Broadband Obstacles

Strange Beer writes: "The Washington Post is running a story discussing many of the roadblocks and speedbumps that Telcoms and ISPs have encountered while trying to rollout broadband. Not surprisingly, most of the obstacles were built by them." The government approach is dysfunctional. Broadband prices are going up - 25% or more in the last six months. Simultaneously rollouts have stopped except in metropolitan areas, and the Bell monopolies are busy finishing off the last independent DSL providers. This is the "free market" in action (government-sponsored monopolies crushing independents), and therefore unquestionable in the US today, and it's also the reason why people aren't getting high-speed access. The only solution suggested in this article is to essentially browbeat citizens into overpaying for high-speed service that they don't want and probably isn't offered in their area, solely so that the MPAA can sell us movies on demand, if they ever decide to do so. What exactly is the thought process here?

Comments

Re:Waiting Period

[nanojath]

Yeah, damnit... When I want a gun I want it NOW!

Lassaiz-Faire Capitalism as bad as Communism

[FreeUser]

In a free market system, monopolies NATURALLY result from good business practices

And in a free market system technological innovation, development and low prices NATURALLY result from competition. You seem to be arguing that the one offering the best services will eventually triumph over the competition and be the only one left on the market. This is sometimes true, but it does not mean that monopolies are always the best thing for a free market system.

This is why completely unfettered, unregulated capitalism (lassaiz-faire capatilism a la the 19th century) is as contradictory and self-destructive as communism: the inherent dichotomy of the free market system requiring competition to work properly but yielding monopolies comes to the fore, short circuiting and ultimately destroying the very market that spawned it.

Capitalism only works over the long term in a situation where its most destructive positive feedbacks (of which the "natural" formation of monopolies from previously free markets is but one example) are mitigated through regulation.

There was a time, up through about the 1940, when western capitalism, particularly in the United States, was on a routine boom-bust cycle punctuated not by recessions, but by multi-year depressions. Note the plural. We grow concerned when growth slows and joblessness rises to the point where we have to endure up to 16 months of recession (usually lasting much shorter than 16 months). Our great-grandparents in the 19th century routinely suffered through multiple depressions, an effective "rebooting" of the economy reminiscent of a Windows NT server. This was a natural consiquence of lassaiz-faire capitalism's inherent internal contradictions and resulting instability.

As much as we like to bitch about government regulation (and it is true that bad regulation can be as bad or worse than no regulation, and that regulation is not needed in many circumstances, but certainly required in many others), ever since the government (and the Federal Reserve) have been proactively regulating the market through both legislation and control of the money supply, our boom-bust cycles have diminished to minor fluxuations, where the worst we have to fear is a few months of slowdown.

Unfortunately, with the government's reluctance to enforce anti-trust regulation (while zealously enforcing mandated monopoly rights such as copyrights and patents) this balance is shifting, with all the potential for economic havoc that implies. This sort of thing happens when you have legalized bribery and a voice in politics defined by and limited to the depths of your pockets, of which a living human's will never be so deep as even a relatively impoverished corporation's, and as such regulations are ever more weakened in the persuit of next quarter's profits the long term stability of our economy, and our society, becomes ever more fragil, and ever more ignored in the rush of cheaply-purchased politicians to quid-pro-quo that last campaign contribution into another law designed to prop up an outdated business model, to deregulate another area of business in the name of short term profits at the expense of long term stability or, in some cases, consumer protection (which arguably amounts to the same thing), or even to simply bail out an entire industry for having chosen, years earlier, to ignore its customers safety and pocket the change saved by not implimenting the kind of security their fudiciary responsibilities to both their stockholders and their customers required.