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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

Hell no.

We will go back to a day where whatever speed you get is all your ever going to see. I know people hate Comcast/etc but where I lived all I had was what the phone company, THE COMMON CARRIER, wanted to offer us until the cable companies came in.

We got a wonderful choice of dial up, ISDN, and T1. Eventually they gave us DSL but the roll out was so slow and the initial installs so buggy it was mind boggling. Then one day I get a flier in the mail, try cable! Five times the speed and what do you know, the phone company suddenly cut their prices and offered deals to get people back.

Common carrier means no competition at all. As in, your area may get an upgrade AFTER all the important people get theirs first, namely those with political connections or in tony neighborhoods. The rest of us, well its like waiting for the roads to be plowed.

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I live in San Francisco and only have one choice (AT&T Uverse). I am in a new building with fiber connections, but I'm stuck paying $150+ a month for 15MB internet and middle of the road TV. My Netflix is heavily throttled. My service hits 1000+ ms pings at least a few times an hour for minutes at a time. I often get download speeds far less than the rate I pay. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I even miss Comcast.

I honestly don't see how it could get worse with internet regulated as a utility. Imagine if my gas and electricity decided to not show up for a day.

This is the opposite of the common carrier model. In the common carrier model, there are many companies that you can choose from as a consumer from the get go, because the network is unbundled from a single company.

You're missing the point: the last mile network is shared across all of those companies. Ergo, the company that actually owns the last mile network has no competition on that last mile network and no incentive to upgrade that network.

Ideally that last mile network would be point-to-point FTTP though, eliminating this entire issue.

Firstly, the last mile company still has QoS agreements with the companies that buy from it, and they can plausibly choose to simply go elsewhere if the last mile company does not give them good enough QoS terms; whether that means building their own network, or simply pulling out of that area. Basically, a small group of companies can more plausibly apply joint pressure to a single company than many millions of people can, purely because of coordination costs.

Secondly, part of the common carrier model is that if the government is not convinced that the common carrier is acting in the public's best interest - for example, if they are delaying needed upgrades - then the government can simply confiscate the common carrier's assets, and sell them to a company that will actually meet its QoS and upgrade obligations, or spin the whole thing off as a SoE.

Sure they do: consumers will pick the best last-mile providers, because in this model, consumers actually have the power to choose.

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