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Comment by Philorandroid | Hacker News Reader

It's fascinating that the author implies more regulatory power over telecoms would solve this, even though they're plainly buying that same regulatory power when it's advantageous. If "the vast majority of politicians are feckless cardboard cutouts with little real interest in market or consumer health" anyways, it'd seem a superfluous effort to give an agency more power only to sell it out later, right?

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The Telecom Act of 1996 started the current mess. I argue it was partly responsible for the dotcom bust. It killed the incentive to create broadband, and the internet without broadband is not that useful. It's a regulatory mess.

You're probably being unfairly downvoted by people associating this act with the CDA but you're absolutely right. That act basically killed the booming industry for last-mile fiber by forcing the incumbent companies to lease out last mile access. Fast forward a few more years to 2004, the startups that put those lines in are gone and the incumbents won the ability to stop leasing most of their infra out: https://web.archive.org/web/20160818001129/http://www.ictreg...

in Israel similar regulation created a bunch of ISP that were riding on infrastructure of the only incumbent telecom and cable companies. What resulted in lower prices for everybody without stalling upgrades of infrastructure. I got 2013 vdsl2 i think with 150/20 or something. Nowdays it's same with fiber deployment.

In same way mobile companies got regulated what created a big market for mvnos what dropped prices by factor or 3-4.

The problem not with unbundling but with how regulation was done and what loopholes it created (no idea what went down, but based on article many people spent a bunch of time in court fighting it). Though, my personal guess that incumbent telecom that were unbundled had also mobile businesses and decided to go for mobile broadband and just to let copper die. In Israel telecom/cable companies were forbidden from operating mobile network.

As anecdote, after I moved to states I had a chat on some network conference with somebody who claimed that he is very liberal and was complaining about quality/price of broadband/mobile in USA. I suggested to do same reforms as in Israel to what he replied that this is extremely crazy approach.

The author actually implies that banning local municipalities from having any regulatory capacity when it comes to broadband (and, it seems cable) is a bad idea.

They already have that capacity now; the proposed house bill would remove it.

It's instructive to consider why local politicians are so much more hostile to ISP monopolies than the centralized, federal politicians. I think it's a combination of being closer to your constituents, legislating for people you meet every day, and economics - there are many local politicians to brib-lobby, but relatively few federal ones, giving orders of magnitude better return on investment.

You make the claim that local politicians are "much more hostile" to ISP monopolies that federal ones. But what's the evidence for this?

I know of several members of the house & senate who are severely hostile to ISP monopolies, but power at the federal level lies mostly with the FCC, thus blunting the effectiveness of any particular elected representative.

At the local level, get the mayor pissed off at you (and a legal framework that allows it), and you (may) have a problem.

My evidence is that if it were the reverse, then ISPs would be lobbying for states rights instead.

Most government agencies aren't primarily staffed by politicians.

They are just primarily gutted by politicians

of course, some regulation is good and some is bad. more regulation is not always bad as libertarians would have you believe.

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