I really think the fact that this kind of thing can be known and reported by a newspaper means we should have some kind of anti-corruption law triggering at least an investigation in cases like this. The fact that "lobbyists for [company] act to manipulate legislature against the public interest" is such a humdrum and daily occurrence is a problem
While I believe lobbing as practiced is actual corruption, it’s totally legal in the US.
Legality aside, there are a not insignificant number of people who truly believe that private industry is invariably better than government at providing virtually any good or service, and that government involvement in anything that could be done privately is by definition harmful.
I actually had a conversation about this exact subject with a family member just last week. We live in a rural area and have awful service from Spectrum. He opposes plans for better cheaper muni internet because “The county government can only do better because they get to cheat - they don’t need to make a profit, but spectrum does.”
I personally think that a hybrid system is best. The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
> I personally think that a hybrid system is best. The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
I fully agree and am on board with this. I liken this to a “public roads” approach and (in applicable countries) a nationalized rail system. So many businesses are successful operating on publicly-owned infrastructure without the burden of maintenance. However, if everyone had to maintain their own infra like that, this same burden creates a high barrier to entry for new companies, promoting a monopoly, which leads to a situation where there is non need to compete or innovate: Build once, bill forever.
In my city, Sacramento, the collectively owned power company (SMUD) owns all the power poles and regularly sells space on them for telecom with little restriction. For internet service, I have the option of 2 different FTTH ISPs, 2 DOCSIS ISPs, and 1 DSL ISP (which is 2-3 more options than many people have). Not perfect, but it does mean there is healthy competition and customer choice. I just wish SMUD would run their own PON and sell bandwidth on it, we would then see a number of ISPs pop up and ISP-adjacent innovation utilizing this (hypothetical) city-wide PON as a platform.
UK has a national grid serving 67m people! That should be how it is done. I think they might own the last mile.
I think Australia might be the same or at least per state. They do own the last mile, AusGrid comes and repairs power poles and has a map of outages online.
Lebanon is the other extreme where you just need your own generator because the infra is localized and unreliable.
Australia has traditionally had government led national infrastructure to achieve span and system uniformity, followed on by waves of privatisation to varying degrees - for roads, power, telecommunications, etc.
It's a large (mainland USA in area equivilant) area with sparse dense pockets of population.
W.Australia has a fully independent power grid, I suspect the Northern Territory is the same. The East Coast (where the vast majority of population resides) has inter connected State grids .. including (recently) Tasmania, an island state with a great deal of hydro electricity and gas reserves.
There's quite a bit of Wind generation, too - and a whole lot of capacity for more, if the windfarms can get approval. (Roadblocks from local communities)
There's a project to duplicate basslink (500MW HVCD) - it was initially planned as 2x 750MW cables, but the three governments involved wouldn't fully agree on the increased price. Which IMO is insane because it'll be needed.
There's a dashboard showing how the various states interlink and export power between themselves[1].
> He opposes plans for better cheaper muni internet because “The county government can only do better because they get to cheat - they don’t need to make a profit, but spectrum does.”
Tell him he needs to be willing to support for the muni internet in order to get Spectrum to offer symmetric fiber in the first place.
Same way he needed to be able to convincingly threaten to cut the cord to DirectTV the umpteen times he's forced them to offer him a discount, or to let XM radio subscription expire in order to get them to drop from $25/mo to $5/mo to get him back.
Dollars to donuts he's had the experience of paying out the ass for those services. Perhaps you're lucky and he's never renegotiated either of those. In that case tell him how to get those cheaper rates, and let him feel what it's like to instantly save an order of magnitude dollars monthly.
Then you'll get a better sense of how deep those beliefs go.
> I actually had a conversation about this exact subject with a family member just last week. We live in a rural area and have awful service from Spectrum. He opposes plans for better cheaper muni internet because “The county government can only do better because they get to cheat - they don’t need to make a profit, but spectrum does.”
This argument is dumb because it has nothing to do with the government. A non-profit could take out a loan and build an ISP and not have to turn a profit.
The real argument in this nature is if the municipal ISP is being subsidized with tax money their competitors don't get. But you can solve that too: Either they pay for the network by issuing a bond and then have to pay it back from subscription fees, or if there is to be a subsidy then anybody operating an ISP gets the same one.
The actual problem here gets back to the original issue: The ISPs lobby the government to suppress any competitor. If the incumbent sucks and people hate them, why doesn't a non-profit, or any other for-profit business, enter the market and take their customers? Because the incumbent has lobbied for laws to prevent that, or will sue them under whatever pretext they can find to slow them down, try to bankrupt them and deter anyone else from making the attempt.
It's harder to do that to a municipal network because the government workers operating the network will have insider knowledge of how to deal with their own bureaucracy and have the ear of the government officials who approved the network to get any artificial roadblocks cleared away. But the real problem is that none of those impediments should be there to begin with.
