Things don’t improve without competition. Roads have to be a monopoly because they take up so much space but we should endeavor to have as few monopolies as possible because they breed complacency every single time. At least here in Chicago the roads are horribly mismanaged but we just have to put up with it.

Last I looked the NASA's capabilities of NASA's space telescopes have been improving rapidly. I'm not aware of any competition. Roads where I live have improved immensely during my lifetime. I'd lay long odds yours have too over the decades, despite your claims. All without competition. I recently heard all the lead water pipes are being replaced in the USA. The water supply people have no competition. Open source projects improve all the time. They aren't driven by competition.

"Things don't improve without competition" sounds like a fairy tale somebody tells themselves to justify a position. People like nice things. They don't need competition to motive them to work towards those things. Granted competition usually speeds things up, but it "nothing improves without competition" clearly wrong. There are too many counter examples.

Which is just as well, because the things we are discussing here are prone to forming natural monopolies. Roads, water, the telephone service, electricity supply - the thing they have in common is you will have one supplier, and you can't change to a different one. There is no competition. So the discussion wasn't about "should there be competition or not", because there is no choice. The discussion was about "who should own a monopoly - people you elect, or people whose only primary interest is extracting money out of their assets (which happen to be you)". You seem arguing for private ownership, and then using competition as the justification - when there is no competition.

By the by, other places do this competition thing far better than the USA. The NBN the parent was complaining about is indeed a government owned monopoly. Their asset is "the last mile". The arrangement in Australia is they are a common carrier in the strictest meaning of the term. But they are not allowed to sell to the public, that's the ISP's job. The NBN's prices are thrashed out in some back room somewhere between the ISP's and the government, in front of a set of open books. The ISP's are allowed to use other technologies like 5G and Starlink without penality, by law. As an consequence every Australian household gets to chose between 100's of ISP's, literally. Those ISP's are require by law to advertise "minimum expected speeds", and none of this "unlimited (meaning we get to define the limit)" bullshit is allowed. In other words, it's nearly a perfect competitive market.

One effect of that is there is no "net neutrality" argument here. The NBN is barred from such distinctions because it's a common carrier. The ISP's are free to do whatever they damned well please, and as a consequence you get all sorts of deals that violate net neutrality. 5G with limited downloads, but unlimited streaming from some platform is free for example. If you don't like that, say because your ISP blocks ports move to one that doesn't. You might be thinking "ahh, but moving between ISP's would be hard". But no, the law mandates churning between ISP's is free, fast, involving no more than a few minutes downtime, and requires no interaction at all with the ISP you're moving from.

Creating near a perfect competitive market in an area that is prone to forming natural monopolies does require some heavy handed government intervention. The NBN was one of the most heavy handed interventions I've seen in a while. The private operators where given every chance to build a new network on the condition it be open to all retailers (including them) at a price the government had some control over. They declined. Partially because government price control on a monopoly was too much to bear, but I think also because they thought their ownership of the copper network was too big a hurdle for even the government to overcome. The government overbuilt it with fibre. In a country that's even more spread out than USA, that was a huge undertaking. I suspect it would be impossible in the USA, where 1/2 the population allows themselves to be brainwashed by large corporates into thinking "government always bad, government always inefficient".

Yes, the government is inefficient compared to private operators in a competitive market. But the corporates who want you to think the government always runs things badly are the ones who want to take control of government owned monopolies. If you want to know what inefficiency looks like, join one as an employee. You won't get to see what's happening otherwise. The sausage is ugly, but they unlike the government are allowed to hide it from prying eyes. So they do, and tell you they are doing a wonderful job. Apparently you swallow it up.

Im not reading all this so Ill just respond to the first paragraph. The space industry was dead in the water before spaceX showed up. Minimal innovation and spend trending down every year and now spaceX has sparked a complete reversal. Competition matters.

> I recently heard all the lead water pipes are being replaced in the USA.

We still have lead pipes to many houses in chicago, and will for the foreseeable future. The water supply people(government) have utterly failed at replacing them in a timely fashion.

