One being that the people choosing to fly out on an expired visa can be data mined from a flight database without needing to be caught in the act.
That assumes they are flying using their own, expired paperwork.
The other being that it is simpler, less risky* and far less illegal to walk out of the country and into another one,
It is much harder to do that than to simply try to fly home.
Gosh, we won't catch all the criminals with this facial recognition stuff. I guess we shouldn't even try. We won't catch all of any kind of criminal, so I guess we shouldn't even try. That does make life much simpler for everyone, even the criminals.
With facial recog you need a buddy that looks somewhat like you. Not a perfect foil by any means.
No system is perfect. Does that mean we should have no systems?
There is also the issue of buddy returning with no record of leaving.
You must not fly international out of the US. They don't care if you leave. You can even leave without needing a passport. The only place they care about a passport when you leave is the airline, and that's for two reasons: so they know you have a passport and they won't have to haul your ass back when you get turned away from the destination for not having a passport, and so they can send the data to DHS/ICE for no-fly. But since you can leave the country without using an airline, there is no way they can figure out that you shouldn't be coming back. If they ask, tell them you drove to Canada or Mexico and flew someplace from there.
I think the friend would have to be someone who wasn't coming back, because otherwise the no-show on the flight that got the friend past security would be an issue that person would have to resolve when trying to come back.
What "resolve"? "I decided not to go." It's not a crime not to take a flight that you've checked in on. The airline may get pissy about applying the money for that flight to something else, but that's why you get a really cheap flight.
You don't think any airline would actually deny someone who didn't make one flight the ability to fly ever again on that airline, do you? No, sorry, they'll happily take your money to fly you from London to Chicago even if you skip out on half a dozen flights from Chicago to Indianapolis. If you do find such a moronic airline, then use a different airline to fly back. Delta will take customers United doesn't want all day long.
But, you've convinced me. Clearly we should spend a billion dollars on poorly performing facial recognition.
I guess the concept of justifying a process but not justifying the cost or poor performance is new. I'm explaining why a system like that would be useful, not that it has to cost a billion dollars.
Enforcing laws always costs money. Is that an excuse not to have any laws?
and using this technology degrades the privacy of citizens and foreign nationals who are here legally?
Think about it a minute. This is not a camera on a public street where nobody knows who anybody is until the facial recognition identifies them so they can be tracked. This is a US airport secured area where you must show ID just to enter, where your face is already compared to that picture ID, where the airline has already collected your passport information and forwarded it to DHS, and your boarding pass is scanned and verified while your ID is being examined. And finally, the passport that you are using to travel on is already in a massive government database -- either a US database for US passports or other country for their citizens -- which includes your picture.
The only new bit of information that facial recognition provides is that the face matches one for a temporary visa holder, or not. But for all those honest folk whose privacy you are worried about, the government already knows you don't have an expired visa, that you are traveling, and what flight you are taking. They can even identify at least one specific point you were at, at a specific time, and from there can easily track you around the airport with existing security cameras.
Sorry. Just because a government camera looks at your face doesn't mean your privacy is violated. "OMG, they're looking at my face and gathering data they already have!" Ummm. Ok.
I parked in a no-parking zone once, so I guess I'm a criminal, too.
Did you think this has something to do with immigration law?
But if they're going to set up a billion dollar program to catch criminals,
Immigration violations, not just generic "criminals".
I'd say they should catch the ones that are worth the bother to catch.
They are. It is worth catching the ones who are leaving, too. You can't flag their record as being disallowed back in unless you catch them first.
If you aren't going to bother trying to catch them, and thus don't care about the violation, why bother having the law? And how do you prosecute others who do the same thing when you've already said you don't care about some who do it? Equal treatment under the law? Ring a bell?
If they're leaving, why not just let them leave on their own rather than go through the expense of detaining them and going through the whole deportation process?
Because you want it on the record that they overstayed so they don't get another visa to do it again. You assume there will be a "deportation process" when there is no need to have one. They're leaving. They have a ticket. You're just making sure they don't get to come back.
What is to be gained?
