Serious question here. Is this law more or less stating that the business gets no revenue back from local or state government? I have no issue with the argument that internet service is a basic right but if that is the case, I would expect the government to either offer the service or pay a market/agreed price to cover the cost for low income users.
I think the logic here is that the government has already subsidized them by granting privileges to use public infrastrucure that was built with tax dollars. There can only be so many wires running on the poles or under the streets so in return for that privilege, you have to provide this in return.
> By the end of 2003, Teletruth estimates that every household in Pennsylvania has paid in excess of $1,135.00 for a fiber optic service they will never get. Teletruth estimates that the total overcharging to be $3.9 billion or more in excess profits, tax deductions, and other financial perks, including funding other business ventures through cross-subsidization.
In the UK, the lines are owned by the government and ISPs/telcos rent access to provide service.
This allows for pretty strong competition from the ISPs and stops there from being a billion dead lines buried underground.
To me, government owned lines and connections makes the most sense for society.
I think that's also a big part of why the US train system sucks. Private entities generally don't want to own that infrastructure, they want the trains that can haul the goods. So make them rent the line and have the government manage access just like they do with airplanes and roads.
That is not, and has never been, true. BT was privatized in 1984. Over the years since then, they've been forced by regulators to open up more and more of the stack to competing ISPs. At one point, you could buy wholesale services like ISDN lines or p2p E1 circuits. Later, ISPs could rent space in the telephone exchanges and individual copper wires. In the current FTTP world, they can either rent a layer 2 service or deploy their own fiber in BT ducts and pay a few pence per meter rental.
> they've been forced by regulators to open up more and more of the stack to competing ISPs.
The 1996 US Telecom act did this and all kinds of local ISPs popped up to compete. We suddenly had cheap DSL all over the place; people left dial-up in droves.
But citizens don't write laws, lobbyists do. Within 10 years, ISPs had clawed back all their monopolistic control. Now most of the US is under a monopoly/duopoly again.
BT also employ lobbiests, and there's regular controversy in the industry over ofcom not regulating them hard enough, or in why exactly they won the original 2010 era rural fibre contracts but overall I guess they simply don't work as hard as thier ATT counterparts;)
> I guess they simply don't work as hard as thier ATT counterparts;)
Since at least the 1950s, AT&T has been so tightly tied to US Gov+NatSec, it's practically another agency.
To illustrate that: AT&T once faced a lawsuit for aiding US Gov's unconstitutional, warrantless wiretapping (also for cloning backbone traffic for the NSA).
When Congress presented a bill to grant retroactive immunity to AT&T, both Obama and Clinton paused their presidential campaigns. They flew back to DC to cast their Yea votes and protect AT&T from any possible accountability.
US news orgs weren't able to spot anything out of the ordinary in that.
> When Congress presented a bill to grant retroactive immunity to AT&T, both Obama and Clinton paused their presidential campaigns. They flew back to DC to cast their Yea votes and protect AT&T from any possible accountability.
Your facts are a little scrambled: are you referring to 2008 [0] or 2012 [1][2] or both? I guess you meant 2008 because both Hillary and Obama were running for President; but Hillary was absent from the 2/12/2008 vote, [2] claims Obama voted against it. I located the bill: [3] "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008" and that Senate vote record from 2/12/2008, although it says "Clinton (D-NY), Not Voting", "Obama (D-IL), Not Voting"(?). You'd expect journalists to get important facts right. Meanwhile US media barely covered that vote.
[0] 2/2008 "Telecom immunity remains intact as Democrats split on vote" "Obama voted with 30 fellow Democrat Senators, but not the absent Hillary Clinton, to allow the telecom companies to face lawsuits... on the [Bush] admin's programme of warrantless wiretapping. But the immunity survived, with 18 Democrats crossing over to support George Bush."https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/feb/12/terrorism.u...
[2] TheAtlantic: "The Supreme Court Isn't Bothered By the NSA’s Warrantless Wiretapping" ... "refused to hear a case that holds telecom companies accountable for letting the warrantless NSA spying" https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/supreme...
No, your facts are very scrambled, you were incorrect about the 2/12/2008 vote that passed it 68-29-3, there were 14 roll-call votes on that bill, not one. Saying "Hillary did vote against the bill" is totally wrong about the 2/12/2008 vote; congress.gov says both Hillary and Obama weren't present or voted present (as did Lindsey Graham). The claim "They flew back [from campaigning] to DC to cast their Yea votes and protect AT&T from any possible accountability." was wrong. I even dug up the exact bill and the timeline of all 14 votes for you:
I believe it. Verizon have a fairly extensive backbone in England and Scotland, all their own duct and chambers yet it's impossible to buy wholesale service from them, even if you're big. I wonder what it's used for :')
Just to be clear, I agree. Despite its faults, I still think we are quite fortunate to have BT Openreach in its current form as a country.
I can understand that perception. Essentially, Openreach is regulated so heavily by the government that it might as well be considered public, from the perspective of 'what services it must offer, on what basis, to whom, and the prices it must set.' However, it is a private company, being a 'firewalled' part of BT
OpenReach is a private company, and has many loopholes to not support you if they do not want to. If you have a line issue and they cannot find the root cause, they will black list you.
I had an intermittent fault on my line which OpenReach couldn't (wouldn't?) resolve when I was with Zen. Magically after switching to BT, they sent out BT engineer, who escalated to OpenReach, who then found the fault and replaced the dodgy part in the green box.
It might be "firewalled" but that's not my experience. It shouldn't be firewalled, it should be a separate entity. The only reason to bundle it with BT is if BT was getting a benefit from it.
We've had BT/OR announce several times over the past 5 years that they are installing proper fibre in the area to squash competition, and then quietly cancel. Funny how we have an AltNet laying fibre here and suddenly BT/OR are getting their act together to upgrade the area.
Similar experience in Canada with our telecom cartel. They're legally required to allow other providers to use their lines but if you need support you're out of luck. We had multi-day outages routinely and a Bell tech couldn't find any issues. We finally switched to FTTH when it became available because we need reliable internet to work from home.
BT customer service are just as hopeless at dealing with OpenReach as everyone else.
I spent three months trying to get them to switch my line over to fibre after OpenReach had stated it was available. Their approach was to hope that waiting long enough would fix the problem.
Eventually someone just closed my existing line and immediately opened a new one.
What alternative would you prefer? It would be ideal to turn openreach over to either it's own heavily regulated PLC or a MIC/COOP, but can we really force that in a capitalistic society, when the current status quo is 'acceptable'?
I would prefer openreach were force to sell a regulated single strand dark fibre product, that can be used however the CP wants, but it would cause genuine chaos for ORs business model e.g leased lines would be cancelled.
This type of system is called “common carrier”. (The firewalled part of BT acts as a common carrier).
Because of the way physics and fiber optics work, having a common carrier that rents out access to wavelengths or bandwidth on the fiber strands is the best economic model, by far.
I disagree since BT/OR * don't rent out fibre or wavelengths. They rent out layer 2 vlans (they own the OLT at the exchange and the terminal in people's homes) this means they set the package speeds, price points and use whatever technology they like. For that reason many ISPs have decided to instead rent duct space from BT/OR and each install thier own fibre. That is not really a common carrier, more like common duct.
*except in very rural areas for highly specific use cases, or in the case of wavelengths for medium range high capacity backhaul.
Also, lots of parallel fibre was laid by NtL and friends in the early 2000s, which is the useful stuff. I think Virgin Media bought it all, and that's what they offer as their broadband.
Fun fact - if you try to purchase broadband from a service that runs over BT infrastructure, the price you'll be charged will vary depending on whether there is also a Virgin Media service that would also be available to you. As in, if there's no competition, you'll be charged more. That's price gouging, and I think it should be illegal.
There's currently a lot of non-BT fibre rollout taking place. Mostly in cities (Hyperoptic et al), as well as B4RN and similar non-profits infilling the rural locations.
Nonsense, Openreach is the worst possible option for consumers. It is just a way to syphon wealth from a previously publicly owned asset to the global elite via dividends.
It just hasn't blown up as big as Thames Water, decades to get a fibre connection (other countries did fibre 15-20 years ago so it was possible) doesn't annoy as many people as filling rivers with sewage.
I'm not a big fan of privatisation either (particularly the way this was handled) however you realise under the GPO there were waiting lists to get a telephone line, and it could easily take months?
Have you tried interacting with a state service recently, like renewing your passport maybe? They are not exactly the pinical of innovation, speed and efficiency.
The fact most of us can get a 1Gb full fibre service for 30-40 pounds a month (and faster is available, for a little bit more) is not bad.
Never forget that BT was rolling out fibre across the country when they got privatised, had production in the UK running. The public BT foresaw the need for fibre and the cost of copper in the 70s, and was preparing, once Thatcher sold them off and tried to woo American ISPs that couldn't offer an equivalent, they sold it all off on the cheap and communication infrastructure in the UK was set back decades.
Thanks that's interesting. At least the affect was shitty broadband rather than filling rivers with sewage, which is what water company privatisation got us.
If the government owns the lines, what are private telcos... actually doing? Operating the webpage that lets you put in a credit card to pay for service?
Don't know how it works, but I do think that's how it should be. Municipality providers dark fiber from the CO(s) to every house.
From there, any ISP can rent rack space, and arrange their own backbone/uplink, and get wired to whatever customers they can. Municipality charges a fee to use the fiber, and that's it.
Muni provides the line to the CO, ISP is responsible after that. They can compete on their internet speed, price, support, and whatever else they want (Netflix box, email, low latency to game servers).
Muni could even add a "no-internet" free service that just provides access to city services, library, etc.
> I do think that's how it should be. Municipality providers dark fiber from the CO(s) to every house.
We have a variant of that here. An indy company just laid fiber here but they don't provide service. Instead I have a choice of 8+ competing fiber companies.
Before fiber, I had 1 'choice' of ISP and paid $124/mo for 1Gb/40Mb w/ 40ms latency to the IX.
Now my choices include 1Gb/1Gb $49, 2Gb/2Gb $79, 10Gb/10Gb $199 w/ 4ms latency to the IX.
Wouldn’t that “no-internet” service actually run afoul of the newly reinstated Net Neutrality rules? Or is there an exception in it for non-commercial or governmental services?
The line is a piece of copper or glass that ends in a port in a rack at central point. The ISP is providing the connection from that point in the building to their equipment that does switching, routing, and yes billing you.
In Australia the government a private company owned by the government largely owns the last mile (except where competitors built fibre first). All the backhaul between "points of interconnect" is owned privately.
As a user though you pay for bandwidth at the interchange because that's how the old privatised and divested government monopoly did it.
The model, last mile public utility but all the speed private wouldn't be all that awful if it weren't butchered by various vested interests. In theory the current last mile company will be sold once it becomes profitable.
Last mile ISPs bring your traffic between your house and an internet exchange somewhere in the nearest major city. Transit ISPs bring it from there to some other internet exchange in a different city where the opposite endpoint is. The premise here is that the government would handle the physical part of the last mile and then customers would either buy "internet service" from a transit ISP or from someone reselling transit because the transit provider doesn't want to deal with customer support and retail billing.
YES, roads, water, sewage, electricity, it could all work with this formula. It could all be added to the long list of things you pay for that are build and maintained by taxes. road service providers, water service providers, sewage service providers, electric service providers etc Picture it!
But in that case, doesn't it make more sense for the government to just cut out the middleman and offer internet to consumers directly? What is the company's value-add?
The ISP company offers customer support, installation services and the fiber modem, and owns the equipment in the network closet that peers with the backbone.
They might even own the peering network closet (which is often a weatherproof enclosure with a backup generator).
> If the government owns the lines, what are private telcos... actually doing?
Providing Layer 3.
Just like the government owns the roads and highways, and lets UPS and FedEx use them for delivery.
The theory is that roads/fibre are natural monopolies, but the services that use them can be competitive. There just needs to be a fee for the upkeep of the infrastructure (but it doesn't necessarily need to make a (hufe) profit).
This is cool, but the government wouldn't be keen on updating the cables, would they? You'd be locked in to whatever cable the local government can afford.
Outside plant cable doesn't really change. Telco copper wires, CATV cables, and optical fiber are pretty much it. They stay in place for decades. OS1 from 2004 is the same quality today. You just swap out the transceivers at the ends for better speeds.
> This is cool, but the government wouldn't be keen on updating the cables, would they?
They charge ISPs for use of the infrastructure and that funds maintenance and upgrades. For the sort of core upgrades that occur every few decades, they can do a bond referendum to cover shortfalls.
