[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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