It enforces immigration law. It prevents a criminal from getting another chance to break immigration law by overstaying his visa again. It makes people who might think it doesn't matter if you overstay a US visa because nothing will be done about it think again. These are all positive things.
First of all, not true. And second, you know when a certain gate has an international flight and when it doesn't. You only use it at a gate where there is an international flight.
can have a flight to Hong Kong or London followed by a flight to Houston.
Yes, so the scanner is on when there is a flight to London boarding and not on when the flight is going to Houston. Is it really that hard?
Hell sometimes even the plane to Houston continues on to South America,
Uhhh, the plane may go on, but not without reboarding. It's an international flight, it needs different handling. The airline is going to make sure everyone on an international flight has their passports or entry documents just so they don't have to cart them back. You can't do that if you have a mix.
And even so, if the flight is international, you turn the scanner on. If it is domestic, you turn it off. That solves the problem of scanning people who aren't going international.
They didn't fly. They took a different route out. On time, before the visa expired.
and even if you catch it the moment they book the ticket, it doesn't matter, you want them to leave.
Of course it matters. You want them to have already left, and you don't want them to come back. You can't do the latter if you didn't catch them failing to leave on time. What if they don't book the ticket? If they're doing something illegal, why would they do the booking? They're going to try to slip out as someone else. With someone else's paperwork. But their own face.
And if someone wanted to leave without a paper trail, anyone can just walk out to Canada or Mexico.
Yeah, so your flippant "flight records" solution is already known to be invalid.
And lots more for the TSA agent to do to make the security theater line even slower...
And then the guy who wants to overstay just walks out the exit after his "official departure" has been logged by TSA and is never seen again.
Or, if you think the airline would report his no-show at boarding to someone, he gets a friend with a US passport to use his boarding pass to take the flight. Now it is irrefutable that he's gone.
and US citizens departing to a country that requires a passport for entry).
I suppose if we're getting Mexico to pay for the wall, we can get every other country on the planet to pay for the immigration/passport control services that our TSA agents will be performing on their behalf.
They broke the law. Why shouldn't we want to catch them? If we don't care how long they stay just as long as they leave, then how can we "catch" anyone who has overstayed? "I was going to leave next week, I promise!" Oh, ok, you weren't going to stay forever. You're ok.
A smart traveler would overstay their VISA, and then purposely get caught. Free flight home?
I don't know where you get that from. They've already paid for the ticket home. If they're lucky, they make that flight. More likely they'll miss that flight and have to pay a rebooking or itinerary change fee, plus lodging when the next available flight is two days away.
Why do you think the US is going to pick up the price of the ticket they already have?
If somebody has an expired visa, what they are supposed to do is to leave the country.
They were supposed to have already left. It's the overstay that is the illegal part.
They are scanning everybody, Americans and non-Americans alike,
How is the camera supposed to know that you are "an American" just by looking at you, without scanning you to figure that out?
what they're supposed to be doing is catching the people on expired visas who are not leaving the country.
They should catch all of the people in the US on an expired visa, whether they are in line to leave or not.
Are you one of those folks who goes to court to fight a speeding ticket with the excuse that the cops ought to be out catching speeders on a different street instead of the one you were on?
and is willing to fly out and risk an anomaly on their own passport.
I'm sorry, but using someone else's passport doesn't create an anomaly on your own. You don't show both of them on the way out. And you aren't showing the other guy's when you come back. You're just another returning citizen at that point.
Basically they build a database of all citizens, maybe right now not crossreferenced to Social Security Number, but it will come. as soon as the tech is capable of it.
This is different than the passport database they already have exactly how, again?
Except, who cares if they overstayed, they're leaving! Worry about it when they try to come back!
If you don't catch them overstaying, how can you worry about it when they come back? Pray tell, how do you know that Achmed overstayed his visa the last time he was here when he's standing in front of you as an ICE officer now, unless you caught him doing it last time and put it in his record? How does the embassy issuing the visa know that THIS time they shouldn't issue Achmed the visa because last time he cheated, unless he was caught cheating last time?