It's the same setup our private infra does here. They own the fiber in the ground and ISPs pay then to sell services.
It can be harder for a private infra company to get in the ground because they're limited to municipalities that aren't captured by telecom/ISP lobbying orgs - but still have a dense enough population.
> To me, government owned lines and connections makes the most sense for society.
I used to think that but now I'm not sure I still believe it. I worry that government owned lines doesn't result in "everyone gets fiber to the home now" but rather "nobody gets fiber yet cause we're still getting cable in Internet to the last X rural users."
From my experience most government programs are more focused on ensuring that _everyone_ has the same baseline experience rather than anyone having a better experience. I don't see why internet lines would be any different.
In the US, the rails are private and the government owns the passenger service.
In Europe, the government owns the rails and the passenger service is private.
People try to frame these issues as "socialist/capitalist" or some nonsense all of the time. But the reality is that neither system is more or less capitalist than the other. It's just one is better structured than the other.
However, having lived in a town in the US that has had a public ISP for decades, it was abhorrent. Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service. So I think there is an argument to be made that we may take for granted a bit the difference between rails/roads and fiber optics.
> Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service. So I think there is an argument to be made that we may take for granted a bit the difference between rails/roads and fiber optics.
Municipal ISPs and ISPs leasing municipal infrastructure dominated PCMag's speed ratings until they excluded local ISPs. Many have excellent satisfaction ratings. Large private ISPs consistently have some of the worst of any business.
> Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service.
Well, there's two aspects at play here.
For starters, you do need to be a certain size as an ISP to really offer cheap services. Imagine, for example, being a town of 500 with a municipal ISP. You'd end up with a lot of equipment to store and maintain and to really be effective, you'd have to employ a bunch of people that spend most of their time doing nothing. (After all, how often would the customer service rep for a small town ACTUALLY be answering any calls?).
That's why a state, county, or national? run ISP would probably make more sense, especially in more rural locations.
That being said, in the UK with BT and the line rentals I described earlier those worked unreasonably well. ISPs could complain to BT to fix problems which ultimately left the various ISPs in a region to compete on tech and price. That was a win for the customer.
This was not at all a small public ISP. And it was managed by the city power company, so it had the economies of scale already.
There's a lot of nitty gritty policy weeds of what went wrong. But the main one was that after the public ISP incorporated in the 90s as a complimentary service to a public cable network, the state passed a legislation regulating public utility rates. Good for power/water/sewer/cable customers. But it meant that the city could not charge customers differently even with wildly different internet speeds.
Going into the 90s, as the internet aspects became more important, they couldn't keep up with upgrading the lines, especially given the costs would be born by all customers regardless of what speed they were getting.
But I think one lesson is that internet and other utilities are not quite as functionally comparable as people claim. Per capita consumption of water has not quadruped in the last 10 years, but home internet has! So the case for internet as a public utility will be stronger when the need for constantly upgrading infrastructure plateaus.
Maybe, infrastructure. But having spent time in both the US and in Europe, I cannot begin to even describe how much better average customer service in America is compared to Europe.
But I think that is also what holds up the adoption of public services - the difference between typical customer service in the US and say, the Post Office or DMV, turns a lot of people off from the idea of public ISPs or etc.
(Although, based on some time spent in Munich makes me think the quality/availability of broadband in Europe is also not all that).
I'm sorry but you cannot begin to compare ATT or Comcast customer service with say even BT in the UK. And if I value say customer service highly I get to choose from one of a hundred or more ISPs. Zen, or A&A for example probably have some of the best ISP customer support in the world.
In many other spheres I will concur America has a better customer service culture. But I think alot comes down to taste and incentives. I am happy with not getting fussed over at a restaurant for example, and the odd frustration comes weighed against the fact I'm not really socially obligated to tip (although usually do).
I struggle to think of places that are more customer friendly overall than the US. There are certainly some companies with generally less favorable reputations like, say, Comcast but that's often a result of having a captive audience. One might even argue that our largest consumer oriented companies span so many different industries but all share good customer service and experience as a cornerstone.
The majority of British lines are owned by OpenReach, which is a subsidiary of BT, which used to be run by the government, but was privatised back in the 80s.
But they have not been owned by the government in decades, and there are competitors who have run their own lines.
You don't need it to be government owned. While that is certainly one effective way of doing it, another can be to let whoever wants to build it build it, but require them to give access to competitors for a regulated fee.
There are many ways to do it, e.g. the former monopolist (a now-privatized company that was created from the part of the government doing it) having a mandate to supply everyone.
The downside of having the government do it is that if the government screws it up, it takes decades to fix, while private companies can swoop in much faster if one company is doing a bad job.
It depends how empowered your regulators are. In many European countries that's how it works and it is literally a better system than the government doing it themselves.
Back when passenger rail still made sense, and was run by private industry, it was great. But it’s been mostly obsoleted by automobiles and airlines. There’s a certain population density where it’s still competitive with airlines, but in the US that only exists between Boston and DC, which is also the only profitable part of Amtrak and would work a lot better if Amtrak could be privatized and focus their investments on that route instead of being forced to run a bunch of subsidized nostalgia routes for train geeks.
“Train geeks” have no meaningful public policy pull, it is silly and counterproductive to insinuate they have much to do with lobbying and promoting long distance rail especially east of Chicago where most of the routes aren’t particularly touristy.
> would work a lot better if Amtrak could be privatized
That’s a bold claim. While I’m not knee jerk anti-privatization, I’m extremely skeptical that privatizing the NEC will be anything but a fleecing of the public since most of the problems are due to aging infrastructure requiring billions of dollars of investment - which even with your beloved cars and airplanes is not something handled much by the private sector. People who argue it’s bad now just assume you’re too much of an idiot to imagine it could be worse.
Under their former CEO Richard Anderson, Amtrak achieved profitability for the first time in its history and had a solid long term business plan that entailed focusing on Acela and investing in improvements there at the expense of the unprofitable outlying routes (many of which are west of Chicago). We could privatize Amtrak next year and they could follow that same business plan—in fact, they’d probably have to. But unfortunately Anderson’s tenure and plan did not last very long, since “Amtrak CEO” is a three year political appointment.
> “Train geeks” have no meaningful public policy pull, it is silly and counterproductive to insinuate they have much to do with lobbying and promoting long distance rail
So who do you think managed to stuff $22 billion of Amtrak subsidies into the 2021 infrastructure act? Fairies?
There are tons of small, dedicated lobbies that are organized and effective enough that they can pressure the government into these sorts of policies, and the train geeks are certainly one of them. Or maybe they just managed to infiltrate the ranks of policy staffers. These people hated Anderson because he was threatening their favorite “historic” long haul routes, like the Seattle-Chicago “Empire Builder”, in favor of focusing on Acela.
> So who do you think managed to stuff $22 billion
Well congress ultimately, but as far as actual influence? Maybe start with: Labor unions, manufacturers throughout the supply chain, maintenance vendors - you know entities with actual money and financial interests. Also, local constituents and representatives where the train service happens to go, like it or not the train service is hugely important to the chamber of commerce in general of a place like Syracuse for instance where an air carrier just pulled out and one of those destinations is Chicago - it matters not much from optics that the journey takes longer than 100 years ago. The idea that the “train geeks” have anything measurable to do with it doesn’t pass any smell test. Moreover, the companies and organizations that are involved and do exist don’t magically disappear in any imagined privatization future. I also have a hard time believing that a motley bunch of train geeks somehow has any pull over the ReDUcE GoVERNmENT SpENDInG crowd.
> We could privatize Amtrak next year and they could follow that same business plan
The NEC corridor still needs billions of dollars of upgrades and maintenance. Again that is something that the public sector has almost invariably footed the bill on.
As for your initial thesis in this comment, it’s straight up garbage that has been discussed to death, and you have to assume I’m an uninformed moron to believe it uncritically.
I’m not going to repeat this:
https://viewfromthewing.com/amtrak-is-lying-they-are-nowhere...
The NEC is profitable if you hand wave away most of the costs like maintenance, and the infrastructure so the those brand new trains they just bought (the $10 billion spend just after Mr Andersons tenure, so as not to derail your narrative) can go more than 80mph (there are still major chunks north of NYC that can’t manage that).
I believe you are being willfully disingenuous so will not continue this conversation further.
> you have to assume I’m an uninformed moron to believe it uncritically
> I believe you are being willfully disingenuous so will not continue this conversation further.
Wow, such hostility. I'm not being willfully disingenuous; you just have a short temper and have a hard time staying civil, but I'll give you a second chance and try to respond in good faith here.
> Maybe start with: Labor unions, manufacturers throughout the supply chain, maintenance vendors - you know entities with actual money and financial interests.
Sure. Pork barrel politics all around.
> Also, local constituents and representatives where the train service happens to go, like it or not the train service is hugely important to the chamber of commerce in general of a place like Syracuse for instance where an air carrier just pulled out and one of those destinations is Chicago - it matters not much from optics that the journey takes longer than 100 years ago.
Amtrak (which doesn't provide working deep links, and doesn't let me look up routes unless I turn off my ad blocker) offers a 13 hour overnight train at roughly the same fare as that two hour flight. What practical customer value is Amtrak providing on this route? Maybe train service between Syracuse and Chicago was faster 100 years ago, but it wasn't as fast as as a two hour flight, and it's not going to be. So who actually cares, aside from train geeks and, as you pointed out, people with a vested interest in federal pork?
> Moreover, the companies and organizations that are involved and do exist don’t magically disappear in any imagined privatization future.
I think a lot of them do "magically disappear" if they're dependent on government subsidies in order to remain economically viable!
> I also have a hard time believing that a motley bunch of train geeks somehow has any pull over the ReDUcE GoVERNmENT SpENDInG crowd.
Please, look at any graph of government spending over the past century and then try to tell me with a straight face that the "reduce government spending crowd" has any pull at all. Government spending does not get reduced. On the other hand, the federal government still subsidizes useless train routes that nobody needs, like the Syracuse to Chicago service you pointed out, or the Seattle to Chicago service I pointed out.
> The NEC is profitable if you hand wave away most of the costs like maintenance, and the infrastructure so the those brand new trains they just bought (the $10 billion spend just after Mr Andersons tenure, so as not to derail your narrative) can go more than 80mph (there are still major chunks north of NYC that can’t manage that).
My claim here is that you can make up the shortfall by eliminating all the useless routes that fail to compete with other modes of transportation. Maybe I'm mistaken about this, but you haven't really shown me hard numbers that account for the elimination of useless routes.
> I just looked up flights between Syracuse and Chicago
This has absolutely nothing to do with the point being made (which was why the mention that the train is slower now was even mentioned): a gross miscalculation of general politically relevant public opinion for long distance rail service.
Even so, if you actually want to understand the indisputable utilization of some of these routes, search say only a week out rather than a month and the differential might be more like $120 for a train ticket and $600 for plane ticket. And compare peak to off peak times where plane tickets will sky rocket but rail differentials are far more modest. Those "affordable" fares also have an $80 differential between basic economy and economy, the privilege to even bring a carry-on bag let alone checked baggage. Getting to and from the station is often cheaper than the airport.
> So who actually cares
And here's the thing, many of these routes do sell out or come close to doing so on a daily basis. With a few notable exceptions, they're not running light trains around. In the case of the aforementioned train averaging about 500 pax in each direction. It's not my job to convince you that the majority of these 500 passengers are not train geeks. Yes it is hard for me to comprehend that is the first thing someone would think critically, as if the majority of those using Greyhound and the Chinatown line are "bus geeks".
It's not like I'm saying axing some of these routes is a not a reasonable enough opinion, but my initial reply was pointing out the ridiculous premises.
> Please, look at any graph of government spending over the past century and then try to tell me with a straight face that the "reduce government spending crowd" has any pull at all.
To keep this on topic, compare a system map and timetable of Amtrak today vs 30 years ago.
> My claim here is that you can make up the shortfall by eliminating all the useless routes
And ignoring the $10 billion of outlay for new trainsets and the $16 billion dollar Gateway for starters (these are just for the NEC).
> This has absolutely nothing to do with the point being made (which was why the mention that the train is slower now was even mentioned): a gross miscalculation of general politically relevant public opinion for long distance rail service.
Your point didn't come across very clearly. I'm sorry about that; I also get frustrated when my points don't come across clearly. But I'm operating in good faith here.
