Separate issues.
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EU roaming charges were ridiculous because âfree marketâ telcos were unwilling to compete with each other based on them all preferring to screw their own customers whenever they traveled, rather than provide a more competitive tariff and use it to improve their offer. In general EU telcos have always done their best to avoid competing by creating tariffs that are: impossible to compare, or lock customers in and make switching hard.
Regulation has since brought roaming charges down considerably, though I expect they can come down further.
Every step of the way, regulation has been necessary to force these companies into competing on price and service as opposed to through advertising and propaganda. The reason they do this is because it is more effective at extracting the most money from the market (customers pockets), which of course is not efficient financially, and doesnât create the best service.
Itâs a classic example of how those with power (wealth) use it to maximize profit, rather than operate in a free market, while crying wolf over any regulation as if it impairs a free market, when obviously itâs needed to create the free market.
This is of course to be expected. These are public companies which the law also requires to put shareholder value higher than almost all other considerations. It is the failure of company law and general business regulations to recognise and reflect the importance of general free market principles and other social goods, and the inadequacy of a model based primarily on profit - particularly short term profit - GDP etc.
If the overarching laws and regulations were more effective there would be a lot less need for all manner of regulators and special laws (e.g for utilities) in different sectors.
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I think itâs worth considering that âregulationâ in the US raises a bit more suspicion amongst Americans than it does in EU/UK, etc., and probably with very good reason. We donât trust politicians for very well-demonstrated reasons. Regulatory capture is built into our system, even more than in most other places. Regulatory agencies more often than not end up creating circumstances opposite to their stated purposes.
Also keep in mind that we have yet to see what the actual regulations are, or how they will be implemented, or what exceptions will be made. We have a flowery statement of principle, but the devil is in the detailsâand by experience it is guaranteed that the devil IS in the details. So weâll see.
There is a high probability that the regs will make it harder for new, innovative players to enter the market, thus limiting real competition to the big players, which probably have contractual ties and interlocking board of directors, common ownership, etc., allowing them to only LOOK like they are competitive. This is what monopolies are all about, and they are the RESULT of âregulationâ rather than lack of it.
Those who view this as a win have not viewed the history, or have short memories. If not for MaidSafe and other decentralized technologies (which are new in history as they are developing) there would be every reason to despair. I donât despair, but I think that suspicion that this is actually a power grab, rather than meaningful reform, is healthy.
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Yes suspicion and keep up with SAFE, no slow down. In the US it took 100 years for the slaves to actually be freed post rhetoric. But the rhetoric at least has symbolic power. It can at least provide some umbrella for a real technological fix where the bad options of bad actors are limited, opening up new horizons for the rest of us. To me this was a rejection of money is speech, you know the kind where the rich are allowed to directly pay for people to vote for them or their interests. It was a rejection of the most blatant conflicts of interests and the ability to lie about them and reinforce those lies.
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Hold on - maybe those high roaming prices were subsidising lower local prices. After all, there is probably more competition locally.
Screwing your customers is , at best, a short term strategy. I doubt this was their goal.
Oh but it is, over and over and over again. They think its their right and that they are entitled and to block this is a crime. I may be used to the North American scene with Bell Canada, or Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T but these firms seems to represent a global culture. The public is not their priority. I imagine it might be a bit better in the EU but in the US I am pretty much stuck with AT&T for some of our internet and phone needs, stuck as if it were some sort of government. And it spends a big chunk of our unwilling subscriber money filling up our physical mail box with junk mail. I will never buy TV, I donât watch TV, but it doesnât stop the phone calls, (and handing out my number) and junk mail and junk email without end about their TV service that I will never ever buy. It also doesnât stop AT&T from lobbying against my basic rights with my money.
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There are two kinds of regulations: the one that puts a lot of legal burdens on small competitors and protects the big players, they are usually the result of lobbying efforts of the big players. I would consider these the bad regulations.
And then there is the regulations that are supposed to prevent dominant players from abusing their position and to maintain a free market. They are the good regulations.
In my opinion net neutrality belongs in the second category, even if many other regulations in the US belong in the first.
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I tend to notice that the 2nd type are usually introduced because the first 1st type had already been introduced.
In the example mobile phones, the state grants monopoly over a spectrum, often to the company with the most money. It is pretty obvious what is going to happen next.
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In the EU example, phones in the UK are marketed for domestic use primarily. This is probably because it is a group of islands and the borders are relatively non-porous.
it makes economic sense to give the best tariffs for domestic use as a result. If that means scalping from roaming rates to discount further, I suspect they will do so.
Ofc, you can switch tariffs, buy bolt-ons to discount international use etc too if needed. Being based in Northern Ireland means that I usually get cheap roaming in the Republic of Ireland thrown in for example.