> The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
You can do even better than that. Have the government install cable trenches along all the roads, then provide cheap access to anyone who wants to install fiber in them. That reduces the build-out cost dramatically and then you get competition without anybody being able to make any claim of unfairness because access to install cable is available to every individual member of the public. It should be cheap and easy enough that if you want to run fiber from your house to your buddy's on the other side of town, your primary cost should be the two miles of fiber optic cable.
> Legality aside, there are a not insignificant number of people who truly believe that private industry is invariably better than government at providing virtually any good or service, and that government involvement in anything that could be done privately is by definition harmful
Given the type of government service they’re going to get—one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese—are they wrong? Their frame of reference is the MTA (which runs subways that are late 15% of the time), the NYCHA, which runs some of the worst slums in the country, and NYC DOE which has a graduation rate worse than the subway’s on-time performance.
Maybe there’s a reason there is a market for the message “hey, however bad Spectrum is, imagine the city government running your broadband.”
> Given the type of government service they’re going to get—one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese—are they wrong? Their frame of reference is the MTA (which runs subways that are late 15% of the time), the NYCHA, which runs some of the worst slums in the country, and NYC DOE which has a graduation rate worse than the subway’s on-time performance.
FWIW, the MTA is run by the state government, not the municipal one. That being said, as someone who has lived in New York the past 8 years (still don't quite consider myself a "New Yorker", but maybe I never will), I have no strong sense that the city government would make a particularly good internet service, but even a mediocre one would be _miles_ ahead of Spectrum. I have no other option in my apartment building, and we get random outages when there isn't even a storm or anything an average of maybe a few hours a month. Their website never shows an outage when it happens, but after I check the status when our internet is down, I'll get a text in around a half an hour saying "oops, there's an outage". The idea of being in one of the largest cities in the world but not being able to get reasonably consistent internet for literally any cost is mind boggling to me, and having such a terrible service have exclusive access to my market is a much larger failure of municipal regulation than merely having a subpar municipal internet service as an alternative.
You're in one of the oldest cities in the US with decaying buildings and infrastructure. It's not mine boggling at all that service stops given the number of utility lines and urban density, especially if cables were retrofitted to your building.
I'm in one of the oldest cities in the UK, i.e. quite a bit older than NY. The oldness of a city is not an impediment to decent internet provision.
[Edit] The university in this town runs its own private ISP, which allows you to download e.g. a Linux distribution in about 12 seconds. The university includes the oldest part of town, which is full of mediaeval buildings and archaeological sites.
This is not my first apartment in New York, and I never experienced internet this bad with the other ISPs I used in past apartments. Yes, this is anecdotal evidence, but this is pretty much the same experience everyone I know has had with Spectrum. Is it really so hard to believe that they might just be a bad ISP?
> Given the type of government service they’re going to get—one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese—are they wrong?
You won’t hear me argue the NY state legislature is not deficient and/or corrupt. pushing back against monopolies writing their own legislation to kill competition is definitely a part of how we begin to fix it.
> You won’t hear me argue the NY state legislature is not deficient and/or corrupt.
What makes you think that’s the problem? The NYC school system, for example, spends $38,000 per year per student. Thats about triple what Japan spends per student. What else can the legislature do? And do you think the NY or NYC legislatures are any more corrupt than those in Japan or Germany or Sweden?
To me, the problem seems to be the workers running who are running the system, not how the system is designed on paper or how it’s funded.
> pushing back against monopolies writing their own legislation to kill competition is definitely a part of how we begin to fix it.
How does that follow? Say you defeat this legislation and NYC adopts community broadband. Will that system be fast, affordable, and reliable? That seems like putting hope over experience.
So having worked in the system before, one major headwind with NYC's operating costs is their buildings. The vast majority of schools are old, often dating back to prewar or immediate postwar period. As a general example, there is no plan to completely eliminate lead piping in NYC school buildings because it would cost too much money.
The school system spends a lot of money on inefficient heating, poor insulation, inefficient water fixtures, repairs etc. because there is no capital budget to replace schools or even these individual systems wholesale. Even finding a site to place a replacement school building is difficult in a city as crowded as New York and with NIMBYs; and then usually a new school isn't replacing buildings because all the buildings are over capacity, sometimes even 200% or 300% capacity with children in trailers on the playground and some lunch periods at 10am because there is no room in the cafeteria.
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One other thing is that NYC spends a lot of money doing things like extensive ESL education. In fact it is pretty rare for an NYC school to have zero ESL resources given the extensive immigration into NYC. This kind of remedial resource is generally not provided in a country like Japan, where only specific schools would have these kinds of resources.
