efforts. While Congress, for example, made it illegal to grant local telecom monopolies in 1994/1996, state and local governments responded by imposing such onerous terms on potential new entrants that nobody but incumbents wanted to invest. In Baltimore, for example, Comcast has a de facto monopoly. The press, which is largely ignorant of the nuances of telecom regulation, paints it as Baltimore giving Comcast a monopoly contract: https://baltimorebrew.com/2016/10/18/city-set-to-approve-10-....
In reality, there is no exclusivity in Comcast's franchise. Rather, the franchise requirements are so onerous that no other company has even applied to build a network in Baltimore. That's despite Baltimore actively trying to solicit Google and other companies to come in and compete with Comcast: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/snubb....
What few people in this debate appreciate is that telecom is monumentally capital intensive, and that money has to come from somewhere. Moreover, that money is always the subject of competition from other needs. If we depend on private industry, investing in telecom has to be sufficiently attractive in comparison to other investments. If we depend on the government, money spent on maintenance and upgrading telecom infrastructure is money we don't spend on schools, public transit, etc. There is no "free lunch" where you get private companies to spend tens of billions of dollars a year while simultaneously adhering to a raft of government-set public interest objectives.