they are trying to compute knowledge-worthy data from a small subset of the web
Not even that. Their database of facts is manually constructed, like the Yahoo index of old. The "natural language processing" is only for queries. This, to me, is the major weakness of the idea.
You can try to say that Wolfram Alpha is a different kind of product than Internet search, but it will have to compete with Google anyway. Until Alpha can crawl the web on its own and automatically construct databases concerning hard-to-quantify things like celebrities, sports, health, news, products, etc., it won't be useful for the vast majority of Internet queries, and especially the kind that make advertising money. It won't be clear to your average search engine user why a certain query would or wouldn't work. Instead of facing that uncertainty users will simply continue to use Google, which has a "good enough" answer for nearly everything.
Hopefully Alpha can find a niche answering homework questions, because I'd love to see the idea evolve further.
Bandwidth scarcity is not an excuse for this kind of behavior. Blocking individual applications and instituting usage caps in a non-negotiable way is nothing more than protectionism from companies with outdated business models. If bandwidth scarcity is the problem, the only real solution is charging per byte transferred. That way people who want to use more can do so by simply paying more (funding infrastructure improvements), while people who want to save money can reduce usage. Simple!
The ISPs have no interest in actually solving the scarcity problem. The goal of the block-and-cap strategy is to dictate how consumers can use the Internet. The endgame of this strategy is for ISPs to become the gatekeepers of all electronic communications, collecting a toll not only from consumers but from the content providers who want to reach them (not unlike the "walled garden" AOL tried to build back in the day).
Pieterh did not argue that the environment is fine. His argument was directed solely at subsidies and did not concern the environment at all. You are reading something into his post that just isn't there, and as a result your post was a massive overreaction.
Such a complex scheme is too hard to enforce. Complexity in the law is just as bad as complexity in a software system. Complex laws breed corruption and waste. People could easily disagree on how to calculate carbon footprints by orders of magnitude. Any direct carbon tax would have plenty of wiggle room for tax lawyers to exploit.
Instead, it's much simpler to tax the sources of carbon; in fact they're already taxed and we could just tax them more. Tax coal, oil, and natural gas, and that's almost all you need right there. Tax the carbon at its source and there aren't any loopholes.
it doesn't help the matter to equate half-hearted, ill-conceived attempts to protect the environment with "sleaze" and "giveaways".
I disagree completely. If a plan is intended to protect the environment, we shouldn't care that it's ill-conceived and perhaps even counter-productive? We absolutely should. We should always call out bad plans, no matter how noble their intentions.
Oh come on. Are you really seriously arguing that gasoline usage is not connected to price at all over the long term? You think that if gas had stayed at $0.22/gal we wouldn't be using more now? You think that if gas went to $20/gal we wouldn't use less 10 years from now? You have to be seriously deluded to believe that.
To see why gasoline usage hasn't gone down, take a look at this chart and learn something about inflation. The price of gas hasn't actually gone up.
Whoa there. If you want to prevent atmospheric pollution caused by burning gasoline, a battery subsidy is not the correct way to do it. Instead, a tax on gasoline (or other CO2 sources) is the way to go. To the extent that batteries reduce gasoline use, they will benefit from a gasoline tax. But unlike a battery subsidy, a gasoline tax benefits every battery company, not just the ones successful in obtaining government grants. Furthermore it's not limited to benefiting battery companies either; it benefits any alternative energy source that reduces gasoline use, leaving the market free to decide the best option. Having the government pick winners and losers in alternative energy might sound nice in the short term but it is a recipe for stagnation, lobbying, and corruption in the long term.
That's only true if you require that shareholders and executives continue to make the same amount of money as before the workers' wages were doubled.
But why wouldn't they? A minimum wage law doesn't directly affect them. The only way it would cause their compensation to go down is by reducing the production of the companies they manage and own, which is terrible for the economy, which ends up hurting everyone, and the poor most of all. If you want to reduce waste, the way to do it is with competition, not legislation.