How is it invasive? It's not looking under your clothes like millimeter waves do. It's not scanning your body for ferrous metal. You don't have to stop or produce documents or anything.
All you have to do is have your face out where it can be seen, like almost everyone already does. Heck, you have to have your face out to show the TSA security line checker anyway, because he's busy comparing your id to your face.
The airlines have already sent your data to DHS, and you're ticket data is scanned going through TSA. They know who you are and that you are at the airport. They also know where you say you're going.
Also keep in mind, ICE is already getting your picture when you enter the country. It's faster than the old manual system.
Simple enough to do properly. Scan passports when leaving the country. The airlines already do it, use that data.
Scanning someone's passport doesn't mean that that person is the one standing there having his passport scanned. Facial recognition at least looks at the person for his identity, not his papers. It's harder to hand your face to someone else; easy to hand them your passport.
And facial recognition can be installed at the gate to watch people as they go on board. If the person intending to overstay the visa gets a buddy to help, it would be easy to defeat "passport scanning". The one who "needs to leave" has a flight out of the US and he goes through all the checkin and TSA, all nicely legal. It's a couple of days before the visa expires, so no problem. His buddy gets a flight to anywhere, just so he can get through TSA and to the gate. Swap boarding passes. Buddy flies out pretending to be the visa holder. Visa holder drives home. Buddy uses his own passport to fly back. TSA/DHS has a record of the visa holder leaving. Buddy gets credit for the flight he didn't take. Yes, it costs some money, but nobody is looking for the visa breaker. He's not here anymore!
But when the facial recognition fails to match the buddy with the visa holder when he's going through the gate, the plot fails.
how easy it is for someone to book and board a flight (let alone international) with documents belonging to someone else.
Not hard to book one. Trivial, even, if you're in cahoots with them. If you look similar, you can probably make it through security as them, too.
If this is prevalent enough that an illegal immigrant can afford it,
Afford what? A return flight? If they're on a short visa, they probably already have that booked. If not, a few hundred dollars to some non-US destination (like Canada, eh?).
Even worse, a 2 for 1 - one of these passport offenders could give their documents and facilitate someone who is on the no-fly list.
Sounds like you've just given the perfect reason for facial recognition -- to pick up what the TSA guy might have missed.
PROTIP: It's an excuse to spy on American citizens
I'm sorry, but what are you smoking? You're going through TSA processing and you've already shown your ID, so they know you're leaving. The airline has forwarded your data to DHS already, and they've gathered your passport data. Exactly what new information is this system providing regarding your departure?
No physics need be broken, only the souls of kittens when Verizon's executives come up with these plans.
Yeah, Verizon is really going to start sending you gigabit data even though you're paying for 100Mbps just because Netflix pays them money for a "fast-lane" on the Verizon network.
"Fast lanes" are not gigabit feeds to the customer over megabit hardware. The cable modem I have that can manage 60Mbps isn't going to go into 13x hyper-mode when a fast-lane provider shows up. Fast lanes means that the Netflix traffic will get priority on your 100Mbps hardware, but you ain't getting hyper-speed for free. You're doing four things at the same time while watching Netflix, well, if there's a choice between a Netflix packet or someone else's going down your pipe Netflix wins.
But the proper capitalist way to deal with competition is by beating them,
Oh, please. You can't beat the competition when you're hamstrung by requirements that they are ignoring.
not by crying to the government and having the competition banned via regulation (while at the same time decrying all of the regulation in your industry because hypocrisy.)
It is not hypocritical in the least to say that you are overregulated but that if you are going to have to meet the regulations then your competitor needs to meet them, too. It's patently absurd for any company to let their competitors off the hook for the costs of meeting legal requirements while they're still paying that price, just because they think the regulations are onerous. It is STUPID for any businessman to say "I'll pay those costs but I don't think my competitor should."
Obviously not counting any laws that give you a monopoly
There are no laws that give anyone in the ISP business a monopoly. Not a single damn one. But there are laws that create contracts that the incumbent has to fulfill that the competitors don't want to, and that's when lawsuits get filed.
Yes. That's how capitalism works.