I don't understand the relevance of the point that the Syracuse to Chicago train is slower than it was 100 years ago. You can fly from Syracuse to Chicago in 2 hours. No train is going to compete with that--maybe a maglev or hyperloop, but not a train. So if the train service between Syracuse and Chicago is going to compete with air service, it's going to have to compete some other way.
> And here's the thing, many of these routes do sell out or come close to doing so on a daily basis. With a few notable exceptions, they're not running light trains around. In the case of the aforementioned train averaging about 500 pax in each direction.
That's great. If those passengers are willing to pay ticket prices that cover the full long term costs of maintaining their share of the infrastructure they're using, then you could have an economically viable privately operated passenger train service. If not, then the ticket prices are artificially low and should be raised. If raising the ticket prices makes the ridership disappear, then it doesn't have economic sense to run a passenger train route.
> It's not my job to convince you that the majority of these 500 passengers are not train geeks. Yes it is hard for me to comprehend that is the first thing someone would think critically, as if the majority of those using Greyhound and the Chinatown line are "bus geeks".
No, you're right. You've convinced me that the widespread public support for Amtrak doesn't come from people naively romanticizing passenger rail, but rather a coalition of people effectively freeloading off the American taxpayer. As a result I am now even more opposed to Amtrak.
> would work a lot better if Amtrak could be privatized and focus their investments on that route instead of being forced to run a bunch of subsidized nostalgia routes
I don't think that's a fair assessment. There's a public non-monetary value that is gained by having broader accessibility to routes that aren't necessarily profitable. USPS has a universal service obligation for the same reason. We also do the same thing (even more explicitly) with air travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service
I don’t think anyone actually relies on Amtrak service in any meaningful way. The only line that anyone might rely on, Acela, is profitable by itself.
USPS has a universal service obligation but also a legal monopoly. Meaning that if you try and start your own postal service, the feds will literally shut it down and throw you in prison. Its probably no coincidence that USPS also has abominably nonexistent spam filtering, to the degree that the majority of USPS service I’ve received in my entire adult life consisted of myself throwing away and/or shredding the vast majority of crap that they shove in my mailbox six days a week. And any suggestion that maybe they cut down to shoving crap in my mailbox 5 or even 4 days a week is treated like it would be the end of Western civilization.
The point of universal service isn't to have routes that a lot of people use. The point is to have routes that few people use, so that places that are otherwise unprofitable to serve have access. The places that are profitable to serve are going to get service anyway.
> The point is to have routes that few people use, so that places that are otherwise unprofitable to serve have access.
Can you name one city or town in the US that is dependent on Amtrak for basic transportation? For instance, is there a single town anywhere in this country that doesn’t have a highway or airport but does have a train station with Amtrak service?
> There are people who do not drive or fly but use trains.
So this isn't about providing people with access to transportation, because people do, in fact, have access to other transportation options. It's about catering to the whimsical preferences of people who like to ride trains. I don't think catering to those whimsical preferences is a necessary public service.
That's ridiculous. Different modes of transportation have real pros and cons, this isn't just whimsical preferences. That's why every city in America has at least a few options for transportation.
> Different modes of transportation have real pros and cons
Exactly. And the pros and cons for trains, as a mode of transportation, have made them a less viable option for most American journeys ever since the mid-20th century. When you say "there are people who do not drive or fly but use trains", you're not describing the typical, reasonable person who weighs the pros and cons between different modes of transportation, you're describing someone who refuses to even consider alternate modes of transportation. Maybe it's not necessarily a whimsical romanticism for trains, but it's certainly something well short of any actual necessity that's deserving of public subsidy.
I disagree. Just like the USPS USO and Essential Air Service, I think it is not only worth subsidizing accessibility beyond the whims of the free market, but it is a duty of the government to do so.
These things should be done exactly because they are not the norm. There are people in unique circumstances in every corner of this country who rely on niche options. I know some of them who have relied on these things. The free market can take care of “normal” people and circumstances just fine.
America's locomotives are diesel-hybrid electrics, so pretty efficient and maintnence is reasonable. You'll see those in Australia and Canada as well, and even China (only 72% electrified, so if you take a train to Lhasa, it will be a diesel hybrid electric...athough they are currently working on an electrified line). 100% of the trans-siberian railroad is electrified, which is impressive.
if renting use is viable, then why isn't construction or maintenance?
i mean this honestly: an investor may not get crazy returns every year, but they get stable returns every year. why is owning and maintaining infrastructure unattractive?
I generally consider myself very politically liberal but the idea of the government controlling all internet infrastructure is truly bone-chilling. At least with many ISPs owning the lines we have some semblance of possibility that government tampering with information would be noticed. If all traffic passed through a single entity’s control, we’re only a slippery slope away from the Great Firewall of USA. Probably justified by either preventing terrorism or CSAM.
Other countries with filtering regimes just obligate their private ISPs to block, eg, torrent trackers or Facebook or whoever. Governments have plenty of leverage over ISPs already, namely that ISPs have employees, addresses and hardware they can seize.
There's no reason to believe that commercial entities would be any less likely to spy on you than a government entity. The government can just pass security regulations that require access to infrastructure with gag orders in place so the infrastructure owner isn't allowed to talk about government access requests or actions.
The trick is simply to ensure you pick a government that isn't going to pass that kind of invasive legislation, or will remove it and retrospectively revoke all access granted under the legislation that they're repealing.
As for Great Firewall of USA, what makes you think it doesn't exist already?
The Snowden leaks proved otherwise. That was over a decade ago, it's wild that everyone just forgot it all and then went back to framing the same fears as hypothetical.
This ownership model doesn't necessarily give the government access to the contents of your communication. It could be gov-owned dark fiber, rented and lit by private parties at each end.
Edward Snowden revealed this was all already happening under robust private industry.
Privatizing publicly built infrastructure did not inoculate us from surveillance.
To actually do it we need to exercise control through the collective mechanism we call government. Laws, regulation, oversight, audits, sunshine policies. It's the only way to curb it. Mistrusting your only mechanism of control and putting blind faith into private markets did not work. We tried it. It failed.
When the government is the one pressuring AT&T to have a secret room, how is the government going to save you from it?
The actual problem is the centralization, regardless of whether it's public or private. There shouldn't be two ISP options, there should be a thousand, so that anyone wanting to compromise all the traffic has to compromise a thousand independent entities, some of which can then be operated by stubborn curmudgeons who would rather loudly go to jail than silently betray the public.
A. Break up the companies, assume mergers and acquisitions don't happen, consolidations never happens and that someone will be defiant of the law in the public interest at a crucial point
B. Change the law
It's important to note that AT&T was broken up and there once was many mobile carriers and there were many surveillance and spy programs going on during that time unabated and then they just bought each other up.
So instead of wishing on a hope and a dream that some invisible hands will orchestrate unexplainable market magic, let's just change the law. There's actual historical evidence of that working.
Or just prohibit them. That's a change to the law you can actually see is being enforced.
The problem with changing the spying law is that the spying is happening in secret, so there is no way to verify that they're not lying to you as they have in the past. Laws with no accountability mechanism are a farce. They need to be backstopped by verifiable structural inhibitions on the practice, like diverse decentralized infrastructure subject to competitive pressure and plausible independent reimplementation by anyone who doesn't trust the incumbents.
> someone will be defiant of the law in the public interest at a crucial point
This is required to turn back injustice. But it's more likely to be achieved the more people have the opportunity to do it.
They already tap into every cable, no matter whether they own it or not. See NSA breaking into Google datacenters and wiretapping cables. Granted, they were only able to do this because the internal traffic was not encrypted. Still, global traffic analysis is nothing to scoff at, and with enough surveilance points privacy becomes almost nonexistent, even in the presence of encryption.
In london I used to have 4 different physical fibre providers available plus one which is fibre to the building and cat5e to the prem. At a retail level there were hundreds of providers to choose from.
Most of the country has more than one physical fibre (or FTTB/FTTC/CATV) provider available.
It's easier to build resilience as a single network or organization than by "hoping" to have that with two different ISPs (who will obviously both of taken the cheapest route dig wise between A and B). If I need two diverse fiber paths between points X and Y, I can go to one provider who can contractually guarantee diversity. For example, they can ensure that maintenance work on Circuit 1 is not scheduled at the same time as Circuit 2, and that the paths are never less than X metres between them, as they are fully aware of the two paths.
And then Circuit 1 and Circuit 2 are taken down at the same time because even though they have diverse paths they're part of the same underlying DWDM system which has just encountered a fault.
Ensuring there isn't a single point of failure is not just as simple as 'putting it in the contract.' Carriers can and have groomed their primary and backup circuit on to the same L1 path without realizing it.
That should only happen if your protection is at the optical layer which hasn't been common for a decade or more, partly for that reason.
I've never seen it happen in 20 years. Although of course small parts of the path change over time and sometimes that means bits get put in the same duct for a short run but that also happens when you buy from different providers to be honest. With some carriers you can insist they send you updated route kmls when they change either path and you can detect the change as you'll see different losses/otdr traces before and after a maintenance/fix.
The one ISP is not going to do that automatically, because it costs more. Then only banks and others willing to pay a massive premium get it. And sometimes even they don't, because they run completely redundant fiber paths along different streets and then use the same OEM's equipment on both of them and a bad software update takes them both out at once, or their union goes on strike and cuts power to the whole operation before they walk out.
Meanwhile diverse ISPs wouldn't be using the same A and B. ISP A has a central office in a high rise downtown, ISP B primarily targets single family homes and has their switching equipment on a piece of land next to a substation in suburbia, so if you subscribe to both you not only have links coming from opposite directions, they're each operated by independent organizations instead of a monoculture.
That might be your perception, but let me give you real life state of affairs in the UK.
In the last decade a number of ISPs have popped up and decided to fibre up areas. They are invariably buying OLTs from Nokia or Adtran (the same two vendors as BT OR) putting them in a BT OR exchange because that is cheap and very convenient, good access to backhaul etc and then renting BT OR ducts and poles to install the fibre in/on (PIA). To top it off they often are using the same fibre vendor as BT and sometimes even the same contractors to install it. Worked example of this; netomia/youfibre (though there are dozens).
What resilience are we really gaining here? Organisational, and that's pretty much it.
You've created an environment where there is a single large incumbent and the ability and incentive for anyone else to piggyback on their existing infrastructure.
Now suppose that anyone could run an ISP out of their house. They wire up a few of their neighbors and then make a single long-distance run to one of many backhaul providers, none of which has a dominant market position like BT. The backhaul providers connect to their customers and each other in telco hotels, but they're smaller and more numerous because each of the largest providers has their own, so the city has three or four instead of one.
Meanwhile even if you have a BT, organizational independence in itself is better than nothing.
Are there western countries with no incumbent telecom provider?
It is a fine concept but you'd have to actually ban infrastructure sharing between ISPs and be building a completely Greenfield network. Quite theoretical. I'm aware of former eastern bloc countries that have dynamics somewhat reminiscent of what you describe though.
It's not that you have to prohibit it, it's that you have to somehow break their existing monopoly if it already exists, and it's easy to choose rules that don't actually break it but instead cause it to be a de facto utility again. So for example, if the incumbent has a monopoly on transit or interconnection, you have a problem because they could just charge prohibitive rates and bankrupt all their competitors. And prohibitive rates are same thing as banning them from using it, aren't they? It's what happens by default. But then the competitors can't get off the ground because the incumbent has a vertically integrated monopoly.
You could require them to provide those services for their competitors at regulated rates, but then you're not actually breaking that monopoly, you're just regulating it while cementing it in place.
If you have an existing monopolist then first you have to thoroughly break them up, not just mitigate the continued existence of the monopoly.
Laying down competing bundles along the same path gains you very little resilience.
For the smallest issues, you can expect a single bundle to already have spare connections. For bigger issues, almost anything that takes out one bundle will take out the neighbors too.
Ironically, the internet is a US government project that was opened up to external participation. The US government has historically controlled significant parts of core internet infrastructure, and didn't fully hand over control of the internet until October 1, 2016.
Governments already control private ISPs and compel them to have the capability to tap massive amounts of data, IIRC 1%. Were also talking about owning the lines not the actual switching and routing, in either case the taps would likely be placed at the ISPs offices.
Exactly. Govt owning physical fibre in a P2P network (i.e one fibre back to the pop per user) is perfectly fine because an ISP can encrypt between the pop and the user (that comes as standard with pon for example) but anything* involving active equipment is a massive no no in my view.