Having lived in Japan, I recall monstrous class sizes of 40 or so, with only one kid that needed "Japanese as a second language" classes (that was me).
And, I live in Florida now, and the public schools here also have lunch at 10 am because they don't want to fund building a new cafeteria. It's real. But, we don't have "woke" problems anymore, I guess.
Japan has some of the best educational results in the world with huge class sizes and modest funding. If everyone speaking Japanese is part of how they achieve that, that suggests immigration is a bigger burden on our educational system than people appreciate.
Do other countries that spend much less on education not have to deal with inefficient and outdated school buildings?
And how much does ESL even cost? If it comes remotely near explaining why NYC needs three times as much money as Japan to do a worse job, that seems like a huge downside to immigration that nobody is talking about.
ESL is essentially a second staff on top of the normal staff. It’s not the only kind of support staff though; US schools mainline special needs children in regular schools because it leads to better educational outcomes and societal integration in the long run, whereas Japan usually separates most of these children into separate schools.
A lot of countries have significantly newer schools, because a lot of the physical building were destroyed like everything else during the wars, or most people moved into newly developed suburbs and new towns. NYC notably doesn’t includes its suburbs so its share of old buildings is a problem that suburban districts do not have.
> US schools mainline special needs children in regular schools because it leads to better educational outcomes and societal integration in the long run, whereas Japan usually separates most of these children into separate schools
If it delivers much worse results at much higher costs for everyone else, that seems like a terrible trade off.
this depends on if you think that the school system is more expensive than basically running an institutionalized welfare state for special needs people. The US dismantled these systems and then proceeded to enshrine these rights in the ADA.
Given that the US can barely handle the meager social security of those with work disability, it's hard to imagine that we could afford widespread, more expensive specialized institutions. And Japan is not exactly doing hot with spending given that they run a 263% debt to GDP ratio.
Does japan run an institutionalized welfare system for special needs people? I don’t believe that’s the case.
Japan has a different set of problems, but delivering efficient and cost effective, high quality education is something they get right. And insofar as special needs people are evenly distributed among various countries populations, we should be able to learn from what they do.
> > You won’t hear me argue the NY state legislature is not deficient and/or corrupt.
> What makes you think that’s the problem?
The US has a presidential system (even at the state level) where the legislative and executive branches are kept independent, which harms policy coherence
Most of the rest of the Western world (outside of Latin America) has either a parliamentary system (in which the executive is fully subordinated to the legislature) or a semi-presidential system (in which the executive is partially subordinated to the legislature and partially independent of it).
This doesn't just happen at the national level, but often gets repeated at the state level – in American states the executive (Governor/etc) and legislature are independent, in Australian states and Canadian provinces the state/provincial legislature controls the state/provincial executive
When things go wrong in the US system, it is so easy for the legislature and executive to engage in buck-passing in which each side claims they could solve the problem if only the other side would let them do it. In the rest of the English-speaking world, in most of Europe (and Japan too), that technique doesn't work, since the leaders of the legislature are also the leaders of the executive.
See also Latin America, where the same system leads to even worse problems. The US has other advantages (wealth, power, etc) which lets it overcome some of the downsides of its political system, where countries lacking those advantages can't
Under this theory, whenever all branches of government, executive and legislative, are held by a single party, we expect the policy to be coherent and the governance solid.
Suffice to say, observing the data from California or New York allows us to quickly reject this theory.
> Under this theory, whenever all branches of government, executive and legislative, are held by a single party, we expect the policy to be coherent and the governance solid
No we shouldn’t. Dominance of a single party will prevent inter-party fighting/fingerpointing/blame-shifting, but their intra-party equivalents can be just as bad. This is especially the case given the US has very weak party discipline by global standards, the party leadership has rather limited powers to tell the party’s elected officials what to do
In a parliamentary system, the executive needs to actively retain the confidence of the legislature, since a bare majority of the legislature can fire the executive at any time for any reason (and in a bicameral system, generally just a bare majority of the lower house). In a presidential system, the executive is an independent power base, separately elected, and the legislature can only remove it on the basis of serious misconduct (and often needs a supermajority to do so)
Busing, sports, schools attached to correctional institutions with crazy-high (six figures) per pupil spending may be in the same system and that may not be true everywhere. High health insurance costs for staff.
A few things off the top of my head that may be different (or maybe not!) but there could well be more.
OTOH lots of other places have far better school lunches and they’re free, but maybe those aren’t budgeted under the school but some other department. Lots of ways to get different outcomes with different accounting, without even doing anything plainly incorrect.
We don’t spend a lot of money because we bus. It’s the other way around: we bus because we have a lot of money to spend.
What happens here particularly often is that insiders (in context of schools, these are teachers and their unions, administrators, consultants, etc) are able to sell more of their services to users, who don’t mind the cost, because it’s spread among non-users (taxpayers), and they have very ability to exercise control over the insiders.