> Open source projects improve all the time

Because theyre extremely competitive. With minimal barriers to entry there are different devs trying to get their code merged and different projects trying to be the top dog. When one shows weakness another pops up.

Illinois is mandating lead service line replacement. I'm not wild about it. Solubility of lead in Chicago municipal service water is very low, because the lines are mineralized by the phosphates in the water. Have your water service tested; you're probably more than fine. But replacing the water lines disrupts those lines, which ironically does introduce lead into your water (for a time).

Regardless, Illinois munis don't really have a choice about this anymore.

Yes replacing the pipes basically Flint's ourselves but still needs to be done in the long run so better sooner than latter imo.

> The space industry was dead in the water before spaceX showed up.

The point was space telescopes. Nice attempt goal post move.

You mention NASA and the space industry. Sorry, but I'm failing to see the connection. NASA does cutting edge space exploration. They have no customers, they sell nothing, they aren't by any definition "an industry". Anything that's simple enough to be taken on by "industry" they contract out. They only take on the near impossible stuff - like landing a rover on mars. And they have a near impecible record at pull those sorts of things off. Amazing. Literally world beating. Bravo.

Most of their feats are world firsts, almost all are far harder than the previous one they pulled off. They have no competition. Yet your claim was, and I quote, "Things don’t improve without competition". I'm getting cognitive dissonance here. Clearly they do.

> Because theyre extremely competitive.

Do you develop much open source? Do you even use it? The "man in Nebraska" meme is so common it even has a cartoon: https://xkcd.com/2347/ Trust me, that man truly wishes he had some competition. He doesn't, but he plods on, turning out the code that supports the internet without it. Again we have a clear counter example to your thesis "you can't have improvement without competition". These examples are everywhere. You would have to be willfully blind not to see them.

Look, no one argues competitive markets aren't a great tool. The trouble is they aren't that easy to create. Then competition weakens. The solution isn't to go into denial and claim there will be no improvement. Or worse claim being privately owned means there is competition, so we will be ok if we just sell it off. That's just daft. In fact it's worse than daft. Believing lies peddled corporations that want to control stuff you must buy from them at a price they dictate is like subscribing to a cult.

God you really have just drunk the NBN koolaid havent you.

> Roads, water, the telephone service, electricity supply

Fun fact, the US has such a variety of fibre providers, because they have such a variety of electricity and water supply. Its called Subducting. They make partnerships with fibre providers and subduct in the fibre with the power lead in.

So they have 3 speeds.

1. Cities, with ancient telstraesque legislative monopolies, getting BEAD funding to be replaced.

2. Townships and cities with private power/water and 1/2/10/100 gig fibre options.

3. Deep rural with hundreds of wisp cowboys.

10 years ago I remember reading about a township of 900 people being passed by a rural fibre company. Fish lake township or something.

>Their asset is "the last mile".

No their asset includes the last mile, but its includes all the way back to 121 points of interconnect. The original, far better model was to have only 21, but the ACCC at the behest of the big 4 ISPs interceded and determined that government intervention is better than engineering. All under Labor mind. Simms has never shown any network engineering credentials. The NBN is literally welfare for Telstra Optus, AAPT and Vocus.

>One effect of that is there is no "net neutrality" argument here.

Net Neutrality in Australia has more to do with the big 4 peering agreement.

>The private operators where given every chance to build a new network

Private networks have been consistently hampered by the NBN. None of them (rightly) would want to attempt a national network. State based private/public co funding would have gotten you the same result faster and cheaper. But Labor wanted one more BIG NATIONAL PROJECT to hang their hat on.

>Creating near a perfect competitive market

It was Turnbull who slightly corrected the NBN funding model to make it halfway profitable. We still have an issue where NBN is serviced largely by the big 4 (who lobbied to have it built this way) wholesalers, and anyone who cant reach 121 poi's is forced into wholesaling.

>In a country that's even more spread out than USA

Rural australia is still mostly just NBN Fixed Wireless and Satellite. And neither of these is largely going to be overbuilt by NBN Fibre. Labor is promising to bring a few more towns online with fibre but not everything.

