Comment by wespiser_2018 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wespiser_2018 | Hacker News Reader

The comparison feels off because it treats Switzerland and the United States as interchangeable test cases for “free market vs. not,” when they operate under completely different constraints.

Switzerland is a small, highly cohesive country with strong local governance, high trust, and tightly scoped systems. The U.S. is a continental-scale federation with massive regional variation, different institutional layers, and far more heterogeneous populations.

At that scale, you’re not comparing “policy choices,” you’re comparing system complexity. Many policies that work in Switzerland don’t fail in the U.S. because they’re bad, they fail because they don’t scale cleanly across 330M people and 50 semi-autonomous states.

So using Switzerland as a counterexample to critique U.S. market dynamics isn’t really isolating “free markets” as a variable, it’s bundling in size, governance structure, and social cohesion, then attributing the difference to ideology. I know Switzerland is great, I've been there, but it feels like a bit of an unfair dunk and very much "punching down".

While you are right about the differences between USA and Switzerland, I do not see any relationship between those and the problem discussed here.

There is absolutely no doubt that the system used in Switzerland is the right one and the system used in USA is the wrong one.

As TFA says, the optical fiber infrastructure that connects all individual customers is a case of natural monopoly and it must be built in a standard way and it must be shared by all who compete for communication services, exactly like the distribution of water or of electricity or like the public roads, which are the best analogy, and which must also be shared freely by anyone who provides transportation services.

Many states prohibit municipalities to do fiber. Regulatory capture and monopolies are your problem.

Sweden managed to build out fiber almost everywhere and are much more like some of your states.

How much bigger is the US than Switzerland? Its like 200x the size of it. Do you think that it's size and division of 50 distinct states might make that task a bit tougher?

Was talking about Sweden. But it's ok, I know Americans find geography challenging.

My bad, I originally said Sweden, but then edited to say Switzerland after seeing the title and doubted myself.

It's okay, you don't have to argue with the point being made or anything.

I made the point elsewhere. Sweden is larger than California yet has only 10m population. Fiber is not just common in urban areas, you have it in small villages and even cabins in the woods.

Basically no state gets close, urban or otherwise. People here keep talking about size, rural, many states, whatever. The problem is really regulatory capture and monopolies, many states ban local municipalities from putting fiber down.

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