In what manner do you consider taxpayers to be non-users of public schools? If you went to a public school you're continually building on the foundation they provided. If you went to a private school you're continually surrounded by people who are as educated as the system could make them.
The world is currently in a race to see who can make the most advanced microchips the fastest, and we're doing that because it's starting to look like whoever makes the best chips gets to call the shots.
There aren't enough people who grasp the fundamentals well enough to contribute to this effort. Education is now a critical national security concern.
But NYC has an extensive and well funded public transit system. It’s unreliable, dirty, and unsafe, but that’s just more evidence that New Yorkers suck at running public services.
Are there schools attached to correctional institutions in NYC driving up the $38,000 per student spending? If we at just guessing, how about: New Yorkers are just bad at running public services?
We actually had a natural experiment with this during COVID. Schools in Western Europe and Asia quickly got students back in the classroom. But in places like NYC, teachers refused to go back to work for a year or more.
US schools are paying higher wages. We're comparing wages across international boundaries, and we're not adjusting for purchasing parity, so this isn't surprising (and also doesn't mean that US schools pay remotely well).
Not to disagree with your larger point, but comparing school performance is basically bogus. The biggest deciding factor in that is how the parents raise the kids. Do the parents raise mild mannered respectful children who are eager to learn, or do they raise little narcissistic brats who want to terrorize other students and in fact the teachers as well? That's what matters the most, not the quality of teachers or the amount of funding the school gets.
Furthermore, while there are bad teachers who hate kids and don't try, few if any start out that way. They become that way after prolonged exposure to bad students, their bad parents, and the school system which binds their hands and tells them to put up with it.
> What makes you think that’s the problem? The NYC school system, for example, spends $38,000 per year per student. Thats about triple what Japan spends per student. What else can the legislature do? And do you think the NY or NYC legislatures are any more corrupt than those in Japan or Germany or Sweden?
I wanted to ask if you were joking, but that wouldn’t be productive.
What else can the legislature do? Figure out why throwing money at a problem isn’t working. This is the point someone above made about private vs public industry. Private can’t operate at a loss. The federal, state, and local governments can, and generally do. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the federal budget deficit.
If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change.
> If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change.
Perhaps, but the better question is _how_ it would change. As we can see from the history of charter schools, typically that would happen by trying to cherry pick the least expensive, best performing students while excluding the most expensive.
As a simple example, one thing which makes large school district costs higher is that public schools are required to have expensive staff to care for students’ health, mental health, and special needs. If you are running a private school, you immediately see a cost advantage if you can find a way to discourage students who need those services from enrolling. It’s illegal to say “no special needs kids” but if you’re careful you can effectively approach the same outcome without a high likelihood of being sued successfully.
So stop trying to pay the same amount for every student and instead explicitly allocate more money to students who are legally required to be provided with more services. If you're paying for it either way you might as well have an accurate line item in the budget and mitigate the perverse incentive.
That would be my preferred option, too, especially if it allowed for things outside of school hours or locations more effectively, but it’d be a big change legally. School lunch is similar: arguably food insecurity should be dealt with separately but that’s a political minefield and so we have schools sending kids home with care packages over holidays because doing it directly is too hard to get through.
Then why would the charter schools avoid those students? They'd get more money. This would only not be the case if the funding isn't an accurate accounting of the costs.
You also gave them a graduation rate mandate, that’s why.
A school with half the funding full of healthy children of white collar professionals in the ‘burbs will graduate more kids than a school with full funding teaching kids who speak broken English, whose parents move them around a lot between schools because they’re not housing-secure, who don’t always eat breakfast or dinner, and who are on an IEP for a learning disorder.
By far the easiest way to hit a graduation rate target is to try to take as few hard-to-teach kids as possible. The funding to make up the difference in difficulty is… I dunno, astronomical. Maybe pay for their family’s entire living expenses or something.
> You also gave them a graduation rate mandate, that’s why.
If some people take longer to learn things than others, you pretty much have two options. Either you teach them slower, and then accept that they're not going to graduate on time and those students aren't going to get a high school diploma until age 21. Or you teach them less, and relax the graduation requirement so they can graduate on time. Both of these are unpleasant, but you have to pick one or you get the default option where they flunk out and never graduate.
At least in the US there is the concept of classes as denoted: AP, honors, standard. If I child can’t pass the standard class threshold, then fine, fail them.
I imagine most of us remember being in high school and there was always that kid in _every_ class that gave the teacher a hard time, caused distractions, etc.
There are, imho, two ways to handle that. Either drop the hammer on the kid, or do a home a visit. Or perhaps, both.
