The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn't

If the internet had been around back when the U.S. Constitution was written, instead of post offices, the framers would have put in ISPs.

You know I wanted to defend America and be like no way of course there is 25 gbit…

But there isn’t. None. Not even in business offerings.

Here in Sweden I have over 20 choices of providers, many with specific a focus. One that is superb, which is the one I have, don’t do any tracking or information gathering at all. They are fully focused on privacy, an open Internet and have helped countries in need, like Ukraine, with hardware to keep Internet access on. They’ve been raided and taken to court over not following the required IP address storage laws and some other things of deliberately not collecting information. Their newsletter is so good too, all about privacy and relevant tech news. Seriously couldn’t dream of a better ISP.

I’m out in the country in Colorado. I have a small local ISP. I can get 10Gb if I want it. I have 100Mb because that’s all I need. Honestly, for most people, I really don’t know what you’d do with 25Gb. Even 10Gb is tough for alot of home users. The equipment is out there and not even that expensive, but its also not something most people own. Most people who own that sort of stuff are either home labbers or tech enthusiasts. And even if most people did, they would rarely use it to its full potential. For most people 2.5Gb is far more practical. Oddly enough it can be harder and more expensive to get your hands on than 10Gb because it’s just starting to really penetrate the consumer market, where 10Gb was common in datacenters for a long time, so used equipment is quite reasonable.

The biggest issue with ISPs in the US is that you have legacy players entrenched in a market and unwilling to spend the money to do upgrades. The main reason I have what I have is because a local company saw an opportunity to go into a space others were failing badly at and used a state grant to help fund the buildout. Soon, I may have a second option because my electric co-op is working on their own build. Since they answer to their members and not the stock market, now that fiber is cheap, they can build this stuff widely. We need more of all that.

In Spain many towns have some tiny local ISP that offers fiber. My town (population 30k) has two local ISPs. I can get 10Gbit for 30 euros/month. Even remote villages have fiber.

I would be happy to have any fiber at all. The only options here are satellite and DSL. The DSL is basically unusable and only available to existing customers. I’m pretty sure the ISP wants to make everyone cancel so they don’t have to maintain the copper lines anymore.

Because it’s more profitable to charge people without upgrading the infrastructure. That’s how privatized systems work. It used to be about building a better product to attract consumers, now it’s about squeezing consumers for the most profit and minimizing costs.

Very good. My TL;DR take:

The American and German approach of letting incumbents build monopolies, allowing wasteful overbuild, and refusing to regulate natural monopolies is often called a ‘free market.’

But it’s not free. And it’s not a market.

True capitalism requires competition. But infrastructure is a natural monopoly. If you treat it like a regular consumer product, you don’t get competition. You get waste, or you get a monopoly.

The Swiss model understands this. They built the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and then let the market compete on the services that run over it.

That’s not anti-capitalist. It’s actually better capitalism. It directs competition to where it adds value, not to where it destroys it.

The free market doesn’t mean letting powerful incumbents do whatever they want. It means creating the conditions where genuine competition can thrive.

because America keeps giving money to broadband companies, who promise to improve internet speeds and access… give the money to executives as bonuses, do shit all with speeds or access, and their reward is another dumptruck of money to expand access and speeds… Which they 20 return to 10 and give it all out as executive bonuses again and do fuck all for the customer/citizens

oh, and when municipalities try to run their own broadband, they force them to shut down because its not fair for them to compete with the monopolistic internet companies. 🙄

the photorealistic AI image model that they use looks scarily realistic

Well you just have to make everyone rich first! Then when everyone’s rich they can solve the problem all by themselves! (Jordan Peterson’s argument for climate change.)

Yep. Infrastructure shouldn’t be privately owned.

Because America is a Banana Republic with nukes and wall street.

The author misses a few key points about the American model:

First, in exchange for the local territorial monopoly, the providers are supposed to be heavily regulated by the local (or State) government, with controls in place to prevent abuse of the monopoly and promote the interests of its residents. Of course, we all know how business interests influence government to make business- friendly regulations. Governments have the ability to enforce more user-friendly practices, if they choose to do so.

But the more important point is that in the US, we hand out different monopolies based on the connection type. For instance, where I live we have one company that owns the twisted-pair POTS landlines, a different company that owns the coaxial cable TV service, and another company that owns the direct fiber to the home. Three companies, three connections to each home, all three (theoretically) capable of delivering the same services, since there is no longer any real differentiation between voice, video, and data service: it’s all just bits.

We just got our FTTH provider only recently. Before that, our choices were only the cable company or the telco’s astonishingly show DSL. So I subscribed to the Cable company, and their pricing model tried to force you into a bundle for the other services. Their speeds were also quite slow for broadband, until the Fiber company started digging. Then I got all sorts of emails saying “we’re increasing your speed – for free!” And sure enough, I was getting better bandwidth. But all that did was piss me off. These losers could have given me that better service all along, but didn’t bother until they were forced to.

So I’m on the fiber now. But I know how it works, this service will be awesome at first, but once this company finishes building out they won’t sign on any new capacity and it will gradually get shittier over time. It’s the American Way!

(And I still pay the local telco way too much money for a POTS landline. What can I say, I’m an old.)

Western & south Europe (not exactly all countries) has fibre in like remote villages.