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Broadband CEOs Admit Usage Caps Are Nothing More Than A Toll On Uncompetitive Markets (techdirt.com)
Though giant ISPs such as AT&T and Comcast continue to impose caps on users with several of their data plans, a crop of local ISPs is no longer hesitating from admitting that there is no justification for these caps as the cost to provide broadband services has only dropped in the past years. From a TechDirt article (condensed): "The cost of increasing [broadband] capacity has declined much faster than the increase in data traffic," says Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic, an independent ISP based in Santa Rosa, Calif. [...] Frontier Communications CEO Dan McCarthy adds, "There may be a time when usage-based pricing is the right solution for the market, but I really don't see that as a path the market is taking at this point in time." Suddenlink CEO Jerry Kent said, "I think one of the things people don't realize [relates to] the question of capital intensity and having to keep spending to keep up with capacity. Those days are basically over, and you are seeing significant free cash flow generated from the cable operators as our capital expenditures continue to come down."
Except crony capitalism is rampant, and so it is not a truly free market.
Once Time Warner introduced a data cap on my broadband service, I instituted several efficiency improvements on my network. Im certain most ISP's will understand, after all, many of these are just content throttling to improve my user experience.
1. Null routing known advertisers: Its a fact of life, that many advertisers cause a strain on my network by utilising far more bandwidth than they should. If advertisers wish to continue, they can purchase additional bandwidth from me or enroll in my advertiser affiliate program for a nominal monthly fee.
2. Ad blocking software: ublock, and noscript are used to help curtail loading flash, tracking, or advertisements that some websites feature. these services also prevent downloading injected advertisements by my network provider (see affiliate program for more information.) 3. torrents: Netflix and hulu use an inefficient protocol in many cases compared to torrents and magnet links. I can watch the same video or listen to the same song at my leisure, whenever I feel like it, without reaching the cap or limit imposed by my provider.
Good people go to bed earlier.
When you're lying to people, make sure to give a wink and a nod.
Cable expenditures are going nowhere but up! *wink* The profit generation from such actions only hurts our bottom line *nod*. The only way we can remain competitive is to raise bandwidth caps to protect the precious little capacity our networks have! *wink* *nod* *wink* *nod* *wink* *nod*
Bye!
Your economics term of the day is rent seeking.
Government regulators used to claim that there were things called "natural monopolies" to justify their stake to power, saying that competition was impossible, for things like telephone wires.
Now that 80% of the population has switched away from PSTN (many to cable providers) the regulators are looking for another hook to hang their hat on. Watch your back - the FCC is starting to dig in on regulating everything-Internet. Not because there's a need, but because they can't possibly admit that their job is obsolete.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
For AT&T and Comcast, it's just business. At the moment, they have leverage in most areas. Most people don't have a comparable alternative to choose so they pick AT&T or Comcast. Comcast offers the best speeds. That's their value proposition over AT&T. When Verizon FIOS and/or Google Fiber show up to offer alternatives with not only faster speeds but no data caps, Comcast and AT&T will have to start actually competing in the free market or be put out to pasture.
We'll make great pets
plus, a free market requires that none of the players be big enough to unilaterally move the price, which is the exact opposite of the usual monopoly situation.
Except crony capitalism is rampant, and so it is not a truly free market.
Never was. The so-called free-market is a myth. Always was. Even the guy who coined the phrase made it plain that without regulatory influence, such a thing would never be possible.
So we have these tiny, no-name providers dangled off Verizon, Comcast, and Level 3 talking about the business internals of running Verizon, Comcast, and Level 3?
Maybe next MVNOs who use Verizon and T-Mobile's networks instead of building their own capacity can tell us how very little it costs to maintain national cell networks and admit that Verizon and T-Mobile are just overcharging.
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Amusing that today's headline is liars accusing other liars of being liars.
These small cable operators don't build the back-end infrastructure of the Internet. They're last-mile carriers. They're like MVNOs who only piggy back on providers, and they're talking about what it's like to build and maintain the Internet backbone as if they actually do that.