If the home visit shows the kid is just a jerk, keep dropping the hammer. If the kid has a shit home life, I imagine that 38k/yr could be spent in much better ways.
> If I child can’t pass the standard class threshold, then fine, fail them.
Now suppose the child has a medical condition and they have to spend half their time in the hospital getting treatment. Or they have a mental health condition and the meds only work until they build up a tolerance and then they have to switch medications and spend three months in a stupor trying to find another one that works.
They can pass the standard classes if you give them twice as long, but then they're learning one semester's worth of material every two semesters. What do you want to do with them?
> The funding to make up the difference in difficulty is… I dunno, astronomical. Maybe pay for their family’s entire living expenses or something.
Yeah, these days I lean towards housing as the root of a lot of these problems but that feels kind of that that “now draw the rest of the owl” joke. There’s so much pent up demand for affordable housing and each density improvement takes long enough that the kids affected today will probably be adults by the time we see improvements.
Or - the graduation rate would stay the same, and schools would be asset-stripped so that most of those 38k would flow to shareholders rather than school budgets.
There are plenty of examples of mediocre public services getting privatized and becoming even worse, from a capital-efficiency perspective (e.g. UK railways, UK water...). Private companies are out to make a profit, and efficiency is just a mean to it; if there are other means, even to the detriment of what should be their core mission, they will pursue those means.
The real objective is both empowering, motivating, and holding accountable the middle-management layers of essential public services: administrators, teachers, railway workers, etc. Privatization doesn't magically do that. Creating a competitive system doesn't require corporate profits.
Another example of this: in the UK the government pays as much as £250,000 per year for severely autistic young people to be looked after in private homes and hospitals. Many of these were funded by private equity. They take huge profits and the level of care is disgraceful. Even when the patients are not being actively abused [1] they are not receiving any care as such. The homes and hospitals are little better than prisons.
This always always seems to happen, and the people never wise up. Government acts as a money funnel to private companies, who pocket as much as they can as profit and provide the most criminally minimal service they can get away with.
And every time it happens and the people are ripped off, the answer is always “even moar privatization.”
> If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change.
Funnily enough NYC has charter schools which aren’t exactly this but are an approximation. They’re renowned for pushing poorly performing students out of their schools and doing a terrible job serving special needs. As a result they do indeed often have great graduation rates.
> If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change.
Often when an ultimatum along these lines happens, whether public or private, the problem winds up being "fixed" in large part by some combination of double standards, gaming the metrics, and outright fraud. Some number called the "graduation rate" would surely change, but it wouldn't necessarily mean the same thing as what was called the "graduation rate" previously, let alone necessarily represent a materially better outcome for students.
It's true, we tried. At some point congressmen and senators decided to start handing billions to huge companies based on promises rather than creating public infrastructure. Now we give money to companies who say they will make the infrastructure, they don't, they legally eliminate competition, then consume more public resources when the public sues because they never created the infrastructure.
This is America. Give companies our tax dollars to be legal monopolies and make our lives suck.
Typically, large ISPs create local laws preventing municipal broadband. In some locales they are more successful and create laws giving themselves money or monopoly status. Often, only certain providers are permitted to use public infrastructure because of the laws (corruption).
If government is installing and maintaining infrastructure then private industry becomes unnecessary overhead. This is, in effect, requesting government subsidies be directed to the corporate officers and shareholders of major telecoms firms to no obvious benefit to the larger public.
Ah no here is where people get it wrong. Government should build infrastructure by getting bids from private companies and it should be the same for maintenance and management of said infrastructure. Then the government should set performance and price targets which are needed to be met for the contracts to be renewed. So the maintainer will charge isp for the using the infrastructure as well maintaining it and charge the isp accordingly. This way there is competition where it is efficient and effective. Instead of expecting multiple companies to spend billions on parallel and redundant infrastructure.
Yeah I don't think so. Providing a profit opportunity to investors provides no additional services, cost benefit, or any other tangible public good. How anyone can even mention competition with a straight face in an era of mass mergers and capital hyper-concentration not seen since the Guilded Age without blushing is one of life's enduring mysteries. At least for a period of time the fastest residential broadband rates in the US were offered by a rural co-op in North Carolina that started as a bond initiative floated by local government because none of the major ISPs wanted to "compete" for rural customers. They didn't mind flinging lawsuits and bribing state legislators into forcing the town to divest, however. Is that what you meant by competition?
Im in a rural area and couldn't even get DSL at any point, best available was a fixed wireless LTE connection until about 6 months ago, and this is a low swampy area with tons of tall trees and the network was consistently overloaded, so it was garbage service.
Finally though there was a cooperative formed with the local power company and they hung fiber up on the power poles and brought drops down right into the home and now we get 1 gig for less than the wireless cost and completely sidestepped the garbage local telecom company who had been promising internet and not delivering for near two decades. And it didn't take them long at all to string it up down all the roads around here and then drops to peoples homes.