No, that isn't. "Capitalism" is not the government competing against private business while still regulating that business. It's not one party to a contract requiring services from the other and then going into business without having to do the same things.
If you can't out-compete them then its time to GTFO and let the better company try their hand at the game.
It's not a better company. It's a company that isn't being held to the same rules, that doesn't have to provide the services that you do, and doesn't have the costs that you are required to have.
When a city "creates competition" by competing against an incumbent, they don't have to pay themselves a franchise fee for access to the rights-of-way, they get city services to do things that the incumbent has to pay for himself, they have no investors that need to get a return on that investment, they don't have to provide the coverage or services that the incumbent has to, and they don't have corporate taxes to worry about. That's not "capitalism". That's outright unfair competition, and the legal system is the exact right recourse to deal with it.
by removing the previous government regulations that caused this in the first place, namely franchise agreements.
Franchise agreements are the means by which a company gains access to the public rights-of-way. You want those agreements removed? Replaced by what, a free-for-all system where the first truck to the pole gets all the space? And the government gets nothing in return for this access?
If Local municipalities treated last mile like infrastructure and allowed any number of service providers access to the last mile customer,
They already have this. All they need to do is get a franchise to get access to the rights-of-way. The city gets a fee to maintain the common hardware (poles, e.g.), the company gets access to the right-of-way, and then the customer gets to decide who runs wires or whatever from those poles to his house.
No, getting rid of franchise agreements is not the solution, nor are they the problem. The problem is that it costs a lot of money to compete, no matter what, and you can't solve that easily.
Slashdot Mirror
One being that the people choosing to fly out on an expired visa can be data mined from a flight database without needing to be caught in the act.
That assumes they are flying using their own, expired paperwork.
The other being that it is simpler, less risky* and far less illegal to walk out of the country and into another one,
It is much harder to do that than to simply try to fly home.
Gosh, we won't catch all the criminals with this facial recognition stuff. I guess we shouldn't even try. We won't catch all of any kind of criminal, so I guess we shouldn't even try. That does make life much simpler for everyone, even the criminals.
With facial recog you need a buddy that looks somewhat like you. Not a perfect foil by any means.
No system is perfect. Does that mean we should have no systems?
There is also the issue of buddy returning with no record of leaving.
You must not fly international out of the US. They don't care if you leave. You can even leave without needing a passport. The only place they care about a passport when you leave is the airline, and that's for two reasons: so they know you have a passport and they won't have to haul your ass back when you get turned away from the destination for not having a passport, and so they can send the data to DHS/ICE for no-fly. But since you can leave the country without using an airline, there is no way they can figure out that you shouldn't be coming back. If they ask, tell them you drove to Canada or Mexico and flew someplace from there.
I think the friend would have to be someone who wasn't coming back, because otherwise the no-show on the flight that got the friend past security would be an issue that person would have to resolve when trying to come back.
What "resolve"? "I decided not to go." It's not a crime not to take a flight that you've checked in on. The airline may get pissy about applying the money for that flight to something else, but that's why you get a really cheap flight.
You don't think any airline would actually deny someone who didn't make one flight the ability to fly ever again on that airline, do you? No, sorry, they'll happily take your money to fly you from London to Chicago even if you skip out on half a dozen flights from Chicago to Indianapolis. If you do find such a moronic airline, then use a different airline to fly back. Delta will take customers United doesn't want all day long.
But, you've convinced me. Clearly we should spend a billion dollars on poorly performing facial recognition.
I guess the concept of justifying a process but not justifying the cost or poor performance is new. I'm explaining why a system like that would be useful, not that it has to cost a billion dollars.
Because doing so is expensive
Enforcing laws always costs money. Is that an excuse not to have any laws?
and using this technology degrades the privacy of citizens and foreign nationals who are here legally?
Think about it a minute. This is not a camera on a public street where nobody knows who anybody is until the facial recognition identifies them so they can be tracked. This is a US airport secured area where you must show ID just to enter, where your face is already compared to that picture ID, where the airline has already collected your passport information and forwarded it to DHS, and your boarding pass is scanned and verified while your ID is being examined. And finally, the passport that you are using to travel on is already in a massive government database -- either a US database for US passports or other country for their citizens -- which includes your picture.
