
We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom - BravoCo
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5djd7/motherboard-and-vice-are-building-a-community-internet-network-to-protect-net-neutrality
======
iamnotlarry
The real snag in net neutrality, and "saving the internet" in general is not
in getting a bunch of pop-up isps. The real crux of the problem has always
been in peering relationships. It's not that hard to start a wISP. It's not
that hard to even lease telco copper or fiber and run a local wired ISP.

Right up until your local customer wants to access Google, or Netflix, or
something in Japan or Europe, or anything that isn't one of your local
customers. Then you have to find peers who respect NN. And you have to build
some connection to those peers.

Peering is expensive. A little ISP running out of a local data center has to
find some other little ISP nearby and they have to build a connection between
their data centers.

Building a worldwide network of such ISPs is very expensive. Sooner or later,
the two little guys combine with each other, then with two others. And then
you get exactly what we had in the '90s, which leads to what we had in the
'00s. Unless you get very luck and get some superpower that builds out the
infrastructure without losing sight of all that is good and right in the
world, you end up where we are today.

Oh, and you have to get the masses to understand the issues and penalize
cheaters. Good luck with that.

~~~
gwright
I'm not sure small ISPs are a viable business model like it was in 10-20 years
ago, but if you want to build a small regional ISP, I don't think peering
relationships are going to be the problem, you can simply purchase transit
bandwidth from the big guys. To do that cost effectively you do need to be
renting rack space at a carrier hotel though.

The really hard part is the layer-2 last-mile infrastructure to end users. For
the most part this means dealing with the local incumbent telco (leasing
copper/fiber/DSL/ATM backhaul) or building your own wireless infrastructure.
Except in rare circumstance I think the regulatory environment is going make
it infeasible to build out your own physical infrastructure to compete with
the telco or with the local cable franchise.

Google Fiber was an attempt to roll out a new last-mile infrastructure and it
hasn't faired well. It isn't going to be easy to disrupt the last-mile
infrastructure market.

~~~
iamnotlarry
I visited a location this week where there were 2-4 houses per mile along
country roads. The residents had a choice of ISPs. The house I visited had
dialtone from a VOIP service.

Yes, it costs money to build out last-mile infrastructure. But even in very
low density areas, it can pay off. Recurring revenues of $50-100/month per
customer can in fact pay for the initial investment. Especially if the
investment was a wifi tower. It's the kind of thing one motivated local can
pull off.

Building a worldwide network of peers who all respect NN is much much more
difficult. Even if you could set up some organization like EFF to define some
"Bill of Rights" and then certify conformant ISPs with a cool logo of
approval, customers will not choose ISPs based on that logo. Average American
consumers will not demand NN.

So your local ISP--even a well-intentioned one--will do as you suggest:
"Simply purchase transit bandwidth from the big guys." There ends NN.

~~~
amorphid
A relative of mine lives in a rural area of Washington State, USA. He has
fiber internet through ToledoTel...

[http://www.toledotel.com/our-
services/internet/](http://www.toledotel.com/our-services/internet/)

...it's expensive, but he has it. Every time I hear someone say we can't have
blazing fast Internet in San Francisco, it's never phrased as a question like
"would you be willing to pay $MONTHLY_PRICE for 1gps fiber?" So far, I've only
heard "Building fiber in San Francisco isn't possible because of
$UNAMBITIOUS_EXCUSE."

~~~
Spooky23
That stuff was all part of the Obama era stimulus bills. Many folks with the
ability to lay fiber did so with substantial capitalization from the Feds.
Many municipal governments and counties built fiber rings as well.

The result was mostly institutional connectivity. Rural prisons, hospitals,
government, factories, and schools got connected. But local franchise
agreements make the last mile pretty much impossible.

~~~
gwright
Huh. ToledoTel _is_ the telco it its service area. It isn't competing with the
local telco. I don't think this is an example of municipal networking.

~~~
Spooky23
Sorry for the confusion in my response. I didn’t mean to imply that.

Rural telcos had access to this money for sure.

Municipal government really benefited as well — for its own purposes, not
municipal broadband.

------
pmoriarty
An Internet that is completely decentralized and independent of gatekeepers is
the only long-term hope that I can see, and it's a very remote hope at that.