Similar story for me in rural Mississippi. AT&T laid fiber years ago with government money but never lit it up. We were able to get 3mbps DSL though which was almost not worth it. Power company coop spun out a ISP and started hanging fiber from the power poles and now I get gigabit fiber for less than I was paying AT&T when I lived in town.
I think you were told nonsense. Glass fibre doesn't break and shatter; it's flexible. It does have a minimum bend radius (depending on the type of fibre); but that's to do with maintaining total internal refraction, and can be fixed by straightening out the fibre again.
> I personally think that a hybrid system is best. The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
The problem that I often see with these approaches is that the companies making the profits often lobby extensively to reduce the "fees, costs..." or have the infrastructure being continously funded by society via e.g. taxes (I actually don't have an issue with initial construction being taxpayer funded). This typically results in infrastructure getting into worse and worse condition because the funds to maintain are not there. Then the lobbying calls for public/private partnership investments (where the private partner reaps the profits and the public is left with the costs). Road infrastructure is a good example, a single truck causes 10000 times more damage then a car [1], but trucks pay only a miniscule proportion of road taxes.
> government involvement in anything that could be done privately is by definition harmful.
They are religious extremists, kind of like the Taliban.
In my experience, they are not actually looking at data and are not ready to be convinced by deeper analysis, examination of natural monopolies, or examples of government successfully delivering something. There are a few in this very comment section
That's such a ridiculous argument on its face. If the government can "cheat" and give you a better service, in what way do you care if they don't turn a profit doing it?
> I personally think that a hybrid system is best. The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
Sorry but your family members argument does not make any sense. In an effort to make profits, spectrum will desperately avoid spending any money on upgrading the existing network.
I oppose municipal internet because then the municipality has to hire a staff of network administrators and a staff of people to actually install the service to households and customer service people to manage subscriptions and front-line tech support questions (or pay contractors to do all that). Lots of graft and favoritism will go in on that. Friends will get hired although they are not competent to do those jobs. County government salaries typically aren't market leading so even when those jobs aren't given to friends, they aren't going to get the best people. I have to pay for all of that, so my taxes go up, even if I don't use their service or if I don't have internet service at all.
Are you sure your taxes are used to fund the municipal Internet? In my locality they issued a bond to fund the initial trenching, and use the subscription fees to pay back that bond and fund the long term operation. No taxes are paying for it, people who are not using the municipal Internet don't pay anything for it.
Do you still oppose municipal Internet in that case?
Maybe your locality is different, but before we got municipal Internet we had basically 3 choices: Xfinity at $180/mo for ~gig down/120M (something in that ballpark) up, CenturyLink with 40Mbps or less DSL (antiquated infrastructure, they actively blocked CLECs from doing anything that could improve it), or terrestrial wireless (fairly sketchy in our environment).
Once we got municipal broadband, we finally got fiber to the house, gigabit symmetric, great customer support, and latency that was 10x lower, AND Xfinity dropped their prices.
In my town we have standard Xfinity for cable and now quantum fiber and Ting Internet laying down fiber. It increased our choice from single ISP to multiple ones.
You realize it isn't free and people still subscribe right?
Also do you realize this has already been done and worked incredibly well in lots of places with much faster speeds and cheaper prices? This isn't some wild experiment.
From an econ theory standpoint it's in a weird place: broadband is both rivalrous and excludable, so it's not a "public good" in the traditional sense, but it also relies on geographically-fixed infrastructure, so a private market for it cannot be efficient.
In the US, goods like this are usually provisioned through a metered semipublic utility. The problem is that to work, those need a monopoly.
The problem is that to work, those need a monopoly.
This isn't true and we can see it by the fact that lots of places have multiple wires run to them from ATT and multiple cable companies. Most of the time with cable a neighborhood is wired up but a cable isn't ran to a house until it is needed.
ISPs make so much profit they don't need everyone to sign up. A lot of times there is nothing to dig and it is run off a pole. They aren't giving a metered commodity like electricity, gas or water with their lines. Once a line is run to someone's house it's wildly profitable since the bandwidth per person is so cheap.
You should actually look at the books of these ISP's.
Then link something and show me specifically what you are talking about.
Loaded with debt and other liabilities and grocery store profits/net margins.
I'm not sure exactly what this is supposed to mean, but debt is how things are financed and comcast made a 3 billion dollar profit from 31 billion in revenue.
That Fed rate spread definitely puts those companies in grocery store rates
It's not a good business to be in unless you're a big investor depending on consistent earnings
They aren't "making it big"
Unless there's collusion, multiple providers means minor amounts of profit.
Bandwidth is ridiculously cheap these days once you're big enough.
