From a US perspective, for your #1, the idea of people “shopping” for broadband, is astonishing. Most people here have available to them one single DOCSIS provider and that’s it. A few lucky ones have a FTTP option too, but that definitely not available to more than 25% of addresses.

(It’s true that you can use cellular for your home internet, but I consider that extremely compromised.)

Starlink shattered this monopoly in my area.

A single extra provider does not mean a monopoly is "broken". Especially if they aren't even competing in the same niches

> Starlink shattered this monopoly in my area.

The parent was noting that most of the US lives in a region, that is under a monopoly of wireline ISP (DOCSIS, FTTH). Starlink can't shatter a wireline monopoly because it is OTA.

I fired my DOCSIS provider for starlink. For many consumers the service is fungible.

You have to decouple the physical infrastructure from the service provider - how else are you supposed to have competition in a market with a natural monopoly? It's just about the only thing the EU did right during the mandated privatization of infrastructure.

This is exactly what Australia did.

The government laid the fibre (sorta) and then the ISP can use the fibre in any location to serve customers. We can select from nearly 100 different ISPs with many different plans (up to 2Gbps) and the switch over can take as little as 10 minutes if provisioned correctly.

* The Australian governement originally elected to roll out fibre everywhere. The next government decided it was too costly and designed "Multi Technology Mix" (MTM). The MTM consisted of Satellite (Skymuster), 4G/5G Towers (Fixed Wireless), FTTN (Fibre to a Node, then Copper to House), FTTC (Fibre to Curb, then copper to house), FTTP (Fibre to the Prem). Many years later, all of this is overtuned and effectively all FTTN/FTTC customers can get a free FTTP upgrade.

What Malcolm Turnbull did to the NBN was absolutely disgraceful

The reforms also resulted in a lot of people never getting FTTN/FFTC in the first place - so will forever be 5G only unless there’s a new scheme rolled out

I firmly believe it was Murdoch’s plan to delay FTTP NBN because he could see it would scuttle his Fox empire preemptively.

I understand your point and generally agree. But I do see some exceptions like the Railway networks (usually a natural monopoly) in Japan being successfully privatized between so many different companies with their own parallel train lines.

Exactly. And because the infra was never public in the US, and thus no “privatisation with rules”, it’s been a bit of a disaster.

> Most people here have available to them one [wireline] provider [mostly DOCSIS] and that’s it.

Three FTTH providers deployed fiber infra here (thanks to BBB funds && before the WhiteHouse clawed those funds back).

The upshot of adding 3 wireline providers is this: I complained to one that I was switching service to the FTTH that had IPv6. My ISP quoted me a 40% lower rate and added a /38 IPv6 to their ASN.

It's like living in a fantasy.

Indeed.

This is a funny legacy of how telecoms was run and regulated in different countries.

Now the US has the least consumer choice, and shitty ISP practices from exploiting peering relations to selling user data.

I often said net neutrality was fine, but it was an answer to a problem created by the legally-enforced monopolies in the US.

What would be the incentive for site owners to reduce the appeal of their site? The user has connected to the site, so there's obviously no immediate problem.

Back when Https deployment wasn't widespread, Chrome added a deliberate delay to http sites so Https sites appeared faster. That was the incentive for deployment for many, because until then Https was generally slower (extra round trips to set up the tls connection).

I think this is a classic chicken and egg problem and the only way to solve this issue is government regulation. Anyone aware of the mandatory IPv6 in Europe? I heard that the Chech Republic is doing something about it. I Poland, only Orange and probably TMobile supports it, the smaller ones - almost none.

This will work on nerds (aka the HN crowd) but the average person will read that and wonder why they should care when the page loaded. Also, if you keep displaying the banner people will grow accustomed to it and ultimately ignore it.

Regular person, “This site requires some weird technology, I’ll shop somewhere else.”

This is one of those “if everyone just” solutions that doesn’t work because shopping websites would never do that. Amazon has tons of evidence that even the slightest bits of friction result in noticeable drops in sales.

And yet Amazon's site seems to be half baked and buggy every time I visit.

I noticed when using some Chinese services, a lot of them have "IPv4" and "IPv6" flags when opening their apps for some reason.