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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. Th

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.

infecto 2y ago
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.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  It would be nice if there was as much interest in making laying new fiber cheaper as there seems to be in shuffling pieces around via regulation.
tshaddox 2y ago
The term of art is "natural monopoly," and ISPs (at least landlines) are a textbook example.
legitster 2y ago
Governments already charge ISPs to use said infrastructure: https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/ad-hoc-commitee-survey-04242018.pdf 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.
- BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
  > $20 per pole per year So low? That's approximately 0% of what the ISP makes from the homes served by that pole. I figured it would be more.
  - legitster 2y ago
    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.
    - BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
      > 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.
      - dmurray 2y ago
        Some reasonable sources [0] put the number of telephone poles in the US (175m) a little above the number of households (125m). [0] https://www.srperspective.com/post/telephone-poles-a-high-wire-act https://www.srperspective.com/post/telephone-poles-a-high-wi...
      - awad 2y ago
        Check out this fun map curtesy of NYC who do a pretty good job exposing a lot of these type of data https://maps.nyc.gov/sandbox/poletop-finder/ https://maps.nyc.gov/sandbox/poletop-finder/
- bbanyc 2y ago
  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.
cogman10 2y ago
This is where I think we are all wrong. 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.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  Tell that to the judge who oversaw AT&T's breakup.
- legitster 2y ago
  I make this point all of the time. 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.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    The general image I get from the US is that public infrastructure and customer service in general is lacking in investment.
    - legitster 2y ago
      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).
ranger_danger 2y ago
> There can only be so many wires running on the poles or under the streets True, but I think using DWDM this is mostly a non-issue.
tzs 2y ago
That logic works, perhaps, for wired ISPs but not for wireless ISPs. Does the New York law cover wireless ISPs or only wired ISPs? Yes, wireless spectrum is a limited public resource that requires government permission to use, but the government in that case is federal government.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> 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?
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > This seems like saying "there can only be so many condos in a city, so we have to ration them." Broadband is a natural monopoly, housing is not. These are well understood economic terms.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Roads are a natural monopoly. Pulling fiber through a pre-existing conduit along the side of the road is not.
    - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
      In this scenario who puts the conduit there, government I guess? 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.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        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.
hughesjj 2y ago
Not even granting public infra, we straight up paid BILLIONS for them to expand broadband coverage and the ISP's didn't do jack most of the time https://www.huffpost.com/entry/verizon-pennsylvanias-com_b_7532008 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/ https://newnetworks.com/bookbrokenpromises/
kbenson 2y ago
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.
eru 2y ago
That seems pretty silly. 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.
zrn900 2y ago
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'.

infecto 2y ago

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.

throwaway48476 2y ago
It would be nice if there was as much interest in making laying new fiber cheaper as there seems to be in shuffling pieces around via regulation.

tshaddox 2y ago

The term of art is "natural monopoly," and ISPs (at least landlines) are a textbook example.

legitster 2y ago

Governments already charge ISPs to use said infrastructure: https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/ad-hoc-commitee-survey-04242018.pdf 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.

BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
> $20 per pole per year So low? That's approximately 0% of what the ISP makes from the homes served by that pole. I figured it would be more.
- legitster 2y ago
  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.
  - BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
    > 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.
    - dmurray 2y ago
      Some reasonable sources [0] put the number of telephone poles in the US (175m) a little above the number of households (125m). [0] https://www.srperspective.com/post/telephone-poles-a-high-wire-act https://www.srperspective.com/post/telephone-poles-a-high-wi...
    - awad 2y ago
      Check out this fun map curtesy of NYC who do a pretty good job exposing a lot of these type of data https://maps.nyc.gov/sandbox/poletop-finder/ https://maps.nyc.gov/sandbox/poletop-finder/
bbanyc 2y ago
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.

cogman10 2y ago

This is where I think we are all wrong. 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.

WillAdams 2y ago
Tell that to the judge who oversaw AT&T's breakup.
legitster 2y ago
I make this point all of the time. 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.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  The general image I get from the US is that public infrastructure and customer service in general is lacking in investment.
  - legitster 2y ago
    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).

ranger_danger 2y ago

> There can only be so many wires running on the poles or under the streets True, but I think using DWDM this is mostly a non-issue.

tzs 2y ago

That logic works, perhaps, for wired ISPs but not for wireless ISPs. Does the New York law cover wireless ISPs or only wired ISPs? Yes, wireless spectrum is a limited public resource that requires government permission to use, but the government in that case is federal government.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> 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?

ClumsyPilot 2y ago
> This seems like saying "there can only be so many condos in a city, so we have to ration them." Broadband is a natural monopoly, housing is not. These are well understood economic terms.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Roads are a natural monopoly. Pulling fiber through a pre-existing conduit along the side of the road is not.
  - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
    In this scenario who puts the conduit there, government I guess? 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.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      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.

hughesjj 2y ago

Not even granting public infra, we straight up paid BILLIONS for them to expand broadband coverage and the ISP's didn't do jack most of the time https://www.huffpost.com/entry/verizon-pennsylvanias-com_b_7532008 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/ https://newnetworks.com/bookbrokenpromises/

kbenson 2y ago

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.

eru 2y ago

That seems pretty silly. 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.

zrn900 2y ago

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'.