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Surely the Invisible Hand(TM) of the Free Market(C) in the only Free(tm) country in the world will solve this problem?
Libertarians don't keep their eyes open during events like this. They screw them shut and go "Oh it's still partially regulated and that's actually the problem". At face value I don't actually hate their philosophy, it's just the blanket denial of the way human beings actually operate. Which is weird because their argument against communism IS that it falls apart because human beings operate they way they do.
Sorry about my semi-off-topic rant, I'm just amazed at the things people say despite being shown stories like this.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Amusing that today's headline is liars accusing other liars of being liars.
These small cable operators don't build the back-end infrastructure of the Internet. They're last-mile carriers. They're like MVNOs who only piggy back on providers, and they're talking about what it's like to build and maintain the Internet backbone as if they actually do that.
The units of the ISPs imposing the data caps are not back-end infrastructure providers either; they internally lease the infrastructure from the other sections of the companies that do the back-end provisioning, often resulting in routes to competitors and other vendors.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
... spent on all the equipment and staff directed to data measurement and billing that tracks usage and imposes the caps, that recoups the costs spent on... wait.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Thanks for stating what all your customers have known for years.
The US government has shoveled billions of dollars to AT&T, Time Warner, and Comcast for services which were never delivered and the government did nothing. The same government's courts also banned people from coming together and building municipal broadband services to compete with them. Yes, what a huge failure of the free market.
Sorry, no. The last mile is the "expensive" part. Unless you think the ISPs that the small ISPs use for uplink are charitable organizations, you'll need to acknowledge that they pay the same uplink costs PLUS a profit to that provider. The large ISPs get it even cheaper by being their own provider.
The unit cost by transfer or rate have dropped steadily over time. The bigger you are, the cheaper it gets. As for the hardware, in 1995 Gig ether switches (dumb) cost about $1000/port. Now it's $5/port.
Wow, I take it you have no idea of how things work.
The expensive part of the internet connection is the last mile. Each endpoint has a cost to it and that's why server co-locations often have faster connections for less than you can get at home with larger data transfer allowances. I don't get how you compare that to an MVNO who rents the last mile from someone else.
They pay their upstream provider for their share of the cost of the internet backbone and here is a hint from someone who actually works from the industry: You pay for your usage on the backbone unless you are large enough for peering. The price is also not linear. Ex an unmetered gigabit connection is less than the cost of two 100mbps. Going the other way a 10 gigabit connection here (Montreal Canada) is only four to five times the cost of a gigabit connection despite being 10 times faster.
If they are paying for their uplink, and they have upgraded their internal connections to the point where they aren't saturated we should pretty well take them seriously when they say they don't need to charge based on usage.
If they are paying their uplink providers for enough bandwidth and all of their internal interconnections aren't saturated and after all that they say that
You mean Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Sprint, etc.?
Comcast, who built the Cable network? Comcast who got into a ridiculous legal battle with Level-3 because Level-3 wanted to peer with Comcast to route traffic to parts of the Interent which required Level-3 to cross Comcast's backbone, but Comcast tried (successfully) to make Level-3 pay for peering? Comcast, who supplies Comcast for Business, placing Internet Web sites for independent businesses *directly* on Comcast's network, which is nation-wide, run on Comcast's own equipment, across Comcast's own fiber, and addressed with public IPs, meaning many Web sites simply aren't reachable without going directly through Comcast?
Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint, who built the phone network? You know, the networks which, if they go down, break your ability to reach random Web sites even though you're on some other network, simply because their network is between your ISP and the Web host's ISP?
These are the people Amazon, Netflix, Pandora, Google, Facebook, and Akamai directly establish peering with. These are the people EC2 and Microsoft Azure hook up to so their data centers (you know, S3 and Microsoft Azure Cloud) don't go down off the entire Internet just because Comcast or Verizon or AT&T unplugged the wrong router today.
The people yammering about how much it costs to supply bandwidth are last-mile providers who lease their data lines to the Internet from Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Level 3, XO, CenturyLink, Cox, or others.
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You only have "freedom" where there are "police" to control those trying to "restrict" your freedom or "abuse" you.
