4/5/2026 at 6:44:58 PM
In my small island community, I participated in a municipal committee whose mandate was to bring proper broadband to the island. Although two telecom duopolies already served the community, one of them had undersea fiber but zero fiber to the home (DSL remains the only option), whereas the other used a 670 Mbps wireless microwave link for backhaul and delivery via coaxial cable. And pricing? Insanely expensive for either terrible option.Our little committee investigated all manner of options, including bringing municipal fiber across alongside a new undersea electricity cable that the power company was installing anyway. I spoke to the manager of that project and he said there was no real barrier to adding a few strands of fiber, since the undersea high voltage line already had space for it (for the power company’s own signaling).
Sadly, the municipality didn’t have any capital to invest a penny into that fiber, so one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.
A few weeks later, the cable monopoly engaged a cable ship and began laying their own fiber. Competition works, folks. Even if you have to fake it.
by ttul
4/6/2026 at 2:12:09 AM
this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.”i truly do believe competition can often drivr things forward but we have countless examples where executives get comfortable and decide their best course of action for profits is to do little to nothing.
if a community has been screaming for fiber internet for years and the service companies cry “oh it’s just too expensive” when we know that isn’t true, then the people who pay the taxes should say “ok, apparently you’re not up to the job, you and/or your business model is clearly a failure, we’ll do it and provide it cheaper than you would have anyway.”
maybe this would force the competition we know can often work. if they can’t figure out a way to do it without subsidies, then we’ll do it ourselves. you can call it “spooky government” all you want, but that’s just another term for “us”
something to the effect of: ok, this thing has become integral to society. ceos, you have 5 years to compete and prove that you’re up to the task by delivering A, B, and C for $N. can’t do it? not up to it? no worries, thanks for trying.
by toofy
4/6/2026 at 2:32:41 PM
> this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.”That's what my town (Longmont, CO) did! We had laid a fiber loop around the city back in the '90s for traffic signal coordination. Over the years the town would engage different private companies to try to get them to lay fiber (or even directional wifi) to the door. None of them took off, so the city decided to do it themselves. Xfinity tried to sue us and ran a weak attempt at astroturfing, but after about five years of concerted back-hoeing most of the town has gigabit. It isn't 25 gigabit by any means but it works.
Bonus: you call a 303 number for support and somebody who lives here picks up like "What can I do for ya, hun?" (I exaggerate, but not by much). Half an hour later your problem is solved.
Edit: It's $50/month for that.
by troyvit
4/6/2026 at 2:40:24 PM
https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-maphttps://communitynetworks.org/content/municipal-ftth-network...
How to Build a Fiber Network on a Small-City Budget [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUhtdBZbOMc
Getting Fiber to My Town [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910 - September 2020 (126 comments)
by toomuchtodo
4/6/2026 at 11:37:01 AM
> where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheapThereby accruing not only a capital expenditure but ongoing operational obligation? How is this better than scaring the cable company into fronting the cash to get the same outcome?
by JumpCrisscross
4/6/2026 at 11:43:27 AM
In which way this is a viable strategy that you can repeat more than once?by AshamedCaptain
4/6/2026 at 12:08:55 PM
If the outcome is you need to pay the next time, but not the first time…. Doesn’t it at least save you from having to pay for it the first time?by lazide
4/6/2026 at 11:44:35 AM
> In which way this is a viable strategy that you can repeat more than once?I’m not saying commit to bluffing. But after the other guy has folded, continuing with your threat just to be petty is kind of dumb.
by JumpCrisscross
4/6/2026 at 6:19:39 PM
> after the other guy has folded, continuing with your threat just to be petty is kind of dumbYour community is still going to be paying whatever the cable company wants to charge for the service. There's definitely a reason to run it yourself.
by fn-mote
4/6/2026 at 11:46:24 AM
Or not if you want the threat to work a next time.by AshamedCaptain
4/6/2026 at 2:05:34 PM
> not if you want the threat to work a next timeYou don’t care if it works next time. It worked this time. If it doesn’t work next time, build it next time.
by JumpCrisscross
4/6/2026 at 4:54:46 PM
Cool, but isn’t this “the next time”, after “the next time”, after “the next time” already? These companies have been threatened, sued, and incentivized in numerous ways over many years, which has yet to be successful, and yet it seems like you are suggesting “just one more time” will be the impetus for change…this time…you swear…probably?Note: I don’t disagree or agree, rather, I’m pointing out how flawed the logic is that just one more time will be what it takes.
by therealpygon
4/6/2026 at 8:09:28 PM
> isn’t this “the next time”, after “the next time”, after “the next time” already?No, it’s the time that it worked. The cable company upgraded. That’s all that matters. Whether it’s happened many times or not is irrelevant. The next time will come next time.
> which has yet to be successful
OP said they laid the fiber. It was literally successful. Preëmptively striking your service provider because they might screw you in the future is silly.
by JumpCrisscross
4/6/2026 at 11:25:07 AM
Australia did that but also paid out the telecom companies a gazillion dollars for infrastructure that had only been privatised like a decade earlier.by kaelwd
4/6/2026 at 1:05:23 PM
they voted a conservative government who did what conservative governments do.what did people think abbot and turnbull were selling? wasn't better service for users, it was servicing telstra and murdoch.
by red-iron-pine
4/6/2026 at 2:29:46 PM
> this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.”In the US, this would likely end with ISPs suing the government, tying the case up in court for years.
by glitchc
4/6/2026 at 2:12:24 PM
Isn't this the Chinese system? Using state corporations to spur competition.by DiscourseFan
4/6/2026 at 7:29:23 AM
That's nice in theory, but look at how much money has gone to Verizon in the name of rural broadband, and how much they (haven't) delivered. And the consequences.by fragmede
4/6/2026 at 8:50:09 AM
What does giving money to Verizon have to do with municipal (i.e. operated by the municipality) broadband?by deaux
4/6/2026 at 9:16:02 AM
[dead]by fragmede
4/6/2026 at 10:28:05 AM
Municipalities don't know anything about the job and few have the resources and personnel to become sufficiently experienced. I know every other poster on HN has a story where they personally stepped in and saw their local government through the process for incredibly cheap, hey that's great, but how is some random municipality without an elder tech god living with them supposed to get "municipal" internet without contracting with an ISP who actually knows how to get that work done?We're talking rural broadband. These municipality don't have great human capital for this kind of stuff. Hell, they struggle to just fill potholes.
by mikkupikku
4/6/2026 at 10:41:57 AM
That is not how it works here. Municipality owned fiber is common here in Sweden (called stadsnät). Often several smaller municipalities join together and co-own the venture.A common variation is that they just provide the physical infrastructure and you can then select which ISP to use on top of the fiber, from a list of about 15 or so usually. This seems to work fine in rural Sweden, so I don't see why it wouldn't work elsewhere.
As to potholes, that is not a big problem? It is usually a larger problem in the cities than out in the countryside.
by VorpalWay
4/6/2026 at 10:40:36 AM
i was only using fiber as just one example. but in the case of fiber, there are plenty of non rural areas that still can’t get it and are stuck with terrible options.even so, even in rural areas, nothing at all stops them from hiring people the same way they hire a weatherman or a police man or a fireman or a city accountant. there are educated intelligent people in rural areas…
by toofy
4/6/2026 at 11:33:14 AM
I guess we have different versions of HN cause the one I read has headlines on the front page pretty regularly about people (collectives, not individuals) doing their own broadband successfully. There's a reason right-wingers and lobbyists are against this and try to pass laws preventing it. It's because it works and undermines their position as rent-seekers who don't invest in their infrastructure.by alsetmusic
4/6/2026 at 9:00:39 PM
> There's a reason right-wingers and lobbyists are against this and try to pass laws preventing it.There’s a reason POLITICIANS are against this and try to pass laws preventing it.
