Hi, Chicago voter here. The question wasn't about public utility, it was "Should the City of Chicago act to ensure that all the City's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" which can imply a number of contradictory policies, from Chicago setting up municipal broadband to Chicago giving tax incentives to the existing national broadband providers.
Illinois limits ballots to three referendum questions, and questions chosen by higher-up political entities have precedence over smaller, more local ones. The three questions on the ballot for Chicago are chosen by the Cook County Board of Commissioners. (For these purposes, Cook County is equivalent to the city of Chicago plus a couple neighboring suburbs.)
Background established and into personal opinion: The question is in fact deliberately vague. The Board's goal is not to ask three divisive questions getting at the heart of urgent political matters. It is to fill the ballot with three questions to preclude local, less connected authorities from putting inconvenient, compelling questions on the ballot. Here's a 2018 court case reaffirming that (Calumet City is in Cook County): https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/opini...
These questions are deliberately worthless and it's a waste of time to analyze them for policy guidance.
If you're curious, the other two questions this cycle were: * In creating its City-wide plan for continued growth and sustainability, should the City of Chicago place equal focus on the goals of resiliency, equity, and diversity? * Should the State of Illinois restrict the sale or possession of firearms that have been defined as assault weapons or of magazines that can hold more than a certain number of rounds of ammunition?
I’m also a Chicago voter and I would be surprised if any city would reject the referendum as stated. “Do you want more free stuff or less free stuff?” It doesn’t discuss the downsides, especially the opportunity costs—Chicago is in a budget crisis which has been exacerbated by COVID and maybe that money could be better spent on those who have lost jobs or something, but none of that nuance is represented on the ballot. Note that I’m not actually opposed to this initiative per se, only remarking that the support probably has more to do with the presentation of the initiative than it’s merit.
First, the premise of those "defund" protests is that work be taken from the police department and moved to more capable organizations, such as mental health crisis response teams. I like broadband as much as the next person but AT&T and Comcast have never seemed like especially strong crisis response teams.
Second, though you might think otherwise from Very Online commentary, cutting funding for the police has in fact not much support from Chicago communities. The Online Discourse seems to have a real problem getting its head around the idea that communities of color in Chicago are both very justifiably upset at CPD for abusing them, and very justifiably upset at CPD for ignoring them.
At any rate, Chicago will not be taking money from the Chicago Police Department to fund community broadband.
All the leading black youth activist orgs in Chicago promote defunding/abolishing police.
It's worth noting the age difference - that defunding police is popular among younger people of color, and unpopular among older people of color, still by and large subscribing to the tough-on-crime approach.
Yes, they do. They also don't speak for the neighborhoods themselves, the same way white defund activists don't speak for... well, anyone but defund activists, I guess. It's a distinctively unpopular idea, a demographic crossover flop of a scale I can't think of anything else to match.
A lot of the ideas underneath defund have legs! In most places, the police should stop doing traffic enforcement (replace with unarmed compliance patrols, the way we handle parking tickets) and obviously, police shouldn't be doing mental health wellness checks anywhere. No-knock warrants should be outlawed in almost all circumstances.
There are lots of other structural reform ideas Defund hasn't really touched; for instance, police should be licensed by their respective states, so that misconduct can result in a revocation that preempts union contracts. Civilian oversight bodies should be given more authority.
It's just that advocates for these ideas centered the least popular and least important aspect of the policy.
I'd despair except the idea behind a national police reform policy push was, I think, ill-conceived from the jump. In Oak Park, where I live, a switch of just 2-3 trustees in our 2021 elections would give us a majority that could rewrite the police general orders, and whatever ordinances govern our police union contract. That's like 10,000 votes, not 70,000,000.
What's more, if you watch town board meetings --- which is easier to do in the C19 era because they're all online --- you'll notice that one of the most powerful bits of evidence in support of any policy idea is "what do the neighboring townships do". It likely won't take many trustee board flips to get a decent snowball rolling.
Not to mention what a terrible slogan it is. Almost exactly the opposite of Black Lives Matter, it takes the most unlikely and poorly thought out aspects of the police reform movement and makes it front and center.
Its a dumbfounding gaffe on the part of the activists using it as a rallying cry.
I don't think its a strawman because unfortunately its the majority of arguments I see... but people will bring up the APCs or "military equipment" some departments have as an example of things that can be cut... while perhaps true a one off APC or extra equipment isn't going to be anywhere close to how much it would cost for many city projects.
A key difference is that ensuring everyone has affordable broadband can be seen as an investment in infrastructure, that likely will end up netting the city far more in taxes than it costs.
From my reading on the topic, the general idea seems to be to cut police responsibilities and budget. One of the biggest problems is that police are used to respond to all kinds of issues for which they are not trained (e.g. non-violent mental health incidences). By cutting responsibilities of the police, their budget could be more efficiently allocated for responding to situations for which they have been trained.
How do you know if a specific “mental health incident”
is not going to be violent?
What if someone is walking in the street, naked, and screaming things? Are they violent? Are they mentally ill? Are they on drugs?
I get the intention here but I don’t think I’ve really seen anyone ask why we police this way. Is there a lesson we are forgetting?
It’s like the tale of the new property owners that come across a fence that appears random. They’d be wise to verify why the fence was put there before removing it.
A lot of countries have mental health response teams that work with the police to balance the safety of the individual in crisis with public safety. Seems like it’s worth looking into.
Many if not most large cities already have this or something like it.
Also, I think your implicit assumption is incorrect (that the police typically don’t have the individual‘s safety in mind, or that they only have the general public’s safety in mind).