So for those poles running down the street in front of your house, ISPs are already paying ~$20 per pole per year. Places like NYC probably also take a cut of the revenue on top. In some regions, this is the primary gatekeeper against competition!
It's really hard to argue that this is a subsidy - if anything it's the municipalities using the power of their natural monopoly.
The revenue cut for use of public streets is known as the "franchise fee." For the legacy cable companies, this was fixed by federal law in the 1980s at 5% of total revenue from cable television. For legacy phone companies, it varies by locality, but it's based on landline phone revenue.
There's a federal law from the 1990s banning any such taxes or fees from being charged on internet service, so cities don't collect anything based on that.
I think you are exaggerating a bit. I have a pole in front of my house that just serves me and my neighbor. I pay $480 a year for Comcast, my neighbor gets CenturyLink.
So the cost for the pole rental works out to about 5% of Comcast's service cost to me.
Keep in mind some poles cost more than others (up to $250 according to the report), and that there are also hookup costs for the pole are ~$1000.
I'm not saying ISPs are suffering here, but cities are not providing this infrastructure at a loss.
> I have a pole in front of my house that just serves me and my neighbor
Hah. We live in veeeeery different housing densities I guess. I was thinking this was NYC, which would be closer to mine. If it's the whole state then probably somewhere in between.
> There can only be so many wires running on the poles or under the streets
This seems like saying "there can only be so many condos in a city, so we have to ration them." Hypothetically if you had billions of fiber optic cables running along the same street you could physically run out of space, but that's an implausibly high number. Meanwhile you could easily have hundreds to thousands without any trouble.
> so in return for that privilege, you have to provide this in return.
The point of even wanting to do that is in order to charge a sustainable price for the service. If you had to provide the service below cost, why would you do it at all?
The conduit would be owned by the government, sure.
All regulatory systems result in a specific market. There is no natural form. In the absence of any laws, people use violence or coercion to seize power and then start making their own rules, effectively becoming the new government and shaping the market with whatever rules they impose (or refuse to impose while excluding another government from forming).
The question is, what kind of rules have good outcomes? Lots of people propose dumb rules, like price controls, that have dumb outcomes. Some rules have okayish outcomes but are still subpar and less efficient or effective than better rules.
The best rules create a market with vigorous competition. Because then you don't need the rules to specifically create other outcomes you like, you just choose the provider who provides them, since the rules have done the most important thing and ensured that you have that choice.
Depending on what infrastructure is already in place, I think $15/mo might be many times the break even price of supportable customers per unit of equipment/infra if amortized over a couple years.
I work for an ISP. We actually build our own fiber networks by stringing fiber along aerial infrastructure to cover whole neighborhoods and then doing drops to individual houses on orders and supplying the ONT, and we can make that work and be profitable after a few years at ~$50/mo, but that's what I would consider many multiples more expensive to deliver than providing service over existing infrastructure, if that's actually what's being talked about here.
And this is in CA and in the bay area and LA areas, so I doubt the regulatory and cost difference factors significantly, unless there's some cost required to be paid to the city to use their infra.
If only a few people can use a limited resources like cable space on a pole, the government should auction off the privilege to the highest bidder. And then let the winner decide how they want to use what they bid for.
The government can use the revenue from the auction (and general tax revenue, too) to help poor people. Though I would suggest to just give poor people money so they can decide for themselves, instead of deciding for them that they should spend their limited resources on eg internet access.
Even more: Verizon et al have built the backbones on public land with public subsidies. They didn't even pay for the costs of building the backbones. They didn't pay anything back to the government in 20 years. Now they want to claim that the backbone is 'theirs'.
Yeah I was thinking that might be the case as well and I can see that argument making sense too. This especially makes sense if they get assigned regions with zero competition.
On the other hand these types of rules seem like they would be hard to perfect I would almost rather have municipal run internet.
I don't know what the costs are but my point is more that its setting price for a for-profit entity. It gets sticky because I don't know NY state law and perhaps these groups have lobbied for getting regions where you are unable to compete as n independent and with that defacto monopoly they should play by any additional rules.
I would just assume that if you want to provide broadband service to low-income that the government would be making up for some of the lost revenue.
The government is letting you provide service using tax-payer fiber. That makes for a fair bit of profit. Take away the fiber n try operating an ISP. Oh I know there's StarLink but that's not going to giver everyone in a city broadband.
25 mbps isn't much, but... $15/month probably doesn't cover any line to your house.
A low cost landline was $10/month 10+ years ago, and usage was extra. I think that's an ok baseline for a connection that needs maintenance and service.
I think there's also the factor that the US government has already paid ISPs for last mile installations several times now - the line to everyone's house has been paid for... if an ISP diverted that money into stock buy backs I'm sure they can explain that to the court and instead be found to have fraudulently expended that subsidy.
Some of that is one time cost, but you've got ongoing costs like pole maintenance and replacement, repairing breaks, trouble tickets, call centers, etc.
I just don't think you can do that for $15/month, even if the capex of build out has already been paid for. Maaaybe if you had near 100% uptake, like landlines used to have. But no ISP is getting that. Most (certainly not all) people can choose between wired internet from a telco and a cable company, and 4g/5g is available in a lot of places, starlink in less dense places, and a lot of people don't need a separate home internet plan because the only networked device is their phone.
My understanding is there are already federal incentives to get less dense areas wired, though I'm not up to speed on the state of that - a quick Google tells me that USDA has loan and grants for it but unclear how well funded that is and how that would impact economics at $15 and $20 a month.
Given that more than half of the population of NY is in NYC and Long Island, I would imagine that there is enough density and economic diversity at least downstate to make this at minimum cost neutral though this is total conjecture.
As an aside, I remember the days of companies partnering with CLECs taking advantage of rural connectivity loopholes to create free conference calling services by billing larger upstream carriers and splitting that revenue with service providers, which was pretty clever.
I think $180/year/person would more than cover what little maintenance is needed in non-disaster situations. I've maybe made a few phone support calls over the last 1 or 2 decades of broadband service. That would add up to $1,800 – $3,600 for 5 or 10 minutes worth of work.
If it's cheaper to build out their own fiber and not have these plans, that is an option these companies have, too.
well wholesale copper line rental in the uk is under £10 a month, and that includes capex pay back. So it is possible for an internet service but it will probably not be enough to allow for much if any allocation of the capex payback. (and that is sort of OK if you are able to take a position that they would never of taken a full price service anyway. 1 dollar a month back to the capex of building out to that house is better than 0)
25Mb doesn't cost any more or less to provide than say 500Mb in reality. If your last mile infrastructure supports those speeds then it supports those speeds. Even the cheapest router possible to buy will do 500Mb.
This comes down to an argument about what "cost", it will cover the marginal cost of an additional subscriber sure (e.g additional customer support, sending a router out, taking a payment each month, 500GB/month across the backbone etc) but will not really be enough to payback the capital cost of the original fibre or coax rollout.
> 25Mb doesn't cost any more or less to provide than say 500Mb in reality. If your last mile infrastructure supports those speeds then it supports those speeds. Even the cheapest router possible to buy will do 500Mb.
It can once you start adding up all the customers and worrying about 'upstream' connectivity.
One thousand customers at 500Mb can potentially saturate a 400Gb link; one thousand at 25Gb cannot. One has to do capacity planning and average and worst case scenarios to worry about, especially at peak times.
It's only slightly more peaky, and there is no more, or very little additional aggregate bandwidth used. I promise you if you've got 2 x 100G links out of an exchange you will not be able to visually tell from the traffic profile which is 5000 500Mb customers Vs 4000 25Mb customers and 1000 500Mb customers.
My limited experience seeing how some of these deals play from the inside, it's usually some sort of a conflict or hostile take over; and the "poor"/"rights" argument is leveraged to attack the other party.
This applies also to politicians buying votes and getting random companies to pay for it. It's easy when it's someone else money.
National retail ISPs should not exist. All Internet should be municipal broadband that should be subsidized or free by the state.
I welcome any ISP who is unhappy about this giving back the broadband infrastructure that governments have already subsidized and paid for as well as given legal monopolies to by, for example, banning municipal broadband.
I also welcome eminent domain to solve this problem.
For the past couple of decades internet access at home has usually been provided over copper phone lines. That infrastructure was originally laid across the country by BT, which was government owned, until a decade ago. The actual digging and trenching work was often done by private contractors, but the resulting infrastructure was owned by the government.
When ADSL broadband rolled out in the 2000s, BT offered their own service, but they were also forced to allow other companies to provide internet access over their infrastructure. At the end of the day the speeds were the same regardless of who you chose, but they competed against each other to gain customers. Unlimited broadband quickly because a thing, and the prices stayed low (compared to the US). Over time they did upgrade the service, and now you can get close to 100mbps over the same, often 40+ year old, cables.
In large cities fibre is rolling out, but it's being done by private companies. The UK has a lot of small towns and villages where that won't make sense, so it will be interesting to see how the market looks in the next 20 years.
Yeah I don't think the UK is the best example. Not as bad as America, sure. But we've been very very slow to roll out fibre or even broadband, especially outside big cities and towns, as you noted. That's exactly why it makes more sense for a single government entity to do this.
In fact BT were going to roll out fibre in 1990 (yes really, I didn't believe this when I first heard but it's true) but Thatcher killed it because it would have given them a monopoly... Yeah. That's exactly as dumb as it sounds. Thanks Tories.
As long as we make sure that the public pensions that will collapse after the expropriation of the utility companies are not bailed out, I am in full support of this. At the end of the day, the largest investors in most utilities are unfunded pension programs (Usually government) desperately looking for a higher rate of return after legislatures overpromised.
Yeah yeah, I remember growing up at the tail end of municipal essential services (USSR). For example, plumbers! You call up the municipal services on a Saturday with a water leak, and they tell you "the plumbers are out till Monday, and actually Monday is fully booked so see you Tuesday". I am not sure if private plumbers were fully illegal or a gray area, but we didn't "know a guy", so my mom used to be pretty good with plumbing fixes.
As long as competition exists or can be enforced, municipal services should not exist.
Most cities capped transit fares at one nickel when streetcars got started and the US was on the gold standard. These laws remained in effect even through massive inflation through two world wars, and usually didn't get repealed until the companies failed, the government took ownership of these services and then realized how much they cost.
I think the 70's gas rationing in the US was another example of where price controls absolutely stomped on consumers.
I'm not sure if there are any examples to the contrary, but there are surely people who benefit as, say, 'winning' a rent controlled apartment (but I wouldn't necessarily consider that those people were ever actually consumers in the market to begin with).
A lot of interesting policy options in that case - thanks for sharing.
I think an evolution of government is necessary, likely where a relatively blank slate is needed to flush out the influence of regulatory capture - and most important where each political party comes forward to present their actual party platform that will update/remove what existing laws in place - basically a version controlled repo like Git facilitates. This way there will be an exact breakdown, exactly in the place of existing laws for the layperson et al to go through it in an easy UI/UX; along with commentary and conversation - similar to how the Genius.com allowing line-by-line threaded commentary.
90% of NYC's subways were built by two private companies in the 19teens and 20s, then they got regulated and their fares got capped until in the late 1940s they were going bust and the city "nationalized" them.
The streetcars between Queens and Brooklyn got killed this way too, and not even replaced.
It's horrible. But public transit yo!
It's funny. In the U.S. the federal government doesn't get to nationalize industry thanks to the Steel Cases. The States don't do it either because they compete with each other. But the cities do do it, and what can they nationalize? Public transportation is what they have nationalized. In other countries it tends to be the inverse. So Buenos Aires has an amazing privately-run public transit (bus) system that is the envy of any American city, and that's because in Argentina they nationalize big companies, not piddly ones, because the politicians who can do it are at the federal level, and they "dream big".
I wish we could put all public transit in the U.S. in the private sector. Then finally we would have real public transit options.
Private transportation only works when all forms of it are privatized. A big reason the railroads and transit companies failed in the US was the construction of interstate highways that were free to use.
Rail failed for transit because it's inflexible. Busses already get to be much more efficient than cars and much more flexible than trains. Rail is a fetish.
Rail does one thing really well; it fits a lot of people into a tight space, much tighter than any road or bus lane. A single road lane carries 2,500 people per hour per direction; the same figure for a grade-separated railway track is 30,000 at the low end and 90,000 at the high end. This is vital in places where land values are high and land acquisition for a sufficiently sized highway, parking lot etc. becomes too high.
Rail generally hasn’t failed in places that are dense enough to support it; Europe, East Asia, and even a few North American cities.