The costs are in laying Fiber, power, repair and support. And definitely debt servicing.
Let's say there's a new residential block with 12 homes one mile away from another place with service from your network core
If the ground is alright or there's poles, you deliver at 15 to 20k/mile to the demarc at the building. Spend 5k for a stub or 20k for a regular connection that allows for extensions like the one you just made. Then spend 750/home for connections+CPE. Maybe extra money for IP addresses if you don't do CGNAT.
If you bill 50 a month and have no issues there you spend 7 years recovering your money before you make any profits.
When you see this you'll know why Verizon removed it's CEO after he laid lots of fiber. These numbers are assuming there's full take-up.
A single truck roll can wipe off two months of earnings from a user
There's better shares to buy. Better businesses to invest in
What point are you even trying to make? Do you know or have you lost the plot?
Above someone was trying to say municipal ISPs don't make money. They clearly can, ISPs make plenty of profit and municipal internet has been done many times before. Not only that their speeds are often higher than competing ISPs in the area.
Comcast has a 148.43 billion market cap, which includes their debt. They made over 3 billion in profit which includes servicing their debt.
That Fed rate spread definitely puts those companies in grocery store rates
What are you even talking about, this doesn't mean anything.
They aren't "making it big"
Comcast is a fortune 100 company worth 150 billion dollars. Municipal ISPs just need to work.
Again municipal internet already works all over the place. Chattanooga offers 300 mb internet for $58 USD. They offer 10 gigabit for $300.
Unless there's collusion, multiple providers means minor amounts of profit.
Prove it.
The whole point was that municipal internet works because it can make its money back over time. You making up random hypothetical scenarios has nothing to do with that.
Better businesses to invest in
Except that a municipal internet service can break the ISP monopoly, offer much higher speeds, lower prices and do it all while earning its money back.
The Fed rate spread is the difference between investing in a company and giving it to the Feds. I'm sure you've heard of "the end of easy money" and articles about if your world view was created by ZIRP. Of course another important rate is that between your profits and the inflation rate. i.e are you actually making money or running on a treadmill
Have you heard of Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Exxon, Facebook, Nvidia?
And that profit is almost nothing although the ratio is 1% into okay
Municipal broadband is a good thing. It keeps the money home. It can be successful. It's the sort of thing that's fine with very long term loans and the associated horizons
In fact most of Comcasts issues are TV related
Municipal broadband=okay
Overbuilding = very terrible idea for anyone trying to make money.
It's like trying to turn a profit in Ashburn selling carrier services where Transit is cheaper than peering
I remember that they actually got a law passed in North Carolina, I believe, that had a hilariously named law like "Save NC Jobs Act" which straight up made it economically impossible to create municipal broadband if it didn't already exist. It had things like: Municipalities had to add "phantom costs" to their rates and adhere to additional vague laws and regulations, couldn't use certain types of financing to build it, required public entities to make "commercially-sensitive data" available to private industry competitors, etc. If I recall it passed overwhelmingly just because of the name of the bill.
What if the broadband companies are right though? I would prefer having a voice in government that isn't just a politician. Obviously an unpopular opinion but municipal broadband would likely not be good for me personally.
I have no idea where you get this impression. Municipal fiber projects have by and large provided consistent symmetric fiber broadband at reasonable prices, while ISPs have invariably gouged people, provided both inconsistent and outdated services, while also selling basically any information about your browsing history they can get their grubby mitts on to everyone under the sun. Between that and abysmal customer service, there's a reason they consistently ranked among the most hated companies in the world. And yet every single one of them is making bank. What world do you live in?
The cities near me that have planned municipal broadband are spending more than $5000 per resident. I pay more taxes than the average person, so I end up spending more than I would spend on private service.
Absolutely agree. Utility company lobbyists in California recently ruined net metering (with something called NEM 3.0 that cuts solar benefits down by 75%), and wrecked the solar industry in California in the process. Nothing has been done to resolve it yet. The corrupt officials in this case were members of the California Public Utilities Commission, who are appointed by the governor. They put the interests of some greedy utility companies (who, on a different note, have caused many forest fires) above the interests of the people of California, the environment movement and its impetus for green energy, etc. It's a sad and horrible state of affairs.
The only way to stop corruption is to remove the violence inherent to the system. When corporations can no longer use government to force people to buy from them (mandates, subsidies, IP), this kind of corruption will end.
Which is why the system needs to be built on consent, not extortion.
In the military we had a saying: "There is only one thief; Everyone else is just trying to get their shit back."
The same applies to the monopoly on force, extorting individuals and corporations, but corporations can actually afford paying off and directing government towards their competition (and us individuals).
Short of a complete reboot of both federal and state governments it is unclear how anything meaningful can be accomplished in this space. Understand this is politicians doing their job by promoting legislation their constituents support. The issue here being corporate and special interest groups pay for politicians to run for office, making them the constituency that is served.