There, fixed it for you.
Let’s not pretend this is a red or blue problem. It’s a big boot hovering over your head problem. It’s a politician problem.
It doesn’t matter if their colour underwear matches yours. This is about people in power doing what they can to stay in power while guaranteeing their easy money.
by ididieicueu
4/7/2026 at 4:38:56 AM
The only "right wingers" that are backing things like this are the ones that get paid by the ISP lobbies.by KetoManx64
4/6/2026 at 1:06:42 PM
lol he thinks big ISPs upgrade their infra or care.by red-iron-pine
4/6/2026 at 1:40:21 PM
Did I say that? No, you made it up. Why you chose to make that up, I can only imagine (or should I make things up too?)Also everybody else responding to me is ignoring the point that most rural municipalities can barely afford keep their roads marginally flat, let alone tear up the roads, lay fiber, then repair those roads. Municipal fiber is a pipe dream in most scenarios, but workable in reasonably high density regions that have a tax base to work with.
by mikkupikku
4/7/2026 at 7:08:04 AM
Road infrastructure is extremely expensive compared to a little bit of glass fiber.You also usually don't need to tear up the road. Maybe the pavement, but not the road.
by imtringued
4/6/2026 at 11:29:40 AM
That's the opposite of what was proposed above. Stop paying them altogether and replace them in the places where they aren't competing. I think that was the message.by alsetmusic
4/6/2026 at 9:52:16 AM
Counterpoint: rural fibre is unbelievably expensive and starlink is solving it in a better way.by philipallstar
4/6/2026 at 10:44:15 AM
i’m sorry, but no, starlink is not comparable to fiber.better than dsl? i mean, sure? but absolutely not even close to better than fiber. there’s a reason data centers in rural areas run fiber for miles and miles to their centers and aren’t on … starlink.
by toofy
4/6/2026 at 4:27:19 PM
My charitable interpretation: adding a turn-key competitor is a better way to incentive the incumbents than a long fight to add a government competitor.by axus
4/6/2026 at 2:07:36 PM
> starlink is not comparable to fiberStraw man. It doesn’t need to comparable. Just sufficient. If a rich rural community wants to pay to lay fiber into the boonies, they can still do that. But it shouldn’t be a shared cost across society. (I live in a rural community.)
by JumpCrisscross
4/6/2026 at 4:23:13 PM
What exactly made it possible to get copper wire into effectively every house in the country?We didn't say "if a rich rural community wants telephones or electricity in the boonies..."
Maybe we need a new Ma Bell that's Uncle Fibre. Give them a very tightly bordered but lucrative monopoly in exchange for mandates to actually build and maintain the network. Perhaps some sort of scheme where consumers actually pay the regulator instead of the service provider, so they can hold payments hostage in the event expansion and QoS goals are not met, giving it real teeth.
It might end up being the same ~USD75-100 per month for 1Gb that many of us are paying for cable now, at least initially, but the cost would be funding making sure people in rural counties are getting modern infrastructure, and gradually ticking up speeds as more and more infra is paid down, rather than on yachts.
by hakfoo
4/6/2026 at 8:06:40 PM
> What exactly made it possible to get copper wire into effectively every house in the country?Subsidies.
> making sure people in rural counties are getting modern infrastructure
Sure. This is inefficient when an alternative is more than sufficient.
Again, I live in a rich rural community. I have gigabit fiber to my home. I have neighbors ditching wired internet for Starlink because it’s cheaper and good enough and they can also put it on their truck when they travel.
My property value does well from the subsidy. But it’s inefficient.
by JumpCrisscross
4/6/2026 at 9:18:31 AM
[flagged]by andrepd
4/6/2026 at 7:05:24 AM
If people truly want something and it can be done profitably, just start a company and do it yourselves.If you need subsidies, that means the people who don't want that think are paying for it, just so people who do want it can have it cheaper.
With subsidies, the cost is still there, it's just hidden in some tax or other.
by miki123211
4/6/2026 at 10:13:59 AM
> If people truly want something and it can be done profitably, just start a company and do it yourselves.There is a specific problem with last mile services: It costs approximately the same amount to install fiber down every street whether you have 5% of the customers or 95%.
So you have an incumbent with no competitors and therefore no incentive to invest in infrastructure instead of just charging the monopoly price for the existing bad service forever. If no one new enters the market, that never changes.
However, if there is a new entrant that installs fiber, the incumbent has to do the same thing or they're going to lose all their customers. So then they do it.
Recall that it costs the same to do that regardless of what percent of the customers you have, but they currently have 100% of the customers. Now no matter what price you charge, if it's enough to recover your costs then it's enough to recover their costs, so they just match your price. Then you're offering the same service or the same price, so there is no benefit to anyone to switch to your service now that they're offering the same thing, and inertia then allows them to keep the majority of the customers. Which means you're now in a price war where you'll be the one to go out of business first because customers will stay with them by default when you both charge the same price. And since this result is predictable, it's hard to get anyone to invest in a company destined to be bankrupted by the incumbent.
Which means that if the customers want someone to compete with the incumbent, they have to invest in it themselves. At which point going bankrupt by forcing the incumbent to install fiber is actually a decent ROI, because you pay the money and then you get fiber. Furthermore, you can even choose to not go bankrupt, by making the basic fiber service "free" (i.e. paid for through local taxes), which then bankrupts the incumbent and prevents the local residents from having to pay the cost of building two fiber networks instead of just one.
by AnthonyMouse
4/6/2026 at 10:49:04 AM
There is an elegant way to solve this. Mandate that whoever install the fiber lets other companies run their ISP on top of it (with a small but reasonable cut of the profit presumably). I believe this happens (mandated or not) already for mobile phone networks in the form of MVNOs.And here in Sweden we have the same for fiber. I don't think it is mandated here, since not every place has multiple options like that, but many do. If you have municipality owned fiber (stadsnät) it always work like that I believe, often you have a choice between 15 or so different ISPs.
by VorpalWay
4/6/2026 at 11:00:51 AM
why would we do that? not everything has to skim profits to a certain group of people just because they exist. they can use magical competition and build it if they want a piece.if an area has been waiting for… (what would it be now? around 30 years since the internet took off?) so these companies had 3 decades to build out and have refused, if we the tax payers step in and we pay for it, why should we let them in? they have refused to do anything for literal decades… even worse, many of these companies took billions in subsidies and still did nothing. they’ve refused to be good boot strappin capitalists, for decades.
(i want to reiterate what i said above, i believe competition can often work really really well. but if we dont understand by now that it fails sometimes too, we're not seeing clearly.)
think about how long that is, like some people become grandparents at around 35. someone born in the windows 95 days might have a grandkid and the poor sap still wont be able to get fiber. even in tons of urban and suburban areas.
some of these same ceos have gone on about how perfect the marketplace is, how awful taxes are, how magical the marketplace is… decades later if we have to build it, why should they get a piece?
by toofy
4/6/2026 at 8:11:56 PM
The physical cable that goes to every house is a natural monopoly. Really it's even more like the conduit the cable is installed in. Doing that part more than once is both fairly inefficient and tends to market failure.The rest of the service isn't. Transit is a fairly competitive market. You may also have providers willing to use more expensive terminating equipment and then offer higher-than-gigabit speeds on the same piece of fiber. You want the competitive market for every aspect of the system where it can work and to keep the monopoly as narrow as possible.