If you legislate for everyone to get cheap roaming, then I can pretty much guarantee that domestic tariffs will increase.
There is no free lunch. Not everything is a conspiracy either.
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@happybeing, youâre right there where they want you to be - looking up to the EUâs central planners to âorganize competitionâ for you.
I am sorry I have to repeat my earlier question, but how come competition doesnât work only in those exact places where the central planners aim to âorganizeâ it?
That to me looks like a self-contradicting statement.
What laws & regulations are there for MaidSafe that (would) make it distort competition with Storj?
What is it that could prevent a Storj user from using a simple shell script to move all his data to MaidSafe (and vice versa), regardless of which one is for profit and which is not?
Of course, service providers (farmers) are for-profit in the both systems, and it would seem to me all of them are greedy enough to buy MAID rather than shares in the profit-rich telcos.
Tell me what kind of competition-creating regulation do you propose for MaidSafe, Storj and other digital storage services?
Do you think MaidSafe should store data access logs, identify its users and build backdoor into the system (like the freewheeling telco capitalists have to do)? Who should pay for that and why?
Every regulation is redistributionist in nature. Thatâs the whole point!
Why would anyone bother to make a new rule or law if it doesnât tip the economic scale?
You can hold your opinion, but what youâll see is higher prices for all because after this kicks in, power users will be subsidized by casual users (https://forum.autonomi.community/t/president-obama-my-plan-for-a-free-and-open-internet/2114/6).
Sadly noone has learned anything from the debacle of Obamacare, to mention just one example of recent government meddling in economy.
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@janitor there is the matter of the data. Relatively highly regulated EU much better price and performance. By comparison much less regulated US much higher prices and much lower performance, last place in fact. So we canât say deregulation in the US has succeeded. Also the neutrality laws are intended to block a pay for censorship business. Further there is no shortage of fiber or capacity there is an ocean of it unlit, the bs last mile problem is of the cable telcos own making to try to create premium and artificial scarcity, its not as much of an issue in the EU because they wouldnât buy the BS, again better oversight. They made their own bed.
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We should compare unregulated (not âderegulatedâ) and regulated.
Unfortunately we canât because thereâs no free market in telecommunications services.
We can get a glimpse of how a free market would work by looking at various projects like mesh networks, but unfortunately there are no large scale mesh networks yet.
If you consider Tor or I2P (and abstract the underlying data links, which is the same as wireless mesh networks), it seems clear to me that unregulated networks can function very well.
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With what failed as hindsight. One thing about these unregulated (regulation resistant) tech approaches in their attempt to do what regulation canât is they seem to start with the empowerment of end users in that they presume choice and competition in a highest common denominator way. I donât think they presume patent games and the regulation that entails. Rather its really an open source type approach where there is trust in the tech and to a lesser extent trust in the relationships and people behind it.
I think SAFE is greatly favored in such an environment relative to say OB even as OB is more limited in its scope. OBâs approach doesnât seem to be the kind that really measures up to our common expectations of a post regulation space. Also, in this context synonyms for unregulated might be commons, more so than red light zone. Its also more than self regulating or supplier regulated, it seems to be a space more directly and dynamically mediated by society itself, its more participatory. Well unless DAOs go bad and make us lament the good ale days of regulatory over reach.
It might be noted that in the US at least the regulatory process was meant to be a completely open process hyper focused on due process often with a decade of open deliberation meant to take and debate all aspects of every concern from every party in successive waves prior to unleashing new rules, with mandatory alarm bells and warnings. But its chided rightly as captured process and and revolving door circus. Prior to public pressure it seemed Wheeler would let Comcast write the legislation in the name of perverse balance.
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@janitor, regulation is necessary to create a free market full stop. Without it, you soon get a situation where one party gains enough power (money, secret alliances, bribery etc) to distort the market in their favour, which creates a feedback loop that ensures they get more and more powerful. If you donât have rules and enforcement, that is inevitable and Iâm not sure how you can deny that.
Anyway, this market domination is ultimately unstable and the system will eventually be reset, for example because the dominant entity rots from the inside and collapses. From civilisations to corporations and dictatorships, nothing lasts forever, but certainly long enough to cause the majority a lot of suffering.
This centralisation of power has been deemed unsatisfactory because it is very destructive, and generally unpleasant for most of the people most of the time. It happens in politics as well as business/economics of course (oligarchy, dictatorship, fascism, communism).
So a collective decision has been taken to try to smooth these things out, but weâre doing particularly badly at it at the moment because regulation, law, justice etc are all failing, having been undermined by precisely the forces they were originally intended to tame, and free markets / democracy are becoming in name only at this point, which is very bad.
From the Koch brothers buying Congress, to bankers forcing bail ins and dodging criminal penalties, regulation / law is proving ineffective.