> Rail does one thing really well; it fits a lot of people into a tight space
This is negated by its downsides:
- rail is supremely expensive
- rail is even more expensive to relocate
- therefore rail is fixed forever
- which means you can't alter routes to fit changing transit demand patterns
Rail is dead. Rail is a fetish. It's an exceedingly expensive fetish. It's malinvestment for anything other than cargo.
> Rail generally hasn’t failed in places that are dense enough to support it
But not most of the U.S., China, Africa, Russia, etc. Even places dense enough for rail would still be better off making better use of roads for busses.
China and Russia have a lot of railways and use them extensively. In fact China operates the world's largest high speed rail network at 45,000km, and 10,000km of urban rail transit. Russian Railways represents 2.5% of Russian GDP and the Moscow Metro is the 8th largest metro in the world and the 7th busiest.
Africa doesn't really have railways but it also doesn't really have roads because the state of African infrastructure is poor in general.
Is this like everyone has the right for a bank account?
In Germany public libraries have free internet access, I rarely see people there though (and in libraries in general, they have the most expensive magazines to read for free!)
I don't know if it's codified anywhere (and unlike Germany, we've got 50 states' worth of laws), but public libraries in the US also [almost always] provide free Internet access.
...and somehow, I'm not at all sure what that has to do with a New York City law requiring ISPs to sell Internet access for people's homes at a price of $15 monthly -- regardless of where in the world a public library might be.
Are the states in Germany similar to the states in the US? I thought they were merely a relic of pre-WW1 unification, after the 1990 reunification, but that the states were just administrative entities with no independent sovereign power.
The states in Germany are basically US States 2.0 (in the sense of optimizing from learnings) as Germany is a federalist country like the US. Some taxes and adminstration is local (police, education, ...) and some is federal (other police, military).
Each state has a parliament ("Parlament"), a governour ("Ministerpräsident") and secretaries of state ("Minister"). Some states have a constitution (like Bavaria) and a supreme court (similar to states supreme courts in the US).
One difference for example, VAT is a federal rate, but both states and the federal system get money from it.
One difference that is always striking to me, judges in Germany are not elected, neither are the police, like sheriffs. There is not jail/prison difference.
The German "constitution" and setup (e.g. Germany has a Supreme Court, but not set by the president, and a "senate" and a "congress") was heavily inspired by the US system (e.g. compared to the French or British system) - the other driving force was a fear of a re-rise of the nazis. So some things got overfederalized, for example every state has it's own internal intellegence service (which hinders work a lot, but prevents a take-over of internal intellignce).
Some states are "pre-WW1", like Bavaria, most are not (only 4-5 out of 27 are). I live in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern which was several states and parts of Prussia "pre-WW1".
Eastern Germany had no states (for most of the time), so those states came into existence with reunification.
Interesting, i didn't know about the "Bundesländer" having their own security services. Maybe that is why Germany has a reputation for poor security services as whole, as it is harder to direct resources. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing and makes sense given the history.
The UK started electing the head of the police service for each county, and it just becomes a politicized popularity contest with anaemic voter turnout, rather than having a competent person take the position.
At least we don't elect judges, which has an even worse effect of politicizing those tasked with interpreting and enforcing the laws concocted by politicians.
Yes. For example EU have eliminated excessive roaming charges between telephone operators in the EU. That brought down costs for consumers by multiple orders of magnitude.
In practice, price controls can work well when there is no efficient price competition.
It might be cheaper for all and easier for the ISPs to instead pay money in lieu of servicing customers into a city-/county-owned municipal co-op for $15/month.
This seems... excessive. I'm all for cheaper internet, but why even bother with $15 at this point? Why not just make it free?
Both companies and consumers are going to be completely at the whim of regulators. If they start jiggering around with the means testing and or the completely arbitrary price point, I'm not confident the quality won't deteriorate or ISPs pull out of the state altogether.
At this point, internet is like electricity. Except that I have more choices for power providers than I do for internet. In my building in New York City, I have one option (cable via Spectrum), and the cheapest plan they offer is $80 per month.
It recently got a lot faster, which is nice, but I'd happily pay $30/month instead for a small fraction of the bandwidth. But I can't.
I wouldn't qualify for the hypothetical state enforced $15 option anyway.
>> Except that I have more choices for power providers than I do for internet
>I've lived in over 15 different places in the US, and I have never, ever had more than 1 option for power provider.
In NYC, Con Edison[0] delivers power to customers. It also generates power, but other power generation companies share their delivery infrastructure in NYC.
As such, there are at least half a dozen folks I can buy my power from. But all of it is delivered by Con Edison -- which, by the way, charges more for delivery than it does for the power itself.
This may well be different from other places in the US/world, but that's how it is here.
N.B.: I too, have only two choices (spectrum and RCN) for broadband where I live, but (as I mentioned) at least half a dozen power providers.
In SF I have two power generation options and one delivery option. It’s stupid because one of the generation options is both cheaper and greener (I don’t know of any reason to prefer the other), and delivery is literally 3x the generation cost so it doesn’t matter much either way.
A combination of some napkin math and 2020 Census data suggests that ~35% of the US population lives in a state that the above article declares to be "fully deregulated".
In bay area I can choose between PG&E and Silicon Valley Clean Energy for power. PG&E even handles the billing for SVCE.
In Finland there was local monopoly for delivery and power could be bought from numerous companies. I just checked offers for my old place and I could choose between 250 different products, some from same companies (e.g. fixed term/permanent, guaranteed wind power, market rate). In there you would get separate bill from your power company rather than it being handled by the local delivery company.
US Law often requires power generators to operate separately from distributors. Even when it's the same company, they have to operate as two separate businesses, and it's illegal for them to even mention certain information to each other as it's considered anti-competitive. The purpose is to allow the market to provide competition. This is not specific to NYC.
In many places your delivery is fixed but you can choose who to buy the power from. It’s all mixed in the grid of course but they do buy proportionate power from the generation companies.
It’s more common in gas service in my experience than in electric.
Personally I have 10+ choices for gas supplier, 2 choices for buried internet (eg excluding Starlink, etc), and 1 choice for power (co-op)
> At this point, internet is like electricity. Except that I have more choices for power providers than I do for internet. In my building in New York City, I have one option (cable via Spectrum), and the cheapest plan they offer is $80 per month.
Why limit yourself to cable internet in 2024? Cellular home internet is widely available and fast.
>At this point, internet is like electricity. Except that I have more choices for power providers than I do for internet.
"choices for power providers" in this context is probably the choice of the company that generates your electricity, not the company that delivers those electrons to your house. Given how the electricity grid works, the exact electrons you're getting might not even be related to the company you're supposedly buying power from. In this respect the electricity provider can't really be compared to an ISP.
Electrons aren't being delivered. The drift velocity of electrons at typical currents is very low, alternating current all but guarantees they're not going anywhere anyway, and even if they did it would only be to the local distribution transformer.
Considering I pay $50 for 10 gig internet here in the US, I suspect those poor downtrodden ISPs can afford to add a small percentage of marginal customers at $15/mo and still at least break even on all of them.
You paying $50 for 10 gig doesn't mean internet costs $5/gig to provide and you can give the poor broadband access for 13 cents. Most of the cost is fixed, $15 is uneconomical for any ISP in the US.
that was neither stated nor implied as you intuited by your "13 cents" vs my comment about $15 being break-even.
Curious about a source for $15 being uneconomical. It's just a SWAG on my part that it's break-even, but if you can state that it's uneconomical for any ISP, I'd love to see it. And is that uneconomical to do for 100% of their subscribers? or even for a small share? As you know there's a difference between marginal cost per additional subscriber vs each subscriber's share of the total fixed costs.
My guess is you've never had to provide network support for 10,000 households, with their busted up routers, virus-filled PCs, and the helpless people who own them.
> I'm all for cheaper internet, but why even bother with $15 at this point? Why not just make it free?
If we were talking about 15¢ per month, I would ask the same question. But, like... $180 every year seems like a lot of money to me?
For comparison, ad-free Netflix costs $15.50 per month. Youtube Premium is $14 per month. And while I haven't looked into the details, I keep hearing Mint Mobile podcast ads for a cell phone plan with unlimited data for $15 per month.
That mint mobile $15/month offering is only for the first 3 months, after which your rate doubles to $30/month, and after 40GB in a month you will be throttled.
> For consumers who qualify for means-tested government benefits, the state law requires ISPs to offer "broadband at no more than $15 per month for service of 25Mbps, or $20 per month for high-speed service of 200Mbps," the ruling noted. The law allows for price increases every few years and makes exemptions available to ISPs with fewer than 20,000 customers.
Okay, so they're either going to make the application process an extremely painful experience so nobody will want to go through it, or make a ton of shell companies where each one is dealing with less than 20k customers.
You think it's more cost effective for a company to artificially restructure itself into a obscured collage of vanishingly small cells than for them to offer a fixed-price minimal-service tier to a specific set of low-opportunity customers who probably have high collections issues under normal circumstances?
This assumes you only have one TV doing 4K streaming, but most households might have more devices consuming bandwidth.
Also, between $15 for 25mbps and $20 for 200mbps, the telco is making more profit off the latter, because at that scale bandwidth is dirt cheap and most services like Netflix deploy servers on-premise inside the telco's network.
> This assumes you only have one TV doing 4K streaming, but most households might have more devices consuming bandwidth
But no households are doing 8 simultaneous 4K streams. The "but you might be doing more than one thing at a time" case is really uncompelling once you get up past 100Mbps, as much as ISPs want to make people believe otherwise in their marketing.
The application process is trivial, because all you have to do is show you're already a recipient of an existing government program such as Medicaid or free school lunches.
And courts will see right through shell companies. It's such a non-starter no company would be dumb enough to even try it.
And for what it's worth right now, Charter Spectrum in the state already sells a 50mbps access package for $25/mo all-in with similar requirements.
So they just gotta save face and drop the price another ten bucks and figure out what broadcast fee they'll slowly increase over time to compensate across the rest of the customer base.
I don't know New York law, but pretty much every jurisdictions has mechanisms for determining that a company is a subsidiary that is not an independent entity. Whether or not the law currently takes that into account, if anyone plays stupid games with that expect the law to be changed accordingly. This is hardly difficult to untangle.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/verizon-pennsylvanias-com_b_7...
> By the end of 2003, Teletruth estimates that every household in Pennsylvania has paid in excess of $1,135.00 for a fiber optic service they will never get. Teletruth estimates that the total overcharging to be $3.9 billion or more in excess profits, tax deductions, and other financial perks, including funding other business ventures through cross-subsidization.
And it's far from just PA
https://newnetworks.com/bookbrokenpromises/
In the UK, the lines are owned by the government and ISPs/telcos rent access to provide service.
This allows for pretty strong competition from the ISPs and stops there from being a billion dead lines buried underground.
To me, government owned lines and connections makes the most sense for society.
I think that's also a big part of why the US train system sucks. Private entities generally don't want to own that infrastructure, they want the trains that can haul the goods. So make them rent the line and have the government manage access just like they do with airplanes and roads.
The 1996 US Telecom act did this and all kinds of local ISPs popped up to compete. We suddenly had cheap DSL all over the place; people left dial-up in droves.
But citizens don't write laws, lobbyists do. Within 10 years, ISPs had clawed back all their monopolistic control. Now most of the US is under a monopoly/duopoly again.
Since at least the 1950s, AT&T has been so tightly tied to US Gov+NatSec, it's practically another agency.
To illustrate that: AT&T once faced a lawsuit for aiding US Gov's unconstitutional, warrantless wiretapping (also for cloning backbone traffic for the NSA).
When Congress presented a bill to grant retroactive immunity to AT&T, both Obama and Clinton paused their presidential campaigns. They flew back to DC to cast their Yea votes and protect AT&T from any possible accountability.
US news orgs weren't able to spot anything out of the ordinary in that.
Your facts are a little scrambled: are you referring to 2008 [0] or 2012 [1][2] or both? I guess you meant 2008 because both Hillary and Obama were running for President; but Hillary was absent from the 2/12/2008 vote, [2] claims Obama voted against it. I located the bill: [3] "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008" and that Senate vote record from 2/12/2008, although it says "Clinton (D-NY), Not Voting", "Obama (D-IL), Not Voting"(?). You'd expect journalists to get important facts right. Meanwhile US media barely covered that vote.