Notice that the point isn't to let just Comcast use the municipal fiber and then get ~100% of the customers again, it's to let this happen with fiber to the home:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_virtual_network...
by AnthonyMouse
4/6/2026 at 11:04:43 AM
Having the municipality run the whole thing would be even better sure. I'm not sure why we do that mix here in Sweden, but it worked out OK for us I think.Also, wouldn't those subsidies come with a legaly enforceable requirement to actually build out infrastructure? If not, I think that is where you went wrong.
by VorpalWay
4/6/2026 at 11:17:21 AM
im saying we shouldnt give them subsidies at all. if they cant make it work in the marketplace, if they arent up to the task, then the competitive marketplace is a failure in that instance. and thats ok.no subsidies. if they cant do it, fine, we'll do it and we'll provide cheaper than they ever would have. and in the case of fiber, we know this is the case. there are plenty of municipally owned fiber areas that are solid and cheap af.
its ok to admit that the market doesnt always work. often, absofuckinlutely. always? not at all.
a lack of subsidies would make it obvious where those failures exist so we can just do it ourselves (the spooky government) for cheaper. tell them "you had your chance" and move on with our day.
by toofy
4/6/2026 at 2:05:15 PM
just start a company and do it yourselves.Do I recall incumbent providers lobbying to ensure that competition be forbidden, so that they can continue to charge a lot for bad service? I think at least a couple of years ago, 16 US states had banned community internet at the behest of Comcast and chums.
I suppose that municipal broadband being banned at the behest of incumbent monopolies and duopolies isn't quite outright banning competition; just making it a lot harder to do.
by EliRivers
4/6/2026 at 7:08:07 AM
This line of thinking comes up so often, but ignores second order effects. I don't need schools because I have no children, but I will certainly depend on well educated children entering the workforce.Or, more facetiously, I don't need a subsidised fire service because no building I visit is currently on fire.
by sirtaj
4/6/2026 at 7:42:10 AM
Yes but you cannot make up more than about 10-15 examples everyone will agree with, seeing as those are subsidized in practically every country on earth, and then apply the thinking the guy above you gives for everything else.In my opinion internet access is as fundamental a right now as water access so I think it should be subsidized to a fair degree.
But not for example if it is to supply only a small island of rich people just because they happen to want to live there and force the rest of the state to supply them. There's nuance to these things and we can't just outright subsidized everything and we can't market economy everything either
by vasco
4/6/2026 at 7:51:42 AM
I agree with you. The internet is now important enough that it's required for almost everything past basic sustenance. Governments worldwide are moving services to the internet, so it's not even optional any more.by sirtaj
4/6/2026 at 9:58:55 AM
As precedent, the framers of the US Constitution specifically authorized the government to run a national service provider of last resort...In that technological era of horses and handwriting, it became the US Postal Service, but I think if it occurred today it would be the US Networking Service.
by Terr_
4/6/2026 at 7:03:15 AM
If it was easy to do with a lot of margin it would have been done by someone else in the private sector. In fact, they tricked these companies into making investments that weren't worthwhile for them. Sounds like the kind of people the deserve the shitty internet they have.by zeroCalories
4/6/2026 at 9:06:39 AM
That’s not necessarily true. A lot of companies are very risk averse and will sit there creaming off profit and not making any investment.If someone came to you and said - you have two choices:
Work incredibly hard, raise a lot of money, build a bunch of infrastructure. And at some point in the future you will make some more money.
Or - keep taking your very nice high guaranteed salary for the foreseeable future.
What would you pick?
by iamflimflam1
4/6/2026 at 11:25:29 AM
I hear vending machine ppl often have 1-3 very profitable locations and 10-40 locations that only barely make sense often only because they already are in the business.I imagine hiring someone to fix or restock them makes a lot more sense if you have 100 machine rather than just one.
It really depends what the goal is. Profit with fiber or fiber with profit?
Here public transport is required to cover all routes. Postal service is the same. Fiber doesn't seem that different?
by econ
4/6/2026 at 1:38:27 PM
Depends on how much margin there was. Sounds like there's not enough.by zeroCalories
4/6/2026 at 9:54:55 AM
The problem is all the regulatory stuff that means the bigger you are and the longer you've operated for the better you understand and have relationships with the often pretty inept regulatory bodies that can stop you.by philipallstar
4/6/2026 at 1:40:15 PM
Then as the local government, maybe start by removing that regulation. Or if the regulation is required, you're going to have to pay a premium for people willing and able to put up with it.by zeroCalories
4/6/2026 at 2:24:56 PM
The problem isn't knowing the solution. The problem is incentives.by philipallstar
4/7/2026 at 7:16:09 AM
How do you trick a company into a calculated strategic play that benefits them? It sounds like something they would figure out on their own.by imtringued
4/6/2026 at 8:26:30 AM
This is a fundamental problem of value creation and value extraction. Just because the ISP's can't extract the value of adding the additional fiber capacity doesn't mean it doesn't confer that value to the customers. We live in an age of value extraction, what's colloquially known as "enshittification", that can't go on forever. Somebody has to create the value that is being extracted.It's the old Marx quote: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Except you know, the opposite.
by delusional
4/6/2026 at 1:43:45 PM
I have a lot of ability. I'm not gonna flex it for others without pay that gives me significantly higher living standards than the average person. Are you going to force me to work?by zeroCalories
4/6/2026 at 2:39:50 PM
No, however there's a bunch of people with your abilities that will do it because they're capable of seeing that something as crucial as internet access is a public good. You can choose to not work, plenty of us will make things move forwards without you, nor care about your living standards.by well_ackshually
4/6/2026 at 8:31:37 PM
If you could find people to do this work below market rate this wouldn't be a problem to begin with.by zeroCalories
4/6/2026 at 2:26:55 PM
Thanks for writing a reply. I was wondering why this comment was floating around 0. I realize it's pretty contentious politics on HN, but I figured the philosophical point is at least interesting anyway, and that HN would be able to separate the two. Your reply helps me adjust that assumption.by delusional
4/5/2026 at 10:36:52 PM
Local municipality power companies put fiber in the ground whenever they put power. The result is fiber almost everywhere at very low cost. Even along rail and major roads.by Hikikomori
4/6/2026 at 2:33:19 PM
Absolutely. Once you’re laying anything at all in the ground, tossing down a fiber costs nothing.by ttul
4/6/2026 at 7:22:21 AM
I wish there was a way to achieve that same outcome in my internet backwater of San Francisco.Nearby blocks have symmetrical GB fibre from Sonic but we only have shity 30MB up from Comcast.
by laurencerowe
4/6/2026 at 7:34:14 AM
Sounds like you do know a way: Buy a spool of fiber and lay one from your house to the nearby block. Make it public knowledge that you're doing this and sharing internet with your neighbours (even if you're not). The incumbent will quickly upgrade your area.by direwolf20
4/6/2026 at 10:28:23 AM
A few years ago I learned that the only thing keeping me on 20/2 ADLS was a few 100 meters of already built but empty cable channel. I easily could buy that much fibre, borrow a fibre splicer and cable puller, patch it up to a relative in one of the already wired buildings and share their gigabit link with my entire apartment building. Half of my building was on the ISP that owned the empty channel, so moving to a competitor would've directly hurt their bottom line.Except that opening the manholes is a crime, using the ISP's channels would be at least a civil cause of action, laying such infra requires a municipal permit... The ISP was not worried about such "competition".