It is not the invisible hand of the free market that is ensuring your food has accurate use-by-dates, correct ingredients listed and accurate nutritional information.
Do you think the free market would have stopped using lead in paints and asbestos in construction all by itself?
Do you think the free market would abolish insider trading all by itself or do we need a policeman called the SEC with teeth to enforce the "rules"
I'm not so purely Libertarian that I can't appreciate the necessary regulations on certain things. My issue is with corporations and government being buddy-buddy, back-room deals and laws being drawn up to benefit only certain corporations, limiting the freedom of others to get into the market and provide whatever service they'd like at whatever price the market would allow. The ISP industry (and by extension the phone industry) is just a perfect example of how monopolies are created with fucking crony shit going on in Washington over the past several decades.
The US government has shoveled billions of dollars to AT&T, Time Warner, and Comcast for services which were never delivered and the government did nothing. The same government's courts also banned people from coming together and building municipal broadband services to compete with them. Yes, what a huge failure of the free market.
Simple to make that CLEAR distinction, you'd think. Not sure why so many people miss this -- most likely regurgitating some political point heard from someone with a vested interest in making Libertarianism look bad.
You're using the argument: "Y must be more expensive than X because Y includes X + P".
What if P is much less than X, and provider of Y claims X is *exactly* the same as P, and thus X is wildly overpriced?
What if P is running the last mile, and X is the sum total of all operations a Tier-1 carries out to maintain and expand their network?
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Except crony capitalism is rampant, and so it is not a truly free market.
A truly free market will quickly devolve into corruption. Its the same process that will convert any anarchy into a feudal system. Without systemic controls, those that can amass power and wealth, will do so, then use that power and wealth to prevent others from doing the same. The free market is a myth, it can't exist for long, as it will fundamentally destroy itself.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
The expensive part of the internet connection is the last mile. Each endpoint has a cost to it
So you're saying putting 300,000 computers on the Internet in Comcast's network requires linking exactly 300,000 endpoints? There's no additional cost per endpoint? No back-end costs, no cross-state lines connecting California to Virginia, nothing but a little line run from your house to Comcast's little shack in your cozy little neighborhood?
You're saying the cost of running a ginormous, distributed network with multiple routes to reach from any point to any other point, spanned across an entire continent, is exactly the same (or less!) per customer endpoint as the cost of plugging one customer endpoint *into* that network?
You're saying this is the expensive part and this is the cheap part?
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Free market doesn't allow for state sponsored monopolies/duopolies.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The first impulse of every commercial venture is to monopolize the market. Competition is for other markets, not mine.
Your point is well taken. The problem is, with something like broadband, just like with roads, it is very reasonable to conclude that it would be best to have a limited number of operators, maybe even just one. The government then has a challenge to understand the "industry," without relying on the industry itself.
I conclude, based largely on a resource allocation viewpoint, that having a single provider is most efficient, if we can minimize the profiteering. An important tool in that fight is transparency. And government can be effective at enforcing that kind of transparency on others, if not always itself.
Crony capitalism is the only kind that CAN exist
This is how class warfare is waged
BY the few, AGAINST the many
It has always been this way, since the days of Pharoah.
Having worked for multiple small ISPs that served rural areas (Wireless Broadband, Dialup, and resold carrier DSL), you are full of shit sir. Broadband Uplinks (DS3, etc) from rural towns cost at most double what they do in a big city. But the upstream bandwidth to service our customers was under 10% of our infrastructure expenditures. I'm sure larger services have better economies of scale than a small ISP with customer counts under 10k.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
It isn't a myth, people just didn't read their Adam Smith and they have no idea what it means. When does the "free market" arise? Does it arise when you take away all the rules? No, that is the Feudal system that Capitalism was designed to fix! Capitalism means that the government is looking over everybody's shoulders, and making sure that the playing field remains level, and constantly making adjustments to stop the tricks that the entrenched businesses will be trying. Then, with the neutral third party regulating the market to ensure fairness, things are predictable and that predictability allows capital to rule; people can decide based on math if they should invest or not. The whole point of Capitalism is protecting the new entrants into a market from the established companies, who will always be in a position to use collusion and other tricks to keep out new companies.