Honestly I have never seen anyone as confidently wrong on the internet before.

> No their asset includes the last mile

As I'm sure you are aware the term least mile has always included everthing up to and including termination at the exchange. The only thing that's changed is the name of the exchange. It's now called a POI.

Yes there are fewer of them. It did reduce costs and engineering complexity. There is no consensus whether it effected competitiveness, but given the NBN has been in operation for a decade now and there are many, many ISP's, most small, any detrimental effect must be near negligible. It's time you put that tired old debate behind you.

> The NBN is literally welfare for Telstra Optus, AAPT and Vocus

Telstra earnings dropped off a cliff when the copper became worthless. If that's welfare I'd hate to see what some real competition would do to them. The other three never had fingers in the consumer last mile pie. They bought it off Telstra before, now the buy off the NBN. They buy at the same price as every other ISP. Where is this welfare you speak of?

> Net Neutrality in Australia has more to do with the big 4 peering agreement.

I'm not sure you know what net neutrality means.

> State based private/public co funding would have gotten you the same result faster and cheaper.

Wow. Such confidence. Admit it, you don't have a clue what that would cost. Also admit not one state offered to do it. I think you hallucinating random possibilities.

> It was Turnbull who slightly corrected the NBN funding model to make it halfway profitable

I have a lot of time for Turnbull. His rear guard actions managed to derail Abbotts attempt to kill the NBN. God knows what we would have done if our internet didn't support video during COVID. However, it did involve buying $800 million for the Optus HFC network that was so degraded it was written off. His FttN is being ripped out long before it's anticipated EOL, and replaced at great expense. That's because it costs a small to run air-conditioned nodes a few hundred metres from every house, and the performance topped out at a 1/10 of what the NBN is offering now. So sadly the compromises made to save the NBN are now having to be rectified at great expense. And knowing all this, you are saving it saved us money! Delusional.

> Rural australia ...

I wasn't referring to rural Australia. According to google the average population density of urban Australian is an order of magnitude lower than the USA. Cable runs are consequently much longer. Compared to the effort the USA would need to put in, replacing them was indeed a huge undertaking.

> Honestly I have never seen anyone as confidently wrong on the internet before.

Having reviewed the outright falsehoods you told above, I'm guessing I'm dealing with quite the bullshitter. And I guess, true to form, you will carry on.

Let me start over.

I think you read what I posted and decided that what I said was "Private ownership is better than public"

Which is often true but not my point.

My point was that a common carrier with a legislative monopoly is always worse than anything else you can imagine.

Telstra - Bad when the government owned it, bad when it was private. We literally required legislative intervention to get ULL which was an absolute positive despite Telstra misplacing keys and refusing entry etc.

NBNCo - Bad under labors original implementation (ACCC really messed up the special access undertaking and it cant be repeated enough. Rod Simms should be fired out of a cannon into the sun. Hes the greatest villain in Australian internet history), Bad under the LNP (They fixed the market a bit, but introduced the postcode lottery and reduced competition by acquiring the HFC networks). Will not be made better by private ownership. Gets better every now and then, but requires ACCC, Ministerial and its own governance to sign off on changes. NBNCo is not the only imaginable model (private or public). Singapore, a government owned last mile monopoly, is really well done and very hard to argue with. Because they just sell glass.

You have clearly reacted to my posts from an ideological position. You see criticism of the governments terrible telco monopoly, as criticism of government action overall. (We have some pretty sweet state government fibre in Queensland for instance, they make themselves difficult to transact with but once you get in there they rock) You believe in immutable things like Natural Monopolies. The "Natural Monopoly" isn't the wire. The Natural Monopoly is the pit and pipe. And Pit and Pipe can already be shared.

