Re: Fwd: [IP] re Competitor access to telco fiber would fix "net neutrality"



[references: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/201008/msg00099.html

ugh, i will read it eventually, but it sounds like more free market
fapping.  I'm starting to filter this stuff out, because it's like a
cold war relic, capitalism == morally right, communism == evil,
therefore there is something moral about markets and immoral about
anything that doesn't fit boomers' imaginary oversimplified ideal
version of a market.

Regulation these days isn't usually a compromise between capitalism
and communism, anyway.  Regulations are what _make_ markets.  ``Market
maker'' is now a core part of finance vocabulary.  When markets are
locked up because people are fucking each over un-transparently, or
exercising ``power'' over the market instead of competing within it,
regulation unsticks things.  It's a way of making markets operate in a
more ideal manner, not a perversion of them.  duh, yeah, some
regulations are stupid or don't work as well as people thought they
would, but the purpose of most modern regulations is to make markets
operate more ideally, and these fappers cannot accept that idea even
though he is actually proposing a complicated harsh (probably too
harsh to have 1st world precedent) regulatory regime in his mail, he's
at the same time suggesting all regulations are morally wrong, pervert
wonderful by-definition perfect markets, $distrust_ur_govt, u.s.w.

reading more carefully, doesn't it sound as ridiculous to you as it
does to me that customers are going to reverse-engineer un-neutral
networks and properly punish the party responsible?  When have they
ever done either of those two things?  For the first, even
highly-technical people had a lot of trouble reverse-engineering
Comcast's un-neutral shennanigans, and in general when a web site's
slow people blame the site, not their ISP, like whenever one of the
big eyeball-hoarders tries to squeeze more money out of Cogent.  For
the second, people switch ISP's because some customer service rep is
rude to them, or they have a long outage.  They don't shop around for
speeds: it's almost the opposite, in that ISP's use their AUP's to
shop around for fat juicy customers---if someone uses too much
unlimited bandwidth, you kick them off and ban their house for six
months.  That kind of reverse-shopping DOES work, but the forward kind
not so much!

and yup, he's fapping to free market dreams, talking about groceries
and shoes and other ``village blacksmith capitalism'' fantasies.  I
really think they get off on this.

Unfortunately, what's needed to make good regulations is an intimate
understanding of the market(s) being regulated, not regressive
storybook fantasies based on renfaire cloakers and cold war newsreels.

His tired and repeatedly proven-wrong reasoning aside, where he does
actually finally get down to the specific history of the American
last-mile, yeah, he and I say the same thing.  i think it's too late
though because either the govt or the courts are against regulations
in the form of a ``taking''.  In other words the duopolists invested
in their fiber under one set of rules, and now you want to change the
rules.  This is an issue of whether a country has ``rule of law'' or
not.  If you do that either the courts will nullify it or the US will
get a reputation as a banana republic, and investment in large
projects will be discouraged generally.  To avoid this the government
would have to *buy* all the fiber, then resell it to a new company
under the new regulations (resell for cheaper, since some of its value
came from the duopolist market the old regulations created).

which from what I hear in the UK and France works great, but it
requres that the incumbent monopolist be *EXCLUDED FROM THE ISP
MARKET*.  That is, one company cannot both own the wires and provide
the service above them.  Otherwise it just doesn't work: you have to
tolerate a little inefficiency in the fixing of the wholesale price on
the monopoly part of the stack in order to have a vibrant market above
it.  Other European countries like Belgium and Germany that have l2tp
DSL competition of private ISP's against the ILEC, the prices are
quite high, and there are silly caps on transit wildly higher priced
than transit in a euro datacenter.  

The horizontally-divided market is exactly what Australia was
proposing to do before their election mucked everything up:

 * newly created govt NBN monopoly *buys* the conduit and right-of-way
   and whatever from the ILEC, Telstra.  This is not needed to reach
   every home, but it's needed to reach some homes easily.

 * NBN runs fiber to all homes

 * the old Telstra copper is *shut down*.  If existing Telstra
   customers do nothing, they become Telstra customers over fiber.
   so...Telstra becomes one of the competing ISP/telcos above the NBN.

for points 1 and 3, govt paid Telstra iirc ~8 billion, to make this
change not a ``taking''.  that is,....some of the 8 billion was for
point 3, the change in the rules.

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