There are too many powerful, vested interests in controlling people and their
communication to let that happen. The only reason the Internet was ever as
free as it was that it slipped under the radar of those very interests and
wasn't taken seriously enough at first. So its users had a decade or two of
relative freedom that's now steadily being chipped away.

~~~
sliverstorm
Trouble is nobody's yet figured out how to build a completely decentralized
internet that is anywhere near as good as the regular internet.

Mostly because wireless technologies still don't scale that far, which means
wires in the ground, which means gatekeepers on the other end.

------
martin1975
MuniFiber.com. Towns are slowly rolling their own fiber to the home. This is
one answer to breaking cable monopolies.

edit:

Apologies, muninetworks.org is the true website. I've been reading way too
much about FTTH obviously and partially substituted the website name :)

~~~
devty
Was interested in learning more, I think the correct website is
[https://muninetworks.org/content/fiber-optic-
network](https://muninetworks.org/content/fiber-optic-network)

------
joeyspn
In 2019 SpaceX should start deploying their satellite constellation...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_satellite_constellation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_satellite_constellation)

~~~
nautilus12
Round trip to a satellite will never rival fiber. Especially the way modern
web apps are built inefficiently

~~~
nmjohn
> SpaceX expects its own latencies to be between 25 and 35ms [0]

There is a huge difference in latency between existing satellite internet
services and what spacex is looking to launch.

[0]: [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/11/space...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/11/spacex-plans-worldwide-satellite-internet-with-low-latency-
gigabit-speed/)

~~~
nautilus12
It sounda similar to fiber latency. Ive never thought about this before but
the amount of time for a round trip to a leo satellite, shouldnt that be in
the range of 10 m/s. (1200 km / 300,000 km/ s) = 4 m/s x 2 i wonder whats the
complete breakdown, is most of it inter satellite optical communication? Does
this offset the additional 8 ms because its a simplified topology?

------
bitsnbytes
I like their fire to get this done.

however , the ISP market is a market hated by its cutomer base for decades. So
you got to ask why hasnt this been done before at a reasonable scale or more
often?

Didnt even google fiber run into epic hurdles due to monopolistic regulations
setup by the telcom oligarch?

if Google fiber struggled how is a small startup going to be able to play?

I'm skeptical in the success of this , but i will be folowing and possibly get
involved and hope they succeed.

~~~
betterunix2
It's not just monopolistic regulations. Outside of dense urban areas there is
not much room for competition among ISPs. At some point it is never going to
be profitable to compete; and in some places it will never be profitable to
even build the infrastructure in the first place. The only reason DSL is
widely available is that phone companies were forced to build the copper
network even in unprofitable places, so adding DSL service was not too hard
for them.

If we really want a market-based approach we need infrastructure sharing
rules. Prior to 2003 we had lots of competition in the DSL market; after the
sharing rules were eliminated competition vanished almost overnight and we
wound up with the monopoly situation we face today. Infrastructure sharing
requirements have worked very well in France, where fiber optic service is
more widely available and costs consumers less.

~~~
zzzcpan
> At some point it is never going to be profitable to compete; and in some
> places it will never be profitable to even build the infrastructure in the
> first place.

If there are no regulations here's how it goes: first ISPs compete in urban
areas, this is very profitable with traditional active fiber to the building
and ethernet to each apartment. It takes like $50 CAPEX per customer. But at
some point as competition increases margins get lower and certain ISPs start
looking into rural areas where they can have no real competition, i.e. DSL or
radio is not a competition to fiber. New ISPs emerge too as people see an
opportunity to profit from temporary geographical monopoly. So they start
building in rural areas, enjoying huge margins. Today they'd use something
like GPON, which is very cheap compared to the old days. It goes on until at
some point the hard part becomes finding areas from where they can profit the
most and where there is no real competition. This is when some start competing
with other ISPs in rural areas. But as margins start to shrink in some areas
due to competition they prioritize investment into areas competition unlikely
to reach. There will be far away neglected areas still, but here's a twist,
since there is a lot of competition people who are willing to pay will be able
to find a whole bunch of ISPs willing to build fiber or at least radio links
with them. In other words - it's always profitable, regulations really is the
only problem.

Forcing to share infrastructure is also not necessary. It helps only if
monopolies share it with everyone, not small players. With no regulations
market solves this pretty well.