Currently, the established companies have tricked everybody, even small businesses wanting to compete with them, even the workers, into believing that "Capitalism" means just letting the entrenched interests set the rules. No, that was the problem that Capitalism can solve...
That they trick small business is sad, but predictable when none of the major (or minor!) political parties remember what Capitalism means. Many Democrats support true Capitalism, but they don't know what the word means and they think they're supporting a mixed system, and it leaves them unprepared to educate people. Most people who support what Adam Smith advocated believe themselves to be anti-Capitalism, at least partially! It is insane.
Someone on here has a sig that says (paraphrasing) "If we built buildings the way we wrote software, the first woodpecker would destroy civilization."
Likewise:
If an ideal libertarian society were ever made to exist, the first crooked businessman would be its tyrant conqueror.
It's also funny how often the "crony capitalism" defense comes up...sounds a lot like the "true communism has never been tried" argument.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Comcast is an important tier 2 network, and have built their own "back-end infrastructure", perhaps not to the same scale as AT&T or Level 3, but it's there.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It isn't a myth, people just didn't read their Adam Smith and they have no idea what it means. When does the "free market" arise? Does it arise when you take away all the rules? No, that is the Feudal system that Capitalism was designed to fix! Capitalism means that the government is looking over everybody's shoulders, and making sure that the playing field remains level, and constantly making adjustments to stop the tricks that the entrenched businesses will be trying. Then, with the neutral third party regulating the market to ensure fairness, things are predictable and that predictability allows capital to rule; people can decide based on math if they should invest or not. The whole point of Capitalism is protecting the new entrants into a market from the established companies, who will always be in a position to use collusion and other tricks to keep out new companies.
Which is why I've been saying that what we want is a "fair market" instead of a "free market".
LOL now I know you are trolling. You provided that second link with no context whatsoever as to what it is.
You were commenting on the complexity of implementing networks; I showed a distributed network.
the cost of the uplink was the minority
The uplink to what?
The answer: the uplink to the big, complex, EXPENSIVE, distributed back-end network run by the major Tier-1 providers.
You're trying to claim this is just an uplink, a cable you plug into somewhere. What it is is thousands of miles of fiber run between regions, into regional hubs which distribute out to other regional hubs, which talk to each other so a break in connection between Region 1 Hub 13 and Region 1 Central can route to Region 1 Central via Region 1 Hub 7 (and so Region 1 Central has 6 paths to Region 2, or Region 3, or so forth). The last mile is the last mile of fiber run to a little cable on a pole trailing all the way to a little box in a closet at a hub data center, which is part of a sizable data center, which has thousands of miles of fiber uplinking it to other, bigger, more-complex data centers.
The problem is your experience is sitting on the last mile. You're looking down at the run to the end user and saying, "Damn, that's a lot more than the three-foot run to the uplink behind me. It's way expensive. 99% of our cost goes to that last mile." Then you're turning around, looking at the uplink, and going, "That's so cheap. Upstream providers have so little to do." You aren't looking at the upstream provider's network, which is a little three-foot cable running down to you and, on the other end, a massive, distributed, highly-complex network of large data centers spanning the entire fucking country.
How much do you think it costs to expand that back-end with new fiber, new equipment, and new capacity when demand goes up?
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Libertarians don't keep their eyes open during events like this. They screw them shut and go "Oh it's still partially regulated and that's actually the problem".
I'm not sure which libertarians you've been talking to, but I'd like to think that they understand that it's not a matter of "less regulation" vs "more regulation" so much as it's a matter of what specifically is being regulated. "increasing regulation" doesn't do anyone else any good if your lobbyist writes the legislation such that it regulates your competitors out of business while only making things easier for you. By the same token, "decreasing regulation" doesn't help things at all if there's a company out there big enough and unscrupulous enough to engage in sketchy tactics to drive the competition out of business.
