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Comment by okreallywtf | Hacker News Reader

I'm having trouble finding it now, but didn't the FCC overturn the rule that says ISP's have to sell bandwidth to other ISP's? If they do not, or they are able to make it to where they do not have to, they could pretty easily prevent people from doing this or charge some huge amount for a contract to connect directly to a backbone.

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Yes absolutely, but it's not really a problem on the commercial market because there's enough competition there.

In my small city in Michigan, for example, there's exactly one phone company and one cable company for residential uses. But there are 4 different local companies selling commercial bandwidth backhaul, in addition to nationwide major providers like Level3 and AT&T.

If you're somewhere truly rural, this can be an issue, the local monopoly might not let you buy commercial (re-sellable) bandwidth. But in most cities -- even small ones, it's probably not a major issue.

At the moment, commercial ISP services are still somewhat competitive. It's the residential ones that are completely monopolized.

This is cool, thank you for explaining. It never occurred to me that it would be so different for commercial offerings. The main question I have with ideas like this is where the shitty pricing scams are going to be happening—if it's the residential companies, then yeah, this is perfect. But if it's Level3 that's shaking down Netflix for more money, for example, then the "fork" isn't happening high enough up the chain. Do you have any insight into this part of the equation?

There is some related (old) discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699862.

That posts link is dead, but the wayback machine is awesome: https://web.archive.org/web/20140828011618/http://blog.level...

Please don't be offended, I am only pointing this out because you are obvious very intelligent and expert in the field.

>If your somewhere

*you're

I only point it out because I know some people discount comments that have grammar and spelling errors.

Thanks for the super informative posts!

Edit: I guess I offended, based on the downvotes. I only pointed it out since it was used incorrectly in the posts. I was trying to be helpful, apologies if I was being a dick.

As a non-native speaker, I appreciate if somebody corrects me like this, even if they hurt a little bit. I think you wrote it in a very nice manner.

I apologise if I hurt you feelings in any way. I meant it only as constructive feedback to someone who might not be aware.

Thanks again for your posts.

I wasn't the original poster you corrected. I wanted to express that I would prefer to be corrected the way you did it.

Oops! Sorry about the confusion.

I didn't downvote you, but you might have gotten downvotes because the beginning of your post built up anticipation by making it sound like you had some amazing point/rebuttal to drop, and then seeing only an `s/your/you're` was a huge disappointment ;-)

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