Walk me through this argument - my local utilities are a nightmare! Their pricing is atrocious and regressive (huge flat fixed fees to connect, tiny marginal costs), they constantly have to borrow money from the city to make ends meet. Combined, we pay $350 a month for gas, water & drainage, electricity (over 50% of the bills are fixed costs, unaffected by our consumption). Customer service is awful.
In comparison, our internet is relatively painfree and only $30 a month. I get that there are certain high level concepts of why it is good to treat internet as a utility, but as a consumer the idea frustrates me.
(Our city offers a municipal internet, btw. But it's worse service for more money, and has generally been a money drain for taxpayers.)
If the municipality lays the fiber and provides the internet service, the result may be poor. But that doesn't have to be the arrangement. The municipality can lay the fiber and allow multiple companies to offer internet service over that infrastructure.
In Chelan County, WA they've blended the best of public and private. The government took on the large upfront costs and laid municipal fiber down all over the place. Literally cabins in the woods are connected up to fiber optics. Then they somehow facilitated the capability for multiple providers to sell internet connectivity over that fiber. I'm not exactly sure how they did that -- maybe they laid multiple fiber strands, maybe they leased a variety of wavelengths, etc -- but the end result is that residents of Chelan County with fiber have multiple ISPs to choose from, the prices are very competitive and the service is good.
In Chelan County, LocalTel offers 1000Mbps down and 100Mbps up for $74.95 per month. No performance issues whatsoever with all the COVID-19 related traffic spikes and when you call LocalTel with a tech problem, a real human answers the phone -- it's wonderful.
In Washington state, this is only permitted in rural counties. The public utility district is allowed to lay fiber, but not to sell access to it directly to consumers. The law requires them to provide common access to the infrastructure at a rate that reflects their operational costs, but only to ISP companies. Someone wrote about their experience here (https://loomcom.com/blog/0098_fiber_optic_bliss.html).
Meanwhile, public utility districts in more populated counties (King, Snohomish, etc) are forbidden to offer network infrastructure at all. Tacoma has some weird public private partnership that seems somewhat dysfunctional and may predate these laws.
Note that I haven't checked in a few years, so the above could potentially be out of date.
All of those providers share the same non-redundant transport provider out of Chelan County FYI. City of Tacoma also has a similar setup, but they moved too early and are stuck with a cable network.
I don’t even understand what the distinction is. For instance PG&E in California is a private company but regulated by the government. I pay for service and if I stop paying they cut me off. Isn’t Comcast internet service the same thing? A private company but regulated by the FCC.
The only difference I can think of is there are still multiple providers for internet service available in most places. Would making internet a public utility just mean giving a government granted monopoly to one provider per region and forbidding anyone else from selling internet service?
The details vary substantially by type of utility and jurisdiction, but generally a public utility is subject to far stricter regulation than internet service providers which are regarded as a competitive industry.
A key example would be requirements for tariff approvals: public utilities are generally not permitted to make their own pricing decisions, instead they need to publish a tariff and they are not permitted to modify the tariff without petitioning the regulator for permission. The regulatory authority generally has broad authority to order utilities to do whatever it believes should be done, and has to approve almost all changes to the service, which the utility must justify as beneficial to customers.
Take a look at your electric bill, for example. Generally there's an interconnection fee and base rate, both of which come directly from the published tariff approved by the regulator. Due to real changes in the energy market there will also be a "fuel cost surcharge," this fee is calculated based on generation costs according to a formula included in the published tariff. If you have any dispute about the pricing or quality of the service you can take that complaint to the regulator, many regulators require that the utilities provide you that phone number as part of your bill.
Then look at your internet bill. The rate on it is whatever the ISP wants, and they have no requirement to explain it to you, except for a few mandated taxes. They can raise and lower it more or less at will, subject to your contractual protections, which are usually minimal. With most incumbent ISPs it is standard for the rate to increase significantly after 12 or 24 months. If you have complaints, there is a small chance you can take them to the FCC under certain regulatory authorities the FCC has exercised, but for the most part your only option is to find another provider.
> Would making internet a public utility just mean giving a government granted monopoly to one provider per region and forbidding anyone else from selling internet service?
Quite the opposite, generally. Many places legislate common access to the infrastructure, so a single provider runs the cables but any number of ISPs can compete to sell service on it.
This removes the primary barrier to entry for ISPs (last mile infrastructure) which allows for actual competition to take place.
> Would making internet a public utility just mean giving a government granted monopoly to one provider per region and forbidding anyone else from selling internet service?
If that's what "public utility" means then Internet is already a public utility in many parts of the US, since this is exactly the arrangement in existence today.
Zero competition in an egregiously high amount of locations in the United States.
The internet is a fundamental human right, like access to water and power. It is now required by most school systems. It should be protected by Net Neutrality legislation and in places with zero competition, treated as a utility. Or, at minimum, the laws should make it easier to allow for competition — such as outlawing geographic cable internet monopolies, outlawing cable company monopoly deals with cities and counties, and providing access to physical infrastructure for new players in the space.
Your anecdote, while understandable, doesn’t apply to all. My utilities are just fine with customer service just fine.
If internet is a fundamental human right, then over the air broadband should be perfectly acceptable. In which case there are a ton of competitive options across the US. Unless the argument is that a specific type of internet access at a specific speed is a human right.
Yes, a specific minimum speed would be required, otherwise you could claim IP over Pigeon or Postal Service would be sufficient.
Also cost would play a role. LTE typically has restrictive caps and high costs, especially for at-home/hotspot internet. Someone having a 15 - 60 minute teledoc video conference with their doctor shouldn't blow through half their monthly data allowance.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. You can get a very respectable average speed out of the postal service.
Latency is an oft-neglected metric. You can browse the web on a satellite internet connection with a 200ms ping, but it's anywhere from bad to unusable for a lot of other applications.
I think that has a lot to do with your municipality. I have municipal electricity and not only is it very affordable, it's 100% renewable because they started the shift to renewables back in the 1980s. They haven't had to raise rates in years. My internet is also municipally owned and it is about half the cost for double the speed as Comcast, which is it's only local competition. So, I think it largely depends on how well the government is run. If government officials look out for the public interest, listen to science, and think long-term, we'll get better outcomes.
In comparison, our internet is relatively painfree and only $30 a month. I get that there are certain high level concepts of why it is good to treat internet as a utility, but as a consumer the idea frustrates me.
(Our city offers a municipal internet, btw. But it's worse service for more money, and has generally been a money drain for taxpayers.)