Now try doing this in the US, the land of endless red tape, NIMBYs and HOAs. And without having an already dug cable channel. Sure, that's going to scare the probably multi-billion-$ incumbent ISP...
by franga2000
4/6/2026 at 2:23:33 PM
This, more than anything, is the cause of limited space utilities monopolies. Companies have to license use of the backing infrastructure, and most often municipalities only give these easements to a tiny number of players. It's a textbook government granted monopoly.by sophrosyne42
4/6/2026 at 2:30:23 PM
To be fair, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't want five different fibre lines going to every apartment building. That's more construction, more space use and more material costs. Ideally, we'd have one run going to every building, which the ISPs could share. Instead of 5x the fibre to every building, we'd get 5x the buildings with fibre.To put it another way, the building of infrastructure should be a monopoly, but the use should be free (as in speech, not beer)
by franga2000
4/6/2026 at 3:29:32 PM
> I don't want five different fibre lines going to every apartment buildingIt’s funny that you’d mention this. My apartment fiber has four lines going into my unit, all under AT&T service, apparently for redundancy. I only use one.
by MarioMan
4/6/2026 at 10:45:59 AM
People are too afraid of breaking the law. Look at every multi billion dollar company - all of them got where they are by breaking the law. How's it going to look in front of a jury when the government says "this man illegally brought cheap and fast internet to a neighbourhood?" The companies don't even have narratives that nice.Even YC startups are encouraged to break the laws. The key is knowing which laws you can break, how much you can break them, and what's likely to happen if you're caught. When an illegal good thing is caught, the response is usually to slap on the wrist and legalise it.
A lot of current ISPs did start out illegally too.
Don't splice into other people's fibers though. That's a much worse crime of property damage.
by direwolf20
4/6/2026 at 11:08:29 AM
You can break the law if you have money. That's it.You won't be in front of a jury for "setting up fast internet". You'll get caught climbing into a manhole with electrician tools and charged with terrorism. The jury will be fed a story of how you had expensive specialized equipment on you, so this was a well-funded professional attempt at sabotaging critical infrastructure. You'll have a shitty public defender who will only realise that fiber in this case is about internet not clothing because he first read the file in the taxi to the courthouse. You'll take a plea deal because you can't afford a trial.
The system doesn't work how you think it does, at least not for the people on the ground.
by franga2000
4/6/2026 at 11:14:33 AM
You'll have money because you'll be selling fast internet to people. If YCombinator startups can make it work, so can you. Wear a hi-vis vest.by direwolf20
4/6/2026 at 10:19:43 AM
ROW?by inemesitaffia
4/6/2026 at 10:44:34 AM
It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, especially if nobody notices.by direwolf20
4/6/2026 at 10:55:04 AM
Is there a possibility to create a wireless point-to-point link ?by petra
4/6/2026 at 3:56:30 PM
Yes. You can actually buy pairs of antennas (basically an AP pair) that do just that. The only downside is that the signal quality varies based on weather.If you want something more or less weather proof, you can get microwave P2P links that run in licensed bands and you don't get any signal interference from similar nearby antennas.
Both WiFi and Microwave equipment act just like bridges and you can connect them to a switch or router.
by ExoticPearTree
4/6/2026 at 9:00:45 PM
We have an ISP (Monkeybrains) that offers this in SF but it’s only up to 100 Mbps each way.I recently tried AT&T fixed wireless which runs over the mobile network but it seems too congested to offer high speeds so ended up back with Comcast.
by laurencerowe
4/6/2026 at 7:25:49 AM
What speed can you get from Monkeybrains?by fragmede
4/6/2026 at 9:04:54 PM
I believe they only offer up to 100mbps. Having 1Gb down from Comcast is definitely useful at times. I just wish I could get more than 30Mb up.by laurencerowe
4/6/2026 at 1:41:59 PM
> Sadly, the municipality didn’t have any capital to invest a penny into that fiber […]Would borrowing money (issuing a bond) be an option in cases like this? Pay it off over the course a decade (two/three?), and make the payments part of the fee put to users?
by throw0101d
4/6/2026 at 2:32:31 PM
Yes, they could have borrowed money. It requires a referendum, but I believe it would have passed. Alas, many small community politicians are retired folks (who else has time when you’re getting paid $500/mo) and in my case, they just didn’t get how crucial this stuff is.by ttul
4/5/2026 at 8:28:20 PM
It seems incorrect to call this competition.I'm glad you got your broadband but what happened sounds much more like American politics than ordinary market processes. And in this political environment, corporations can engage in a variety of other tactics than placating a squeaky wheel - they can outlaw competition, buy off officials, pay for shrill media hit pieces and so-forth.
by joe_the_user
4/5/2026 at 10:11:58 PM
It's clearly competition. The incumbent company saw a potential competitor and acted upon it. That's literally what happens when there's competition. It doesn't matter that the competitor didn't actually exist if the incumbent behaved as if it did exist.I'm never sure what the point of comments like this is. "It seems incorrect". But it isn't. You just don't want to admit that competition is good and necessary.
by HauntingPin
4/5/2026 at 11:04:44 PM
OK, I should have said "economic competition" though I imagined that it was implied.If you just say "competition", you can point at the efforts of ten people to gain a seat on the politbureau as a clear case of this.
by joe_the_user
4/6/2026 at 11:05:00 AM
If they ever find out they've been duped, they'll certainly go out of their way to make something worse down the line at the expense of the people.These are the kind of short-sighted tactics that competition and capitalism breeds that belongs in luxury markets, not utilities or essentials.
by hnthrow0287345
4/5/2026 at 10:59:41 PM
No, it's called market manipulation. OP's action caused spending at the expense of the companies. Not going to "won't someone think of the shareholders", but calling competition is misleadingby postsantum
4/6/2026 at 4:26:56 PM
I think this demonstrates that while there are many factors at play, including difference in geography as many have pointed out, the main factor is priority. American's generally have different priorities, sometimes that just prioritizing our personal comfort by not having to fight against the current "system". So, even if we would love to have better internet, other things are more important. I'm one of those people. My cellular based rural internet would be considered poor by most people on Hacker News, but it's good enough for us. I have no motivation to pay for faster. I only rarely download large file and have always been willing to let them download in the background and come back hours later. If I'm going to campaign for something I currently have far bigger priorities.by wisemanwillhear
4/6/2026 at 4:58:03 PM
> Competition works, folks. Even if you have to fake it.Sometimes it works in ways you don't expect though https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/07/telco-wont-ins...
by autoexec
4/6/2026 at 1:05:37 AM
Either side of the spectre lies enshittification:- more competition comes with margin squeezing and cheapest source for service or goods
- less competition brings the monopoly, the dream of any capitalist (owner, not user).
Either way comes enshittification, and there's no middle balance, it drifts towards one of the sides always.
by zx8080
4/6/2026 at 8:08:46 AM
This German supermarket system has strong compettion , low margins but it is cheap and reliably good quality what most German wish.So I disagree.
by lava_pidgeon
4/6/2026 at 1:59:41 AM
During the Soviet Union years, tourists to it knew that the thing to do was pack blue jeans in their luggage, which were highly desirable under communism. Wearing blue jeans in the USSR was a mark of status.by WalterBright
4/6/2026 at 2:24:07 PM
False dilemmaby sophrosyne42
4/6/2026 at 1:31:33 AM
we still had luxury goods without monopolies, so I think I'll take more competition please.by jimbooonooo
4/5/2026 at 7:45:59 PM
[flagged]by bestouff
4/5/2026 at 10:15:47 PM
[flagged]by HauntingPin
4/6/2026 at 12:11:16 AM
> What exactly did they prove?They proved that the Free Market doesn't automatically provide functional competition, if you think about it, the Western-style free market is very keen on creating and maintaining monopolies, even cheating isn't going to help you here.
> The company laid down fibre because of what they saw as a potential competitor (municipal fibre).