The only new bit of information that facial recognition provides is that the face matches one for a temporary visa holder, or not. But for all those honest folk whose privacy you are worried about, the government already knows you don't have an expired visa, that you are traveling, and what flight you are taking. They can even identify at least one specific point you were at, at a specific time, and from there can easily track you around the airport with existing security cameras.
Sorry. Just because a government camera looks at your face doesn't mean your privacy is violated. "OMG, they're looking at my face and gathering data they already have!" Ummm. Ok.
I parked in a no-parking zone once, so I guess I'm a criminal, too.
Did you think this has something to do with immigration law?
But if they're going to set up a billion dollar program to catch criminals,
Immigration violations, not just generic "criminals".
I'd say they should catch the ones that are worth the bother to catch.
They are. It is worth catching the ones who are leaving, too. You can't flag their record as being disallowed back in unless you catch them first.
If you aren't going to bother trying to catch them, and thus don't care about the violation, why bother having the law? And how do you prosecute others who do the same thing when you've already said you don't care about some who do it? Equal treatment under the law? Ring a bell?
If they're leaving, why not just let them leave on their own rather than go through the expense of detaining them and going through the whole deportation process?
Because you want it on the record that they overstayed so they don't get another visa to do it again. You assume there will be a "deportation process" when there is no need to have one. They're leaving. They have a ticket. You're just making sure they don't get to come back.
What is to be gained?
It enforces immigration law. It prevents a criminal from getting another chance to break immigration law by overstaying his visa again. It makes people who might think it doesn't matter if you overstay a US visa because nothing will be done about it think again. These are all positive things.
Except any gate can have an international flight.
First of all, not true. And second, you know when a certain gate has an international flight and when it doesn't. You only use it at a gate where there is an international flight.
can have a flight to Hong Kong or London followed by a flight to Houston.
Yes, so the scanner is on when there is a flight to London boarding and not on when the flight is going to Houston. Is it really that hard?
Hell sometimes even the plane to Houston continues on to South America,
Uhhh, the plane may go on, but not without reboarding. It's an international flight, it needs different handling. The airline is going to make sure everyone on an international flight has their passports or entry documents just so they don't have to cart them back. You can't do that if you have a mix.
And even so, if the flight is international, you turn the scanner on. If it is domestic, you turn it off. That solves the problem of scanning people who aren't going international.
From the flight records.
They didn't fly. They took a different route out. On time, before the visa expired.
and even if you catch it the moment they book the ticket, it doesn't matter, you want them to leave.
Of course it matters. You want them to have already left, and you don't want them to come back. You can't do the latter if you didn't catch them failing to leave on time. What if they don't book the ticket? If they're doing something illegal, why would they do the booking? They're going to try to slip out as someone else. With someone else's paperwork. But their own face.
And if someone wanted to leave without a paper trail, anyone can just walk out to Canada or Mexico.
Yeah, so your flippant "flight records" solution is already known to be invalid.
The scanner could do OCR on the ID, ...
And lots more for the TSA agent to do to make the security theater line even slower...
And then the guy who wants to overstay just walks out the exit after his "official departure" has been logged by TSA and is never seen again.
Or, if you think the airline would report his no-show at boarding to someone, he gets a friend with a US passport to use his boarding pass to take the flight. Now it is irrefutable that he's gone.
and US citizens departing to a country that requires a passport for entry).
I suppose if we're getting Mexico to pay for the wall, we can get every other country on the planet to pay for the immigration/passport control services that our TSA agents will be performing on their behalf.
These aren't the ones we want to catch.
They broke the law. Why shouldn't we want to catch them? If we don't care how long they stay just as long as they leave, then how can we "catch" anyone who has overstayed? "I was going to leave next week, I promise!" Oh, ok, you weren't going to stay forever. You're ok.
A smart traveler would overstay their VISA, and then purposely get caught. Free flight home?
