Regulation isn't good enough. The government needs to make their own competing ISP.

Hell, at least in the US, there's precedent for this: government builds and maintain all the roads; they run most transit and intercity rail operations; and they run physical mail delivery. At one point they even owned most of the railroads[0]. Communications and travel infrastructure are things government is moderately good at.

For some reason, we just decided not to have a government-sponsored telecom company, even when Ma Bell made it patently obvious that having all the country's telecom infrastructure be privately owned by one company was a bad idea. It's obvious that a government-run ISP is about as crucial to life in 2025 as a government-run postal carrier was in the early 1800s.

[0] In the 1970s, all of America's railroads went bankrupt. First, they discharged their passenger rail mandates into Amtrak, then they went bankrupt anyway, and then they got nationalized.

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stego-tech 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

As I’ve stated in other comments, the reason western governments don’t do this more often boils down largely to regulatory capture. Every single time there’s been a large mobilization of efforts to regulate some aspect of tech - municipal broadband expansion, cable box standardization and openness, right to repair, DMCA reform, privacy reforms, mandatory binding arbitration clauses, EULA’s, provider monopolies, etc - tech money floods into regulators and political races to counter the will of the mobilizers and their supporters. Then those same ghouls repeat mantras like “disrupt” and “deregulate” to convince people that actually it’s a good thing you only have three cellular networks, one cable provider, one telephone provider, two operating systems, and four media conglomerates to choose from. At one point these slimeballs claimed anyone who used anything else (like Linux, or GrapheneOS, or FOSS) was obviously a criminal who wanted something for nothing, such was their fear of an open ecosystem.

Regulations get a bad rap because for decades the only ones to really get passed have only entrenched existing players and (rent-seeking) business models while blocking new entrants or competitors. I’m 100% in agreement with you that every single state and country should have an internet network that’s open access and governed solely by that country’s constitutional law - a sort of digital state, if you will, with which they can court business and interest groups alike to represent their interests globally. Instead, we’re presently stuck with a “whoever donates the most money to politicians wins” model, and that means the open internet exists in spite of the interests of Capital, not because of their good graces.

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coredev_ 2 days ago | parent [-]

What you are describing sounds mostly like a US-problem, not sure it's a western gov problem in general?

In my city, the municipality owns much of the fibre. The country I live in owns a bank where you can get a mortgage pretty cheap. The good parts of GDPR or CRA are very good and was not disrupted by large corporations?

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kmeisthax 2 days ago | parent [-]

Even in America, there are plenty of places that have municipal ISPs. But it has some... interesting political dynamics.

Basically, because people move out of cities that don't have good Internet connectivity, and it's unprofitable for private industry to serve rural America, rural America's towns and cities wound up just building their own ISPs. However, since a lot of these cities tend to be in blood-red states, a lot of these networks get kneecapped by state legislatures who are bought and paid for by cable companies worried that the government will subsidize Internet service into oblivion.

For example, in Utah we have a municipal fiber network, but because our state politicians are bought and paid for by Comcast, the UTOPIA[0] network is wholesale-only. That is, the towns in UTOPIA can lay the fiber, but they can't sell you Internet. At least, not without doing a shitton of accounting work to prevent subsidization by making sure they're accounting for costs that a fully private system would theoretically[1] incur. So, because of these stupid accounting rules, you have to buy Internet from someone else who is then paying UTOPIA for last-mile access, which makes it very difficult for UTOPIA to actually break even on their build-out. Other states have even more onerous laws[2] regarding municipal ISPs.

The thing about regulation is that it can either be constructed to improve competition and market freedom (i.e. antitrust) or it can be constructed to build moats around existing competitors. The state is the root of almost[3] all monopoly, after all. Additionally, it's difficult to write competent regulation without expert opinion; and if all the experts work for 2 companies, it's very easy for those companies to 'keep the story straight' and hoodwink the public. If you have a public option, then you can 'prove them wrong', so to speak.

[0] Utah Telecommunications OPen Infrastructure Agency.

For what it's worth, I'm not in the UTOPIA coverage area, but they did also have a Google Fiber buildout in my neighborhood. I jumped off Comcast almost immediately.

[1] To be clear here, almost no telecom last-mile is actually fully private, that's why Ronald "Fuck Antitrust" Reagan was willing to break up AT&T. This is just to make UTOPIA's life harder.

[2] https://www.baller.com/wp-content/uploads/BallerStokesLideSt...

[3] Strictly speaking, in a perfect ancap world of perfect competition with no aggression on homesteaded virgin land, you'd still see monopolies develop. Both because certain companies have value as infrastructure and because someone will break the whole 'no aggression' thing pretty damned quick and make themselves the state.

	▲	toast0 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> So, because of these stupid accounting rules, you have to buy Internet from someone else who is then paying UTOPIA for last-mile access, which makes it very difficult for UTOPIA to actually break even on their build-out Washington state just makes the customers pay the costs for build-out. Then the municipal utility district always breaks even. You can finance it through a utility lien, but either way, build out is expensive; less so if someone else already paid to get fiber to pass your lot, but still pretty spendy.

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panick21_ 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Hell, at least in the US, there's precedent for this: government builds and maintain all the roads; they run most transit and intercity rail operations; and they run physical mail delivery.

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me the US government is doing a terrible job at all of these.

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kmeisthax a day ago | parent [-]

Yes, but most of those problems aren't inherent limitations of government. They're specific missteps that could have been avoided, like:

1. The suburbanization of cities turning road-building into a Ponzi scheme and transit into a guaranteed money-loser. Lowering the density of cities dilutes the tax base while increasing the need for roads and cars to carry people on them.

2. America's absolutely stupid decision to privatize Conrail without retaining ownership over the trackage. Wall Street infected all of the Class I railroads and convinced them to downgrade their own infrastructure. Imagine if your local city had sold all the roads to a private company.

	▲	panick21_ 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ok, but if something has gone on for 70+ years its not a 'misstep' that something else. And doing all these things very well is not easy even in the nations that do it 'best' and most nations are not in that class. In terms of the Post Office for example, they had to kill their commercial competitor to establish a monopoly and held back more advanced competitors like FedEx with their monopoly. Thus useful services didn't exist for many decades where they could have existed.