Ideally you want regulation that protects customers and keeps an even playing field between businesses while at the same time not meddling so much as to interfere with the companies ability to innovate and/or get things done.
Except crony capitalism is rampant, and so it is not a truly free market.
that's irrelevant because the concept of a "free market" requires perfect information which is impossible.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You keep trying to imagine what I am thinking and create arguments based on what you think I am thinking but you are getting it horribly wrong.
In both cases the equipment is the cheaper side of the equation. Most of the expense is in the actual running of the cables, the cost of paying for wherever municipal fees/rental for the space the cables take in the ground, and repairing faults as they happen. The difference is that we can (with some equipment on the back end) plug multiple users into the same uplink to the backbone and aggregate the cost.
Again, our uplink provider is not selling us anything below cost and I never saw any argument in the original article about forcing the backbones to lower cost, only that they couldn't justify charging usage based pricing to their own customers.
Wouldn't be Slashdot without the obligatory and completely-unrelated-to-anything-in-the-thread post about APK!
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Come join our QUANTUM Tunnel Network. We have the best Quantum Tunneling algorithms and no limits. You can use all the Q-Bits you like. We have hubs in all Major cities. If you want a direct line to your home all you need to do is get one of our Q-Boxes (Cat's not included). This will give you the superposition you need today. Warning, some Q-bits might go faster than light under certain conditions, not responsible for lost bits. All this for $14.99 a month, inquire about our lifetime plans also.
Would you please define your terms? This reads like the Chewbacca defense.
Under capitalism, the rich become politically powerful. This is bad.
Under socialism, the politically powerful become rich. This is worse.
Under feudalism, the militarily powerful become both politically powerful and rich. This is about as bad as it gets.
Sure would be nice if we had a new idea that was better than capitalism, but we know that idea doesn't involve a powerful central authority because that's the thing that is inevitably corrupted.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Indeed. The usual free-market fanatics routinely keep quite about the little problem that a corporate stranglehold can be even worse for market freedom than government control.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The last mile is very expensive. It costs a ton to maintain that infrastructure.. Yeah, so I can add a downstream DOCSIS QAM to an existing chassis for $50.. Say 8*50 = $400, it is just the beginning. Cable modem termination systems? Go buy and maintain a bunch of uBR10012s and ASR routers and tell me how cheap it is. The taps, the wiring, the amplifiers, the trouble calls cause the plant is old. Do I need additional chassis to handle, will the lasers even do it, if I split the node how far will I need to trench new fiber? Do I even have spare fiber back to my headend? Will it even fit in my existing building, do I need more AC? Have I maxxed out my power panel?
The broadband CEOs quoted have no clue.. They clearly don't work for tier-1 MSOs.. Multiply by 10s of thousands and it starts getting real -- very fast. Anyone can run 50 service groups out of one small town. (E.g. Sonic?) Frontier hardly faces the same constraints.. They have distributed DSLAMs and offer crap speed through them.
In the real world, broadband demand is quickly outstripping cable plant capacity. Just adding 8 or 16 QAMs would be too easy. (Assuming you have it and a lot of plants don't.) This means - more money. Plant upgrades to 1.2 Ghz, CCAP, all active/passive component upgrades, and it still only buys you a few years the way things are going.
If it were up to me, municipalities would run fiber to each house and then connect us to the provider of our choosing. It's a nice dream.
I *DID* say the last mile is the expensive part. However, as I said before, the smaller broadband providers have the same costs PLUS profit for their providers. I'm quite certain they're not getting all of that for free. Things get cheaper overall at scale, not more expensive.
They're not just talking out of their asses, their companies actually don't have caps and they actually are profitable.
Data caps are all about uploaders and have nothing what so ever to do with downloaders. The PR or course is always about people downloading but the reality is about killing off uploaders. The idea is ISPs want to become middle persons, publishers of content and want to charge a percentage for that. Hence caps target uploaders, raising up their costs, in order to cut them out of the market, unless they sign up with the ISP to be their publisher. For the end user, typical the ISP does not metre data coming from the ISP but does for all competitors to the ISP content publishing model.