I don't know where you get that from. They've already paid for the ticket home. If they're lucky, they make that flight. More likely they'll miss that flight and have to pay a rebooking or itinerary change fee, plus lodging when the next available flight is two days away.
Why do you think the US is going to pick up the price of the ticket they already have?
If somebody has an expired visa, what they are supposed to do is to leave the country.
They were supposed to have already left. It's the overstay that is the illegal part.
They are scanning everybody, Americans and non-Americans alike,
How is the camera supposed to know that you are "an American" just by looking at you, without scanning you to figure that out?
what they're supposed to be doing is catching the people on expired visas who are not leaving the country.
They should catch all of the people in the US on an expired visa, whether they are in line to leave or not.
Are you one of those folks who goes to court to fight a speeding ticket with the excuse that the cops ought to be out catching speeders on a different street instead of the one you were on?
The only way this would work is to scan everyone at the airport.
No, just scan everyone going out a gate with an international flight.
compared to finding someone who looks like them
Friends and family are cheap. Maybe even free.
and is willing to fly out and risk an anomaly on their own passport.
I'm sorry, but using someone else's passport doesn't create an anomaly on your own. You don't show both of them on the way out. And you aren't showing the other guy's when you come back. You're just another returning citizen at that point.
Basically they build a database of all citizens, maybe right now not crossreferenced to Social Security Number, but it will come. as soon as the tech is capable of it.
This is different than the passport database they already have exactly how, again?
a guy from the NSA would turn up at your door with beer and Cheetos?
Let him bring beer and cheetos, but he can go downtown and buy his own smokes. It would be cheaper for him than buying beer and cheetos.
Except, who cares if they overstayed, they're leaving! Worry about it when they try to come back!
If you don't catch them overstaying, how can you worry about it when they come back? Pray tell, how do you know that Achmed overstayed his visa the last time he was here when he's standing in front of you as an ICE officer now, unless you caught him doing it last time and put it in his record? How does the embassy issuing the visa know that THIS time they shouldn't issue Achmed the visa because last time he cheated, unless he was caught cheating last time?
Sure it is invasive,
How is it invasive? It's not looking under your clothes like millimeter waves do. It's not scanning your body for ferrous metal. You don't have to stop or produce documents or anything.
All you have to do is have your face out where it can be seen, like almost everyone already does. Heck, you have to have your face out to show the TSA security line checker anyway, because he's busy comparing your id to your face.
The airlines have already sent your data to DHS, and you're ticket data is scanned going through TSA. They know who you are and that you are at the airport. They also know where you say you're going.
Also keep in mind, ICE is already getting your picture when you enter the country. It's faster than the old manual system.
Where's the invasive?
Simple enough to do properly. Scan passports when leaving the country. The airlines already do it, use that data.
Scanning someone's passport doesn't mean that that person is the one standing there having his passport scanned. Facial recognition at least looks at the person for his identity, not his papers. It's harder to hand your face to someone else; easy to hand them your passport.
And facial recognition can be installed at the gate to watch people as they go on board. If the person intending to overstay the visa gets a buddy to help, it would be easy to defeat "passport scanning". The one who "needs to leave" has a flight out of the US and he goes through all the checkin and TSA, all nicely legal. It's a couple of days before the visa expires, so no problem. His buddy gets a flight to anywhere, just so he can get through TSA and to the gate. Swap boarding passes. Buddy flies out pretending to be the visa holder. Visa holder drives home. Buddy uses his own passport to fly back. TSA/DHS has a record of the visa holder leaving. Buddy gets credit for the flight he didn't take. Yes, it costs some money, but nobody is looking for the visa breaker. He's not here anymore!
But when the facial recognition fails to match the buddy with the visa holder when he's going through the gate, the plot fails.
how easy it is for someone to book and board a flight (let alone international) with documents belonging to someone else.
Not hard to book one. Trivial, even, if you're in cahoots with them. If you look similar, you can probably make it through security as them, too.
If this is prevalent enough that an illegal immigrant can afford it,
Afford what? A return flight? If they're on a short visa, they probably already have that booked. If not, a few hundred dollars to some non-US destination (like Canada, eh?).
