Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> But you can always use DSP, cable, satellite, or even tether off a wireless if you don't like your home ISP.

You can, if you're willing to accept a second-rate experience. But avoiding that is the whole point of net neutrality enforcement.

ADSL is fundamentally unable to compete with DOCSIS or fiber; phone lines simply do not have sufficient bandwidth except over impractically short distances. Satellite can never offer acceptable latency. Cellular radio solutions exist on a spectrum where at one end they have broad coverage but horrible latency and throughput, and at the other end they can outperform DSL but only by deploying a dense enough wired backhaul network that you aren't saving much money over building out a pure wired network.

If you want 50+ MBps with low latency, there are only three viable technologies: DOCSIS over coax, short-range xDSL, or fiber. Only one of those three is currently widely deployed in the US. The latter two are available only where it is most convenient and profitable for ISPs to deploy.

>Satellite can never offer acceptable latency.

Satellite internet can offer very competitive latency, even though nobody is doing it so far. Small cubesats make lower orbits viable than what's currently used for satellite internet. At a low earth orbit of 400km (about the height of the ISS) you have a round trip time of just 3ms.

A theoretical alternative no-one is deploying is not an alternative.

SpaceX is planning on launching there satellite internet service in the next 5 years, and it could potentially have lower latency than traditional fiber networks due to the satellites being able to communicate more directly.

I don't disagree with you though, we need solid fiber internet options available at reasonable prices.

OneWeb has funding and has already purchased a bunch of satellites and launches.

The parent's point is that most alternatives to Google are a "second-rate experience". Almost nobody else has the data input to meet Google's offerings or compete on price. While the additional configuration options is a huge perk when getting rid of "we just do the best thing" products like Google and Apple, the alternatives are often a little dumber and cost a little more.

> The parent's point is that most alternatives to Google are a "second-rate experience".

Because there is competition they have competitively built up a better product within the market and on top of the internet. Google built up when Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, Alta Vista and others were there, they did it better up until now. There are still user choice and Google has no local/physical monopoly control.

People choose to use Google, most people can't choose their broadband provider.

ISPs could have invested in their own search engine or a third party one but they did not. Google built the best search engine but there are some up and coming competitors (DuckDuckGo mainly).

Companies that built up their market lead and or mind share monopolies did so in the open market, they did not lobby their way to a monopoly that controls your local area and blocks out competitors and innovations like muni networks. Google also isn't against NN.

If there is a monopoly do which you seem to think Google is, do you support companies building up their own product into a monopoly by choice or one that uses representatives and bribes to buy their way to control your internet from the moment you are on to the moment you are off.

Google is a destination on the web, built on top of it. Broadband is a lower level that we need to access a fair playing field of competitive products.

> People choose to use Google, most people can't choose their broadband provider.

Do they? In that case let's get Chrome to default to DuckDuckGo.

If you are right then usage stats will hardly change.

On the other hand 90%+ of my internet usage goes over my phones data plan.

> Google also isn't against NN

Google discriminates more than the worst NN offenders.

Lots of mildly controversial youtubers have been deliberately de-monetized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com