~~~
iamnotlarry
As a little experiment, I picked a random dot in the middle of Nevada--
northern Nevada, far away from Las Vegas.

I landed on this house: <deleted out of respect for the owner>.

This looks pretty rural to me.

Then I went to their telco and the first thing on the homepage was a link to
check for fiber availability.

Fiber is available for this home.

You might have to rethink your plan for competition. I'm guessing the result
won't be too different for Mississippi, Texas, Ohio, etc.

EDIT: I tried again and landed in Batesville, AR. It seems there are three
Fiber ISPs here.

Edited for courtesy to individual property owners.

~~~
kalleboo
It almost seems like semi-rural areas are a better place to start, as they're
less regulated (no "cable monopoly", no NIMBYs) and the properties are too far
away to have the options of Cable/DSL.

------
basicplus2
All major infrastructure such as roads, power, communications etc needs to be
owned and run by government upon which is then a level playing field on which
free enterprise can then compete.

When you have any major infrastructure essential to running a business in
private hands you no longer have a democracy or free enterprise.

~~~
amelius
On a related note, can't a digital platform such as iOS or Android be viewed
as major infrastructure? How about Google's search?

~~~
jedmeyers
Main difference between digital platforms and government owned utilities it
that utilities require access to land. No one is stopping you from rolling out
your own digital platform, while there is no practical way to get any land to
lay your own gas pipeline. Therefore the answer to your question is "no,
Google search cannot be considered public infrastructure, and one for the
reasons is that it does not require any public land to operate".

------
mempko
What is sad is the internet used to be run by the small time guys. I bought my
internet off a guy down the street in the 90s who had a rack of servers and
routers in a closet. The future we want is the past we had.

------
Can_Not
One thing I've wondered, if the big regional monopoly ISPs actually violate
our net neutrality on a large enough scale, can enough new ISPs pop-up who
have net neutrality in their company charter (or otherwise are non-profits) to
keep the old internet alive? Can municipalities drop existing exclusive
contacts citing "loss of net neutrality" as a material change? How will
regressive districts take it when other states are keeping NN and prospering?
If net neutrality can be restored from the bottom up, has anyone explored
strategies and methods to protect ourselves from regional monopoly ISPs and
how it will actually roll out over time and regionally? How will the top
resist a bottom up change?

~~~
dboreham
No. Because people love cheap and free stuff. Non NN ISPs will be cheaper and
consumers couldn’t care less as long as they get their Netflix, which the
will.

~~~
justicezyx
A global internet does not need to be consumer oriented.

~~~
dboreham
The Internet that serves consumers does.

------
rayiner
> internet infrastructure that is locally owned and operated and is dedicated
> to serving the people who connect to it

In theory our public transit is “locally owned and operated and is dedicated
to serving the people” rather than shareholders. Yet public transit is almost
uniformly awful in the US. If you live in San Francisco, do you really want
your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?

~~~
Can_Not
You can show them Chattanooga as a case study where the results were optimal.

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpk77/chattanoog...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpk77/chattanooga-
gigabit-fiber-network)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2013/09/17...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2013/09/17/how-chattanooga-beat-google-fiber-by-half-a-decade/)

[https://www.thedailybeast.com/chattanooga-has-its-own-
broadb...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/chattanooga-has-its-own-broadbandwhy-
doesnt-every-city)

