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.
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.