[HN Gopher] Anti-municipal broadband budget amendment gets nixed...
___________________________________________________________________
Anti-municipal broadband budget amendment gets nixed in New York
Author : leotravis10
Score : 88 points
Date : 2024-04-21 16:48 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (communitynets.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (communitynets.org)
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| No information on who introduced the amendment in the first
| place?
|
| Is such anonymity common?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > As we reported last month, buried in language near the bottom
| of the Assembly budget proposal was a Trojan horse legislative
| sources said was being pushed by lobbyists representing Charter
| Spectrum.
|
| https://communitynets.org/content/trojan-horse-cripple-muni-...
| masfuerte wrote:
| Presumably Charter doesn't have the power to edit proposed
| legislation. Who actually introduced it?
| shmerl wrote:
| They have the power to control those who have the power to
| edit it. Which is basically the same thing.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| It seems to me what they're asking is who (elected
| official who Charter worked through) people can hold
| directly responsible
| shmerl wrote:
| Charter is disgusting.
| advael wrote:
| I really think the fact that this kind of thing can be known and
| reported by a newspaper means we should have some kind of anti-
| corruption law triggering at least an investigation in cases like
| this. The fact that "lobbyists for [company] act to manipulate
| legislature against the public interest" is such a humdrum and
| daily occurrence is a problem
| jimbob45 wrote:
| How would you prefer the lobbyists act? Corporations do have
| interests and it's sometimes beneficial for those interests to
| be taken into account when creating laws (e.g. Intel with fab
| construction).
| nativeit wrote:
| "Against the public interest" might contain a clue for the
| distinction they're making.
| Tyrek wrote:
| "Against the public interest" is the vaguest bar for
| investigation I can imagine, it's even vaguer than
| "probable cause" in policing! As long as you can find a
| person who disagrees (and presumably pays taxes), you're
| good to go on "against the public interest"?
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| K, so let's give it a try anyway and see what kind of
| behavior it incentivizes.
| 6510 wrote:
| It's not as silly for cable lobbyists to want something
| they shouldn't have as it is to have people on the gov
| payroll attempt to write it into law. Even more silly is
| for journalists to not name the offenders. _Those evil
| cable lobbyists did this!_
| advael wrote:
| Your example is too vague to make much of, frankly, but in
| theory I'd believe perhaps it's possible for lobbyists'
| positions to align with or at least not contradict the public
| interest, though recent decades have shown precious few
| examples compared to the sheer volume of fuckery like this. A
| law could be written to not target all lobbying activity
| while still being able to draw useful distinctions between
| doing harm in the name of profit and providing some kind of
| useful industry insight (whatever that may be) to the process
| of government
| jimbob45 wrote:
| How about AI censorship? Without lobbying, how would
| corporations share their expertise on the matter for
| politicians to take into account?
| Retric wrote:
| Intel fab construction _is_ exactly the kind of corruption
| we're talking about here. Trying to manipulate markets via
| subsidies is horrifically inefficient and thus a vast waste
| of taxpayer dollars.
| CPLX wrote:
| This statement contains the unstated premise that
| efficiency is a higher goal than all other goals.
| Retric wrote:
| No, it does not. It simply suggests it's the general
| public that should be protected.
|
| Bringing up inefficiency seems wrong because the goal is
| a subsidy not acting in the interest of the general
| public.
| xnyan wrote:
| While I believe lobbing as practiced is actual corruption, it's
| totally legal in the US.
|
| Legality aside, there are a not insignificant number of people
| who truly believe that private industry is invariably better
| than government at providing virtually any good or service, and
| that government involvement in anything that could be done
| privately is by definition harmful.
|
| I actually had a conversation about this exact subject with a
| family member just last week. We live in a rural area and have
| awful service from Spectrum. He opposes plans for better
| cheaper muni internet because "The county government can only
| do better because they get to cheat - they don't need to make a
| profit, but spectrum does."