Different phones have different requirements for things like voltages, amperages, connector size, and other features of a charging interface. Forcing a standard would reduce the number of power bricks a consumer would need, but it would constrain phone designers as well. Phones with unusual requirements would be basically outlawed. Imagine a great new battery technology requiring high voltage to charge; it wouldn't work with the government standard low-voltage connector. Or imagine a phone with wireless charging; it would be forced to also include all the hardware for a government standard connector, increasing size and price and ruining aesthetics. Or how about a waterproof phone, or a super-rugged phone? It's quite unlikely the government standard connector would be ideal for waterproofing or functioning with dirt rubbed into it or whatever. What about a tiny wristwatch phone? The government connector would likely be too large. How about a netbook with phone features? The government connector wouldn't provide enough juice.
I'm sure it's easy for you to dismiss every example I gave above, saying "oh, the regulation will include a special case to fix that problem." These examples are things I came up with in 5 minutes of thought, but the real problem with regulations like these are the things nobody has thought of yet. Every market regulation is a constraint on future innovation. We can't know yet why the government standard connector might be bad, because we don't know how technology and the cell phone market will evolve in the future. Innovation moves fast and the government is far too slow to keep up.
OK, we've got assertions going both ways. Now where's the evidence? I don't want anecdotes, I want a quantitative survey of a large number of articles. Until that exists, this argument is going nowhere.
Sanger has been saying stuff like this ever since he started Citizendium, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Citizendium sucks.
I think the problem is evident in his statement quoted in the summary: "Without granting experts any authority to overrule such people, there is no reason to think that Wikipedia'a articles are on a vector toward continual improvement". Well, unless you count the fact that collectively Wikipedia's articles have quite obviously been on a vector toward continual improvement since Wikipedia started. Wikipedia's article quality is not monotonic, but it is increasing. Under what metric is Wikipedia not getting better? Larry, stop speaking in generalities and point us to some actual evidence that Wikipedia articles are not increasing in quality.
And how do you propose to fix that? There's no magic wand to wave and give them more choices. The factory gives them a choice between manufacturing and subsistence farming. If you take away the factory, they don't have any choice at all. If you attempt to improve their lot by (for example) doubling wages via minimum-wage legislation, you'll halve the number of available jobs (TNSTAAFL).
The fact is if people are choosing the factory over farming of their own free will, then the factory is improving their lives from their point of view, and for rich Westerners to come in and take that choice away from them is not only arrogant and capricious but counterproductive.
The fact is that capitalism is lifting Chinese peasants out of poverty by the hundreds of millions, far more effectively than any amount of international aid ever could. Expecting their living standards to reach ours instantly is expecting the impossible. It's already happening far, far faster than it did for our own Industrial Revolution. Give it time and it will happen.
I'll tell you what's going on: government documents which are intrinsically public domain are being held behind artificially constructed "pay" walls erected by private companies. It's not an uncommon practice, not only in federal government but all the way down to local city and county governments, and in the past it actually made small amounts of sense. In the pre-internet days distributing documents cost non-trivial amounts of money because physical copies had to be made. Now that the Internet has driven those costs to nearly zero, there is no longer any excuse for these private companies to be acting as the gatekeepers for information about our own government. We should work to tear down these old arrangements and allow people to access government information for free, straight from the source. That's what's going on here.
Memory in all computers is mapped to address space.
Of course, but in traditional OSes the mapping changes at every context switch. What they're saying is if you write all your code in a memory-safe language, there's no need to use separate address spaces for every process, which removes most of the overhead of process switching. This is not a unique idea; for example Microsoft's Singularity experimental OS does this too.
Nobody needs files? How, exactly, can I retrieve a document then?
This is a good question. The filesystem in a traditional OS serves two completely different purposes: persistent storage, and communication between programs. The article describes how Phantom does persistent storage, but there's no mention of how you'd transfer a document from one program to another, or one computer to another. I'd be interested to see their solution.