Its going to hurt you, but let me put this to you. It would have been quite easy to run "NBNCo" as simply a common access arrangement to the pit and pipe. Instead of criminalising deployment of internet to residences, the government could instead subsidise underserviced areas. (which is the correct keynesian arrangement that Labor should be clamouring for if the NBN wasnt just a grab to brand the internet as something Labor did)

I cannot express to you how crazy it is, when I compile a map of fibre providers in metro areas, to see really good private fibre wholesalers holed up in private estates. It looks like a map of gerrymandered congressional districts in the USA. On one side of a fence you can get cheap blistering fast internet and on the other its gig at best with a nice big asterisk about CVC. Not to mention how many places these fibre providers already had hardware ready to go years before NBN came along. Basically, thanks to both Labor and the LNP, the best internet services in this country are available only to people who can afford brand new homes in private estates or inner city apartment buildings. Its BONKERs. Its absolutely MENTAL. My own mother lives in an estate that had 2 stages. Stage 1 was Telstra, now NBN VDSL, and 3 doors up the road when Stage 2 was built, they brought a private provider in first and I remember qualifying it for a 5 gig service 4 years ago. Its the same number of penalty units to overbuild the NBN as importing a million dollars of cocaine. And you would need to be importing vast quantities of drugs to see the NBN, any NBN, as the ideal path forward.

And whats great is you can hate the NBN but still support the government being the agent of success. They could atomise it (my preferred term as privatisation implies selling it to your mate steve and still having it be legislatively required to be shit) or ask it to simply provide pit and pipe. Or just glass. The government could do any number of sensible things, but it wont. Labor cant face up to the monster they created, and the LNP cant face up to the monster they claim to have fixed.

>And isn't the NBN currently ripping out the FttN, replacing it with FttP, at no cost to the cusytomer? Sounds like a major upgrade to me.

In select areas, some of which are currently served by third party fibre providers, who can provide up to 10G, who now will be forbidden to pipe in to new non business customer dwellings.

>And wasn't the reason we got the NBN that Telstra point blank refused to replace the monopoly copper infrastructure with fibre?

Right, a single giant telco monopoly is bad. Instead of removing the monopoly we built a new monopoly and tipped money in.

>If I didn't know better, I'd be think the major policy mistake Australia made in Telecom was the liberals to selling off Telstra.

They sold it off AND enforced ULL. Its the same thing, monopoly is forced to be better, still lagging behind competitive markets.

>In a competitive market when a new technology came along a telecom is forced to upgrade because their a competitors would use the new technology to steal their customers.

Right see my comment about the singapore model, where they just rent glass instead of a service.

>That works fabulously for 5G, where there is competition.

In the cities we had ADSL2+ competing with HFC and Fixed Wireless. The only monopoly was Telstras, who prevented people running residential fibre in their pit and pipe asset. HFC was a hack to use overhead wires because people could not use pit and pipe. That asset has been gifted to NBNCo who also have a legislative monopoly and also dont play nice.

> absurd situation of having buildings full of federal court judges and lawyers fighting to get reasonable ULL access.

Yeah there were a few instances of them fighting it. Which is another reason why monopolies are bad.

>But replacing the wires themselves - never.

Happened all the time. Actually they negotiated a shutdown due to NBNCo, certain copper services were simply stamped beyond economical repair and Telstra could choose to simply cancel services as part of the deal. I think you are upset about the customer owned piece of copper from the demarc in, which most residents would never upgrade.

>Desperate to make the obvious move to fibre, the Libs then offered Telstra, the Optus, then anybody money to build a new fibre network - but they all refused to do so unless the government effectively guaranteed monopoly ownership over the new network.

No one wants to commit to a national scale rollout of fibre. But many people are happy to roll out community and metro scale fibre. The key is open access. When you have a restricted pit and pipe asset, there can only be one provider. But funnily enough, commercial properties like housing estates and apartment buildings dont give a shit and let people come through and overbuild the NBN. TPG had to take NBN co to court and NBN withdrew rather than risking the rest of their monopoly.

>Oh, that's right, public ownership shared natural monopolies like wires, roads, water mains is bad. The thing I missed is why a private rent extracting monopoly beholden to no one except the profit seeking share holders owning those things is better.

My point is that common carrier sucks. If you instead made the pit and pipe asset the common resource, there would be little to no issue. Or just run glass like Singapore.