[0] 2/2008 "Telecom immunity remains intact as Democrats split on vote" "Obama voted with 30 fellow Democrat Senators, but not the absent Hillary Clinton, to allow the telecom companies to face lawsuits... on the [Bush] admin's programme of warrantless wiretapping. But the immunity survived, with 18 Democrats crossing over to support George Bush." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/feb/12/terrorism.u...
[1] "US Supreme Court finalizes gift of immunity to the telecom giants" - Glenn Greenwald https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/10/suprem...
[2] TheAtlantic: "The Supreme Court Isn't Bothered By the NSA’s Warrantless Wiretapping" ... "refused to hear a case that holds telecom companies accountable for letting the warrantless NSA spying" https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/supreme...
[3]: 02/12/2008 "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008", click through on "14 roll call votes" https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/224...
Mostly not. Hillary did vote against the bill so thank you for clarifying that.
> are you referring to 2008 or 2012
2008 because Clinton campaign + Obama campaign + AT&T Amnesty bill.
[3]: 02/12/2008 "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008", click through on "14 roll call votes" https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/224...
I thought BT was owned by the government (particularly because every ISP ends up renting from them).
I still think that a centralized network that is rented out ends up working better than one that's deployed by different ISPs.
I can understand that perception. Essentially, Openreach is regulated so heavily by the government that it might as well be considered public, from the perspective of 'what services it must offer, on what basis, to whom, and the prices it must set.' However, it is a private company, being a 'firewalled' part of BT
OpenReach is a private company, and has many loopholes to not support you if they do not want to. If you have a line issue and they cannot find the root cause, they will black list you.
I had an intermittent fault on my line which OpenReach couldn't (wouldn't?) resolve when I was with Zen. Magically after switching to BT, they sent out BT engineer, who escalated to OpenReach, who then found the fault and replaced the dodgy part in the green box.
It might be "firewalled" but that's not my experience. It shouldn't be firewalled, it should be a separate entity. The only reason to bundle it with BT is if BT was getting a benefit from it.
We've had BT/OR announce several times over the past 5 years that they are installing proper fibre in the area to squash competition, and then quietly cancel. Funny how we have an AltNet laying fibre here and suddenly BT/OR are getting their act together to upgrade the area.
I spent three months trying to get them to switch my line over to fibre after OpenReach had stated it was available. Their approach was to hope that waiting long enough would fix the problem.
Eventually someone just closed my existing line and immediately opened a new one.
I hope you complained to your MP, and/or ofcom?
What alternative would you prefer? It would be ideal to turn openreach over to either it's own heavily regulated PLC or a MIC/COOP, but can we really force that in a capitalistic society, when the current status quo is 'acceptable'?
I would prefer openreach were force to sell a regulated single strand dark fibre product, that can be used however the CP wants, but it would cause genuine chaos for ORs business model e.g leased lines would be cancelled.
Because of the way physics and fiber optics work, having a common carrier that rents out access to wavelengths or bandwidth on the fiber strands is the best economic model, by far.
*except in very rural areas for highly specific use cases, or in the case of wavelengths for medium range high capacity backhaul.
It just hasn't blown up as big as Thames Water, decades to get a fibre connection (other countries did fibre 15-20 years ago so it was possible) doesn't annoy as many people as filling rivers with sewage.
Someone posted this below, sums up the situation rather nicely. https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
Have you tried interacting with a state service recently, like renewing your passport maybe? They are not exactly the pinical of innovation, speed and efficiency.
The fact most of us can get a 1Gb full fibre service for 30-40 pounds a month (and faster is available, for a little bit more) is not bad.
The full story: https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
From there, any ISP can rent rack space, and arrange their own backbone/uplink, and get wired to whatever customers they can. Municipality charges a fee to use the fiber, and that's it.
Muni provides the line to the CO, ISP is responsible after that. They can compete on their internet speed, price, support, and whatever else they want (Netflix box, email, low latency to game servers).
Muni could even add a "no-internet" free service that just provides access to city services, library, etc.
We have a variant of that here. An indy company just laid fiber here but they don't provide service. Instead I have a choice of 8+ competing fiber companies.
Before fiber, I had 1 'choice' of ISP and paid $124/mo for 1Gb/40Mb w/ 40ms latency to the IX.
Now my choices include 1Gb/1Gb $49, 2Gb/2Gb $79, 10Gb/10Gb $199 w/ 4ms latency to the IX.
As a user though you pay for bandwidth at the interchange because that's how the old privatised and divested government monopoly did it.
The model, last mile public utility but all the speed private wouldn't be all that awful if it weren't butchered by various vested interests. In theory the current last mile company will be sold once it becomes profitable.
Lots of it is just about marketing though.
But in that case, doesn't it make more sense for the government to just cut out the middleman and offer internet to consumers directly? What is the company's value-add?
They might even own the peering network closet (which is often a weatherproof enclosure with a backup generator).
Providing Layer 3.
Just like the government owns the roads and highways, and lets UPS and FedEx use them for delivery.
The theory is that roads/fibre are natural monopolies, but the services that use them can be competitive. There just needs to be a fee for the upkeep of the infrastructure (but it doesn't necessarily need to make a (hufe) profit).
They charge ISPs for use of the infrastructure and that funds maintenance and upgrades. For the sort of core upgrades that occur every few decades, they can do a bond referendum to cover shortfalls.
It's the same setup our private infra does here. They own the fiber in the ground and ISPs pay then to sell services.
It can be harder for a private infra company to get in the ground because they're limited to municipalities that aren't captured by telecom/ISP lobbying orgs - but still have a dense enough population.
I used to think that but now I'm not sure I still believe it. I worry that government owned lines doesn't result in "everyone gets fiber to the home now" but rather "nobody gets fiber yet cause we're still getting cable in Internet to the last X rural users."
I fear that private IsPs will collude to keep internet slow and prices high, while never delivering to rural.
In the US, the rails are private and the government owns the passenger service. In Europe, the government owns the rails and the passenger service is private.
People try to frame these issues as "socialist/capitalist" or some nonsense all of the time. But the reality is that neither system is more or less capitalist than the other. It's just one is better structured than the other.
However, having lived in a town in the US that has had a public ISP for decades, it was abhorrent. Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service. So I think there is an argument to be made that we may take for granted a bit the difference between rails/roads and fiber optics.
Municipal ISPs and ISPs leasing municipal infrastructure dominated PCMag's speed ratings until they excluded local ISPs. Many have excellent satisfaction ratings. Large private ISPs consistently have some of the worst of any business.
Well, there's two aspects at play here.
For starters, you do need to be a certain size as an ISP to really offer cheap services. Imagine, for example, being a town of 500 with a municipal ISP. You'd end up with a lot of equipment to store and maintain and to really be effective, you'd have to employ a bunch of people that spend most of their time doing nothing. (After all, how often would the customer service rep for a small town ACTUALLY be answering any calls?).
That's why a state, county, or national? run ISP would probably make more sense, especially in more rural locations.
That being said, in the UK with BT and the line rentals I described earlier those worked unreasonably well. ISPs could complain to BT to fix problems which ultimately left the various ISPs in a region to compete on tech and price. That was a win for the customer.
There's a lot of nitty gritty policy weeds of what went wrong. But the main one was that after the public ISP incorporated in the 90s as a complimentary service to a public cable network, the state passed a legislation regulating public utility rates. Good for power/water/sewer/cable customers. But it meant that the city could not charge customers differently even with wildly different internet speeds.
Going into the 90s, as the internet aspects became more important, they couldn't keep up with upgrading the lines, especially given the costs would be born by all customers regardless of what speed they were getting.
But I think one lesson is that internet and other utilities are not quite as functionally comparable as people claim. Per capita consumption of water has not quadruped in the last 10 years, but home internet has! So the case for internet as a public utility will be stronger when the need for constantly upgrading infrastructure plateaus.
But I think that is also what holds up the adoption of public services - the difference between typical customer service in the US and say, the Post Office or DMV, turns a lot of people off from the idea of public ISPs or etc.
(Although, based on some time spent in Munich makes me think the quality/availability of broadband in Europe is also not all that).
Starlink, comcast, hughes.net and at&t customer support can take my RJ45 crimper and stick it where they don’t need network connectivity (sideways).
In many other spheres I will concur America has a better customer service culture. But I think alot comes down to taste and incentives. I am happy with not getting fussed over at a restaurant for example, and the odd frustration comes weighed against the fact I'm not really socially obligated to tip (although usually do).
The point stands though that the feedback loop between customer wants and the government is much much longer than between consumer and business.
The majority of British lines are owned by OpenReach, which is a subsidiary of BT, which used to be run by the government, but was privatised back in the 80s.
But they have not been owned by the government in decades, and there are competitors who have run their own lines.
The downside of having the government do it is that if the government screws it up, it takes decades to fix, while private companies can swoop in much faster if one company is doing a bad job.
> would work a lot better if Amtrak could be privatized
That’s a bold claim. While I’m not knee jerk anti-privatization, I’m extremely skeptical that privatizing the NEC will be anything but a fleecing of the public since most of the problems are due to aging infrastructure requiring billions of dollars of investment - which even with your beloved cars and airplanes is not something handled much by the private sector. People who argue it’s bad now just assume you’re too much of an idiot to imagine it could be worse.
> “Train geeks” have no meaningful public policy pull, it is silly and counterproductive to insinuate they have much to do with lobbying and promoting long distance rail
So who do you think managed to stuff $22 billion of Amtrak subsidies into the 2021 infrastructure act? Fairies?
There are tons of small, dedicated lobbies that are organized and effective enough that they can pressure the government into these sorts of policies, and the train geeks are certainly one of them. Or maybe they just managed to infiltrate the ranks of policy staffers. These people hated Anderson because he was threatening their favorite “historic” long haul routes, like the Seattle-Chicago “Empire Builder”, in favor of focusing on Acela.
Well congress ultimately, but as far as actual influence? Maybe start with: Labor unions, manufacturers throughout the supply chain, maintenance vendors - you know entities with actual money and financial interests. Also, local constituents and representatives where the train service happens to go, like it or not the train service is hugely important to the chamber of commerce in general of a place like Syracuse for instance where an air carrier just pulled out and one of those destinations is Chicago - it matters not much from optics that the journey takes longer than 100 years ago. The idea that the “train geeks” have anything measurable to do with it doesn’t pass any smell test. Moreover, the companies and organizations that are involved and do exist don’t magically disappear in any imagined privatization future. I also have a hard time believing that a motley bunch of train geeks somehow has any pull over the ReDUcE GoVERNmENT SpENDInG crowd.
> We could privatize Amtrak next year and they could follow that same business plan
The NEC corridor still needs billions of dollars of upgrades and maintenance. Again that is something that the public sector has almost invariably footed the bill on.
As for your initial thesis in this comment, it’s straight up garbage that has been discussed to death, and you have to assume I’m an uninformed moron to believe it uncritically. I’m not going to repeat this: https://viewfromthewing.com/amtrak-is-lying-they-are-nowhere...
The NEC is profitable if you hand wave away most of the costs like maintenance, and the infrastructure so the those brand new trains they just bought (the $10 billion spend just after Mr Andersons tenure, so as not to derail your narrative) can go more than 80mph (there are still major chunks north of NYC that can’t manage that).
I believe you are being willfully disingenuous so will not continue this conversation further.
> I believe you are being willfully disingenuous so will not continue this conversation further.
Wow, such hostility. I'm not being willfully disingenuous; you just have a short temper and have a hard time staying civil, but I'll give you a second chance and try to respond in good faith here.
> Maybe start with: Labor unions, manufacturers throughout the supply chain, maintenance vendors - you know entities with actual money and financial interests.
Sure. Pork barrel politics all around.
> Also, local constituents and representatives where the train service happens to go, like it or not the train service is hugely important to the chamber of commerce in general of a place like Syracuse for instance where an air carrier just pulled out and one of those destinations is Chicago - it matters not much from optics that the journey takes longer than 100 years ago.
I just looked up flights between Syracuse and Chicago, and I can find multiple affordable nonstop flights: https://www.kayak.com/flights/SYR-CHI/2024-05-25/2024-06-01/...
Amtrak (which doesn't provide working deep links, and doesn't let me look up routes unless I turn off my ad blocker) offers a 13 hour overnight train at roughly the same fare as that two hour flight. What practical customer value is Amtrak providing on this route? Maybe train service between Syracuse and Chicago was faster 100 years ago, but it wasn't as fast as as a two hour flight, and it's not going to be. So who actually cares, aside from train geeks and, as you pointed out, people with a vested interest in federal pork?
> Moreover, the companies and organizations that are involved and do exist don’t magically disappear in any imagined privatization future.