If your data are in memory and not the hard drive when it quits, you'll lose your data. If data are all written instantly to the HD, your PC will be slower than molasses in january.
The data doesn't have to be written instantly. Program state can be checkpointed at intervals, and only the checkpoints need be written to disk. The interval can be adjusted for a performance/safety tradeoff. While a checkpoint is being written, programs can continue running unaffected using a copy on write scheme. If the whole thing is built into the OS from the ground up and all the applications are written with it in mind, the performance could be just fine.
What baffles me is how none of the nine million hardware review sites have taken up input lag measurements as part of their standard battery of tests. I'm half tempted to set up my own little testing lab; the only equipment you need is one of those 1000 FPS cameras.
I really don't think that insulting the founding fathers would provoke a stronger reaction than insulting any other famous people. Clearly if you're shouting obscenities in an airport like a crazy person it doesn't matter who you're insulting; it'll be a problem no matter what.
Imagine a drive 99% full of unchanging data, and 1% full of constantly changing data. The wear leveler could, every X number of writes, move 1% of the unchanging data to expose a fresh section of drive for the changing data. There would be a small performance penalty that could easily be adjusted by changing various parameters, and the increase in drive lifetime would be more than worth it.
Now, I don't know specifically if the wear leveling algorithms used by Intel's SSDs or Samsung's SSDs or random Chinese OEM's SSDs actually do this, but it's certainly possible.
Whoa, hold on there. Wireless is a completely different issue. I'm just talking about wires here. And what I'm saying is build *one* public network, just like you! The difference is this: in my network the government isn't the ISP, because that opens a whole can of censorship and privacy worms. Instead, the government installs and owns fiber connecting homes and businesses to colocation points. Then the homes and businesses individually choose their own private ISPs, and the government leases fiber access and colocation space to the ISPs at standard rates.
The ISPs are individually profit-driven, but because hundreds of ISPs can compete for the same customers via the standard government fiber, like any good market competition works to ensure good service and reasonable prices. And since the government has built the expensive part of the infrastructure, there's no reason rural customers can't be served as well as urban ones. Then all your telephones are VoIP and all your TV is IPTV, and voila! Every part of the telecom market is a happy competitive place.
On a different note, I disagree that the government should own backbones. For backbones (unlike last-mile) it actually makes sense to have many highly redundant competitors, and private industry has done a respectable job of meeting demand so far. Peering disputes are WAY down at the bottom of the list of problems facing the Internet today, below last-mile capacity, multicast, DNS hacks, IPv6 adoption, and a host of other things. Nationalizing Internet backbones to stop peering disputes would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In Slashdot's defense, note that the dept. of this story is "too-insane-to-ignore-forever". I can only imagine that since Songsmith's release several weeks ago Slashdot's submission queue has been overflowing with stories like this one. They probably could have gone with a little less blatant title, though.
Personally I think Songsmith is hilarious and should have been released as an XNA Community Game on XBox Live, like Kodu, or maybe even as a part of Kodu.
I'm sure Quest's service is fine in some areas, even great perhaps. But not in my area. I tried Quest first because of the price. I cancelled it after a month. When I say my service was bad, I'm not joking. Every day during peak times the service was basically unusable, with the latency and bandwidth of a 56k modem, plus packet loss. At non-peak times I'd be lucky to get 1/3 of the rated speed and latencies of 150 ms. Customer service had nothing useful to say; I don't think they even knew what the word "latency" meant.
With Speakeasy I'm getting the full rated speed, with latencies of 10-60 ms, all the time. Plus I get a static IP, and customer service that actually knows what a static IP is. It's night and day.
There are exactly two data lines going into most houses. When those lines were installed they were not generic data lines; they were completely separate markets and did not compete in any way. If it had been technically possible to send video signals over telephone lines before cable became popular, separate cable lines would never have been installed and cable companies wouldn't exist today.
