>Comcast is the company that seems like the entity that one would provide as an example of why Libertarian ideology can't feasibly work, but the example would seem so absurd it still shocks me it exists.
The problem with making lame generalizations about ideologies is that you can pretty much point to any one you like and claim this is an example of its shortcomings.
The reason comcast is the only provider in many locations is because of regulations that prevent new companies from laying cables. Google has effectively unlimited money to throw at Google Fiber, but it's a slow process because of regulatory hurdles.
"Comcast is the company that seems like the entity that one would provide an example of why government regulations leads to regulatory capture."
This is a debate I'd like to insert a thought into.
I'll rephrase both your sentences.
"Comcast is the company that seems like the entity that one would provide an example of how with sufficient connections and power (monetary) one can exploit any loopholes provided in a governing framework."
I do not see this is a partisan or philosophical debate. Comcast doesn't care what govt is in power, +/- some ease of operation, I believe we'll see the same modus operandi. If we leave a hole through insufficient regulation, they'll abuse it. If we leave a hole through to MUCH regulation, they'll abuse it. Here's where I start spewing generic quotes about "who watches the watchmen" and drawing parallels between the almost unwinnable battle of security devs vs. hackers (and at least in the tech world in a lot of instances we have provable math on our side, politics/philosophy doesn't even have that much to be confident in.)
At the risk of deflating any utility of my comment, I can't answer the implied question of "so what" but the correct answer to me is not believing one idiology is somehow immune to what I see as a very side-channel behavior. A focus on how to combat _that_ can be far more productive than more divisive partisanship; and at the additional risk of sounding like a tin foil hatter, "the more we fight among ourselves the more they're SURE to win."
I don't think there's a need to mention tinfoil hats. The way we combat that is by aligning the interests of would-be rule-breakers with those of whom the rules are designed to protect.
My preferred solution is a bit radical, but I think we should make digital infrastructure like internet/cable/telecoms the sole role of the government, just like the way we do with regular roads. R&D may make sense to sponsor with grants/bounties, and construction/maintenance may make sense to subcontract out, but the specs are open-source and up to the public[1] so that if some party were to say, exfiltrate user data for ad targeting use, they'd be in violation of multiple laws and would be arrested (not to mention reviled by the rest of society). It would also require a conspicuous degree and scale of security for someone who's supposed to be transparently manufacturing open hardware (which could then be further inspected by consumers - no more of this restricted binary blob shit).
[1] Implying some other process changes around increased transparency and accessibility of government, and patent reform, but we're blue-skying here.
I've heard about the utilities argument a lot, I don't know enough to have formed a strong opinion on it, but the following devils advocate point has always seemed a legitimate argument:
Govt isn't frankly great at roads+infrastructure. Given the oft-cited statistic of how many of our bridges are dangerously unsafe, I worry that if govt. were running internet we'd all be on 90s era DSL (at best).
There are other arguments rattling around in my head namely concerns re: budget allocation/prioritized areas that leave others in the dark with no free market recompence to serve that market (not to say free market is doing a good job now) but as you can see from even this slight tidbit there's a lot of back and forth in my head, and I don't know the full picture for a lot of these considerations; however the "our existing infrastructure investment isn't fantastic" is something I can observe relatively empirically. Do you have any thoughts to that?
TL;DR Those concerns are reasonable given our current implementation, but if we want to solve this problem we must liberate ourselves from the constraints of that implementation.
It's like talking about whether a feature should be part of the Linux kernel or left to userland. You can say that ideally some functionality ought to be in the kernel without asserting that the current implementation of the kernel is compatible with such ideals.
I think that most people shy away from this thought exercise ("assuming an ideal implementation were available, what would government look like if it were re-imagined from the ground up to address the challenges our society faces today?") because it ignores enough details about the current situation to feel like a complete departure from reality.
If there are objections/concerns regarding some piece of the spec, identify the general solution, even if it sounds like a tautology - then get more specific until you have a solution.
In this case, if your concern is based on the assertion that "we have not proven ourselves capable of implementing government that adequately services public works", we can examine that assertion. I'm not certain that it's true, but if it is, we can ask "why?" until we can form a hypothesis. Then apply the scientific method and repeat until you _know_ why. Then follow the same process for hypothetical solutions. ???. Profit.
Sorry I didn't really answer your question, but hopefully this provides a framework for answering it and any others you should come up with.
No sorry needed, it was the shape of an answer, at least to the extent that I feel like I can respond:
I realize the mental exercise and see the benefit of it, having done so in various isomorphic forms, and come to many of the same answers regarding systemically self-reinforcing power in the form of money and networked influence. I find very little in terms of either incentives or historical precedent to suggest that this will shift without some massive upheaval.
At the risk of being overly pragmatic from this, aside from identifying some root problems of structural government run by fallible humans, I don't necessarily see it as a path to a solution due to the depth of the root problem your analytical framework would identify (from my analysis.)
For the same reason it's not really "useful" (if we're being obnoxiously utilitarian) outside of a thought experiment to ask that question for linux (actually, to some extent, it's more useful in linux since toy OSes are more of a thing than toy governments, and have significantly more chance of both existing as experimental ventures and catching on in any real fashion) I'm not sure how this answer or thought process leads to progress?
Now my turn to apologize, since this was a bit of a braindump-response.
The problem with making lame generalizations about ideologies is that you can pretty much point to any one you like and claim this is an example of its shortcomings.
The reason comcast is the only provider in many locations is because of regulations that prevent new companies from laying cables. Google has effectively unlimited money to throw at Google Fiber, but it's a slow process because of regulatory hurdles.
"Comcast is the company that seems like the entity that one would provide an example of why government regulations leads to regulatory capture."