
Nationalize the internet - ourmandave
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/nationalize-internet-net-neutrality/
======
natalyarostova
When people want something nationalized, it usually comes with the asterisk
*as long as the gov officials managing it are part of my tribe and preferred
policy set. This isn't always bad, since sometimes we all are in general
agreement, but it's important to ask yourself: in political systems power can
shift fast, do you want these policies to be part of this shift? Do you want
the internet to be managed by trump appointees?

~~~
confounded
Indeed, while I really want to like the proposal, democracy in the US doesn’t
seem strong enough (and the judiciary don’t seem interested enough) for it to
work.

It’s easy to imagine the Internet facing a different class of threats, from a
united front of spooks, rights-holders-groups, and moralists. I can’t imagine
the open uncensored web surviving long, unless it had some kind of mini
constitution of its own.

This said, the future under private companies doesn’t look great either. ISPs
are uncompetitive, exploitative, and anti-consumer, and the corporations who
act as censors (Google, Apple, Facebook) have increasing skin in the rights-
holder-group game, and are happy to build censorship machines for lobbyists,
spies, and other authoritarians.

Maybe it’s worth thinking about what such a “Constitution for the Internet”
might be now, before it completely disappears. (And perhaps while TBL and Vint
Cerf have some fight left in them for a roadshow)!

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aaron-lebo
I genuinely struggle to understand proposals like this. The current political
system is broken - the FCC is symptomatic of that. In what world does it seem
like a good idea to give more power to that broken system?

~~~
skywhopper
If we have to choose between direct government control or government-endorsed
cartel control that will just ease towards full monopoly sooner or later, I
would rather just skip to nationalization so we can start talking about how we
reprivatize it in a new, competitive fashion.

~~~
api
Telecom is like health care. What we have now combines all the worst things
about a private system with all the worst things about a state run system.

~~~
jquery
If you think we have the worst things about a state-run system, you haven't
tried using the internet in certain countries which do not need to be named.

It's far from as bad as it can get.

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monday_
First of all, the way that people on both sides of the political spectrum
decry the federal and government as authoritarian and at the same time want to
give it more power, is literally Orwellian. Doublethink, to be precise.

Second, this article argues that the government should have a try at running
the internet since the private sector ostensibly failed. The irony is that the
situation today is _exactly_ a product of government mismanagement. A vital
infrastructure is underdeveloped, overpriced and operated by a duopoly - where
exactly was the US Government when this happened? Where was the antitrust
authority? Where was a liberal President of eight years, a man deified by the
likes of the Daily Dot, who took on health insurance companies? Did the
Congress deign to investigate this issue? And did the voters "vote them out"
for failing to do that, as the author suggests?

Of course not. People tend to have a job, a life and a hobby - they can only
care about a limited set of issues. And an increase in broadband pricing or a
change in ISP product set is not one of those. They can get riled up, short
term, but probably won't be able to sustain pressure, as is the case with the
second amendment or healthcare. This is why the government officials have for
so long neglected this issue, and this why the nationalized internet
bureaucracy will have the same relationship with third party contractors (that
ISPs will become) as FCC does.

I am not an expert on broadband legislation, but it seems like a better
solution would be encouraging investment into small scale ISPs. A federal
legislation that ensures backbone access, major tax cuts for investors, a lot
of red tape for ISPs trying to get above city-wide coverage, things like that.
If you have 2-3 ISPs per town and tens of those in a large city the net
neutrality issue goes away.

edit:spelling

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shaftoe
Generally, when you want something to remain free from coercion or
interference, nationalization isn't the way to go.

~~~
jstanley
I strongly disagree. I think if you want something to remain free from
coercion or interference, giving it to the government is the last thing you
want to do.

If you want something to remain free from coercion or interference,
decentralisation is the way to go.

Edit: Oops! I totally misread your comment ("is" vs "isn't"). Turns out I'm
agreeing :)

~~~
wslh
Governments inflate agency costs ad infinitum without increasing the QoS. This
is not a law but based on statistics around the major countries.

~~~
jayd16
Is that why America's private healthcare system costs more than any other
country and yet we do not have any where near the top outcomes?

What statistics are you cherry picking to make your argument?

~~~
gonational
Government interference is precisely the cause of our high medical costs (for
instance, what do you think would happen to the price of Doritos if the
government required everyone to purchase one bag of Doritos every week?).

Second to that is the government interference in farming (specifically, corn
subsidies, which have led to an increase of corn products our food, resulting
in higher inflammation levels in humans and the animals we eat, obesity, heart
disease, diabetes, etc.).

