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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Is this a special case in law or just known bribery or .. even plain normal ?

ps: the NN FCC thing got me curious, how much the web would be different if we had to pay. Even a small fee for things like google.

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It's pretty normal. My town has its own ISP. But they're not allowed to provide service outside certain zones, because Comcast already provides service there.

http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/local/story/2016/mar/15/h...

So... the government is protecting the corporations’ territory agains the people?

How is that free market or even capitalism?

It's certainly not a free market. Cities commonly provide exclusive franchise to specific companies. I've got Cox internet and access to Cox cable. AT&T provides phone service, but not any kind of internet access. My access options are Cox, mobile, or satellite. Mobile and satellite obviously have much smaller max transfers per month; they wouldn't cover my requirements for household internet.

Capitalism simply means the government doesn't own the infrastructure and provide the service to use that infra. It is not free market in terms of it being a competitive market. It is a free market if you think "free" means unregulated (or less regulated).

But it's a shift of the goal post to consider free markets as unregulated ones. It was for a long time well understood that good regulation ensures competitive markets. Or when there can be no competition, to have highly regulated monopolies to in effect legislate the outcome that most people who are politically active want.

Who said we have a free market? It is capitalism, because ISPs are using their financial leverage to their best interests.

it's consolidated free market. #rimshot

I live in NYC, the city is basically sliced and diced by the internet providers. Every apartment I've had I haven't had a choice.

So why isn't anything done about this? This seems like a bigger issue than net neutrality to me.

This has been an issue since MaBell.

It's not a special case in law, it's allowed because the U.S. does not have particularly strong competition law (anti-trust) compared to the EU or pretty much anywhere.

US split up Bell (and maybe Microsoft ? can't recall) that's something

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