You suggest Iâm exactly where someone âtheyâ, who exactly? wants me. I suggest people who seek deregulation as an ideology are either those with the power to dominate but are being made to play fair by regulation, or those who have swallowed right wing propaganda, delivered by the centralised control mechanisms wielded by those powerful people. Why do such people like to buy or control newspapers, often making great losses on them. Why do they love to control the media? Why do they spend fortunes on advertising, think tanks, etc.? And why do they invariably try to keep this spending secret?
Look at how Berlusconi used his monopoly control of media business and has created a system of justice that has failed to hold him to accounts for decades. Look at how Putin managed to gain control of Russiaâs newly privatised wealth to give himself unlimited executive power, or the Koch brothers are now able to buy the US Congress.
Give me a few well meaning EU bureaucrats every time.
Iâm sorry, I donât have the inclination to respond to your long list of questions. Iâve explained what my position is and why I donât accept the thrust of yours, so weâll have to agree to differ.
A very interesting article by Jeffery Tucker on this subject, which articulates my concerns very well.
Mark, of course regulation is necessary to the free market. But what regulation? Regulation by central authorities will almost ALWAYS be co-opted by the very big actors you are talking about, which are supposed to be being regulated.
It may not be quite as bad in your neck of the woods, with its history of monarchs who at least considered they had an ongoing interest in their people as a resource to be protected, and passed on to their hereditary heirs to the throne. But the world is moving way beyond that paradigm. âDemocracyâ brings people into power who have no ongoing commitment to âthe peopleâ beyond their time in office, and even then an offer of future perks in the private sector redirects any dubious commitment to âthe peopleâ which might have been there.
Anyway, these comments are just a sidebar. Please read the article. It really does reflect what weâve experienced repeatedly in the US with "major reform in the interest of âThe Peopleâ ".
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I donât buy Tuckerâs argument here. Comcast and Verizon are the establishment. Netflix and Amazon are the disruptors. The government is siding with the disruptors over the incumbents.
Yes, everyone will be fine. Seems to me that net neutrality helps entrepreneurship a lot more than is creates gatekeeping regulators for protecting the oligopolies.
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Version and Comcast are ISPs. Netflix and Amazon are content providers. HBO is not new on the scene and has the same interests as Netflix.
I think you didnât get his point straight.
I re-read it. Perhaps I did miss some nuance. I still donât see a lot of other ISPâs cropping up on the scale of Comcast or Verizon anyway, as that is near impossible to do without a government sanctioning your monopoly⌠This FCC intervention doesnât change the entrepreneurial Steepness curve much.
All in all, that is why I see this as silliness. We are pretending like this was a free market and it never was. Comcast, Verizion, whomever has cables strung across the nation have it because they bought the rights to do so from a government.
Regulation by central authorities will almost ALWAYS be co-opted by the very big actors you are talking about, which are supposed to be being regulated.
Not read the article, sorry, maybe if you insist! However, I do totally agree with your statement above.
You have also agreed with mine, that regulation is necessary for a free market to exist. So what to do?
We also agree that a truly free markets, not the faux free markets we have today, is at least a good thing to have (though not necessarily enough on its own), as part of our economic and political systems.
Well, in this scenario I guess leaving the monopoly incumbents without regulation is to me the more, immediate and important risk. Hence my support for net neutrality. I am undecided on the âutilityâ classification - it sounds right, but I donât actually know what it means in US law, or in practice - and of course like you - I donât rust the FCC for the reasons you stated: they/government are too easily co-opted by wealthy individuals and corporations, particularly in the US, significantly in the UK, perhaps less so across the EU. Or perhaps just not as blatantly!
So yes, I agree itâs not the whole solution and government/regulation is the other vital piece of the problem to deal with. We need to deal with both.
What I object to is the idea that because of this, regulation is either inherently bad, or that no regulation is anything but a disaster for the majority. This seems to me a naive (learned propagada) or specious position designed to sabotage improvements that will benefit the majority, for the benefit of a tiny minority. I think it rubs against the very essence of SAFE (E = everyone) and I question the motives of someone who says they support SAFE while advocating unregulated policies from an ideological standpoint. SAFE is highly regulated system, and addresses the weaknesses in current regulatory systems by being as decentralised and transparent as possible, in order to make its regulatory function immune to even very powerful actors.
@fergish You and I seem to have broad agreement on the need for regulation, and the need for it to work as intended, which in its present forms is all too easily subverted. I think our difference is only in priorities on what to tackle first: what regulation is appropriate, and how to implement it so this is in fact how it operates. But yes, itâs useless unless both are adequate.
Whoever gives more generous campaign contributions for the next election.
One thing is sure, they never side with those who they purportedly represent.