This is pretty typical for HN. You get a lot of techno libertarians who think any form of regulation is the worst thing ever. To say that the new classification is somehow going to be worse I think is a bit of a stretch.
Because recent government conduct has been stellar, I really want more government regulation, government always knows best, government does an amazing job, is very fair, is very open and transparent, government is democratic and responsive to citizen concerns.
Isn't this argument basically, "governments are prone to being co-opted by special interests, therefore we should go ahead and give away the farm to Comcast"?
The problem of government isn't simply that they can be co-opted by special interests. It's that they have a near-monopoly on the ability to implement policies using the threat of violence, and that ability can be co-opted by special interests.
The guy who runs the gas station down the street could also be co-opted by special interests, but I'm not particularly worried about that, because he has very little ability to force people to, for instance, give him a portion of their income.
Question: suppose a group of knowledgeable engineers and technicians in a city decided that they were going to run their geography's network infrastructure without the supervision of Comcast shareholders. They decide to stage a nonviolent sit-in overnight in Comcast offices to take over the extant and state-guaranteed monopoly of the network infrastructure in that area, and another group delivers food to them until Comcast gives up its claims.
Does Comcast calmly decide to talk to them about them nonviolently, or does it call in mass State violence to get back control?
You assume a separation between property rights and State power that doesn't exist. They're two sides of the same coin. Capital and property rights don't exist in opposition to the State, but in a mutually-dependent complex of institutions and learned practices.
That doesn't mean you have to throw out one or the other, or both. But it's fair for people to try to change the norms that govern relations between them in a way that generates the social outcomes they prefer.
I suspect that Comcast would call the police. But imagine a similar situation happens in a hypothetical society with no state police, or better yet, in some area where there are no state police available in a reasonable time frame (plenty such areas exist, even in the USA). Don't you suppose that Comcast might have private security guards?
Of course! I'd go so far as to say that's the case in most of the USA--Comcast almost certainly has some level of private security at most of its locations, even (or perhaps especially) in urban areas.
I'm not sure, though, how that undermines the point that Comcast shares in the monopoly of violence with the government. It doesn't make its violence independent of government (at least in the USA): small matters can be dealt with most quickly by those private forces, but in more serious matters, Comcast would call on government violence to provide either a supporting or primary role. The people in conflict with Comcast could do the same, but the difference is that Comcast would actually get the government's help.
Note that this isn't a claim of fascist corporatism or anything: it's part of a healthy society, and really the only way I can imagine a civil society I'd want to live in working. But there's no reason to say that Comcast doesn't have the ability to be co-opted by special interests (its shareholders and affiliated unions, to be explicit about who I'm talking about) and use state-guaranteed violence to impose economic policy in the small on unwilling participants.
> I'm not sure, though, how that undermines the point that Comcast shares in the monopoly of violence with the government.
I didn't mean to imply that. I was addressing your point of protection of property to be only possible via the state, which I believe to be demonstrably false. The fact that Comcast would likely call the largest and most powerful group of property enforcers (the state) is not particularly interesting.
Wouldn't it be: "governments are prone to being co-opted by special interests, therefore we rather allow companies to compete with each other freely in an open market and let consumers make the choice"
Competition requires a "free open market", which isn't a thing that exists, and it depends on a knowledgeable and informed consumer base, which also isn't a thing that exists, and this all depends upon there being choice in the marketplace, which as has been demonstrated ad nauseum, also isn't a thing that exists.
What if the free market in telecommunication does not exist "yet" or is, due to a long history of regulation and government involvement, inhibited, we need to add another bureaucratic layer? If Google Fiber shows up in my neighborhood and Comcast did everything to upset us, would not we all switch and Comcast realize that it needs to adjust (its service, pricing, quality, speed)? I guess my difficulty lies in not understanding why this market warrants a different approach than any other market.
Two decades is a long time to set up a market, to be honest. And in that time, there have been fewer choices in the market, with smaller companies being regularly gobbled up into large conglomerates with astoundingly bad customer satisfaction the result.
or is, due to a long history of regulation and government involvement, inhibited
And this is really begging the question, in the fallacious sense.
Where does this "bureaucratic layer" argument come from? The only telcos that are going to be burdened by these regs are ones who are already doing shady stuff. In other words, the ones that need to be.