Every greedy fucker on the planet wants to be a publisher, produce nothing but bullshit marketing whilst seizing permanent ownership and control of all creative content in order to basically print money via monopolistic practices. This in spite of the fact that the internet has pretty much made publishers redundant, which is why they strive so hard via corruption of government to maintain control of information channels.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I'm very curious what the caps cost given the need for metering, billing and support costs.
And are they set eternally at a couple hundred GB or something?
Could it be that they cost more than they save? Couldn't be, right.
The ironic thing is that an unregulated "free market" capitalism's end game is EXACTLY the same as the Soviet-style communism idiots fear when they hear the word "socialism;" all the money and power gets distilled into the hands of a small group of self-appointed elitists and everyone else is a serf.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Broadband is not like roads. It is reasonable to have 2 or 3 providers, perhaps with joint custody of the last mile. But here in California my broadband provider owns everything and can abuse us to their heart's content - I have no options and no purchasing power to make choices. it is anti consumer and anti competitive. That is why competition "police" who stand up for the citizen can be an excellent watchdog to ensure the "corps" are serving the people and not fleecing/milking them.
No economic law or theorem presumes the existence of perfect information. Supply and demand and everything works all the same, regardless of the type, informed-ness, and rationality of the actor.
In fact, it's a mathematical theorem that there were perfect information, prices could not exist (and therefore, there cannot be such a thing as perfect information).
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Citation needed? You're comparing two different kinds of power.
To achieve socialism's alleged ends, politicians say they need "power" (i.e. violence), but socialism is impossible in the first place because it lacks a price mechanism to inform people what is productive and what is wasteful.
But in capitalism, no actor threatens violence. The kind of "power" you talk about here is merely owning money, a completely voluntary action.
Even my the financial metric, the government is still way more powerful: Last year, the government accounted for 18% GDP. Walmart, by contrast, was a mere 2.6%.
So once we've cut the size of the government by an order of magnitude, then I'll take this idea seriously.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
It isn't a myth, people just didn't read their Adam Smith and they have no idea what it means.
You're absolutely right. Just like every Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, Fascist, Techocrat (the political party), Islamic State warrior, Spanish Inquisitor, etc. is right. If everybody would read the book and follow the rules then the outcome would be perfect. The problem is the people who are too stupid or foolish to obey the rules who screw if up for everyone. If we could only remove them and their influence then the ends would justify the means...
Why is Snark Required?
The ISP shill is back.
And just as ignorant as ever
But in capitalism, no actor threatens violence.
You should probably acquaint yourself with the history of the banana republics and other interesting bits of history where they did exactly that, or else got the government (ours and the local ones) to exert the violence for them.
There is no ignorance like the ignorance of a libertarian with an internet connection.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Libertarianism needs no help making itself look bad.
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Perry seized the moment, basically insisting that blind 4-year-olds should be legally permitted to drive without any sort of government imprimatur
as he insisted that 5-year-old children should have the legal right to inject heroin without adult supervision.
The first of these put his cellphone on the lectern, played a song into the microphone, and stripped down to his underwear, shaking rolls of fat in some sort of demented burlesque.
When I pulled this guy aside and asked why he favored McAfee, he began, “My main concern is interstate commerce legislation,” launching a runon sentence that somehow ended, after several minutes and some really surprising detours, with an avowal that “humans will be displaced by A.I. the same way we displaced the whales and the rhinoceroses, and so it’s important to remember that bigotry is better than slavery.”
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
> Citation needed? You're comparing two different kinds of power.
Hmm, how about most of history? You funnel all the money and power into the hands of a select few, the corporate entities continue to merge for growth and to stifle competition, offshore more and more jobs, then eventually you end up with an unemployed society who cannot afford to do anything they choose to do, banks confiscate land and other properties, and the things those serfes will be able to afford, they are offered limited choice. How is that unlike soviet communism in practice? It's largely identical.
> To achieve socialism's alleged ends, politicians say they need "power" (i.e. violence), but socialism is impossible in the first place because it lacks a price mechanism to inform people what is productive and what is wasteful.