|
| I personally think that a hybrid system is best. The government
| should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like
| fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to
| access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide
| all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
| ang_cire wrote:
| > The county government can only do better because they get
| to cheat - they don't need to make a profit, but spectrum
| does.
|
| Amazing... they're _so_ close to realizing. :)
| rayiner wrote:
| > Legality aside, there are a not insignificant number of
| people who truly believe that private industry is invariably
| better than government at providing virtually any good or
| service, and that government involvement in anything that
| could be done privately is by definition harmful
|
| Given the type of government service they're going to get--
| one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese--are they
| wrong? Their frame of reference is the MTA (which runs
| subways that are late 15% of the time), the NYCHA, which runs
| some of the worst slums in the country, and NYC DOE which has
| a graduation rate worse than the subway's on-time
| performance.
|
| Maybe there's a reason there is a market for the message
| "hey, however bad Spectrum is, imagine the city government
| running your broadband."
| xnyan wrote:
| > Given the type of government service they're going to get
| --one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese--are they
| wrong?
|
| You won't hear me argue the NY state legislature is not
| deficient and/or corrupt. pushing back against monopolies
| writing their own legislation to kill competition is
| definitely a part of how we begin to fix it.
| rayiner wrote:
| > You won't hear me argue the NY state legislature is not
| deficient and/or corrupt.
|
| What makes you think that's the problem? The NYC school
| system, for example, spends $38,000 per year per student.
| Thats about triple what Japan spends per student. What
| else can the legislature do? And do you think the NY or
| NYC legislatures are any more corrupt than those in Japan
| or Germany or Sweden?
|
| To me, the problem seems to be the workers running who
| are running the system, not how the system is designed on
| paper or how it's funded.
|
| > pushing back against monopolies writing their own
| legislation to kill competition is definitely a part of
| how we begin to fix it.
|
| How does that follow? Say you defeat this legislation and
| NYC adopts community broadband. Will that system be fast,
| affordable, and reliable? That seems like putting hope
| over experience.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > What makes you think that's the problem? The NYC school
| system, for example, spends $38,000 per year per student.
| Thats about triple what Japan spends per student. What
| else can the legislature do? And do you think the NY or
| NYC legislatures are any more corrupt than those in Japan
| or Germany or Sweden?
|
| I wanted to ask if you were joking, but that wouldn't be
| productive.
|
| What else can the legislature do? Figure out why throwing
| money at a problem isn't working. This is the point
| someone above made about private vs public industry.
| Private can't operate at a loss. The federal, state, and
| local governments can, and generally do. I'm sure I don't
| need to point out the federal budget deficit.
|
| If a private company was given the same 38k per student
| with the mandate "fix the graduation issue or you're
| fired" the graduation rate would absolutely change.
| toyg wrote:
| Or - the graduation rate would stay the same, and schools
| would be asset-stripped so that most of those 38k would
| flow to shareholders rather than school budgets.
|
| There are plenty of examples of mediocre public services
| getting privatized and becoming even worse, from a
| capital-efficiency perspective (e.g. UK railways, UK
| water...). Private companies are out to make a profit,
| and efficiency is just a mean to it; if there are other
| means, even to the detriment of what should be their core
| mission, they will pursue those means.
|
| The real objective is both _empowering_ , _motivating_ ,
| and _holding accountable_ the middle-management layers of
| essential public services: administrators, teachers,
| railway workers, etc. Privatization doesn 't magically do
| that. Creating a competitive system doesn't require
| corporate profits.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Another example of this: in the UK the government pays as
| much as PS250,000 per year for severely autistic young
| people to be looked after in private homes and hospitals.
| Many of these were funded by private equity. They take
| huge profits and the level of care is disgraceful. Even
| when the patients are not being actively abused [1] they
| are not receiving any care as such. The homes and
| hospitals are little better than prisons.
|
| [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/2
| 4/learni...
| ryandrake wrote:
| This always always seems to happen, and the people never
| wise up. Government acts as a money funnel to private
| companies, who pocket as much as they can as profit and
| provide the most criminally minimal service they can get
| away with.
|
| And every time it happens and the people are ripped off,
| the answer is always "even moar privatization."
