Re: [NNagain] On "Throttling" behaviors

[David Lang <david@lang.hm>]

On Tue, 3 Oct 2023, Sebastian Moeller via Nnagain wrote:

>> On Oct 3, 2023, at 18:54, rjmcmahon <rjmcmahon@rjmcmahon.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Natural monopolies are things with high sunk costs. Things with high sunk costs don't necessarily exist (like electrified roads) even though they add huge value to society and can help curb climate impacts. A natural monopoly exists unrelated to a provider already having an infrastructure in place per that monopoly.
>> 
>> Fiber with up gradable optics to hundreds of millions of buildings that can leverage the NRE from data centers are natural monopolies and don't really exist in most places, even though they are critical to mitigating climate impact.
>> 
>> The idea of municipal ownership of access networks in the U.S. was pushed in 2000 after the 1996 Telco act. It didn't work out.
>
> 	[SM] I only monitored this cursory (not living in the US any longer), 
> but I seem to recall quite a number of questionable plays against municipal 
> ownership by the existing ISPs; I would book this as "never really tried", and 
> not as we gave it an honest try but it fell short. That said many 
> municipalities (in many parts of the world) are hardly in the shape required 
> to built new costly infrastructure as they are having troubles maintaining the 
> infrastructure on their hands with the available funds.

I would say that it failed in many high-profile locations, succeded in a few 
others, and isn't a dead idea.

My city (LA suburb of >125k) is in the process of rolling out fiber everywhere. 
They are well behind, so probably a 3-4 year process rather than a 2-3 year 
process (now saying spring of next year for my location), so I can't say how 
well it will end up working. But they are avoiding the 'space on the poles' 
fight by having them trench up every street (~4" wide trench)

In some other states, the ISPs were able to get state laws passed to prohibit 
community owned networks (on the claim that they were anti-competitive)

David Lang