I think a lot of them do "magically disappear" if they're dependent on government subsidies in order to remain economically viable!
> I also have a hard time believing that a motley bunch of train geeks somehow has any pull over the ReDUcE GoVERNmENT SpENDInG crowd.
Please, look at any graph of government spending over the past century and then try to tell me with a straight face that the "reduce government spending crowd" has any pull at all. Government spending does not get reduced. On the other hand, the federal government still subsidizes useless train routes that nobody needs, like the Syracuse to Chicago service you pointed out, or the Seattle to Chicago service I pointed out.
> The NEC is profitable if you hand wave away most of the costs like maintenance, and the infrastructure so the those brand new trains they just bought (the $10 billion spend just after Mr Andersons tenure, so as not to derail your narrative) can go more than 80mph (there are still major chunks north of NYC that can’t manage that).
My claim here is that you can make up the shortfall by eliminating all the useless routes that fail to compete with other modes of transportation. Maybe I'm mistaken about this, but you haven't really shown me hard numbers that account for the elimination of useless routes.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the point being made (which was why the mention that the train is slower now was even mentioned): a gross miscalculation of general politically relevant public opinion for long distance rail service.
Even so, if you actually want to understand the indisputable utilization of some of these routes, search say only a week out rather than a month and the differential might be more like $120 for a train ticket and $600 for plane ticket. And compare peak to off peak times where plane tickets will sky rocket but rail differentials are far more modest. Those "affordable" fares also have an $80 differential between basic economy and economy, the privilege to even bring a carry-on bag let alone checked baggage. Getting to and from the station is often cheaper than the airport.
> So who actually cares
And here's the thing, many of these routes do sell out or come close to doing so on a daily basis. With a few notable exceptions, they're not running light trains around. In the case of the aforementioned train averaging about 500 pax in each direction. It's not my job to convince you that the majority of these 500 passengers are not train geeks. Yes it is hard for me to comprehend that is the first thing someone would think critically, as if the majority of those using Greyhound and the Chinatown line are "bus geeks".
It's not like I'm saying axing some of these routes is a not a reasonable enough opinion, but my initial reply was pointing out the ridiculous premises.
> Please, look at any graph of government spending over the past century and then try to tell me with a straight face that the "reduce government spending crowd" has any pull at all.
To keep this on topic, compare a system map and timetable of Amtrak today vs 30 years ago.
> My claim here is that you can make up the shortfall by eliminating all the useless routes
And ignoring the $10 billion of outlay for new trainsets and the $16 billion dollar Gateway for starters (these are just for the NEC).
Your point didn't come across very clearly. I'm sorry about that; I also get frustrated when my points don't come across clearly. But I'm operating in good faith here.
I don't understand the relevance of the point that the Syracuse to Chicago train is slower than it was 100 years ago. You can fly from Syracuse to Chicago in 2 hours. No train is going to compete with that--maybe a maglev or hyperloop, but not a train. So if the train service between Syracuse and Chicago is going to compete with air service, it's going to have to compete some other way.
> And here's the thing, many of these routes do sell out or come close to doing so on a daily basis. With a few notable exceptions, they're not running light trains around. In the case of the aforementioned train averaging about 500 pax in each direction.
That's great. If those passengers are willing to pay ticket prices that cover the full long term costs of maintaining their share of the infrastructure they're using, then you could have an economically viable privately operated passenger train service. If not, then the ticket prices are artificially low and should be raised. If raising the ticket prices makes the ridership disappear, then it doesn't have economic sense to run a passenger train route.
> It's not my job to convince you that the majority of these 500 passengers are not train geeks. Yes it is hard for me to comprehend that is the first thing someone would think critically, as if the majority of those using Greyhound and the Chinatown line are "bus geeks".
No, you're right. You've convinced me that the widespread public support for Amtrak doesn't come from people naively romanticizing passenger rail, but rather a coalition of people effectively freeloading off the American taxpayer. As a result I am now even more opposed to Amtrak.
I don't think that's a fair assessment. There's a public non-monetary value that is gained by having broader accessibility to routes that aren't necessarily profitable. USPS has a universal service obligation for the same reason. We also do the same thing (even more explicitly) with air travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service
USPS has a universal service obligation but also a legal monopoly. Meaning that if you try and start your own postal service, the feds will literally shut it down and throw you in prison. Its probably no coincidence that USPS also has abominably nonexistent spam filtering, to the degree that the majority of USPS service I’ve received in my entire adult life consisted of myself throwing away and/or shredding the vast majority of crap that they shove in my mailbox six days a week. And any suggestion that maybe they cut down to shoving crap in my mailbox 5 or even 4 days a week is treated like it would be the end of Western civilization.
Can you name one city or town in the US that is dependent on Amtrak for basic transportation? For instance, is there a single town anywhere in this country that doesn’t have a highway or airport but does have a train station with Amtrak service?
So this isn't about providing people with access to transportation, because people do, in fact, have access to other transportation options. It's about catering to the whimsical preferences of people who like to ride trains. I don't think catering to those whimsical preferences is a necessary public service.
Exactly. And the pros and cons for trains, as a mode of transportation, have made them a less viable option for most American journeys ever since the mid-20th century. When you say "there are people who do not drive or fly but use trains", you're not describing the typical, reasonable person who weighs the pros and cons between different modes of transportation, you're describing someone who refuses to even consider alternate modes of transportation. Maybe it's not necessarily a whimsical romanticism for trains, but it's certainly something well short of any actual necessity that's deserving of public subsidy.
These things should be done exactly because they are not the norm. There are people in unique circumstances in every corner of this country who rely on niche options. I know some of them who have relied on these things. The free market can take care of “normal” people and circumstances just fine.
i mean this honestly: an investor may not get crazy returns every year, but they get stable returns every year. why is owning and maintaining infrastructure unattractive?
The trick is simply to ensure you pick a government that isn't going to pass that kind of invasive legislation, or will remove it and retrospectively revoke all access granted under the legislation that they're repealing.
As for Great Firewall of USA, what makes you think it doesn't exist already?
Privatizing publicly built infrastructure did not inoculate us from surveillance.
To actually do it we need to exercise control through the collective mechanism we call government. Laws, regulation, oversight, audits, sunshine policies. It's the only way to curb it. Mistrusting your only mechanism of control and putting blind faith into private markets did not work. We tried it. It failed.
The actual problem is the centralization, regardless of whether it's public or private. There shouldn't be two ISP options, there should be a thousand, so that anyone wanting to compromise all the traffic has to compromise a thousand independent entities, some of which can then be operated by stubborn curmudgeons who would rather loudly go to jail than silently betray the public.
A. Break up the companies, assume mergers and acquisitions don't happen, consolidations never happens and that someone will be defiant of the law in the public interest at a crucial point
B. Change the law
It's important to note that AT&T was broken up and there once was many mobile carriers and there were many surveillance and spy programs going on during that time unabated and then they just bought each other up.
So instead of wishing on a hope and a dream that some invisible hands will orchestrate unexplainable market magic, let's just change the law. There's actual historical evidence of that working.
Or just prohibit them. That's a change to the law you can actually see is being enforced.
The problem with changing the spying law is that the spying is happening in secret, so there is no way to verify that they're not lying to you as they have in the past. Laws with no accountability mechanism are a farce. They need to be backstopped by verifiable structural inhibitions on the practice, like diverse decentralized infrastructure subject to competitive pressure and plausible independent reimplementation by anyone who doesn't trust the incumbents.
> someone will be defiant of the law in the public interest at a crucial point
This is required to turn back injustice. But it's more likely to be achieved the more people have the opportunity to do it.
Most of the country has more than one physical fibre (or FTTB/FTTC/CATV) provider available.
Ensuring there isn't a single point of failure is not just as simple as 'putting it in the contract.' Carriers can and have groomed their primary and backup circuit on to the same L1 path without realizing it.
I've never seen it happen in 20 years. Although of course small parts of the path change over time and sometimes that means bits get put in the same duct for a short run but that also happens when you buy from different providers to be honest. With some carriers you can insist they send you updated route kmls when they change either path and you can detect the change as you'll see different losses/otdr traces before and after a maintenance/fix.
Meanwhile diverse ISPs wouldn't be using the same A and B. ISP A has a central office in a high rise downtown, ISP B primarily targets single family homes and has their switching equipment on a piece of land next to a substation in suburbia, so if you subscribe to both you not only have links coming from opposite directions, they're each operated by independent organizations instead of a monoculture.
In the last decade a number of ISPs have popped up and decided to fibre up areas. They are invariably buying OLTs from Nokia or Adtran (the same two vendors as BT OR) putting them in a BT OR exchange because that is cheap and very convenient, good access to backhaul etc and then renting BT OR ducts and poles to install the fibre in/on (PIA). To top it off they often are using the same fibre vendor as BT and sometimes even the same contractors to install it. Worked example of this; netomia/youfibre (though there are dozens).
What resilience are we really gaining here? Organisational, and that's pretty much it.
Now suppose that anyone could run an ISP out of their house. They wire up a few of their neighbors and then make a single long-distance run to one of many backhaul providers, none of which has a dominant market position like BT. The backhaul providers connect to their customers and each other in telco hotels, but they're smaller and more numerous because each of the largest providers has their own, so the city has three or four instead of one.
Meanwhile even if you have a BT, organizational independence in itself is better than nothing.
It is a fine concept but you'd have to actually ban infrastructure sharing between ISPs and be building a completely Greenfield network. Quite theoretical. I'm aware of former eastern bloc countries that have dynamics somewhat reminiscent of what you describe though.
You could require them to provide those services for their competitors at regulated rates, but then you're not actually breaking that monopoly, you're just regulating it while cementing it in place.
If you have an existing monopolist then first you have to thoroughly break them up, not just mitigate the continued existence of the monopoly.
For the smallest issues, you can expect a single bundle to already have spare connections. For bigger issues, almost anything that takes out one bundle will take out the neighbors too.
https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/ad-hoc-commitee-surv...
So for those poles running down the street in front of your house, ISPs are already paying ~$20 per pole per year. Places like NYC probably also take a cut of the revenue on top. In some regions, this is the primary gatekeeper against competition!
It's really hard to argue that this is a subsidy - if anything it's the municipalities using the power of their natural monopoly.
There's a federal law from the 1990s banning any such taxes or fees from being charged on internet service, so cities don't collect anything based on that.
Your franchise fee, for example, could buy permission to build your own poles. But it would not pay for you to put lines up on city-owned poles.
So low? That's approximately 0% of what the ISP makes from the homes served by that pole. I figured it would be more.
So the cost for the pole rental works out to about 5% of Comcast's service cost to me.
Keep in mind some poles cost more than others (up to $250 according to the report), and that there are also hookup costs for the pole are ~$1000.
I'm not saying ISPs are suffering here, but cities are not providing this infrastructure at a loss.
Hah. We live in veeeeery different housing densities I guess. I was thinking this was NYC, which would be closer to mine. If it's the whole state then probably somewhere in between.
[0] https://www.srperspective.com/post/telephone-poles-a-high-wi...
This seems like saying "there can only be so many condos in a city, so we have to ration them." Hypothetically if you had billions of fiber optic cables running along the same street you could physically run out of space, but that's an implausibly high number. Meanwhile you could easily have hundreds to thousands without any trouble.
> so in return for that privilege, you have to provide this in return.
The point of even wanting to do that is in order to charge a sustainable price for the service. If you had to provide the service below cost, why would you do it at all?
Broadband is a natural monopoly, housing is not. These are well understood economic terms.
Like this is a reasonable approach, but you are artificially creating a specific market, maybe there are other kinds of market we can as well.
All regulatory systems result in a specific market. There is no natural form. In the absence of any laws, people use violence or coercion to seize power and then start making their own rules, effectively becoming the new government and shaping the market with whatever rules they impose (or refuse to impose while excluding another government from forming).
The question is, what kind of rules have good outcomes? Lots of people propose dumb rules, like price controls, that have dumb outcomes. Some rules have okayish outcomes but are still subpar and less efficient or effective than better rules.
The best rules create a market with vigorous competition. Because then you don't need the rules to specifically create other outcomes you like, you just choose the provider who provides them, since the rules have done the most important thing and ensured that you have that choice.
I work for an ISP. We actually build our own fiber networks by stringing fiber along aerial infrastructure to cover whole neighborhoods and then doing drops to individual houses on orders and supplying the ONT, and we can make that work and be profitable after a few years at ~$50/mo, but that's what I would consider many multiples more expensive to deliver than providing service over existing infrastructure, if that's actually what's being talked about here.