Tell it to the rest of the first world, who figured out how to pay for health care safety nets and more and more are implementing a basic income (that allows one to actually live not just engage in a miserable existence) without breaking the bank.
> But in capitalism, no actor threatens violence. The kind of "power" you talk about here is merely owning money, a completely voluntary action.
They use bribes. The threats of violence will come once the balance of power is tipped enough in their favor.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You mean Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Sprint, etc.?
Comcast, who built the Cable network? Comcast who got into a ridiculous legal battle with Level-3 because Level-3 wanted to peer with Comcast to route traffic to parts of the Interent which required Level-3 to cross Comcast's backbone, but Comcast tried (successfully) to make Level-3 pay for peering? Comcast, who supplies Comcast for Business, placing Internet Web sites for independent businesses *directly* on Comcast's network, which is nation-wide, run on Comcast's own equipment, across Comcast's own fiber, and addressed with public IPs, meaning many Web sites simply aren't reachable without going directly through Comcast?
You do realize that there are separate divisions/units/etc within Comcast, AT&T, Sprint, etc that deal with last-mile versus backbone. Yes, they may ultimately be under the same overall corporate entity, but they are internally segregated. Even internally businesses cross-charge their units; so the last-mile unit will purchase back-bone capacity from the backbone unit - even if it's just moving numbers around on paper.
The internal separation allows the company to easily migrate technologies (e.g dial-up -> Cable -> DSL) or service different kinds of customers differently, f.e business vs residential - each of which are serviced even for last-mile by different units with services that overlap and are substantially different, i.e businesses don't get data caps on their services.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
It isn't a myth, people just didn't read their Adam Smith and they have no idea what it means.
You're absolutely right. Just like every Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, Fascist, Techocrat (the political party), Islamic State warrior, Spanish Inquisitor, etc. is right. If everybody would read the book and follow the rules then the outcome would be perfect. The problem is the people who are too stupid or foolish to obey the rules who screw if up for everyone. If we could only remove them and their influence then the ends would justify the means...
First of all, kudos to GP, who is one of the very few here on /. who understand what Smith envisioned. All those who've been drinking the "government is bad" koolaid since the Reagan years are in the "too stupid or foolish to obey the rules" group. Yes, all of them.
We're not using any notion of fairness here. We're saying that a market where one individual player can control the prices isn't free. In a free market, if some vendor raises prices too much, that vendor will be undercut, if necessary by new entrants into the market, and hence no individual actor can control prices in a free market.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Broadband is similar to roads in that it requires expensive infrastructure that can't be deployed indefinitely. The last mile is a natural monopoly.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Could you point me to the theorem? It seems very unlikely to me.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Libertarians don't keep their eyes open during events like this. They screw them shut and go "Oh it's still partially regulated and that's actually the problem"
This actually shows you don't know Libertarianism too well. If you watch Milton Friedman's lectures which are on youtube you'll notice he makes the distinction between "Limited Government Libertarians" and "Anarchist Libertarians". I'm pretty sure you're referring to the latter and I'm not a big fan of them either. Milton Friedman himself proclaimed himself a "Limited Government Libertarian". Even in the Ford Pinto controversy back in 1972, when Friedman was asked about whether Ford had any obligation to put the additional parts in the car to make it more safe, he said no. What he did say though was that Ford was morally obligated to make it clear to consumers how much more at risk they were of death because failure to do so is fraud. Fraud of course being determined by federal laws aka the government. If a person wants to make a choice to drive a car that is more likely to result in their death to save a few bucks, that's their choice. If the majority of the population isn't interested, there won't be demand for the car and they'll stop making it. Friedman also points out that many people smoke even though it's clear they are more at risk of death. He might have told such a person they were foolish but he would never have advocated a law banning smoking aka prohibition.
We'll make great pets
When Level 3 had the two links get cut on the East coast, all kinds of bad happened. With so many alternate routes from other ISPs like AT&T, Charter, Comcast, and others, why such the issue? Turns out those two links carried so much traffic, all of the other ISPs combined couldn't handle the overflow. Level 3 handles A LOT of bandwidth.