Furthermore, two "competitors" does not a market make. To have real competition between ISPs, the number of competitors should be more like 10 or preferably 100; the higher the better. There will never be 10 separate wired data networks installed in a typical home, let alone 100, because wired data networks are a natural monopoly.
well, "we" don't give out local monopolies. [...] there are no laws stating that X county must only have one ISP/telecom
Au contraire! We do, and there are. Cable franchise monopoly agreements are the most direct and egregious example. There are plenty of other laws that perhaps don't explicitly forbid competition but are nonetheless quite effective at suppressing it.
communications networks work best as a single large monopoly
You are half right. Physical wire last-mile networks work best as regional monopolies. However, since the invention of packet switching, it is no longer true that service providers must be tied to those physical wire networks and given the same monopoly powers. Service providers work best under free-market competition. The Internet is about as far from a single large monopoly as you can get.
if it weren't for government regulations that force major communications carriers to lease out a portion of their networks to smaller second-tier carriers, there'd be even fewer ISPs/telecoms for consumers to choose from
That's true, and what we're proposing is basically an extension of that: instead of leaving the wires in private ownership but trying to control how the owners use them with reams of regulations, simply go all the way and nationalize the wires. If the government is already deciding where the wires should be installed, how they can be used and what prices can be charged for them, why doesn't the government just own them?
In the current telecom market we have two tiers of service providers: one tier gains advantage by owning the wires, and the other tier is totally dependent on regulation to force cooperation from the first tier while simultaneously trying to compete with them. In my experience it just doesn't work. My phone company is Quest, and Quest DSL sucks, but all the alternative DSL providers cost far more. I pay 2-3x as much for Speakeasy DSL because Quest's service really is that bad. If Qwest and Speakeasy both paid the same rate to the government for the wires, those prices would be much closer (and Speakeasy's far superior service and support would crush Qwest into the ground).
have tax payers fork out the money for the infrastructure, and then let the telecoms charge the public to use the infrastructure that they "own"? that's pretty much what we've got now.
Except now we give out local monopolies over use of the infrastructure, protecting telecoms from competition. If we stop giving out monopolies, then competition will ensure reasonable prices.
Slashdot Mirror
Google Code Search supports regular expressions. The code index is obviously much smaller than the web index, but it's still quite impressive.
they are trying to compute knowledge-worthy data from a small subset of the web
Not even that. Their database of facts is manually constructed, like the Yahoo index of old. The "natural language processing" is only for queries. This, to me, is the major weakness of the idea.
You can try to say that Wolfram Alpha is a different kind of product than Internet search, but it will have to compete with Google anyway. Until Alpha can crawl the web on its own and automatically construct databases concerning hard-to-quantify things like celebrities, sports, health, news, products, etc., it won't be useful for the vast majority of Internet queries, and especially the kind that make advertising money. It won't be clear to your average search engine user why a certain query would or wouldn't work. Instead of facing that uncertainty users will simply continue to use Google, which has a "good enough" answer for nearly everything.
Hopefully Alpha can find a niche answering homework questions, because I'd love to see the idea evolve further.
Bandwidth scarcity is not an excuse for this kind of behavior. Blocking individual applications and instituting usage caps in a non-negotiable way is nothing more than protectionism from companies with outdated business models. If bandwidth scarcity is the problem, the only real solution is charging per byte transferred. That way people who want to use more can do so by simply paying more (funding infrastructure improvements), while people who want to save money can reduce usage. Simple!
The ISPs have no interest in actually solving the scarcity problem. The goal of the block-and-cap strategy is to dictate how consumers can use the Internet. The endgame of this strategy is for ISPs to become the gatekeepers of all electronic communications, collecting a toll not only from consumers but from the content providers who want to reach them (not unlike the "walled garden" AOL tried to build back in the day).