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| > If a private company was given the same 38k per student
| with the mandate "fix the graduation issue or you're
| fired" the graduation rate would absolutely change.
|
| Often when an ultimatum along these lines happens,
| whether public or private, the problem winds up being
| "fixed" in large part by some combination of double
| standards, gaming the metrics, and outright fraud. Some
| number called the "graduation rate" would surely change,
| but it wouldn't necessarily mean the same thing as what
| was called the "graduation rate" previously, let alone
| necessarily represent a materially better outcome for
| students.
| acdha wrote:
| > If a private company was given the same 38k per student
| with the mandate "fix the graduation issue or you're
| fired" the graduation rate would absolutely change.
|
| Perhaps, but the better question is _how_ it would
| change. As we can see from the history of charter
| schools, typically that would happen by trying to cherry
| pick the least expensive, best performing students while
| excluding the most expensive.
|
| As a simple example, one thing which makes large school
| district costs higher is that public schools are required
| to have expensive staff to care for students' health,
| mental health, and special needs. If you are running a
| private school, you immediately see a cost advantage if
| you can find a way to discourage students who need those
| services from enrolling. It's illegal to say "no special
| needs kids" but if you're careful you can effectively
| approach the same outcome without a high likelihood of
| being sued successfully.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| So stop trying to pay the same amount for every student
| and instead explicitly allocate more money to students
| who are legally required to be provided with more
| services. If you're paying for it either way you might as
| well have an accurate line item in the budget and
| mitigate the perverse incentive.
| afavour wrote:
| > If a private company was given the same 38k per student
| with the mandate "fix the graduation issue or you're
| fired" the graduation rate would absolutely change.
|
| Funnily enough NYC has charter schools which aren't
| exactly this but are an approximation. They're renowned
| for pushing poorly performing students out of their
| schools and doing a terrible job serving special needs.
| As a result they do indeed often have great graduation
| rates.
| gopher_space wrote:
| > The NYC school system, for example, spends $38,000 per
| year per student. Thats about triple what Japan spends
| per student.
|
| The US school system's remit is larger than any other
| nation's.
|
| Ever seen an article that breaks down costs between
| countries when education is discussed? I haven't.
| rayiner wrote:
| > The US school system's remit is larger than any other
| nation's.
|
| What does that mean?
| lupusreal wrote:
| Not to disagree with your larger point, but comparing
| school performance is basically bogus. The biggest
| deciding factor in that is how the parents raise the
| kids. Do the parents raise mild mannered respectful
| children who are eager to learn, or do they raise little
| narcissistic brats who want to terrorize other students
| and in fact the teachers as well? That's what matters the
| most, not the quality of teachers or the amount of
| funding the school gets.
|
| Furthermore, while there _are_ bad teachers who hate kids
| and don 't try, few if any start out that way. They
| become that way after prolonged exposure to bad students,
| their bad parents, and the school system which binds
| their hands and tells them to put up with it.
| saghm wrote:
| > Given the type of government service they're going to get
| --one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese--are they
| wrong? Their frame of reference is the MTA (which runs
| subways that are late 15% of the time), the NYCHA, which
| runs some of the worst slums in the country, and NYC DOE
| which has a graduation rate worse than the subway's on-time
| performance.
|
| FWIW, the MTA is run by the state government, not the
| municipal one. That being said, as someone who has lived in
| New York the past 8 years (still don't quite consider
| myself a "New Yorker", but maybe I never will), I have no
| strong sense that the city government would make a
| particularly good internet service, but even a mediocre one
| would be _miles_ ahead of Spectrum. I have no other option
| in my apartment building, and we get random outages when
| there isn't even a storm or anything an average of maybe a
| few hours a month. Their website never shows an outage when
| it happens, but after I check the status when our internet
| is down, I'll get a text in around a half an hour saying
| "oops, there's an outage". The idea of being in one of the
| largest cities in the world but not being able to get
| reasonably consistent internet for literally any cost is
| mind boggling to me, and having such a terrible service
| have exclusive access to my market is a much larger failure
| of municipal regulation than merely having a subpar
| municipal internet service as an alternative.