The last mile is very expensive
According to some smaller ISPs, last-mile infrastructure consumes about 1%-2% of their revenue. 8 years ago, it was 20%, but the cost of infrastructure keeps dropping. Is last mile expensive? Yes, but only 1% expensive.
You obviously haven't read the book, based on the form of your dismissal. "Oh, gosh, somebody read a book, I better cite Marx to discredit the book."
The funny thing about it is that Marx cites Adam Smith's description of the problem of collusion in business, but doesn't even address Smith's solution to the problem. He just handwaves that because the problem exists, private enterprise is horrible.
I didn't say anything about "read the book and follow the rules." You have to read the book, understand the principles, understand the context, and apply the system of problem-solving to the context of the problem you're trying to solve, within the political constraints of the day. It turns out not every book is a bullshit set of absolutes; some actually discuss problems with the goal of increasing understanding of them. You will not find absolutes and rules in Wealth of Nations; you'll find analysis of a bunch of specific problems within their historical context, and analysis of the solutions that were competing at the time.
For example on the building of roads, idiots who didn't read the book often like to point out that Smith was in favor of toll roads; but what he analyzed and compared was two ways of maintaining roads: giving the landowner a lump sum of cash to maintain the road traversing his land in exchange for public right of passage, or allowing him to charge tolls. Between these two, he goes through all the different ways that granting a lump sum payment will encourage low-quality roads and interfere with commerce because the roads will be closed for repair frequently, and will only ever get the least amount of repair that is allowed under the system. (with lots of excuses by the responsible party) Compare that to a toll road, and you can see that the toll road will be better maintained, and so commerce will be encouraged. Business people will know the toll, and expect the road to be open because the owner won't receive the toll if you have to take a different route. Commerce gains predictability from the toll road. Now, if you apply that same analysis to the modern American system of government traffic engineers deciding what needs to be fixed, and hiring private construction companies to do the actual work, it isn't hard to see that it results in greater access, and a high quality of roads, presuming there is sufficient tax revenue available. And if there isn't enough tax revenue, (such as in countries with weak government) then toll roads again are expected to be better.
He goes through it industry by industry, and you can redo the analysis using modern contexts.
He also points out that universities aren't subject to price competition, and so the economy benefits by public involvement. Most industries of his day are analyzed in this way.
If they threatened capitalism, then that's not violence. The two are mutually exclusive.
Whoops, I mean, strike that, reverse it.
Also, "Back?"
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Hmm, how about most of history? You funnel all the money and power into the hands of a select few, the corporate entities continue to merge for growth and to stifle competition...
Most of history really doesn't have any basis for comparison. Corporations have existed, but we haven't had the means for them to operate globally until about two centuries ago.
So there's only been a small handful of anything we could call a monopoly or a cartel. The lightbulb cartel is the only legitimate example of a domestic cartel I can think of - it lasted fifteen years and collapsed all by itself. Standard Oil is commonly cited as a monopoly that was "broken up", it was done so on the myth that low prices were bad for customers (same myth that caused business owners to be thrown in jail for selling products too cheaply during the Great Depression).
We have endless examples of states doing horrible things to their citizens. Economic policy in the Soviet Union directly caused 5.5 MILLION deaths.
How many deaths have corporations caused by being "too powerful"?
Wonder what the public key field is for?
There's a few different variants of this, and it's been a while since I've reviewed it. One variant deals with how prices integrate future uncertainty in them, and if the future was exactly certain you end up with a division by zero problem. But we're not presuming we can predict the future here.
The more relevant variant is simpler: If you knew the consumer's marginal value of an item they desire, you would never charge anything less than the price representing that value. Since we have perfect information, we don't have the problem of sunk costs, and can avoid selling things at a loss since we wouldn't have produced those to begin with. There's nothing new about price discrimination (it's why children and families pay less at movie theaters), but in this case we enter a scenario called perfect price discrimination, and the result is there is no market demand curve (or, one person becomes the market for supply-and-demand purposes), and therefore there's no market-clearing price.
Wonder what the public key field is for?