Pieterh did not argue that the environment is fine. His argument was directed solely at subsidies and did not concern the environment at all. You are reading something into his post that just isn't there, and as a result your post was a massive overreaction.
Such a complex scheme is too hard to enforce. Complexity in the law is just as bad as complexity in a software system. Complex laws breed corruption and waste. People could easily disagree on how to calculate carbon footprints by orders of magnitude. Any direct carbon tax would have plenty of wiggle room for tax lawyers to exploit.
Instead, it's much simpler to tax the sources of carbon; in fact they're already taxed and we could just tax them more. Tax coal, oil, and natural gas, and that's almost all you need right there. Tax the carbon at its source and there aren't any loopholes.
it doesn't help the matter to equate half-hearted, ill-conceived attempts to protect the environment with "sleaze" and "giveaways".
I disagree completely. If a plan is intended to protect the environment, we shouldn't care that it's ill-conceived and perhaps even counter-productive? We absolutely should. We should always call out bad plans, no matter how noble their intentions.
Oh come on. Are you really seriously arguing that gasoline usage is not connected to price at all over the long term? You think that if gas had stayed at $0.22/gal we wouldn't be using more now? You think that if gas went to $20/gal we wouldn't use less 10 years from now? You have to be seriously deluded to believe that.
To see why gasoline usage hasn't gone down, take a look at this chart and learn something about inflation. The price of gas hasn't actually gone up.
Whoa there. If you want to prevent atmospheric pollution caused by burning gasoline, a battery subsidy is not the correct way to do it. Instead, a tax on gasoline (or other CO2 sources) is the way to go. To the extent that batteries reduce gasoline use, they will benefit from a gasoline tax. But unlike a battery subsidy, a gasoline tax benefits every battery company, not just the ones successful in obtaining government grants. Furthermore it's not limited to benefiting battery companies either; it benefits any alternative energy source that reduces gasoline use, leaving the market free to decide the best option. Having the government pick winners and losers in alternative energy might sound nice in the short term but it is a recipe for stagnation, lobbying, and corruption in the long term.
That's only true if you require that shareholders and executives continue to make the same amount of money as before the workers' wages were doubled.
But why wouldn't they? A minimum wage law doesn't directly affect them. The only way it would cause their compensation to go down is by reducing the production of the companies they manage and own, which is terrible for the economy, which ends up hurting everyone, and the poor most of all. If you want to reduce waste, the way to do it is with competition, not legislation.
Different phones have different requirements for things like voltages, amperages, connector size, and other features of a charging interface. Forcing a standard would reduce the number of power bricks a consumer would need, but it would constrain phone designers as well. Phones with unusual requirements would be basically outlawed. Imagine a great new battery technology requiring high voltage to charge; it wouldn't work with the government standard low-voltage connector. Or imagine a phone with wireless charging; it would be forced to also include all the hardware for a government standard connector, increasing size and price and ruining aesthetics. Or how about a waterproof phone, or a super-rugged phone? It's quite unlikely the government standard connector would be ideal for waterproofing or functioning with dirt rubbed into it or whatever. What about a tiny wristwatch phone? The government connector would likely be too large. How about a netbook with phone features? The government connector wouldn't provide enough juice.
I'm sure it's easy for you to dismiss every example I gave above, saying "oh, the regulation will include a special case to fix that problem." These examples are things I came up with in 5 minutes of thought, but the real problem with regulations like these are the things nobody has thought of yet. Every market regulation is a constraint on future innovation. We can't know yet why the government standard connector might be bad, because we don't know how technology and the cell phone market will evolve in the future. Innovation moves fast and the government is far too slow to keep up.
OK, we've got assertions going both ways. Now where's the evidence? I don't want anecdotes, I want a quantitative survey of a large number of articles. Until that exists, this argument is going nowhere.
Sanger has been saying stuff like this ever since he started Citizendium, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Citizendium sucks.