| jancsika wrote:
| > He opposes plans for better cheaper muni internet because
| "The county government can only do better because they get to
| cheat - they don't need to make a profit, but spectrum does."
|
| Tell him he needs to be willing to support for the muni
| internet in order to get Spectrum to offer symmetric fiber in
| the first place.
|
| Same way he needed to be able to convincingly threaten to cut
| the cord to DirectTV the umpteen times he's forced them to
| offer him a discount, or to let XM radio subscription expire
| in order to get them to drop from $25/mo to $5/mo to get him
| back.
|
| Dollars to donuts he's had the experience of paying out the
| ass for those services. Perhaps you're lucky and he's never
| renegotiated either of those. In that case tell him how to
| get those cheaper rates, and let him feel what it's like to
| instantly save an order of magnitude dollars monthly.
|
| Then you'll get a better sense of how deep those beliefs go.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| If government is installing and maintaining infrastructure
| then private industry becomes unnecessary overhead. This is,
| in effect, requesting government subsidies be directed to the
| corporate officers and shareholders of major telecoms firms
| to no obvious benefit to the larger public.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I oppose municipal internet because then the municipality has
| to hire a staff of network administrators and a staff of
| people to actually install the service to households and
| customer service people to manage subscriptions and front-
| line tech support questions (or pay contractors to do all
| that). Lots of graft and favoritism will go in on that.
| Friends will get hired although they are not competent to do
| those jobs. County government salaries typically aren't
| market leading so even when those jobs aren't given to
| friends, they aren't going to get the best people. I have to
| pay for all of that, so my taxes go up, even if I don't use
| their service or if I don't have internet service at all.
| rdudek wrote:
| In my town we have standard Xfinity for cable and now
| quantum fiber and Ting Internet laying down fiber. It
| increased our choice from single ISP to multiple ones.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| As opposed to the private industry, famously meritocratic
| and never hiring friends, family, and insiders?
| linsomniac wrote:
| Are you sure your taxes are used to fund the municipal
| Internet? In my locality they issued a bond to fund the
| initial trenching, and use the subscription fees to pay
| back that bond and fund the long term operation. No taxes
| are paying for it, people who are not using the municipal
| Internet don't pay anything for it.
|
| Do you still oppose municipal Internet in that case?
|
| Maybe your locality is different, but before we got
| municipal Internet we had basically 3 choices: Xfinity at
| $180/mo for ~gig down/120M (something in that ballpark) up,
| CenturyLink with 40Mbps or less DSL (antiquated
| infrastructure, they actively blocked CLECs from doing
| anything that could improve it), or terrestrial wireless
| (fairly sketchy in our environment).
|
| Once we got municipal broadband, we finally got fiber to
| the house, gigabit symmetric, great customer support, and
| latency that was 10x lower, _AND_ Xfinity dropped their
| prices.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _I have to pay for all of that,_
|
| You realize it isn't free and people still subscribe right?
|
| Also do you realize this has already been done and worked
| incredibly well in lots of places with much faster speeds
| and cheaper prices? This isn't some wild experiment.
| bandrami wrote:
| From an econ theory standpoint it's in a weird place:
| broadband is both rivalrous and excludable, so it's not a
| "public good" in the traditional sense, but it also
| relies on geographically-fixed infrastructure, so a
| private market for it cannot be efficient.
|
| In the US, goods like this are usually provisioned
| through a metered semipublic utility. The problem is that
| to work, those need a monopoly.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _The problem is that to work, those need a monopoly._
|
| This isn't true and we can see it by the fact that lots
| of places have multiple wires run to them from ATT and
| multiple cable companies. Most of the time with cable a
| neighborhood is wired up but a cable isn't ran to a house
| until it is needed.