And this is in CA and in the bay area and LA areas, so I doubt the regulatory and cost difference factors significantly, unless there's some cost required to be paid to the city to use their infra.
If only a few people can use a limited resources like cable space on a pole, the government should auction off the privilege to the highest bidder. And then let the winner decide how they want to use what they bid for.
The government can use the revenue from the auction (and general tax revenue, too) to help poor people. Though I would suggest to just give poor people money so they can decide for themselves, instead of deciding for them that they should spend their limited resources on eg internet access.
Yes, wireless spectrum is a limited public resource that requires government permission to use, but the government in that case is federal government.
On the other hand these types of rules seem like they would be hard to perfect I would almost rather have municipal run internet.
True, but I think using DWDM this is mostly a non-issue.
I would just assume that if you want to provide broadband service to low-income that the government would be making up for some of the lost revenue.
A low cost landline was $10/month 10+ years ago, and usage was extra. I think that's an ok baseline for a connection that needs maintenance and service.
I just don't think you can do that for $15/month, even if the capex of build out has already been paid for. Maaaybe if you had near 100% uptake, like landlines used to have. But no ISP is getting that. Most (certainly not all) people can choose between wired internet from a telco and a cable company, and 4g/5g is available in a lot of places, starlink in less dense places, and a lot of people don't need a separate home internet plan because the only networked device is their phone.
Given that more than half of the population of NY is in NYC and Long Island, I would imagine that there is enough density and economic diversity at least downstate to make this at minimum cost neutral though this is total conjecture.
As an aside, I remember the days of companies partnering with CLECs taking advantage of rural connectivity loopholes to create free conference calling services by billing larger upstream carriers and splitting that revenue with service providers, which was pretty clever.
If it's cheaper to build out their own fiber and not have these plans, that is an option these companies have, too.
This comes down to an argument about what "cost", it will cover the marginal cost of an additional subscriber sure (e.g additional customer support, sending a router out, taking a payment each month, 500GB/month across the backbone etc) but will not really be enough to payback the capital cost of the original fibre or coax rollout.
It can once you start adding up all the customers and worrying about 'upstream' connectivity.
One thousand customers at 500Mb can potentially saturate a 400Gb link; one thousand at 25Gb cannot. One has to do capacity planning and average and worst case scenarios to worry about, especially at peak times.
This applies also to politicians buying votes and getting random companies to pay for it. It's easy when it's someone else money.
I am curious how you would define “a right”?
I welcome any ISP who is unhappy about this giving back the broadband infrastructure that governments have already subsidized and paid for as well as given legal monopolies to by, for example, banning municipal broadband.
I also welcome eminent domain to solve this problem.
For the past couple of decades internet access at home has usually been provided over copper phone lines. That infrastructure was originally laid across the country by BT, which was government owned, until a decade ago. The actual digging and trenching work was often done by private contractors, but the resulting infrastructure was owned by the government.
When ADSL broadband rolled out in the 2000s, BT offered their own service, but they were also forced to allow other companies to provide internet access over their infrastructure. At the end of the day the speeds were the same regardless of who you chose, but they competed against each other to gain customers. Unlimited broadband quickly because a thing, and the prices stayed low (compared to the US). Over time they did upgrade the service, and now you can get close to 100mbps over the same, often 40+ year old, cables.
In large cities fibre is rolling out, but it's being done by private companies. The UK has a lot of small towns and villages where that won't make sense, so it will be interesting to see how the market looks in the next 20 years.
In fact BT were going to roll out fibre in 1990 (yes really, I didn't believe this when I first heard but it's true) but Thatcher killed it because it would have given them a monopoly... Yeah. That's exactly as dumb as it sounds. Thanks Tories.
As long as competition exists or can be enforced, municipal services should not exist.
You mention the solution to this already, there’s nothing wrong with a municipal service so long as you allow private industry to service it.
I wonder if city could sue Federal government for printing money and causing such consequences?
Reminder that deflation should be occurring with the benefits of automation technology, where the buying power of the dollar should be increasing.
Most cities capped transit fares at one nickel when streetcars got started and the US was on the gold standard. These laws remained in effect even through massive inflation through two world wars, and usually didn't get repealed until the companies failed, the government took ownership of these services and then realized how much they cost.
I think the 70's gas rationing in the US was another example of where price controls absolutely stomped on consumers.
I'm not sure if there are any examples to the contrary, but there are surely people who benefit as, say, 'winning' a rent controlled apartment (but I wouldn't necessarily consider that those people were ever actually consumers in the market to begin with).
I think an evolution of government is necessary, likely where a relatively blank slate is needed to flush out the influence of regulatory capture - and most important where each political party comes forward to present their actual party platform that will update/remove what existing laws in place - basically a version controlled repo like Git facilitates. This way there will be an exact breakdown, exactly in the place of existing laws for the layperson et al to go through it in an easy UI/UX; along with commentary and conversation - similar to how the Genius.com allowing line-by-line threaded commentary.
I don't like to assume - but would I be more right to assume you're big into "cryptocurrencies" with crypto being in your username or more wrong?
The streetcars between Queens and Brooklyn got killed this way too, and not even replaced.
It's horrible. But public transit yo!
It's funny. In the U.S. the federal government doesn't get to nationalize industry thanks to the Steel Cases. The States don't do it either because they compete with each other. But the cities do do it, and what can they nationalize? Public transportation is what they have nationalized. In other countries it tends to be the inverse. So Buenos Aires has an amazing privately-run public transit (bus) system that is the envy of any American city, and that's because in Argentina they nationalize big companies, not piddly ones, because the politicians who can do it are at the federal level, and they "dream big".
I wish we could put all public transit in the U.S. in the private sector. Then finally we would have real public transit options.
Rail generally hasn’t failed in places that are dense enough to support it; Europe, East Asia, and even a few North American cities.
This is negated by its downsides:
- rail is supremely expensive
- rail is even more expensive to relocate
- therefore rail is fixed forever
- which means you can't alter routes to fit changing transit demand patterns
Rail is dead. Rail is a fetish. It's an exceedingly expensive fetish. It's malinvestment for anything other than cargo.
> Rail generally hasn’t failed in places that are dense enough to support it
But not most of the U.S., China, Africa, Russia, etc. Even places dense enough for rail would still be better off making better use of roads for busses.
China and Russia have a lot of railways and use them extensively. In fact China operates the world's largest high speed rail network at 45,000km, and 10,000km of urban rail transit. Russian Railways represents 2.5% of Russian GDP and the Moscow Metro is the 8th largest metro in the world and the 7th busiest.
Africa doesn't really have railways but it also doesn't really have roads because the state of African infrastructure is poor in general.
In Germany public libraries have free internet access, I rarely see people there though (and in libraries in general, they have the most expensive magazines to read for free!)
Unless you work at a library, you're only seeing who's there when you are - not very indicative of how often they're actually used, I would say.
...and somehow, I'm not at all sure what that has to do with a New York City law requiring ISPs to sell Internet access for people's homes at a price of $15 monthly -- regardless of where in the world a public library might be.
Each state has a parliament ("Parlament"), a governour ("Ministerpräsident") and secretaries of state ("Minister"). Some states have a constitution (like Bavaria) and a supreme court (similar to states supreme courts in the US).
One difference for example, VAT is a federal rate, but both states and the federal system get money from it.
One difference that is always striking to me, judges in Germany are not elected, neither are the police, like sheriffs. There is not jail/prison difference.
The German "constitution" and setup (e.g. Germany has a Supreme Court, but not set by the president, and a "senate" and a "congress") was heavily inspired by the US system (e.g. compared to the French or British system) - the other driving force was a fear of a re-rise of the nazis. So some things got overfederalized, for example every state has it's own internal intellegence service (which hinders work a lot, but prevents a take-over of internal intellignce).
Some states are "pre-WW1", like Bavaria, most are not (only 4-5 out of 27 are). I live in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern which was several states and parts of Prussia "pre-WW1".
Eastern Germany had no states (for most of the time), so those states came into existence with reunification.
The UK started electing the head of the police service for each county, and it just becomes a politicized popularity contest with anaemic voter turnout, rather than having a competent person take the position.
At least we don't elect judges, which has an even worse effect of politicizing those tasked with interpreting and enforcing the laws concocted by politicians.
If the reasoning is, ISP need to be %15, so everyone has convenient internet, that argument makes sense.
Why not $15 Internet access to use while at home, and free Internet access to use while at the library?
What part of this potential eventuality "does not make sense"?
I’m not aware of any, but I’m also in a conservative bubble.
In practice, price controls can work well when there is no efficient price competition.
Both companies and consumers are going to be completely at the whim of regulators. If they start jiggering around with the means testing and or the completely arbitrary price point, I'm not confident the quality won't deteriorate or ISPs pull out of the state altogether.
It recently got a lot faster, which is nice, but I'd happily pay $30/month instead for a small fraction of the bandwidth. But I can't.
I wouldn't qualify for the hypothetical state enforced $15 option anyway.
I've lived in over 15 different places in the US, and I have never, ever had more than 1 option for power provider.
>I've lived in over 15 different places in the US, and I have never, ever had more than 1 option for power provider.
In NYC, Con Edison[0] delivers power to customers. It also generates power, but other power generation companies share their delivery infrastructure in NYC.
As such, there are at least half a dozen folks I can buy my power from. But all of it is delivered by Con Edison -- which, by the way, charges more for delivery than it does for the power itself.
This may well be different from other places in the US/world, but that's how it is here.
N.B.: I too, have only two choices (spectrum and RCN) for broadband where I live, but (as I mentioned) at least half a dozen power providers.
[0] https://www.coned.com/en
Edit: Added the missing link
A combination of some napkin math and 2020 Census data suggests that ~35% of the US population lives in a state that the above article declares to be "fully deregulated".
In Finland there was local monopoly for delivery and power could be bought from numerous companies. I just checked offers for my old place and I could choose between 250 different products, some from same companies (e.g. fixed term/permanent, guaranteed wind power, market rate). In there you would get separate bill from your power company rather than it being handled by the local delivery company.
An Introductory Guide to Electricity Markets regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission: https://www.ferc.gov/introductory-guide-electricity-markets-...
Deregulation and competition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
It’s more common in gas service in my experience than in electric.
Personally I have 10+ choices for gas supplier, 2 choices for buried internet (eg excluding Starlink, etc), and 1 choice for power (co-op)
Why limit yourself to cable internet in 2024? Cellular home internet is widely available and fast.
https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/cellular-home-internet-ov...
https://www.usnews.com/360-reviews/services/internet-provide...
https://broadbandnow.com/5G/home-internet
"choices for power providers" in this context is probably the choice of the company that generates your electricity, not the company that delivers those electrons to your house. Given how the electricity grid works, the exact electrons you're getting might not even be related to the company you're supposedly buying power from. In this respect the electricity provider can't really be compared to an ISP.
Curious about a source for $15 being uneconomical. It's just a SWAG on my part that it's break-even, but if you can state that it's uneconomical for any ISP, I'd love to see it. And is that uneconomical to do for 100% of their subscribers? or even for a small share? As you know there's a difference between marginal cost per additional subscriber vs each subscriber's share of the total fixed costs.
If we were talking about 15¢ per month, I would ask the same question. But, like... $180 every year seems like a lot of money to me?
For comparison, ad-free Netflix costs $15.50 per month. Youtube Premium is $14 per month. And while I haven't looked into the details, I keep hearing Mint Mobile podcast ads for a cell phone plan with unlimited data for $15 per month.
Okay, so they're either going to make the application process an extremely painful experience so nobody will want to go through it, or make a ton of shell companies where each one is dealing with less than 20k customers.
Also, between $15 for 25mbps and $20 for 200mbps, the telco is making more profit off the latter, because at that scale bandwidth is dirt cheap and most services like Netflix deploy servers on-premise inside the telco's network.
But no households are doing 8 simultaneous 4K streams. The "but you might be doing more than one thing at a time" case is really uncompelling once you get up past 100Mbps, as much as ISPs want to make people believe otherwise in their marketing.
And courts will see right through shell companies. It's such a non-starter no company would be dumb enough to even try it.
So they just gotta save face and drop the price another ten bucks and figure out what broadcast fee they'll slowly increase over time to compensate across the rest of the customer base.
There's tons of loopholes everywhere allowing companies to get away with ridiculous stuff, getting it fixed is the last thing I'd expect