I think the problem is evident in his statement quoted in the summary: "Without granting experts any authority to overrule such people, there is no reason to think that Wikipedia'a articles are on a vector toward continual improvement". Well, unless you count the fact that collectively Wikipedia's articles have quite obviously been on a vector toward continual improvement since Wikipedia started. Wikipedia's article quality is not monotonic, but it is increasing. Under what metric is Wikipedia not getting better? Larry, stop speaking in generalities and point us to some actual evidence that Wikipedia articles are not increasing in quality.
And how do you propose to fix that? There's no magic wand to wave and give them more choices. The factory gives them a choice between manufacturing and subsistence farming. If you take away the factory, they don't have any choice at all. If you attempt to improve their lot by (for example) doubling wages via minimum-wage legislation, you'll halve the number of available jobs (TNSTAAFL).
The fact is if people are choosing the factory over farming of their own free will, then the factory is improving their lives from their point of view, and for rich Westerners to come in and take that choice away from them is not only arrogant and capricious but counterproductive.
The fact is that capitalism is lifting Chinese peasants out of poverty by the hundreds of millions, far more effectively than any amount of international aid ever could. Expecting their living standards to reach ours instantly is expecting the impossible. It's already happening far, far faster than it did for our own Industrial Revolution. Give it time and it will happen.
I'll tell you what's going on: government documents which are intrinsically public domain are being held behind artificially constructed "pay" walls erected by private companies. It's not an uncommon practice, not only in federal government but all the way down to local city and county governments, and in the past it actually made small amounts of sense. In the pre-internet days distributing documents cost non-trivial amounts of money because physical copies had to be made. Now that the Internet has driven those costs to nearly zero, there is no longer any excuse for these private companies to be acting as the gatekeepers for information about our own government. We should work to tear down these old arrangements and allow people to access government information for free, straight from the source. That's what's going on here.
Of course, but in traditional OSes the mapping changes at every context switch. What they're saying is if you write all your code in a memory-safe language, there's no need to use separate address spaces for every process, which removes most of the overhead of process switching. This is not a unique idea; for example Microsoft's Singularity experimental OS does this too.
This is a good question. The filesystem in a traditional OS serves two completely different purposes: persistent storage, and communication between programs. The article describes how Phantom does persistent storage, but there's no mention of how you'd transfer a document from one program to another, or one computer to another. I'd be interested to see their solution.
The data doesn't have to be written instantly. Program state can be checkpointed at intervals, and only the checkpoints need be written to disk. The interval can be adjusted for a performance/safety tradeoff. While a checkpoint is being written, programs can continue running unaffected using a copy on write scheme. If the whole thing is built into the OS from the ground up and all the applications are written with it in mind, the performance could be just fine.
What baffles me is how none of the nine million hardware review sites have taken up input lag measurements as part of their standard battery of tests. I'm half tempted to set up my own little testing lab; the only equipment you need is one of those 1000 FPS cameras.
I really don't think that insulting the founding fathers would provoke a stronger reaction than insulting any other famous people. Clearly if you're shouting obscenities in an airport like a crazy person it doesn't matter who you're insulting; it'll be a problem no matter what.
Imagine a drive 99% full of unchanging data, and 1% full of constantly changing data. The wear leveler could, every X number of writes, move 1% of the unchanging data to expose a fresh section of drive for the changing data. There would be a small performance penalty that could easily be adjusted by changing various parameters, and the increase in drive lifetime would be more than worth it.
Now, I don't know specifically if the wear leveling algorithms used by Intel's SSDs or Samsung's SSDs or random Chinese OEM's SSDs actually do this, but it's certainly possible.
2010.
Whoa, hold on there. Wireless is a completely different issue. I'm just talking about wires here. And what I'm saying is build *one* public network, just like you! The difference is this: in my network the government isn't the ISP, because that opens a whole can of censorship and privacy worms. Instead, the government installs and owns fiber connecting homes and businesses to colocation points. Then the homes and businesses individually choose their own private ISPs, and the government leases fiber access and colocation space to the ISPs at standard rates.