The OP is about free market failures, not about competition. As another example, many people have pointed out that there is much more competition in China than in the US. Hope, this is enough for you to understand the difference.
by bigbadfeline
4/6/2026 at 2:31:55 AM
Free markets don't automatically do anything. There's nothing automatic. It's about giving individual people the opportunity to take action.by eru
4/6/2026 at 5:30:55 AM
Free markets tend toward monopoly which restricts individual people’s opportunities for action. In this example, there was a cable monopoly mentioned. The only way to coerce it (not even to defeat it in some way) was through baseless deception, not free market competitive action. The monopoly remained.by wahnfrieden
4/6/2026 at 6:18:13 AM
> Free markets tend toward monopolyNot true and oversimplification. Some markets tend toward monopolies, but you rarely will get one unless enforced/protected by a state. If you navigate through history, you will find almost exclusively monopolies on salt extraction, coal mining oligopolies (with the help of worker unions), silk... Curiously, the Standard Oil was accused of being a monopoly, and the proof was they were offering lower prices than anyone thanks to their scale, destroying the competence. The reward for offering low prices was disolving the company (notice that they never reached the hypothetical price hike stage).
It is also common practice for the state to declare something "public utility" or "natural monopoly", on things like snail mail distribution, telephone or TV, that were clearly not a natural monopoly and could be offered by free market. Here fall a lot of ISPs, that get a "public utility" status and only then can abuse that monopolistic position with the help of the state.
A lot of free market sectors tend to atomization: think hair or nail saloons, masonry, plumbers, carpenters... if you know someone in the sector, it seems that as soon as they get a size over 5 or 6 people, two of them always decide to split and go by themselves.
by otherme123
4/6/2026 at 7:10:26 AM
You're right on most of these, but wrong on telephony. That actually was a natural monopoly.It's exactly how OP describes it. It's unproductive for multiple companies to maintain disconnected, parallel telephone infrastructures. The most productive use of resources is to lay more wires to more houses, not to lay more wires to places which have already been wired up for telephone service by somebody else. That creates a monopoly, and the government should step in.
With modern tech, you can mandate local-loop unbundling and fix some of this, but that wasn't possible with 1970s (and earlier) phone infrastructure.
by miki123211
4/6/2026 at 8:53:01 AM
We use "natural monopoly" too freely and too quickly, almost as a free card to actually implement monopolies that last for decades. Anecdo-time: in my small city there is a small "natural" monopoly in public bus service: the municipality offers a monopoly on which buses can operate in the city, that lasts for 25 years or so. I lived through a renewal that was a bit rocky, the bus company went on a strike, and as a result there was a vacuum of monopoly for six months. That resulted in a flood of other companies, big and tiny (as in 1 bus only, serving 1 very demanded route), doing the routes. They were as cheap as it gets, offering month cards outrageously cheaper than previous public-natural-monopoly. It was so cheap, and the offer was so high that cars seemed to vanish from the city center, that was so full of buses that you didn't even check the timetable: you just waited for the next for 5 minutes.Eventually the municipality renewed the previous contract with the same previous company, a contract that forbids other companies from entering the city center, and we went back to the worse service we were used to. Of course they were a lot of narratives: they were trying to capture the market, drive competence away and then hike the prices; they were bounded to bankrupcy at such prices; that many buses were damaging the roads, and others. But the reality was that for a brief time we had the best bus service in the modern world.
As for telephone wires, we went through some years, between copper-IDSN and fiber (the DSL bridge) that a lot of companies found a way to make it profitable to put new copper cable parallel to what it already existed. The only thing the municipality did was to make it mandatory that the first to install it must use a wider-than-needed conduct (a solution much less disruptive than giving a natural monopoly, latest shown by new small companies born everywhere), so if a company wanted to add more cable later could use the same tubing. Predictions about company A blocking their tubing showed false, as other companies could retaliate in other places. No second tubing was allowed until the first tube was full, this was the only state intervention in the issue. The same tubes have now the optic fiber.
I am not fully anti-state, but there are undeniable overreaching everywhere, and a lot of zealots of intervention that are itching to issue mandates and interfere with everything, and then fix what fails with more interventions.
by otherme123
4/6/2026 at 12:48:39 AM
The OP is about telecom. I took a look and learned [1]:> The telecommunications industry in China is dominated by three state-run businesses: China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile.
A little slippery to bring China into the telecom free market discussion and contrast it with “Western-style” while failing to mention the structure of its telecom industry.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_industry_in...
by peyton
4/6/2026 at 1:03:41 AM
> The OP is about telecom. I took a look and learned [1]:Untrue - in the context of the OP, telecom is just an example. Look at the title.
> The telecommunications industry in China is dominated by three state-run businesses: China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile.
"More competition" doesn't mean "no monopolization". Communications are political everywhere, I'd be surprised if they were a subject of less control in China than in the US. However, even on Amazon and even with tariffs, there's more competition between Chinese sellers than between sellers of other origins.
by bigbadfeline
4/6/2026 at 4:38:23 AM
Markets are just a tool. This tool functions on information. OP explained how information (in this case, the rumor of a competitor laying fiber) caused action within the market.Hmm. Seems the tool is working as expected.
by remarkEon
4/6/2026 at 12:34:29 AM
Western free market doesn’t create monopolies. Where did you get that idea?The only place monopolies tend to emerge is heavily regulated areas that allow for regulatory capture (laying fiber is a great example of this).
by kortilla
4/6/2026 at 2:52:43 AM
> The only place monopolies tend to emerge is heavily regulated areas that allow for regulatory capture (laying fiber is a great example of this).No, actually laying fiber is a great example of the problem with a free market.
It's not regulations that make it hard to put down fiber, it's property rights. Without some sort of regulation or government action (such as eminent domain) it's impossible to build out modern infrastructure. There will always be some person with property right in the way of a cable line. You can beg and plead with them to let you bury a line (including pointing out that it's very temporary disruption of soil) and they can still just say no.
It isn't unusual for a phone company that's looking at a difficult land owner to say "ok, screw it, we'll just have to take a 90 mile detour because the guy that owns that 500 yard strip won't let us bury here". Imagine how much harder that is if the land owner is related to or owns stock in a competitor company.
We have been able to lay as much fiber as we have in the US because there's a bunch of regulations around right of way that ultimately grants burying rights near public roads to utilities companies like ISPs. Without those, it'd be almost impossible.
by cogman10
4/6/2026 at 4:29:41 AM
Property rights are regulation. You’re just vehemently agreeing with me. Markets filled with laws that make entry difficult are subject to monopolies.by kortilla
4/6/2026 at 6:52:28 AM
If property rights are regulation, then so is anything that allows you to ignore them.Once you get down to the level of property rights, the only alternative left is total might-makes-right anarchy.
Property rights are some of the earliest and most basic things protected by governments—indeed, to a large extent they precede governments, being protected with force by the people who wish to assert them.
Wipe out all regulations, all laws, all property rights, and try to run fiber across someone's property without their permission, and they're likely to come out with a shotgun and start shooting everyone digging. Follow the steps logically from that point, and you'll fairly quickly start reinventing governments and regulations.
by danaris
4/6/2026 at 12:23:31 PM
Ok, let's imagine property rights are gone. Now it's impossible to build a fiber line without also employing an armed guard of that line. Sure, the open market allows for anyone to build out their lines where ever they like, but since we've eliminated all property rights and laws it means the most natural thing to do to your competition is sabotage.That means if you are a new comer, you have to employ significant military strength to guard and defend your line going in. Otherwise, existing powers will simply stomp it out as soon as they get a whiff that someone is trying to compete with them. That, or they'll simply take your line by force.
That is probably the most difficult form of entry because it requires someone to be independently very wealthy before they could dream of putting in new infrastructure and it requires them to enforce their own property rights since there's no government doing that.