And on a more visceral and arational level? Fuck 'em. Fuck Comcast, fuck Verizon. They had years to get their house in order, and it wasn't regulation preventing them from doing so. It wasn't regulation that gives Comcast the worst customer satisfaction scores in the entire industry. It wasn't regulation that made Comcast's "capacity" problems magically disappear when Google Fiber shows up in the same city. It wasn't regulation that made Comcast acquire and abuse what amounts to a monopoly position. It wasn't regulation that made Verizon run what amounts to a protection racket on Netflix.
Nobody put a gun to the CEO's heads and said "be the biggest bastards you possibly can" - they managed to do that quite well with minimal government involvement.
Perhaps this market warrants a different approach because it's demonstrably broken and because the internet is more akin to infrastructure than a consumer good.
Stefan Molyneux came out with a one hour long video today - very detailed historic overview and discussion - of the government involvement that led to the current state of affairs (which beg for more government involvement, etc). Its worth watching it in its entirety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z_nBhfpmk4 Personally, I can't stand Comcast/Verizon/AT&T either, but I was born in Stasi East Germany. To me, the idea to further entrench government in what should be a completely free market place, seems backwards.
A "completely free marketplace" will always tend towards a monopoly, and besides, that philosophy doesn't work when there are physical barriers to entry.
Against the concept of democratic government, or against the implementation of a purely democratic government with no other additional regulations?
I think it's the same thing with the "free market". The general concept is sound, but there are corner cases that must be addressed. Infrastructure, I would argue, is one of those.
Against the concept of any government whose policies ostensibly reflect the preferences of the population and whose authority is ostensibly consented to by the population, which I believe includes most modern Western nation states.
According to mainstream Western theory (as I understand it), even aspects of policy which are not directly democratic or even routinely voted on by elected representative, like the Constitution, are justified as having legitimate authority because they are consented to by the governed.
In other words, even those "additional regulations" you mention, which I assume include things like basic human rights which are supposedly not subject to reversal by normal voting, are included in my broad usage of the phrase "democratic government."
That would be the ideal, but infrastructure issues such as this can't be handled by a "free market" acting all by itself.
That's because whoever owns the land the infrastructure runs through can block progress, and the free market solution of competing elsewhere doesn't work. Land access is inherently limited by real world access problems that don't obey free market ideology.
A free market for public utilities would start from the public, i.e. government, OWNING said infrastructure outright and then allowing private corporations to lease the right to use it to provide service. Only the government has the legal right to eminent domain so it can build roads and public utilities and generally seize land for the common good - private corporations would have to negotiate with every landowner whose property needs to be crossed, and that is obviously unworkable in the real world.
From the current situation - which is a hodge podge of municipal services, private corporate services, agreements that limit competition, coupled with land access needs only eminent domain can provide - the only way to arrive at this paradise of "free market competition" is for the government to nationalize the entire thing, void all contracts with private service providers, and recreate the rules to allow competition among service providers by renting/licensing the infrastructure that is owned by the public. Otherwise it would take decades for existing agreements to expire or be renegotiated, and any improvement still have to rely on access and easements and various forms of eminent domain anyway.
I cannot imagine the unending howling of the libertarian-type crowd if this were to happen. They complain that various governments have created this situation (municipalities giving exclusive deals to cable providers) but government power had to be there in the first place or there wouldn't be any infrastructure at all.
It is much cheaper to purchase legislation mandating people buy a product or mandating legal barriers to protect a business from competition than it is to convince people to willing purchase and engage with a business.
Why are people so afraid of each other? Why are people so afraid of allowing their fellow humans to choose the services and products and businesses they want to choose? Why are people so quick to call upon the government to implement through force the ideas they think are best? Especially when they are faced with the reality that their government continually flaunts their own laws when it suits them?
So many intelligent people so quickly willing to give away their rights to a government they criticize on one hand but call upon to protect them with the other.
? can you help me understand, I am curious why you believe this to be the case?
By any metric I can think of US government regulation has increased dramatically. Size of US tax code, number of laws, number of regulations, number of government agencies, expenditures, population of washington DC, the # of people with security clearances.
The only thing that has decreased is total work force, but if you add in the additional hiring of contractors that reduction is also thrown into question.