The ISPs are individually profit-driven, but because hundreds of ISPs can compete for the same customers via the standard government fiber, like any good market competition works to ensure good service and reasonable prices. And since the government has built the expensive part of the infrastructure, there's no reason rural customers can't be served as well as urban ones. Then all your telephones are VoIP and all your TV is IPTV, and voila! Every part of the telecom market is a happy competitive place.
On a different note, I disagree that the government should own backbones. For backbones (unlike last-mile) it actually makes sense to have many highly redundant competitors, and private industry has done a respectable job of meeting demand so far. Peering disputes are WAY down at the bottom of the list of problems facing the Internet today, below last-mile capacity, multicast, DNS hacks, IPv6 adoption, and a host of other things. Nationalizing Internet backbones to stop peering disputes would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In Slashdot's defense, note that the dept. of this story is "too-insane-to-ignore-forever". I can only imagine that since Songsmith's release several weeks ago Slashdot's submission queue has been overflowing with stories like this one. They probably could have gone with a little less blatant title, though.
Personally I think Songsmith is hilarious and should have been released as an XNA Community Game on XBox Live, like Kodu, or maybe even as a part of Kodu.
I'm sure Quest's service is fine in some areas, even great perhaps. But not in my area. I tried Quest first because of the price. I cancelled it after a month. When I say my service was bad, I'm not joking. Every day during peak times the service was basically unusable, with the latency and bandwidth of a 56k modem, plus packet loss. At non-peak times I'd be lucky to get 1/3 of the rated speed and latencies of 150 ms. Customer service had nothing useful to say; I don't think they even knew what the word "latency" meant.
With Speakeasy I'm getting the full rated speed, with latencies of 10-60 ms, all the time. Plus I get a static IP, and customer service that actually knows what a static IP is. It's night and day.
There are exactly two data lines going into most houses. When those lines were installed they were not generic data lines; they were completely separate markets and did not compete in any way. If it had been technically possible to send video signals over telephone lines before cable became popular, separate cable lines would never have been installed and cable companies wouldn't exist today.
Furthermore, two "competitors" does not a market make. To have real competition between ISPs, the number of competitors should be more like 10 or preferably 100; the higher the better. There will never be 10 separate wired data networks installed in a typical home, let alone 100, because wired data networks are a natural monopoly.
Au contraire! We do, and there are. Cable franchise monopoly agreements are the most direct and egregious example. There are plenty of other laws that perhaps don't explicitly forbid competition but are nonetheless quite effective at suppressing it.
You are half right. Physical wire last-mile networks work best as regional monopolies. However, since the invention of packet switching, it is no longer true that service providers must be tied to those physical wire networks and given the same monopoly powers. Service providers work best under free-market competition. The Internet is about as far from a single large monopoly as you can get.
That's true, and what we're proposing is basically an extension of that: instead of leaving the wires in private ownership but trying to control how the owners use them with reams of regulations, simply go all the way and nationalize the wires. If the government is already deciding where the wires should be installed, how they can be used and what prices can be charged for them, why doesn't the government just own them?
In the current telecom market we have two tiers of service providers: one tier gains advantage by owning the wires, and the other tier is totally dependent on regulation to force cooperation from the first tier while simultaneously trying to compete with them. In my experience it just doesn't work. My phone company is Quest, and Quest DSL sucks, but all the alternative DSL providers cost far more. I pay 2-3x as much for Speakeasy DSL because Quest's service really is that bad. If Qwest and Speakeasy both paid the same rate to the government for the wires, those prices would be much closer (and Speakeasy's far superior service and support would crush Qwest into the ground).
Except now we give out local monopolies over use of the infrastructure, protecting telecoms from competition. If we stop giving out monopolies, then competition will ensure reasonable prices.