Are you an anarco-communist by chance? That's about the only group I'm aware of that would advocate for the complete elimination of property rights, but they also usually don't advocate for a "free market".
by cogman10
4/6/2026 at 4:00:14 AM
The "only" place monopolies tend to emerge in is any market with a significant barrier to entry. Regulatory regime can be one such barrier, but e.g. up-front capital costs and network effects are other barriers to entry that can and will lead to monopolies.by pdpi
4/6/2026 at 1:09:29 AM
> Western free market doesn’t create monopolies.To quote myself: "the Western-style free market is very keen on creating and maintaining monopolies"
Guess who's the highly influential investor, with strong connection to the WH who said the following:
"Competition is for losers".
This sums up pretty well what the free market is keen on.
by bigbadfeline
4/6/2026 at 1:40:13 AM
It is well known that individual businessmen often want to reduce competition, because it's best for them. That is why the government's important role in the free market is to promote competition. But just because the market is imperfect and can be captured without the government making sure that people play fair, does not mean that the free market is "a lie" as TFA claims. It means that it's imperfect, as are all human endeavors.by bigstrat2003
4/6/2026 at 4:30:36 AM
A participant is not the market. Competitors very famously hate competition.by kortilla
4/6/2026 at 2:16:08 AM
> to quote myselfOkay, totally meaningless, it didn’t prove anything.
by what
4/6/2026 at 12:57:07 AM
Or in places where network effects make it impossible to compete.by greedo
4/6/2026 at 1:56:08 AM
So this shows competition works, but I thought the original post was about the free market. When the two companies were asked to fill a need for the people, they refused, and the people were not otherwise about to independently provide the service based on their own funds. I feel as though if the only way of getting companies to do something without organic competition is to use underhanded methods (such as lying about another competitor), then the free market has some places for improvement, no?by NewsaHackO
4/6/2026 at 2:52:23 AM
Competition works up to a certain point its best for short term returns and not for long term as the time and capital investment increases the chances of monopolies forming increases. This is the reason why I think most public infrastructure should be invested in and owned by the government. Let companies compete on building, running and maintaining it.by xbmcuser
4/5/2026 at 10:18:42 PM
> ...one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.They called in a favor that put pressure on the company from public expectations.
by xboxnolifes
4/5/2026 at 10:22:12 PM
Yes. What do you think happens in a competitive marketplace? Sony heard about Nintendo partnering up with Philips for the SNES CD expansion, so Sony made their own console. That's literally competition.The details of how the "public pressure" came to be don't matter, because the monopoly didn't know about that. All they knew was there was a potential competitor, so they behaved according to that information. That's how it works.
by HauntingPin
4/6/2026 at 7:20:08 PM
Maybe i misinterpreted the original comment, but having the government step in to pressure a company is not usually what i find people mean when they talk about competitive markets. Let alone when the pressure is through a side channel.by xboxnolifes
4/5/2026 at 10:55:52 PM
Frankly, I think you're trying to poke holes in a straightforward concept. And now you've dug your heels in and you're trying to justify it. But... let's ignore opinions and interpretations...> Sony heard about Nintendo partnering up with Philips for the SNES CD expansion, so Sony made their own console
This is completely inaccurate in every way possible. You even have the order of events backwards (Nintendo and Sony partnered first). There is in no way in which even the most charitable interpretation of this statement could bear out. Just about the only correct part is that you have some (but not all!) of the relevant parties involved.
If you're wrong about such a well documented, cut and dry matter of historical record, then what else are you wrong about? :)
by karlgkk
4/5/2026 at 11:53:52 PM
That isn’t actually refuting his original argument. Just proving his example false.Then you beg the question with a bit of a straw man fallacy thrown in.
by drfloyd51
4/8/2026 at 5:08:19 AM
> That isn’t actually refuting his original argument. Just proving his example false.Correct. It is extremely false. And it's an extremely well documented event, as well.
> Then you beg the question with a bit of a straw man fallacy thrown in.
I expressed my opinion. I did not misrepresent that person's argument (i didn't represent it at all). As for begging the question, well, I'm not sure what you're referring to, unless you mean the intensely cut and dry sequence of historical events? In which case... well, they're so unaligned with reality that it's comical.
by karlgkk
4/5/2026 at 11:39:38 PM
I don't understand this line of thinking. The spreading of a false rumor is an example of a competitive marketplace? If this took place in a different domain wouldn't it be fraud? That it was in the public benefit seems orthogonal.by hrimfaxi
4/6/2026 at 1:17:04 AM
Yes, if a simple unsubstantiated rumor is enough to get your competitors to spend potentially millions of dollars to fight you, that's a competition. Literally what else could it be?It can be two things, anyways. You can utilize fraud to manage your competitors expectations. CEOs lie constantly about the state their products are in, in order to drum up more sales.
It has absolutely zero requirement to be beneficial to the public in order to be a competitive marketplace. They're also competing to make as much profit as possible, which has effectively zero benefit for the public.
by kulahan
4/6/2026 at 1:54:20 AM
> They're also competing to make as much profit as possible, which has effectively zero benefit for the public.The end result is plenty of cheap stuff for people to buy. It's why free markets have full supermarkets and socialist markets have long lines.
Take the free market in software, for example. My entire software stack on my linux box cost me $0.
by WalterBright
4/6/2026 at 5:30:41 AM
Plenty of cheap stuff is a consequence of companies interested in people's money and, yes, presence of at least nominal competition between providers (i.e. they can be essentially a cartel, mirrioring each other exactly, but each still wants to step into other's money supply and retain its own). Choice for customer is present but also equally nominal.In deficit economy, economic agents aren't really interested in people's money, and competition is between consumers - who'll bid higher and offer something of real interest to provider. So providers hoard stuff and there are long lines.
Benefit for public is not a boolean, it's a spectrum. Lots of cheap poor stuff readily availible is better than having to compete for stuff, but less good than having choice between cheap poor stuff and more expensive better stuff, for example. For the latter, you need non-nominal competition and providers having to compete whithin the market, not outside of it, and also each individual provider having infinitesimal effect on whole market.
by nnevod
4/6/2026 at 3:37:29 AM
"Companies optimize to make as much money as possible, which is why there is cheap stuff" does not logically follow. I get what you're saying, but it's not related to the concept of companies trying to make as much profit as possible. Some will simply chase higher profit margins.by kulahan
4/6/2026 at 4:39:53 AM
> Some will simply chase higher profit marginsThat's constrained by the Law of Supply and Demand.
> "Companies optimize to make as much money as possible, which is why there is cheap stuff" does not logically follow.
Standard Oil gained great profits by reducing the price of kerosene by 70%.
by WalterBright
4/6/2026 at 5:37:43 AM
>That's constrained by the Law of Supply and Demand.Law of supply and demand works in the really free market, when providers are essentially infinitesimal and are not able to exert their will upon consumers. If a single provider is capable of significantly affecting the prices and supply of the whole market, it can bend law of supply and demand.
>Standard Oil gained great profits by reducing the price of kerosene by 70%. They (I suppose, don't know for sure) had plenty of margin for that, and as price-demand relation is not linear, increase of volume was larger than margin reduction. That is often not the case, and race to (quality) bottom and shrinkflation happens.
by nnevod
4/6/2026 at 6:40:21 AM
Standard Oil made more money by lowering the price. They had margin to do that by being very good at lowering costs.> race to (quality) bottom
When people aren't willing to pay for quality, there's no point in increasing the costs for more quality.
by WalterBright
4/6/2026 at 6:32:06 AM
The math doesn't support this. There is great confusion about this point. Imagine, for example, that there are people that want to buy one unit of a product made by a monopoly that is a greedy corporation trying to maximize profits. And to keep things simple, make everything discreet in dollars.10 people are willing to pay $2
5 people are willing to pay $3
1 person is willing to pay $4
and no one is able or willing to pay more than $4
So this would be the demand curve.