~~~
rayiner
But are the odds in your favor? I live in the DC area. What are the odds that
the public ISP is going to be run better than WMATA, where trains are catching
fire on a regular basis? Or the roads, which are chock full of potholes. Or
the water system, where the system is full of lead pipe? Or the sewer system
that dumps untreated sewage into the local rivers after heavy rains?

~~~
Can_Not
The difficulty in an ISP is going to be about initial funding and being sued
by regional monopolies. An ISP, specifically one that does not require
additional hardware/software to organize and power tiered net neutrality
violations logic, has orders of magnitudes less moving parts and disruptive
needs for real estate/infrastructure. Maintainence labor could be simplified
by training existing city electrical teams to work on both wire sets. We're
talking about something with a lot less toes to step on. The failure scenarios
for an ISP are so miniscule they make public transportation look like
Chernobyl. Does a public ISP need to be ran better than those other things?
There's just so much less to mess up and the consequences are just so much
smaller and less permanent. Even if the mayor explicitly sells you out to the
NSA or acquires someone's browsing history abusively or somehow the internet
is out for a day, that's pretty much nothing compared to lead water, out of
service rail line, environmental disaster, etc..

------
ilaksh
Maybe someone can make a FSOC (freespace optical communications) kit that is
cheap and safe and we can install them on our rooftops and start beaming our
packets all over ourselves.

[http://ronja.twibright.com/](http://ronja.twibright.com/)

I'm sure someone will explain how they believe that is stupid, dangerous and
impossible.

------
veeragoni
I am hoping Elon Musk could rescue us from this. Hopefully with satellite
based internet using SpaceX rockets.

------
xkarga00
Other related acts:

[https://www.mail-
archive.com/cypherpunks@lists.cpunks.org/ms...](https://www.mail-
archive.com/cypherpunks@lists.cpunks.org/msg09156.html)

------
jim_combinator
And we need food that isn't grown by big farming. And we need news that isn't
reported by big journalism. And we need entertainment that isn't produced by
big Hollywood. And we need government that isn't...wait, we need big
government. Never mind.

------
ghthor
This is where a new startup isp needs to pair with Artemis networks can create
a next gen wireless network that puts these big telecoms to shame.

------
EGreg
Those of you who have seen me post over the years know that I am passionate
about this topic. I wind up linking to my own project to provide more info but
let me know if that's bad form on HN.

In 2011 I started a company to decentralize facebook. I thought there was no
reason that signals needed to go through server farms in California just to
organize a local dinner, have a local marketplace, classes, dating, or a host
of other things. I wanted to build a platform like Wordpress that communities
could host and then install social apps the same way they install wordpress
plugins.

The developer model would be pretty cool, too: no gatekeepers to kick you out
of the app store or revoke your API keys while they compete with you. Instead,
you sell your apps to entire communities. Over time we built apps like:

    
    
      Group rides (uber for friends)
      Group activities
      Group chat
      Collaborative docs
      Marketplace
      Pitching in for a gift
    

As time went on, I realized that eventually communities will have their own
mesh networks and we would have built the social software they would need to
run on them! Right now, they don't really have software uilt to run on the
local networks, they still need to connect to centralized services on the
global internet.

We asked some guys to build router firmware for us, so that we can have local
software run on the wifi networks of cruise ships, classrooms etc. It is great
for taking attendance for example, as phones automatically connect to the wifi
and the cookie does the attendance bit.

You can literally have a superfast social network for a university or company
or whatever, and signals go over the internet only when they have to.

If you want more in depth info I give a talk about it here:
[https://youtu.be/WzMm7-j7yIY](https://youtu.be/WzMm7-j7yIY)

And we blogged about the details here:
[https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/centralization-
and-o...](https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/centralization-and-open-
source/)

Now we went one step further and made a spinoff company, Intercoin Inc to
allow communities to issue and democratically manage their own local currency!
([https://intercoin.org](https://intercoin.org))

IPFS and SAFE a great fit for an even further future where no elites control
anything. But that's a little further on.

Here is what I would like to see eventually replace the Web:
[https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0](https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0)

~~~
Y7ZCQtNo39
I'll provide my two cents, in the case of group activities. It seems awfully
convenient to have a single site (e.g., meetup) for, say, if I'm traveling to
a new city and looking for something to do.

It'd seem like an unnecessary barrier to entry to have to find the locally
hosted instance of every particular problem, every location I go.

Knowing I can use Yelp or Groupon etc to find local restaurants or deals
anywhere is actually pretty helpful.

To get to the core of your premise:

> I thought there was no reason that signals needed to go through server farms
> in California just to organize a local dinner, have a local marketplace,
> classes, dating, or a host of other things.