Even worse, a 2 for 1 - one of these passport offenders could give their documents and facilitate someone who is on the no-fly list.
Sounds like you've just given the perfect reason for facial recognition -- to pick up what the TSA guy might have missed.
PROTIP: It's an excuse to spy on American citizens
I'm sorry, but what are you smoking? You're going through TSA processing and you've already shown your ID, so they know you're leaving. The airline has forwarded your data to DHS already, and they've gathered your passport data. Exactly what new information is this system providing regarding your departure?
No physics need be broken, only the souls of kittens when Verizon's executives come up with these plans.
Yeah, Verizon is really going to start sending you gigabit data even though you're paying for 100Mbps just because Netflix pays them money for a "fast-lane" on the Verizon network.
"Fast lanes" are not gigabit feeds to the customer over megabit hardware. The cable modem I have that can manage 60Mbps isn't going to go into 13x hyper-mode when a fast-lane provider shows up. Fast lanes means that the Netflix traffic will get priority on your 100Mbps hardware, but you ain't getting hyper-speed for free. You're doing four things at the same time while watching Netflix, well, if there's a choice between a Netflix packet or someone else's going down your pipe Netflix wins.
But the proper capitalist way to deal with competition is by beating them,
Oh, please. You can't beat the competition when you're hamstrung by requirements that they are ignoring.
not by crying to the government and having the competition banned via regulation (while at the same time decrying all of the regulation in your industry because hypocrisy.)
It is not hypocritical in the least to say that you are overregulated but that if you are going to have to meet the regulations then your competitor needs to meet them, too. It's patently absurd for any company to let their competitors off the hook for the costs of meeting legal requirements while they're still paying that price, just because they think the regulations are onerous. It is STUPID for any businessman to say "I'll pay those costs but I don't think my competitor should."
Obviously not counting any laws that give you a monopoly
There are no laws that give anyone in the ISP business a monopoly. Not a single damn one. But there are laws that create contracts that the incumbent has to fulfill that the competitors don't want to, and that's when lawsuits get filed.
Yes. That's how capitalism works.
No, that isn't. "Capitalism" is not the government competing against private business while still regulating that business. It's not one party to a contract requiring services from the other and then going into business without having to do the same things.
If you can't out-compete them then its time to GTFO and let the better company try their hand at the game.
It's not a better company. It's a company that isn't being held to the same rules, that doesn't have to provide the services that you do, and doesn't have the costs that you are required to have.
When a city "creates competition" by competing against an incumbent, they don't have to pay themselves a franchise fee for access to the rights-of-way, they get city services to do things that the incumbent has to pay for himself, they have no investors that need to get a return on that investment, they don't have to provide the coverage or services that the incumbent has to, and they don't have corporate taxes to worry about. That's not "capitalism". That's outright unfair competition, and the legal system is the exact right recourse to deal with it.
Currently, you can't start a business and run fiber to peoples homes.
Why not? We just had a story a week ago about a company called "Layer 3", which does exactly that.
The only competition is satellite,
Uhhh, no.
So these are local monopolies w/o competition. They are virtual utilities and need to be regulated as such.
The only car company that makes a car I find acceptable is Chevrolet. Therefor, they must be regulated as a virtual monopoly.
by removing the previous government regulations that caused this in the first place, namely franchise agreements.
Franchise agreements are the means by which a company gains access to the public rights-of-way. You want those agreements removed? Replaced by what, a free-for-all system where the first truck to the pole gets all the space? And the government gets nothing in return for this access?
If Local municipalities treated last mile like infrastructure and allowed any number of service providers access to the last mile customer,
They already have this. All they need to do is get a franchise to get access to the rights-of-way. The city gets a fee to maintain the common hardware (poles, e.g.), the company gets access to the right-of-way, and then the customer gets to decide who runs wires or whatever from those poles to his house.
No, getting rid of franchise agreements is not the solution, nor are they the problem. The problem is that it costs a lot of money to compete, no matter what, and you can't solve that easily.