Now, let's do the supply curve. Keep it simple and assume a constant cost of production equal to $1 per unit.
The question is, if you are a greedy corporation, then how much should you charge to maximize your profits?
You should charge $2.
At that price, you will make $10 selling to the poors, $5 selling to the middle, and $1 selling to the rich. $16 bucks in profit for the greedy corporation.
If you charged $3, you would make $10 in profit selling to the middle, and $2 in profit selling to the rich, for only $12 in profit.
12 < 16. The greedy monopoly prefers $16 in profit to $12 in profit. That's why it lowers prices.
If you charged $4, you would make only $3 in profit.
3 < 16
In other words, it is profit maximization + law of demand + law of one price that drives down prices in the face of a demand curve.
People get this all wrong, they think that it requires perfect competition or some set of unobtainable market assumptions to make stuff affordable, it does not. It's just the law of demand (charge more and you get fewer customers) plus the law of one price (everyone pays the same amount).
This is why things like government subsidies to the poor to help them buy stuff actually drives prices up. It's why businesses wage an eternal war to be able to price discriminate. Health care, for example, would be much more affordable if hospitals had to post their prices and could not charge different rates to different people based on what they could squeeze from their insurance or based on how much money they had. It's why programs to help the poor by giving them more cash to buy stuff end up making things unaffordable for everyone else. It's why section 8 rental subsidies drive up rents. It's why during the covid subsidies, the new car price index went up from 147 to 188, but after the imposition of tariffs, it didn't change at all. So much of the world is explained just by some simple math, the law of one price, and the law of demand.
Because the companies are already charging the most to maximize their profits. They are not charities. Whenever a business says "if I have to pay this extra tax, it will just drive up prices", then ask them "Are you a charity? If you could charge more, then why aren't you charging more now? If you can't charge more now, why do you think you will be able to charge more tomorrow?"
Now, I'm not saying that there is no relationship between costs and prices, and that everything is set purely by demand and the law of one price. To get supply in there, you need more assumptions about the type of competition and the cost curve. But in general, supply only enters into the picture in that if you raise a firm's costs, then some firms go out of business because they can't pay the higher costs, and for the firms that are left, there is less competition, and it is this reduced competition that allows (some) of the increase costs to be passed on to consumers.
Always remember -- firms are already charging the most they can possibly charge in order to maximize total profits. That's the normal state of affairs, and it is what drives prices lower. Whether you are modeling a monopoly, or monopolistic competition, or an oligopoly, or perfect competition, it does not matter. They always charge the most they can possibly charge, and the law of demand, working with the law of one price, drives prices down.
by carefree-bob
4/6/2026 at 9:54:58 AM
Except it doesn’t scale at all like this. There are companies selling sandwiches on private jets for $150/ea. Some people sell a candle for $5 at Target while others sell them for $45 at a farmer’s market. If you’re making websites for a living, it’s common advice to raise your prices to keep away people who aren’t very serious or who will balk at every expense.There are countless companies working with excellent profit margins.
by kulahan
4/6/2026 at 3:29:56 PM
None of those are monopolies, unless you consider someone selling a sandwich on a particular plane as a monopoly and the people on the plane are your market, in which case it is exactly this situation, and why that sandwich doesn't cost $100.So instead of trying to think of complications, you need to first understand the argument, and then you can see it everywhere once you understand it.
by carefree-bob
4/6/2026 at 10:50:51 PM
I’m simply saying it’s incorrect to assume that everything everywhere is as cheap as possible. This is true in MANY INDUSTRIES, but not everywhere, and it’s absolutely nothing like a rule.You, I think, are tying it into a larger discussion about monopolies, but I’m not sure that makes sense because if you’re a monopoly, you don’t have competitors to beat on price, so you again would not charge the least amount possible. That makes no sense.
by kulahan
4/7/2026 at 3:27:32 PM
> I’m simply saying it’s incorrect to assume that everything everywhere is as cheap as possible.This is a non-sequitur. Please read the post and reply to what I wrote (or don't reply) - not to whatever ghosts are dancing in your head. I think the combination of you not understanding what I wrote, yet somehow getting triggered by it, and then launching on a debate with a interlocutor that exists only in your mind is the reason why you are objecting to things I said by providing examples that solidify my case.
by carefree-bob
4/9/2026 at 4:37:54 AM
lol, what other weird fantasies do you have about how I'm reacting? Relax buddy. I do not have to engage with your entire comment, I can comment on a specific part, or even just talk about something it reminds me of, as it turns out. If that's too much for you to handle, stop commenting? I dunno.I really just didn't care much about most of what you had to say, because it was based entirely on an incorrect premise. I skipped like 80% of it.
by kulahan
4/7/2026 at 3:30:10 PM
[dead]by cindyllm
4/6/2026 at 12:24:25 AM
It is not fraud to claim that one is considering doing something, and publishing that information.Imagine how that would actually play out if you were right. (You’re not)
by irishcoffee
4/6/2026 at 2:20:33 AM
But in the case of the grand parent the company had no intention of following through and did it seemingly at the request of the friend.> one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.
by hrimfaxi
4/5/2026 at 11:26:21 PM
Sometimes commenters all over the internet write like this because they just got incredibly jealous after reading the parent post. I've been thinking more and more about how most posts are jealous or depressed outtakes against the world, system, or other person. This fundamental human behavior won't change, and is as reflexive as a monopolistic company reacting to a press release, proving the parent correct despite their scathing response of the child.It's worth noting that 4chan and Reddit also live here because both sites are insufferable.
by MajorTakeaway
4/6/2026 at 4:11:58 AM
[flagged]by hahahacorn
4/6/2026 at 4:42:57 AM
I don't know. I feel like "price fixing until maybe there was a hint of competition" is pretty far from frictionless sphere, supply and demand economics.Competition was possible but was not working. A fake news brief is the supposed solution. That's not really competition actually lowering prices. That's the price fixing regime blinking for an unsubstantiated reason.
It would be a different story if the friend's fiber laying company actually saw an opportunity and pursued it, but they didn't.
by jayd16
4/6/2026 at 6:47:38 PM
ISPs and other extremely capital intensive industries with a relatively fixed demand are always going to be warped markets. Nobody thinks they’re a spherical cow.Despite that, the single mechanism that works so well in a competitive market, the threat of competition, (this time) worked just the same in a 2 person market where you would expect the inefficiencies of a price fixing regime and for all decisions and investments to have to pass through (and have funds allocated to) an army of lawyers, politicians and special interest groups.
That is objectively what happened and reframing it into a negative light is a choice grounded in emotion and not analysis.
Have you ever taken an economics course? Nobody finishes a basic micro/macro course without an introduction to game theory. Game theory is the EXACT reason that N=2,3,4 markets struggle with competition and provide insights into the regulation and “rules” needed for markets with very low suppler cardinality.
You thinking that anyone else expects a local ISP market to function efficiently and competitively is a failure of your own understanding, not of the system.
by hahahacorn
4/6/2026 at 6:11:04 AM
[flagged]by bestouff
4/5/2026 at 9:43:06 PM
[flagged]by littlestymaar
4/5/2026 at 11:04:27 PM
This is a perfect example of competition in microeconomics. If you've only been exposed to an introductory economics, you've missed out on a lot.This type of situation sounds like an amalgamation of a few exam questions from my first year of an econ PhD. "Cheap talk in a Bertrand market with entry costs and capacity constraints" or something. No I haven't worked it out but my intuition is that it would predict exactly what was observed: the threat of a new entrant with enough capacity risks loosing your entire business so you invest to expand your capacity to prevent that entry.
by youainti
4/6/2026 at 7:56:11 AM
The problem isn't that econ PhDs don't have classes giving more nuanced views of the world, but the fact that people spend so much time with “introductory economics” that even Nobel prices will make nonsensical arguments based on those flawed concepts.It seems that spending several years working with models assuming that the earth is flat isn't being well compensated by one class on “imperfect flatness”.
