I don't see how internet is any less a natural monopoly than electricity. Picture a residential street with 100 completely separate fiber optic networks vs 10 vs 1, now which seems more efficient. It's not like everyone connects to a different Hacker News.
It's not obvious whether it's really a bad idea to have several independent fiber networks in the same geographic area. Choice is good. And it would also necessarily imply more total capacity, which is also good.
So deciding the "right" number of network operators in one place is subjective, and comes down to what consumers are willing to pay for. Or at least it would, if competition weren't illegal. There's nothing "natural" about the monopolies we have now.
And even if it turns out that a single network is the best arrangement, it should still be possible for municipalities to choose to own their own last mile fiber and buy transit at competitive rates. Which is also generally illegal in most of the US, thanks to the lobbying efforts of the big incumbents.
And it's also absurd that we're still letting analog-era regulations govern our use of wireless spectrum. We should really have ultra wideband wireless ISPs by now.
They do the same with the fibre network in Singapore, too.
I think the British rail network might work on similar lines? The German electricity companies emphatically do not work on those segregated lines. There are some politically pushes every once in a while---Germany has some biggest price differentials between domestic and wholesale electricity prices (and some of the highest domestic prices), but the regulatory capture seems to be too much to overcome.
Choice and redundant infrastructure are different things.
If you have one wide, dumb pipe, and you paid an ISP to route your traffic from some other point on said local pipe into the backbone, you would have tons of ISP choices. The only reason more ISPs do not exist is because of the infrastructure costs.
And those won't change. You will never be in a climate where it is haphazard to rip up roads or peoples lawns or add more mess to the overhead lines to run fiber channel everywhere. In terms of cost, the fiber cable itself is not even expensive - it is the manual labor installing it all.
> we're still letting analog-era regulations govern our use of wireless spectrum.
It isn't ideology, it is the current incumbent owners of spectrum like having artificial superpowers over the future of communication.
Because with electricity, everyone gets the same power. You're tied to the same grid; your provider just meters your usage, bills you, then pays wholesale prices for the power you used. But the system as a whole only measures inputs (from power generators) and outputs (consumers). It works for something like electric power where a volt is a volt and a kilowatt is a kilowatt.
With Internet access, you're looking for SPECIFIC packets. Those packets have to be routed in a certain way and delivered over a shared, multicast last mile infrastructure. If you want the ability to choose your ISP, then while it may be the same Hacker News, the route the packets take to get there might be very different.
> With Internet access, you're looking for SPECIFIC packets. Those packets have to be routed in a certain way and delivered over a shared, multicast last mile infrastructure. If you want the ability to choose your ISP, then while it may be the same Hacker News, the route the packets take to get there might be very different.
That is only really true in the parts of the network that don't matter for network neutrality. If you want to send or receive 500MB worth of data, the last mile doesn't care whether you're communicating with Hacker News or Google or Amazon, it's all going over the physical wire that comes into your house. It's only after you cross the last mile and get into the central office that the paths of packets diverge in every direction, but those are the parts of the network that have competition.
Your ISP does not give a shit where your packets are going to or where packets directed towards you are coming from. That is the backbones problem, and most ISPs do not manage it at all. For an ISP, it is effectively electricity - the cost to route a packet is always constant, assuming they don't have meterage deals with different backbone routers depending on the destination. To them, they just care where the packet is going, to just send it in the right direction either way. And maybe billing for data usage is a valid business model, but the real world per unit costs of packets are magnitudes lower than the per unit costs of even electricity in traditional measures like kwh. IE, the modern "pricing schema" for data, where a gigabyte costs multiple dollars, is an insanely unrealistic measure - if you are not paying for the wires in the dirt.
> assuming they don't have meterage deals with different backbone routers depending on the destination.
That's a big assumption, and an incorrect one at that. Most content delivered to large ISPs is delivered by CDNs over paid interconnects (and it's been that way for a decade or more). They either pay the ISPs directly or for transit at a peering point.
> IE, the modern "pricing schema" for data, where a gigabyte costs multiple dollars, is an insanely unrealistic measure - if you are not paying for the wires in the dirt.
If you're expecting pricing to be tied to cost, you're gonna have a bad time. That's just not how modern product pricing works for ANY product. You pay as much as the service is worth to you; if it wasn't worth it, you wouldn't pay it.
> Similarly, with electricity you're not looking for SPECIFIC electrons.
Actually, I am, though its more the source of those electrons. I pay more specifically to get as much power from wind/solar sources. This is an option on my power bill that I explicitly support. I would pay more for internet access that isn't comcast and isn't tied to their stupid bs.
>I pay more specifically to get as much power from wind/solar sources.
And you are able to do this because there is a grid network, which allows your alternative energy provider to enter the market simply by connecting themselves to it, instead of having to run cables to your house.
Actually not really, there is only one electric provider here, they just give you the option of choosing to prefer power generated with renewables or not.
I don't think the actual electrons come from there its just a budgeting trick I expect.
Of course it's a trick. If you're anywhere other than an island that has no transmission lines running to it and you pay for electrical service, you're connected to the same grid everybody else is. Your power comes from the same place everybody else's does. You don't actually have a choice of where your "electrons" come from (they come from the wires, by the way, generating stations just make them move around).
Your "preference" is nothing more than providing an extra subsidy to generating stations that make the electrons wiggle via renewable energy sources.
