This isn't as uncontroversial of an opinion as it might appear to be in a place like HN. What you're admitting here basically is that you think Comcast should be broken up because they lobby for things you don't like, but FAANG is fine because they lobby for things you do.
> you think Comcast should be broken up
I think efforts to break up tech monopolies should first be focused on telecommunication companies.
> because they lobby for things you don't like,
Not just me, but are objectively harmful to 99% of the people they would affect
> but FAANG is fine because they lobby for things you do.
I'm mostly focusing on Google here, and yes, they at least occasionally lobby for things I like because sometimes their interests and the interests of the public in general happen to align.
With Comcast (and other ISPs), you have only one choice, and they spend tons of money and effort making sure you only have that one choice, and continue to have only that one choice. Comcast recently spent nearly $1M to prevent Fort Collins from creating a municipal ISP[1]. That is actively anti-competitive and monopolistic by definition.
[1]: https://muninetworks.org/content/totals-are-comcast-spends-9...
I'm sure if the U.S. government was proposing to sell public bonds to build a search engine or ride-sharing service, you'd see a lot of lobbying from Silicon Valley. It's not "actively anti-competitive and monopolistic by definition" to oppose government backed and funded competition in your industry.
Is it possible for them to have other strategic incentives for their action, such as preventing a type of competitor from emerging? Yes. And if you take the perspective that government is a uniquely troublesome competitor, it's understandable to feel extra strong about it.
But it's still monopolistic in context. A counterpoint to "competition from the government is uniquely unfair" is "having only one provider is uniquely unfair". One is from the perspective of a profitable $100B corporation, the other is from the perspective of the consumers.
The city wanted to launch a municipal internet service. Predictably, it failed because the requirements were to provide service everywhere and the bids all came back too high.
Meanwhile they continue to resist private ISPs who want to expand into neighborhoods where they think they can do so profitably.
Still I agree breaking up Comcast is not the solution. You will just end up with smaller more localized monopolies. That's pretty much what happened with Bell after all.
The solution would be either nationalizing the infrastructure and leasing it to operators or forcing existing operators to rent their infrastructure to their competitors for a set price. The later is actually working quite well in France. Short of that you will never get competition. It's simply not profitable.
Cost wise however, you can't even compare the USA and France. In France, a full speed FTTH subscription with no data cap cost 25 euros and you can pay 20 more to get a cell phone plan with unlimited call and unlimited data. If you are ready to switch provider yearly, you can bring that down to 25 euros all included.
And how quickly is France's number going to grow given that France's second largest ISP recently cancelled its plans to deploy fiber? https://www.reuters.com/article/altice-sfr-france/altice-aba....
Also note that the French deployment is being heavily subsidized by the government (to the tune of $24 billion). Except for a small amount during the post-2008 economic stimulus, broadband deployment in the U.S. is not subsidized. Whereas the French government is paying a direct subsidy to build fiber in rural areas, in the U.S. rural deployment is financed by a cross subsidy (taxing ISPs in urban areas to subsidize ISPs in rural ones).
Most likely unaffected. You rightfully pointed that the state is paying for much of it. A significant part of the deployment is actually done directly by the state (via the equivalent of counties) which owns the infrastructure.
> Also note that the French deployment is being heavily subsidized by the government (to the tune of $24 billion). Except for a small amount during the post-2008 economic stimulus, broadband deployment in the U.S. is not subsidized. Whereas the French government is paying a direct subsidy to build fiber in rural areas, in the U.S. rural deployment is financed by a cross subsidy (taxing ISPs in urban areas to subsidize ISPs in rural ones).
I don't really see what this has to do with my initial point: mandatory leasing of ISP private infrastructure to their competitors successfully create competition.
It is not subsidies to ISP by the way. Most of this money goes to counties so they can build their own infrastructure which they then lease to ISP. It makes a lot of sense because while this infrastructure wouldn't be profitable if privately built they have a significant positive economic impact on the region where they are deployed.
[1] When you build an income-producing capital asset like copper wire in the ground, you can’t deduct the cost from your revenues immediately for tax purposes, like you can with say employee salaries. Instead, you gradually deduct the capital cost over the income-producing life of the asset. If the government allowes you to depreciate an asset faster than the value of the asset actually drops, that nets you some tax benefit due to the time value of money. On the other hand, if the accelerated depreciation reflects the fact that certain types of assets depreciate quicker, then it will result in the correct amount of taxes being paid. For example IT equipment in data centers can generally be written off immediately—unlike wires in the the ground it’s pretty much worthless after a few years.
The 'cost vs. benefit' analysis should reveal similar ROI as "the wall."
What's the purpose of monopoly laws? What is their spirit? Consumer benefit, right? If that is better served by municipal utilities, then while it may not violate the word of antitrust, it certainly violates the spirit.