IOW, more government == more worse

~~~
orf
How do you juggle that option with the fact that other countries with much
more government intervention (or entirely government led, like the NHS) have
much cheaper healthcare, and better outcomes.

If everyone mandated that you had to buy dorritos, it's in dorritos interests
to put the price up. But if the government produced the dorritos, and the
government isn't a for profit business, it's in their interests to keep the
prices as low as possible, at cost.

There was this great thread I saw on /r/libertarian, where someone posted some
images about the NHS. It was supposed to make 'socialised medicine' look
terrible by showing an obese guy costing the NHS £200 a day for a bed while
refusing to reduce their diet - "hey look with socialised medicine you are
paying for this guy! How bad is that!!!"

However it backfired when all everyone was talking about was how it only cost
£200 a day for a bed.

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natural219
I'm surprisingly sympathetic to idea of nationalizing the internet, but the
paragraph about "deregulation in general is bad" seriously baffles me. Not
only because taking a principled stance on "regulation as a whole" is
abhorrently coarse for me, but they specifically reference the airline
industry -- and then links to an article talking about how good deregulation
was? -- without blinking an eye or realizing that a vast majority of people
view the 1978 airline deregulation as an obviously good thing.

I'm now slightly less convinced that nationalizing the internet would be a
good thing.

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jstanley
People in countries other than the US might have something to say about that!

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zerostar07
You mean, like china?

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dailyvijeos
Maybe not because it’s a confederation of peers. As for ISP’s, Australia is
not a good example because it’s poorly run, which it doesn’t have to be.

Instead, perhaps a GSE value-for-money internet, TV and mobile provider that’s
a non-profit, customer-first, no-nonsense, doesn’t gouge people no matter
their zipcode, and upfront about privacy and pricing. That way, where
monopolies / oligopolies form and rural customers miss out, there is an
alternative at a reasonable price. It’s like single-payer for connectivity
that’s not the only game in town.

Less extreme, more practical and better run than the post office... more like
a credit-union. Heck, make it partially employee- and/or customer-owned so
people care.

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inetsee
I don't think creating a government monopoly is the solution to the problem. I
think there needs to be more competition rather than less.

I think a good first step would be to remove the current barriers to local
municipalities setting up their own internet services. There are a lot of
small rural communities that have really crappy internet service, because the
giant companies are unwilling to invest in the infrastructure required, but
they do everything in their power to prevent the local governments from
setting up internet service for their communities.

Chattanooga is an excellent example of what can be accomplished by local
government, including gigabit fiber internet at reasonable rates.

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Avernar
This is going in the complete opposite direction than what's needed. You
definately don't want a single ISP especially if it's run by the government.

You need more ISPs. A lot more. But for that to happen you need to make the
last mile neutral and preferably run by an independent third party.

The next best thing would be for the last mile ISPs being required to lease
the last mile to other ISPs at a fixed rate. This still has problems as the
last mile ISP can pull some shenanigans like prioritizing their own customers
for repairs, messing with the other ISPs traffic, etc.

------
dmfdmf
No.

"Now observe the practical demonstration of the fact that without property
rights, no other rights are possible. If censorship and the suppression of
free speech ever get established in this country, they will have originated in
[the FCC in] radio and television.

The Property Status of Airwaves:
[http://www.criminalgovernment.com/docs/aynrand.html](http://www.criminalgovernment.com/docs/aynrand.html)

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hanklazard
I would love for this to work, but im afraid the temptation for the government
to control / censor information would be too great.

~~~
astrodust
Either the corporations are going to do it, or the government is going to do
it. Pick one.

~~~
benjohnson
The former please - it's been my experience that switching from Verizon to
AT&T is somewhat easier than a bloody revolution.

~~~
astrodust
What if they merge? Then what?

~~~
grizzlylabs
Anti-Trust?

~~~
astrodust
What if the government isn't interested in that?

~~~
rhino369
Civil law suits.

~~~
astrodust
That's going to be really hard when the court is stacked with those
sympathetic to the conglomerate because it can buy unlimited political
influence.

This is not the case when there's a multitude of smaller players that have a
vested interest in maintaining a competitive marketplace, or where they're all
boxed in by regulations so that investors don't get wild ideas about unlimited
potential profits.

------
rayiner
> Conventional wisdom has been that private industry is better equipped to
> handle things than the government. Deregulation has been the agenda of baby
> boomer conservatives. And it has failed. It has failed the environment. It
> has failed the airline industry. It has failed education. It will fail the
> internet.

The biggest trend in administrative law over the last few decades has been
reductions in the degree to which the government micro-manages the economy. In
both the U.S. (with bi-partisan support) and the EU, industries have been
privatized, invasive regulatory regimes have been replaced with light-touch
ones, etc. Germany energy law post-1998, for example, is pretty recognizable
to someone familiar with American energy law. There was a time when the
government either owned major industries, or micro-managed things like the
routes airlines or trucking companies ran and the prices they charged. Pretty
much the whole developed world has agreed to get rid of most of that.