(I've contemplated doing an econ PhD myself before changing course, and I've been exposed to much more than econ 101).
by littlestymaar
4/5/2026 at 11:19:36 PM
> with the notable exception of people with lots of capital to wipe the competition out of the market then do a rug pull after the factThey used to be called robber barons.
by matheusmoreira
4/6/2026 at 1:57:30 AM
Ironically, during the anti-trust trial of Standard Oil, Rockefeller's market share kept slipping. His competitors figured out how to compete with him.As for Rockefeller being a "robber", the rise of Standard Oil resulted in the price of kerosene dropping 70%.
by WalterBright
4/6/2026 at 1:31:08 PM
If technical advances make cost go down 90% but prices only goes down by 70%, someone is making tons of money at the expense of consumers.That's what happened with the telco by the way, the price is is still significantly lower than 40 years ago, but in the US it's still more expensive than it should.
by littlestymaar
4/6/2026 at 8:10:32 PM
Margins are not owed to customers, whether they are large or small. Supply & Demand sets the price.For example, if you buy a car for $5000 and flip it for $10,000, you don't owe your customer a discount.
by WalterBright
4/6/2026 at 9:03:59 PM
“Supply and demand” refers to the idea that under competition, prices will go down to the marginal cost of production.When a cartel sets a price it's very much not “supply and demand” who sets the price, it's the cartel…
by littlestymaar
4/6/2026 at 9:50:28 PM
The cartel setting a price is still subject to the Law of Supply and Demand. The Law is not about setting a price, it is about how much sales you're going to get at a particular price point.Maximizing the price is not the same thing at all as maximizing profit. Standard Oil made more money by reducing prices, not maximizing them.
by WalterBright
4/7/2026 at 6:20:33 AM
There are many instances of “the” law, but your argument basically boils down to “who cares about markets, monopolies are good” which is a strange take.by littlestymaar
4/7/2026 at 6:32:27 AM
> a strange takeand a strawman. Monopolies are still subject to the Law of Supply and Demand, whether they are good or bad.
by WalterBright
4/7/2026 at 12:58:52 PM
It's not a strawman, right above you said Standard Oil didn't steal anything because monopolies “don't owe [their] customer a discount.”by littlestymaar
4/7/2026 at 6:33:52 PM
> “who cares about markets, monopolies are good”I never wrote anything resembling that fabrication, and it doesn't follow from your reply, either.
by WalterBright
4/7/2026 at 8:31:22 PM
> As for Rockefeller being a "robber", the rise of Standard Oil resulted in the price of kerosene dropping 70%.This is your quote right? Now tell me how this doesn't resemble the “fabrication” above?
And indeed it follows from my reply as well: if setting prices independently from costs is OK, then monopolies are good. Because market competition is lauded for preventing exactly that.
by littlestymaar
4/8/2026 at 4:37:15 AM
I quoted "robber" in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47654948 when I replied to it. I did not "fabricate" it.> if setting prices independently from costs is OK, then monopolies are good. Because market competition is lauded for preventing exactly that.
Your premise does not lead to your conclusion. It doesn't make any sense.
by WalterBright
4/8/2026 at 5:30:06 AM
I'm pretty sure you don't have reading deficiency, yet that's the only explanation I can find for this thread…by littlestymaar
4/7/2026 at 3:05:10 PM
Falling prices is not always indicative of a well-functioning competitive market.Rockefeller was known to deliberately lose money to undercut his competitors and put them out of business. With enough scale, a near-monopoly can provide irrational predatory pricing long enough make competitors insolvent. In between, it looks like the near monopoly is losing market share while prices drop.
Without taking the larger context, it's easy to misconstrue the long-term anti-competitive systemic effects.
by bumby
4/7/2026 at 6:31:31 PM
Rockefeller did not get rich by losing money.Nor did Rockefeller eliminate his competitors. He never got more than a 90% market share. SO was not tried for being a monopoly, it was tried for trying to create one.
SO's market share sank during the trial, as Rockefeller's competitors learned how to compete with him.
See "Titan" by Chernow.
> With enough scale, a near-monopoly can provide irrational predatory pricing long enough make competitors insolvent.
The reason this doesn't work is if X has 10 times the market share of Y, if X wants to lose money to hurt Y, X loses 10 times the money that Y loses. I.e. the larger the market share of X is, the proportionately more money is lost trying to undercut Y.
by WalterBright
4/8/2026 at 1:16:30 AM
Chernow is more of a laity source than an academic one. Fun to read, but it’s not a strong source. He tends to over emphasize the efficiency side and neglect the logistical barriers to entry and many would consider Chernows thesis incomplete.If your claim is that someone needs to have 100% market to be anti-competitive, we’re talking past each other. I know HN can have relatively high levels of binary thinking, but the real world is more complicated and nuanced.
X doesn’t have to perpetually lose money, just long enough to put Y out of business. Modern definitions of predatory pricing did not exist at the time, but that is essentially what Standard Oil was found guilty of in their day. They can also lose market share as new markets emerge but that doesn’t undermine the monopoly argument. If I have a utility in TX and another utility opens in CA, my regulated monopoly is still intact.
by bumby
4/8/2026 at 4:31:24 AM
SO had a significantly lower cost structure, it didn't need to lose money.The nuance is throughout the SO anti-trust trial, SO was losing market share.
SO's main method of growing was to buy out competitors, and made them rich with SO stock.
by WalterBright
4/8/2026 at 4:46:42 PM
The court case found SO used local aggressive price cutting until competitors were driven out. That’s why they were broken up. I don’t think there is court evidence whether they lost money (although there’s speculation) in those cases because that standard wasn’t established until later antitrust cases. But once competitors were gone SO raised prices. SO still meet the threshold for monopolistic operation.Yes, SO had a lower cost structure in many cases. But efficiency is not the determining factor for antitrust behavior. That’s the chink in Chernows perspective: he focuses almost solely of efficiency argument and ignores the larger context.
And not to be snarky, but that’s the same pattern you take whether you defend Rockefeller, Musk, or any other business magnate. There’s a narrative you identify with and you’ll stick to it almost to the point of circular reasoning.
by bumby
4/6/2026 at 1:32:09 AM
This is provably not true. You can look at computers (besides Apple), cell phones (besides Apple), TVs, any commodity item, etcby raw_anon_1111
4/6/2026 at 7:44:29 AM
Interestingly enough, all the examples you cited are being produced by Asian brands, where the various governments have specific policies designed to make companies actually engage in such a competition in order to take over the world markets.Now do banking, retail, real estate, insurance, healthcare, software, or any business where Asian governments are not actively subsidizing a race to the bottom competition and you'll see it how it works.
by littlestymaar
4/6/2026 at 4:51:19 PM
Software is easy - look at the App Store. Every piece of software and even the console market is moving away from pay once to shady pay to win mechanics.Google and Facebook make most of their money by giving things away and selling to advertising.
The biggest retail stores squeeze their suppliers and compete on prices, healthcare everywhere else except the asinine system in the US is government backed.
The fast food places compete on price and “fast casual” that costs slightly more are dying
by raw_anon_1111
4/5/2026 at 10:02:17 PM
As Peter Theil literally said, "Competition is for losers."by hn_throwaway_99
4/6/2026 at 12:36:57 AM
In other words, competition works, and lack of competition leaves you vulnerable.by wat10000
