> Kind of like how people continue to complain about their cable provider being evil but they don't do anything about it except complain.

> Want to solve your cable provider being evil? Start a cheap WISP. Anyone can do it, yet no one does.

> Complaining is cheap. It takes a lot of work to actually do something.

That "answer" elides so many problems that it smells strongly of BS:

* Most people who complain about their cable company barely have the technical capability to set up their own router, let alone run an ISP.

* Even a small ISP would require thousands to tens-of-thousands of dollars of equipment, very few people have that kind of money laying around to fund a quixotic endeavor like that.

* The person who runs such an ISP will probably have to deal with a significant administrative burden, including things like child porn investigations. The smaller the ISP the more likely the police are to treat the operator as a suspect himself.

* Even if someone's willing to deal with all of the above, they'd still have to sign up their neighbors. It's unlikely many of them are Sancho Panzas.

* etc.

The solution to most monopolies and other over-concentrations of market power isn't small-fry consumers attempting to compete with them directly; that idea doesn't even pass the smell test. The actual solution is some kind of government regulatory action, and the complaining you deride is part of the process to (possibly) make that happen.

> The solution to most monopolies and other over-concentrations of market power isn't small-fry consumers attempting to compete with them directly; that idea doesn't even pass the smell test. The actual solution is some kind of government regulatory action, and the complaining you deride is part of the process to (possibly) make that happen.

You do realize that all the problems you listed exist because of regulation or can also be solved with regulation? Maybe instead of regulating how Comcast does business we should regulate things so it's easy to have many ISPs. That has a lot more benefits than trying to baby sit the one ISP:

* more jobs (many small companies are less efficient than one large company, economy of scale in reverse, leading to more jobs to do the same amount of work)

* better local community impact (decisions that impact the community aren't being made by people living somewhere far)

* more competition (better services, better prices, see some of the places where there's a lot of ISP competition are also the places that have the best cheap Internet and also overlaps with places with not very strong regulation, or enforcement, that directly affects running an ISP)

When I talk about relaxed regulation that affects ISPs I don't mean relaxed labor regulation (minimum wages, benefits), the bulk of the labor costs for an ISP comes from people that are payed much over minimum wage and get good benefits. But I do mean things like copyright strikes/enforcement and other Internet regulations, I mean things that control who and how can install wires, a fair market to rent existing wires and interconnect with existing ISPs.

> You do realize that all the problems you listed exist because of regulation or can also be solved with regulation? Maybe instead of regulating how Comcast does business we should regulate things so it's easy to have many ISPs.

I was mainly just responding to the weird idea that "anyone" who doesn't like Comcast should start their own ISP.

More competition would be great, but I think it'd only occur within some kind of regulatory framework that explicitly encourages it, which I think is along the lines you're thinkging. ISPs are basically natural monopolies that require significant amounts of expensive physical plant to operate. The unregulated free market handles such situations poorly, so some kind of regulation is a necessity even if it's not the current regulatory regime.

It's not the job of the average consumer to conduct antitrust enforcement. That's what governments are for.

The fact that ours is for sale to the highest bidder is problematic, clearly, but the whole point of antitrust as a concept is you can't just start a competitor, because of the predatory anti-competitive actions of the monopolist.

> There's no group of people up in the sky listening to our complaints.

Do you not believe the government exists? Regulatory agencies aren't mythic gods, they're law enforcing bodies constructed by the people we vote for in every single election. You don't have to pray to them, you can just write them letters or call them.

Life does work that way, and has always worked that way since the beginning of the US. We have always regulated the market, even from the very first day that this country was founded.

> People are voting with their wallets

Yeah. And they're also voting by actually voting in the real elections that phrase is based on.

It's normal and realistic for government to break up monopolies and force regulations that help the market overall, especially in cases where market forces overall can't be trusted to enforce the same outcomes. We do this all the time; see pollution, price fixing, privacy violation, false advertising, and so on.

Arguably, Amazon itself only exists because of broad Title 2 classifications on the early Internet. No online business can in good faith argue that market regulation is unrealistic or impossible or inherently immoral, when the entire Internet ecosystem is built on top of the exact kinds of market regulation they're protesting: a forced level playing field that was forced by the government even though no individual consumer would have turned down zero-rated, prioritized, or access bundles through their ISPs.

> There's no group of people up in the sky listening to our complaints.

Yeah, no. They're at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, on the Blue & Orange line: https://www.justice.gov/atr/about-division

Problem is they've mostly decided not to do their job since about 1997 or so.

Why did you a few days ago complain that YouTube was banning covid-related content? Shouldn't you have followed your own advice and start a YouTube competitor instead?

There's a lot to unpack here -- people don't always vote with their wallet in their own best interests, because the market introduces a real cost against making purchasing decisions around the long-term instead of the short-term, and because not everything is easy for consumers to quantify with money, and because information disparity exists.

But that's a longer conversation. Ignoring all of that, the ISP argument is really weird to me.

> Start a cheap WISP. Anyone can do it, yet no one does.

Google started their own ISP, and then almost got forced out of the market by crony regulations that made it impossible for them to compete, despite offering a product that across the board was better priced and had higher customer satisfaction. And this is Google, who else in the US market was better positioned to start an ISP?

A big part of capitalist theory is the idea that markets trend towards efficiency. If you believe that ISPs are ruthlessly incompetent, and that the only thing blocking consumers from jumping ship to a better alternative is that nobody else has built one yet, then an efficient market should have solved that problem at some point in the last two decades.

If you're a Capitalist, and you believe there's an obviously underserved market where customers are constantly complaining about their current options, and nobody is stepping into that market even though anybody could -- well, there are two possibilities there:

A) Either the market doesn't actually trend towards efficiency, and all of Capitalism is wrong.

or

B) There's some kind of regulation, monopoly, or other barrier of entry that means ordinary people can't actually step in and easily compete.

Believing in Capitalism means believing that people follow money. You're telling me there's a massive underserved ISP market, everybody already knows that it exists, and that the only reason nobody has stolen every Comcast customer over the past decade is because people today are lazy? That's not how a free market works.

But of course, Capitalism does (at least mostly) work. So once you do the research on ISPs to figure out why they don't have competitors, you start to discover how many states ban community wifi efforts. You discover how many states still don't have decent one-touch-make-ready laws surrounding telephone poles. You find out how much money ISPs are willing to spend to sue and bully competitors out of the market, and how much government money ISPs rely on to keep their services running. You figure out that a lot of the free market businesses you're championing are basically publicly funded utilities that convert taxpayer money into private profits via exclusive government-funded contracts.

And once you discover all of that stuff, you realize that solving those problem requires serious legislative intervention, and it's not actually trivial to just vote with your wallet, and it's not actually that people are lazy or that they just want to complain. Some of the people you think are just complaining are actually working really hard to try and build (through legislative solutions) the type of market you think is going to magically solve the problem.

ISPs are a really good example of how sometimes if you want a legitimately free market, you have to work for it in government, and not just complain that other people haven't started their own business yet.