By and large, these reforms have been overwhelmingly successful. In the U.S.
and EU, you can go almost anywhere and get a 4G mobile wireless connection,
using networks built almost entirely with private money. UPS and FedEx--and
services like Amazon built on them--are the direct outgrowth of the
deregulation of air freight. Consumer airline ticket prices are a fraction of
what they were a few decades ago (even though airline technology has evolved
very little in that time!).

If you look at hiccups like wireless data caps or airline seats getting
smaller as signs that deregulation has "failed," frankly you're off the
reservation. Just look at areas of the economy that _haven 't_ been subject to
deregulation. Some of the worst environmental effects are caused by public
water utilities, which have for decades failed to make investments to improve
their infrastructure. In most places, public water utilities freely dump
untreated sewage into rivers when obsolete combined sewer/rainwater systems
overflow, they poison kids by pumping water through ancient lead pipes, etc.

Re-regulation and nationalization is on peoples' tongues here in the U.S., but
I'd suggest looking over the pond to see what they're doing. How did Sweden
wire up its country with fiber? It wasn't through massive government
investment, or by forcing private companies into the charity business through
universal service obligations. Stockholm empowered to municipal operator to
lay dark fiber, with no government subsidies and no mandate to cover any
particular portion of the population:
[https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Stockholms%20Stokab%20-%20A%...](https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Stockholms%20Stokab%20-%20A%20Blueprint%20for%20Ubiquitous%20Fiber%20Connectivity%20FINAL%20VERSION.pdf).
The network was built out not based on "public interest" considerations or
trying to fight urban poverty, but simply by building in a demand-driven basis
to high-value customers first.

And unlike the U.S., Sweden didn't wire up rural areas by forcing private
operators to subsidize rural customers. Instead, it simply gave rural
residents a 50% tax break on the cost of hooking up their own fiber:
[http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/Opinions/2013/Rural_FTTH...](http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/Opinions/2013/Rural_FTTH_Nordics_Final.pdf).

~~~
jnordwick
Most Americans have an outdated notion of European and Asian economies and how
they have changed in the last few decades (to great success too). They still
think of Europe as universally more regulatory and less economically free, but
in reality many countries have had some great outcomes because they have
abandoned t their old tendencies in some cases.

I would really like to read a roundup of how other countries have wired
themselves up and have states model the successful policies. Some of the
policies might work well for an area geographically and demographically
similar to a smaller county, and I'm okay with that. There is a lot to be said
for forgoing a national policy and instead allowing 50 smaller policies.
Economies of Scale doesn't seem to apply to government actions as well as
private actions. Instead you seem to get Grift of Scale instead.

------
heurist
Decentralize it! We need better measures of power centralization. When an ISP
is effectively able to create its own monopolizing legislation, it might as
well be part of the government. The government isn't going to buy them out and
improve their architecture, so we need a new internet that is owned and
operated by all of us all the time.

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grizzlylabs
The government screws up something simple.... net neutrality... so let's give
the whole darn thing to government!

The Government screws up the VA Hospitals so let's give them our entire health
system!

Has there ever been a situation that the government screws up and someone
doesn't gets the bright idea to double down?

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notjesse
Australia did this. Ask any Australian what they think about the NBN, I doubt
any will speak highly of it.

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rjeli
Hm, I’m interested to see a good proposal for this -

>Last Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission, led by deregulation
zealot Ajit Pai

Never mind. Unsubstantiated ad hominem in the first sentence. Move along.

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aristocles
I registered just to say this is literally the worst idea I've ever seen.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
Hello, friend. Welcome to the site. I see you're new here, so I thought I'd
let you know why you're being downvoted.

Your post isn't very substantive. You express your opinion, but you don't
explain the thought processes behind your opinion. When combined with the
snarkiness, it just wasn't a productive comment.

If you haven't yet, read up on the Hacker News Guidelines[1], that may help
when posting something somewhat controversial.

We try hard to avoid forming an echo chamber here. Overly emotional and
unsubstantive comments are downvoted, and controversial comments with a lot of
substance to them are often(but not always, unfortunately) upvoted.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

edit: The irony of being downvoted for trying to maintain a positive,
productive culture on this site is not lost to me. I won't bother to do so in
the future.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam
> or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them
> instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good,
> and it makes boring reading.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam
> or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them
> instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

They were new. It's important to teach people these things instead of just
deleting every comment that is bad. It's on all of us to maintain this site's
culture, it's not just the mods' job.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good,
> and it makes boring reading.

Noted.

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partycoder
The problem with making the government larger (in terms of responsibilities
and influence) is that the incentive to be corrupt grows.

Then, when your government is large, the performance of your country starts
depending on having a long interrupted sequence of perfect administrations,
something that is very unlikely.

The idea of government is to have an entity that represents the best interests
of people, to preserve and grow social capital, and achieve balance, not
absolute control.

~~~
partycoder
Being a bit more specific, I think the Internet should be regulated to prevent
anti-consumer behavior, but not nationalized. Nationalize the Internet means
that only the country can act as ISP.

