Don't let the fact that it's incorporated as a private business fool you, Comcast is a government monopoly.

A deregulated ISP market would be a huge improvement for this country!

A system where large corporations handle the backbone and local ISPs and/or municipalities handle the last few miles sounds ideal for the US, but I am pretty skeptical as to whether we would get that if regulations simply ceased to exist.

("regulations simply cease to exist" seems like the casual definition for "deregulation," though the actual process of deregulation is for a bunch of people to pass a new set of regulations and if they're pandering to a certain constituency, they will call it "deregulation," regardless of the effect of the regulations they just passed. See: telecom, the airlines, banking, etc.)

ISPs are a natural monopoly [1]. Deregulation is unlikely to fix the issue. Creating (or regulating) a common infrastructure, e.g. poles and/or cable tunnels looks like a better way to induce competition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

Not to fight over terminology, but in most of the US, cable companies are given an explicit monopoly "franchise" from the local municipality.

There are some areas that might be a natural monopoly anyway due to low density population, but only way you could know is open things up. That's a tough pill to swallow since the franchise "fees" (taxes) are guaranteed so long as the cable company has a guaranteed monopoly. Yes they could pass a generic tax on cable service, but that would be a new tax.

I focus on cable companies because that seems to be the most common way to get broadband to many parts of the US.

You can make a decent natural monopoly argument for cabled ISPs. Still debatable, but it has some merit.

But in 2020, wireless ISP work great wherever they're not regulated away.

One big problem with regulations is that even if they're beneficial when enacted, they will remain in force for many decades after the underlying reality has changed.

> But in 2020, wireless ISP work great wherever they're not regulated away.

Because in CURRENT_YEAR we don't have to worry about rain fade or quirks of local terrain or unintended interference?

That's quite a big statement to make, generalized over the whole world like that.

> One big problem with regulations is that even if they're beneficial when enacted, they will remain in force for many decades after the underlying reality has changed.

We tend to avoid principles-based regulation in the US, but it's not destiny that regulations remain the same forever, even with our system. We certainly don't have to choose between that and not having any regulations at all (which isn't even an option when you're talking about radio spectrum, or use of wires at the last mile, or whatever).

My impression is that regulations turn to legacy status more often than not. Not that I've conducted any scientific study to back that up.

For radio spectrum you don't need any regulations or regulators. Just establish that radio frequencies in a certain area can be owned, and use general property right rules.

It's not really my area, but I feel like the distinction you're making between "regulations" and "general property right rules" is a bit like the distinction that is made at times between "fees" and "taxes."

To me, "regulations" either means there is a regulator directly issuing rules and orders to the regulated industry, or a legislature manages the rule set through occasional legislation.

This is quite different from laws protecting property, where all the state does is settle property disputes.

In slogan form, one is "rule of man" vs "rule of law".

I think I mentioned it upthread but principles-based regulation can at times be a nice middle ground.

The only thing to break the duopoly is some third option that requires no additional last mile infrastructure investment - either a common infrastructure that decouples provider from physical wiring or wireless Internet that isn't horrible.

Just because we want a technology to exist doesn't mean it's ever going to.

Regulation deals with the here-and-now.

Fixed wireless internet and satellite internet do exist now - there have been barriers to deployment, some of which have been put up by traditional terrestrial ISPs.

There have recently been well funded pushes into satellite internet such as Starlink and Project Kuiper.

Exactly what regulations are preventing new broadband providers from entering the market?

I think it's mostly that cities hand out monopolies to Comcast or regional equivalents.

I'll admit I don't know the details well.

Ask Google. They couldn't put fiber in my city because AT&T told the government to tell them not to.

But how would the gov't handle installing all the back-doors?

you can't blame the free market when comcast has a state sponsored monopoly/duopoly (with the telephone company being the other) on fast internet.

"state sponsored" only in the sense that the state hasn't stepped in to break them up. Comcast's monopoly is entirely self-created through mergers and non-competition agreements.

No, state sponsored - or more likely city sponsored. If you attempt to run wires around your neighborhood to provide TC, Telephone, and internet (you need to do all 3 to have a chance at making money) you will be shut down because Comcast already as an agreement with the city to not allow anyone else to do it.

I'm assuming a serious plan to run wires above. That is you have found deep packet backers to fund you; you have found qualified people to do the work; you have figured out all the other details to do this. There are good reasons to stop someone running cat-6 wires everywhere, but here I'm assuming you have figured out the right way to do this - whatever it is.

And what, you think it's a complete coincidence that every single city in broad swaths of the country decided to contract with a single company to run those wires?

No, agreements between the companies ensure that only one option is available to each region. My city can offer Time Warner the right to run cable here whenever they want, but Time Warner will refuse to do so, because Time Warner has a deal with Comcast that says they will never offer cable in my city. There is no legal barrier to new cable startups like Google Fiber, only the immense cost of it and the threat of retaliatory blacklisting and throttling from the cable monopolies.

That's why the only places these companies compete are ones where the cities have decided to set up a local public broadband to buck the monopoly, or a very well resourced competitor like Google has decided to enter the market and refuses to play their anticompetition game.

Google setup their fiber in the early days based on if they could easily get permission, not where it made the most business sense (they did have some choices, but many cities didn't give them any option).

Also, in many locations, the incumbent telcos lobby specifically to block any sort of municipal/public broadband infrastructure from being permitted when it is proposed.

You can blame The High Priests of The Invisible Hand for keeping the members of the duopolies astonishingly poorly regulated, to go back to the original point of the grandparent post.

As an aside, it's funny, I'm not sure what qualifies for me as "the telephone company" anymore. I guess there probably is one where I live, technically, but it doesn't seem to factor in.

edit: this is evidently going to be one of those posts that fluctuates in "points" over time, bouncing up and down. It'd be fun to have a sparkline implementation that illustrates this change over time

Utility markets are anything but free. They're locally sanctioned monopolies or duopolies.

They are a good example of why government running things is generally a bad idea.

Regulating an industry is not the same as running it. For an industry to truly not be regulated, it needs to exist in an imaginary space, perhaps next door to physicsland with its frictionless surfaces and spherical cows.

At present the only example of governments running - or at least owning - communications utilities in the United States that I'm aware of are municipal broadband [1] providers, which tend to be much more well-liked by their users than something like Comcast. (and bitterly opposed by The High Priests of The Invisible Hand, who want competition but not that competition)

Of course, other countries have state-owned communications monopolies, which actually run the gamut in terms of quality and cost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband

Pointless bullshit that adds no information to the topic while ignoring some that is already there (note the "about 3 months ago" and try to think of what was happening in various fields of work at that time).