You might think there is no reason for this; but users of these services
aren't concerned with this problem. If your selling point is "Hey, don't you
hate how this one big corporation has a monopoly on <marketplace> <group
activities> etc?", you're going to hear crickets. This isn't a customer
problem.

~~~
EGreg
Our customers are the directors of organizations and on average communities
pay us tens of thousands of $ each to put an app for their members in the
store.

For example a university realizes that if they give an app to their students
while they are still actively studying there, as alumni they will be part of a
social network across the country where they can get job and business
opportunities, date or just meet someone for an activity. They are more likely
to donate and participate when the university posts their own events.

As for the users - you're right. A user doesn't necessarily want to have one
app for each community. That's why the process should be seamless.

Ideally, an app should be usable across many communities. So think for example
of Meetup.com as an app on our platform. It would be on the app store and
you'd automatically see meetups across all the communities where you are a
member.

We go way further btw, with authentication and friend discovery:
[https://github.com/Qbix/auth](https://github.com/Qbix/auth)

It has to be absolutely seamless, private and integrate with existing
websites.

------
StreamBright
We need a handcrafted, vegan, artisan internet operated by SF hipsters. Most
definitely.

------
da_n
I just loaded this article on my mobile device. An ad on the website triggered
with auto playing audio that stopped background media playback of my device. I
class these type of ads as a type of vermin, and generally avoid any website
that contains them. Why should I trust an organisation that chooses to run
user hostile ads on their site line this to make a better internet?

~~~
vorotato
This is a literal ad hominem fallacy. Whether someone is honest or good
doesn't have any bearing on any individual statement's veracity. A statement
is true or false regardless of who says it. Additionally the article was
written by an author who is not responsible for the advertisements, or really
any actions of this establishment which are entirely outside of their control.

All being said, yeah that sounds horrible, and you probably shouldn't trust
them as they are a for profit, but that's not an argument as to whether they
are wrong or not.

~~~
ekianjo
> This is a literal ad hominem fallacy.

This is rather a problem with the author who is benefiting from the ad-driven
Internet while preaching for something else. It's like a weapons reseller
advocating for peace.

~~~
betterunix2
Is there some non-ad-driven web ecosystem that I somehow missed? Just because
the web currently depends on ads to pay for things does not mean that it is an
OK situation or that we should tolerate every intrusion by advertisers.

~~~
ekianjo
> non-ad-driven web ecosystem that I somehow missed?

Yes there is. Patreon and similar systems.

------
emerged
I've noticed that when Trump detaches a thing from government control (Paris
agreement, net neutrality), the populace and media go full on chicken little
sky is falling.

Then as the dust settles, people start having conversations like this one.
Private and corporate entities, wealthy individuals, organizations, step up
and attempt to fill the gap.

So. Isn't that the whole point? That society as a whole is better suited to
solve these problems than the largest centralized node on the network?

Edit: K I'll just absorb downvotes for having an opinion which doesn't
actively oppose trump in one particular case.

~~~
mempko
You have it exactly backwards, By privatizing, Trump will increase the size of
the government. After the USSR collapsed and Chicago style economists pilfered
the place, the size of the government went up! You ended up with more
bureaucrats than ever. Why? Because when you add markets to things that didn't
have markets, you add regulators and all sorts of other score keeping to make
sure the markets function.

It is far more efficient not to use markets in most cases. When the Federal
government privatized the internet in the late 90s, the regulatory system went
up! Also of course corporations love regulations when it benefits them. Don't
forget most regulations are written and pushed by the industry that is being
regulated.

~~~
malteof
Surely you're the one getting this backwards somehow? You're talking about
privatisation, but the OP discusses deregulation.

You don't mean to say that deregulation leads to more regulation, do you?

EDIT: Also, your thesis that using markets is inefficient due to more
regulation, it sounds rather that you mean to say that more regulation is
inefficient. How is this a failure of the market and not the state?

~~~
mempko
Deregulation often leads to more regulation. By allowing a whole class of
actions to happen, you will find exceptions will start popping up and laws
will be written to patch market failings.

If you allow X, you will find overtime it will turn into 100 different 'Allow
X but' rules.

Example, Cable companies can now charge more for Netflix, then netflix lobbies
and gets a new regulation 'Can charge more for traffic Except by accredited
content providers'.

On and on exceptions will be lobbied and won and eventually you end up with
more regulations and a larger government administering those regulations.

Net neutrality is a far more efficient regulation.