Fixing the electoral commission to allow for better influence from the public could be helpful.
Independent redistricting commissions, banning political Gerrymandering/requiring competitive districts, publicly financed political campaigns, and rank choice voting would all have positive impacts on who gets selected and the ability of a constituency to replace them when they don't vote in their interest.
I note that California has an "Independent redistricting commission" and it gerrymandered the state more than the previous "by legislature" system. (Exactly how do you determine "independent" in a way that isn't easily gamed?)
Of course, there's also the "define gerrymander" question.
The typical answer is some variation on "minimize the perimeter of districts." That's measurable but why is it good? For example, it doesn't follow interest group lines
Sure there's several roadmaps to get back to something approximating representative government but they all have to get through legislative bodies that have been well and truly captured by corporate interests and oligarchs. The issue isn't that we don't know what representative government looks like, it's that we don't have one and there are no clear incentives for elected officials to make supplying one a priority.
How would you prefer the lobbyists act? Corporations do have interests and it’s sometimes beneficial for those interests to be taken into account when creating laws (e.g. Intel with fab construction).
Intel fab construction is exactly the kind of corruption we’re talking about here. Trying to manipulate markets via subsidies is horrifically inefficient and thus a vast waste of taxpayer dollars.
Regulations, Research, or Taxes. In this case tariffs would be the obvious option as there’s no long term costs beyond the inherent inefficiencies of domestic production.
Huh? Either the chips we need are made on an island surrounded by Chinese warships, or they are made in Arizona. That’s what this is about. It’s not some abstract concept.
It's not as silly for cable lobbyists to want something they shouldn't have as it is to have people on the gov payroll attempt to write it into law. Even more silly is for journalists to not name the offenders. Those evil cable lobbyists did this!
"Against the public interest" is the vaguest bar for investigation I can imagine, it's even vaguer than "probable cause" in policing! As long as you can find a person who disagrees (and presumably pays taxes), you're good to go on "against the public interest"?
Your example is too vague to make much of, frankly, but in theory I'd believe perhaps it's possible for lobbyists' positions to align with or at least not contradict the public interest, though recent decades have shown precious few examples compared to the sheer volume of fuckery like this. A law could be written to not target all lobbying activity while still being able to draw useful distinctions between doing harm in the name of profit and providing some kind of useful industry insight (whatever that may be) to the process of government
>Without lobbying, how would corporations share their expertise on the matter for politicians to take into account?
There is literally an entire govt department in the US whose core job is to unbiasedly keep the politicians informed on the expert details of the areas they're legislating.
Specifically, the Library of Congress (this is why the US Congress has a library), and it's Congressional Research Service.
What really shocked me most about lobbying and campaign contributions is how little money companies can spend to effect radical change. I always thought there were millions of dollars being given to campaign funds. But it’s often just a few thousand or tens of thousands.
You can't give millions of dollars to politicians. There are laws, and yes, they're enforced.
It's not even "thousands". Those are actually just the individual employees making donations. You have to name your employer so that the election commission can make sure they aren't filtering money.
The power brokering happens in terms of trading favors. Often, trading votes. (And these days, "issue ads", which was the Supreme Court's big ole fuck-you to election finance laws.)
> As we reported last month, buried in language near the bottom of the Assembly budget proposal was a Trojan horse legislative sources said was being pushed by lobbyists representing Charter Spectrum.
I'm not sure what a good solution to this problem would be though.
I do not expect my congressperson to be an expert in every issue. So they should go to the experts. What do you do when the experts have a vested interest in one narrative?
> I'm not sure what a good solution to this problem would be though.
A more powerful Congressional Legislative Counsel akin to the Congressional Budget Office.
There is currently a House of Representatives Office of the Legislative Counsel and it does a lot of great work like summarize each bill, but it's rarely involved in legislative drafting unless explicitly asked. It should operate more like the CBO which gets called in for every bill that might impact government finances and the California Office of Legislative Counsel.
They have that power due to corrupt elected officials, who is the corrupt elected official here? You need to write giant hit pieces against every corrupt politician who introduces such things or these things never get better. That will be almost everyone at first, yes, but as things improve it will be less and less, and after a while it might be like a typical country instead of almost every politician.
The problem isn't that lobbying is allowed, the problem is that corrupt politicians are allowed to act without punishment due to the press not caring about it. Blaming "lobbying" is just politicians way of deflecting blame when it is their own fault.
Bill Gurley’s talk during the 2023 All-In Summit provides interesting perspective on the type of regulatory capture that leads to bill modifications like this. It’s worth listening to if you have an idle 30 mins.
https://youtu.be/F9cO3-MLHOM
