Removing incentives to come in and compete is of no consequence when no one is doing that anyway. Gigabit fibre to the home has been all over the world for years (more than a decade?) and the vast majority of Americans are sitting here being treated like shit by Comcast/AT&T with connections that work barely or not at all at peak streaming time.
The free market has had its chance; we've gotten nothing but the token effort from Google Fibre in a tiny handful of markets.
I'm not sure public WiFi is the answer. I'd much rather see municipal fibre from homes to PoPs where consumers can ask to be patched to various ISPs. But competition just isn't doing it.
The U.S. market is smothered by local monopolies[1] and a global duopoly. Your argument would hold water if the free market has been given chance at all.
Local monopolies were granted by municipalities, certain officials and not the prospective end users. The very first winning bid from a cable company carried the monopoly clause. Once the monopolies had been granted, the market was no longer free; basically the market was (and is) no more.
I'd argue that a free market for cable / broadband access never ever existed.
> I'd argue that a free market for cable / broadband access never ever existed.
I agree. This is because that market was never regulated. A free market for POTS/DSL access did exist (and to a large extent still exists). Federally regulated mandatory line sharing made it happen.
It does not benefit the public good to run multiple, competing sets of infrastructure to carry commodities.
However, -as we see in things as disparate as Instant Messaging networks, remote-controlled lightbulbs, and wired Internet access- private business places far more value on capturing and walling in sections of the population than they do helping to facilitate a vibrant, competitive marketplace that promotes customer choice. From a business perspective, this lock-in makes sense. This isn't the best thing for society, though.
I think GP is thinking further back to ol' Ma Bell. If Bell hadn't been broken up, and competition-promoting regulations put in place, there would have been no need for municipal exclusivity agreements--Bell would have been the only carrier out there in the first place.
It's possible that Cable could eventually have grown to compete technologically, but in a world where Bell was still a single unregulated entity, it strikes me as unlikely that cable could have survived independently.
In a sense, yes. I would argue that the cabled infrastructure is not a natural monopoly at this stage of technology development, but the pre-existing regulatory framework and the local municipalities treated it as such. The effect was a market where local monopolies were bought and sold. Which leads to no free market for buying and selling last mile Internet access.
To build a parallel tax-funded infrastructure like the fine article says, would be just silly in those monopoly markets (instead of enabling commercial competition first; not sure if New York in particular has any meaningful competition, so this may not apply there).
The free market has had its chance; we've gotten nothing but the token effort from Google Fibre in a tiny handful of markets.
I'm not sure public WiFi is the answer. I'd much rather see municipal fibre from homes to PoPs where consumers can ask to be patched to various ISPs. But competition just isn't doing it.