|
| ISPs make so much profit they don't need everyone to sign
| up. A lot of times there is nothing to dig and it is run
| off a pole. They aren't giving a metered commodity like
| electricity, gas or water with their lines. Once a line
| is run to someone's house it's wildly profitable since
| the bandwidth per person is so cheap.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I actually had a conversation about this exact subject with
| a family member just last week. We live in a rural area and
| have awful service from Spectrum. He opposes plans for better
| cheaper muni internet because "The county government can only
| do better because they get to cheat - they don't need to make
| a profit, but spectrum does."
|
| This argument is dumb because it has nothing to do with the
| government. A non-profit could take out a loan and build an
| ISP and not have to turn a profit.
|
| The real argument in this nature is if the municipal ISP is
| being subsidized with tax money their competitors don't get.
| But you can solve that too: Either they pay for the network
| by issuing a bond and then have to pay it back from
| subscription fees, or if there is to be a subsidy then
| anybody operating an ISP gets the same one.
|
| The actual problem here gets back to the original issue: The
| ISPs lobby the government to suppress _any_ competitor. If
| the incumbent sucks and people hate them, why doesn 't a non-
| profit, or any other for-profit business, enter the market
| and take their customers? Because the incumbent has lobbied
| for laws to prevent that, or will sue them under whatever
| pretext they can find to slow them down, try to bankrupt them
| and deter anyone else from making the attempt.
|
| It's harder to do that to a municipal network because the
| government workers operating the network will have insider
| knowledge of how to deal with their own bureaucracy and have
| the ear of the government officials who approved the network
| to get any artificial roadblocks cleared away. But the real
| problem is that none of those impediments should be there to
| begin with.
|
| > The government should build and maintain the physical
| infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private
| industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a
| small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and
| services on top of that infra.
|
| You can do even better than that. Have the government install
| cable trenches along all the roads, then provide cheap access
| to anyone who wants to install fiber in them. That reduces
| the build-out cost dramatically and then you get competition
| without anybody being able to make any claim of unfairness
| because access to install cable is available to every
| individual member of the public. It should be cheap and easy
| enough that if you want to run fiber from your house to your
| buddy's on the other side of town, your primary cost should
| be the two miles of fiber optic cable.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Short of a complete reboot of both federal and state
| governments it is unclear how anything meaningful can be
| accomplished in this space. Understand this is politicians
| doing their job by promoting legislation their constituents
| support. The issue here being corporate and special interest
| groups pay for politicians to run for office, making them the
| constituency that is served.
| non-chalad wrote:
| The only way to stop corruption is to remove the violence
| inherent to the system. When corporations can no longer use
| government to force people to buy from them (mandates,
| subsidies, IP), this kind of corruption will end.
| yard2010 wrote:
| And a new corruption begins? The problem is with human nature
| rather than the system
| aaomidi wrote:
| Okay. I'm glad this happened. I depend on municipal broadband
| where I am...
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| What really shocked me most about lobbying and campaign
| contributions is how little money companies can spend to effect
| radical change. I always thought there were millions of dollars
| being given to campaign funds. But it's often just a few thousand
| or tens of thousands.
|
| Our politicians are bought cheap.
| non-chalad wrote:
| Check politicians' speaking fees.
| jfengel wrote:
| Ex politicians can make speaking fees. Current ones can't.
|
| There are ways to sneak around campaign finance laws but it's
| not that simple.
| jfengel wrote:
| You can't give millions of dollars to politicians. There are
| laws, and yes, they're enforced.
|
| It's not even "thousands". Those are actually just the
| individual employees making donations. You have to name your
| employer so that the election commission can make sure they
| aren't filtering money.
|
| The power brokering happens in terms of trading favors. Often,
| trading votes. (And these days, "issue ads", which was the
| Supreme Court's big ole fuck-you to election finance laws.)
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| PACs let companies nearly bypass that.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-04-21 23:00 UTC)