There’s definitely an argument to be made here that their interests don’t align with the public, and that they should therefore be targeted first — public interests is a subjective phrase.
Perhaps outright defending FANG is going too far, but the parent definitely has a point that ISP's should be looked into when we're discussing "breaking up" companies.
I don't think that you could get any reasonably representative range of economists in a room to even agree that this is ever a better option, so I think your claim to objectivity is unwarranted.
Beyond that...yeah.
Far from being a shocking "admission," it's the least surprising thing in the world that people support policy they like and oppose policy they don't. And ignore policy they're indifferent to.
(People may also at times support policy they don't like and oppose policy they do for various practical political reasons, but that's a different discussion.)
This might be more of an issue in areas where things people do/don't like are arbitrary matters of taste. I'm certainly not saddling up to lead a state-backed charge against the company that produces Peeps despite the fact that I think they're a terrible excuse for candy.
But net neutrality is not an arbitrary matter of taste.
Nor, really, are immigration, tax reform and antitrust issues.
The original point of anti-trust law was to make things better for the consumer. If Comcast is using their power to lobby for anti-consumer practices then they should be broken up. Naturally consumers are going to disagree with anti-consumer practices.
But the point is well made. We can't be breaking up companies that don't do what we want, if they're playing by the rules.
The real answer is to change the rules. Warren is running on some populist anger, and that's a dangerous thing to praise.
The government running an entire industry, even the threat of such a thing, is a great way to completely destroy innovation in that industry. Why would I invest in research if it's a real possibility the government can come in and take everything from me for nothing?
What you're suggesting doesn't create a free market, it creates a dead market.
Additionally, and far more importantly: Comcast is a regional monopoly. They have a lot of power in some geographic areas of the United States. Google is a global monopoly that has power in nearly every home on the planet. You shouldn't be willing to strengthen a global monopoly to try to fight a regional one.
And Google is far more than just where you go to search or store your email. Somewhere around 90% of the web uses Google Analytics, Google Ads, or Google Fonts, so they can track you regardless of where you go online. And that's before you get into the fact that plenty of websites are on Google's cloud services, which you may not even know. (I left Google Docs for another service, for instance, but it's still hosted on Google's servers.) Even if you're not logged into a Google account, Google is tracking you and profiling your behavior across the web. (Google also collects credit card data, so they can track you in brick and mortar stores now too.)
Using Google's browser to access the web is also becoming increasingly inescapable, now that the company with the second largest market share in web browsers is switching to Chrome's codebase. Firefox is nearly the last remaining holdout against Chromium. In fact, the very protocol we use to talk to the web is constantly being revised primarily on Google's lead and direction. HTTP/3, QUIC, DNS-over-HTTPS, etc. is all about moving the web's standard to something more palatable to Google's business models, and making them harder to block or filter out.
It's incredibly naive to believe you can escape Google. I've spent years de-Googling, and there's plenty of data Google still has on me.
ISP monopolies are a big problem, but they won't follow you when you move. A high bar for escape, to be sure, but escaping Google likely requires an even higher bar: Entering the witness protection program and getting a new identity.
And the reason they don't have more market share is because Chrome is still faster and provides a better experience on average than Firefox does. I switched (back) to Firefox a few years ago, and I'm mostly happy with it. But when I try to get others to switch, those that end up not switching try for a few days and run into horrible performance issues that cripple their browsing experience. Clearly this isn't a universal issue (my experience is fine), but it's a big enough issue that it likely hampers further adoption.
I pretty much never hear "Firefox doesn't work properly on X site" as a reason they can't use Firefox. In the end, people use Chrome because it tends to give a better experience for people, even given its lack of respect for their privacy.
Without net neutrality, ISPs would be free to charge big players like Google and Netflix more money, and that would leave a lot more room for smaller players to get involved. Getting "the same terms" as Google and Netflix is not always, inherently, a good thing.
When ISPs decide that they should charge more for all video traffic, the smaller companies can't pay it but the larger ones can. Why would the ISPs act in the benefit of small companies when they can make more by charging more for all streaming video.
From https://www.opensecrets.org/news/issues/net_neutrality/
> Not only was Google the pro-net neutrality organization that spent the most on lobbying in 2014 — $16.8 million in 2014 — it was the 10th biggest spender on federal lobbying that year. Impressive as that sounds, however, it still ranked behind both Comcast and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.
And it seems like every dollar that Comcast spends lobbying is directed towards efforts that will have a negative impact on my life, and the lives of everyone not on Comcast's board of directors. At least with Google, sometimes our incentives align, so that's another point in favor of attempting to break up the Comcast monopoly before the Google one.