Susan Crawford on Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry & Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended in broadband and net neutrality threads as an overview of the US telecom monopoly problem.
What it is
Susan Crawford talks at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center about her book Captive Audience. She argues that deregulation and consolidation left a few telecom companies in control of American internet access, so people pay too much for slow service.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2013 to 2014.
What Hacker News said
Recommends cameron913 · 2013-07 · on “Telco Astroturfing Tries To Bring Down Reviews Of Susan Crawford's Book”
A talk on the book in question (as well as audio) can be found here: [LINK] and if you prefer YouTube, here: [this video] It's a pretty good overview of the American broadband infrastructure problem.
Recommends graedus · 2014-01 · on “Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules”
Because it's considered "vertical integration" and therefore not subject to anti-trust laws. Comcast merging with Time Warner would be considered horizontal; Comcast merging with NBCU was considered vertical and therefore allowed to go forward in January 2011. I'm currently reading Susan Crawford's book Captive Audience, which is a detailed history of this exact topic. Recommended. Here's a talk she gave at Harvard summarizing the story and issues at stake: [this video]
Recommends fossuser · 2014-02 · on “Why is broadband more expensive in the US?”
That's interesting (didn't know about the whole city coverage). The general telecom issue is also gone over well in this talk called captive audience [ [this video] ]. It goes over the telecom industry, how it's not competitive and the current day incentives/problems. While the underlying reason that this issue cannot easily be fixed appears to be related to a more fundamental problem with American campaign fundraising and how it creates a competing dependency that prevents any meaningful reform from moving forward. This Ted talk by Lawrence Lessig ( [LINK] ) gives a good overview of this problem.
Cites fossuser · 2013-09 · on “The new Galaxy Note 3 is region-locked”
The ETF goes down, but so does the value of the phone - you're also paying off the difference in price every month. On Tmobile when you bring your own device you can get a $50 everything plan - the equivalent plan is $100 on competing networks. Granted you could argue this isn't all subsidy and that Tmobile is also cheaper because their network is worse, but when you compare to international cell services this doesn't appear to be the case. It's at least in part because the companies are near monopolies that don't need to compete ( [this video] ).