My implicit assumption is that rank and file police officers regularly lack the years of psychological training required to appropriately respond to these kinds of incidents.
Because we created police forces to round up slaves and then just kept adding more responsibilities to them. In fact, before we had ambulances, police officers would just throw the injured/sick in the back of their paddy wagon and drive them to a doctor. Frustrated with the staggeringly high death rate for people in his community, a black doctor eventually created the idea of an ambulance and specialized paramedics who handle that situation instead of police. It was so effective, white neighborhoods started calling him too and we eventually adopted the idea everywhere.
The idea of defunding the police means to do more of that. Trained specialists for different types of calls who are dispatched based on need. Much like how police will often show up with an ambulance to make sure it’s safe but then leave pretty quickly once they confirm it is, the same could be done with other non-violent calls like the one you described.
This isn’t rocket science, and it’s well steeped in research. We just need to be able to get over our biases.
We also seem to have a lot of violent reoffenders. Maybe we have an average amount, but it certainly seems like every other murderer was recently released after serving only a fraction of his sentence. Keeping murderers in prison until they are rehabilitated seems like a pretty good way to improve quality of life without putting more police on the street.
I don't think you're second question is answerable as phrased, but I think having fewer killers on the street probably matters for quality of life in Chicago, or, at the very least, quantity of life.
What is the alternative to detectives that solves more crimes?
A 30% solution rate for homicides is abysmal. For rapes, you have to discount the solution rate by the reporting rate. And those are the university educated police detectives. Then there is the problem of uniformed patrol cops who abuse people without probable cause and beat a fair number of them resulting in high rates of complaints. On top of that they get petulant about the complaints against them.
A 30% solution rate is great when you're asking whether it happens at all. Certainly we can agree that the number should be higher, but, until you propose an alternative, I can't imagine that the answer is taking money away from the people who are doing the solving.
You asked whether police solve crimes and whether that matters to people, and you gestured at the existence of alternatives. I answered your two questions, and you didn't contest those answers. And I asked what those alternatives might be. I guess what I'm saying is I don't know why you're talking about the complaint rate for patrol cops now.
Mandatory gun ownership for all Chicagoans, stand your ground laws, and castle doctrine. There's legal precedent for requiring citizens to purchase goods in services in the way Obamacare was required. We create a new tax, and if you can prove you own a gun you get a tax credit.
The first year will be a bit rocky, but after that the worst offenders will be removed from the planet.
None of this requires defunding the police, but I imagine you're far to the right of the person I'm replying to, so possibly irrelevant.
I haven't seen evidence that this is an effective strategy, though there's not really compelling evidence in either direction. At the very least, I can argue that this should be tested thoroughly before implementation in Chicago.
On a personal level, I really do not want to be made responsible for killing anyone, though I expect your response is that enough people would be willing to kill a person that there would be a kind of herd immunity. I also do not believe in the death penalty, even for murder. Accordingly, I disagree with this plan wholeheartedly, exactly to the degree that it is effective.
Believing that a person has a right to defend themselves is wholly unrelated to support of the death penalty. I don't support the death penalty either. But if you break into my house and try to kill me, I'm going to try to kill you first. Firearms are the great equalizer. Removing them just puts women in the position of being submissive and/or victimized by larger, stronger men.
Chicago isn't particularly more violent than other places, that's a meme propagated by the President because he hasn't paid attention to real news in decades.
The police department however has had numerous scandals.
While Chicago certainly does get mentioned more often than Houston for political reasons, it still has a pretty significant violent crime problem. And because Chicago is so deeply segregated, racially and economically, the areas hardest hit greatly exceed the city-wide average.
It is worth noting that, earlier this year, when property crime briefly became popular in certain rich areas, the response of the city government was to deepen segregation by raising the bridges over the Chicago river, which serves as a boundary between the poor south/west and the rich north. Chicago's inequality problem is more serious than its crime problem.
Totally agree and if you listen to community leaders in Chicago, they pretty consistently advocate for economic change and housing/education desegregation above police reform and gun control.
But I'd contest that the bridges that separate the Loop from the rest of city is symbolic as a divide between rich and poor. Plenty of the near west side across the river is affluent, as are the near west suburbs, and the lower north side. It's remarkable how much of the violence (especially homicides) are concentrated to East and West Garfield Park outside the south side where it's less concentrated. Raising the bridges doesn't really inconvenience anyone but commuters going between the Loop, West Loop, and River North. The bridges were raised to prevent looting of the store fronts, not stop violent crime. I wouldn't compare the boarding up of stores in Emeryville at the same time as symptoms of the divide between rich and poor in the east bay.
All that said, the violence is much better today than it was even a few years ago, and orders of magnitude improved over 30 years ago. Though there is debate whether crime was reduced or just spread out to the suburbs after the demolition of housing projects like Cabrini Green.
I agree that the river is in many senses a symbolic boundary, but I think its symbolism is important, especially in the near vicinity of the Loop.
And while property crime and violent crime are separate to a degree, I think the city's response says a lot. My experience in Chicago is that the police are more interested in keeping crime contained than truly eliminating it.
> the response of the city government was to deepen segregation by raising the bridges over the Chicago river, which serves as a boundary between the poor south/west and the rich north.
This is pretty silly. The highways were open between the north and south sides (I crossed the river the next day without issue); they were only isolating the hardest hit commercial districts to dissuade more damage. It wasn’t some ploy by our Black mayor to increase racial segregation.
I don't care what Lightfoot looks like, I don't understand how you can watch a deeply segregated city attempt to isolate its poorest residents from its richest areas, even temporarily, and not see a problem.
No doubt Trump exaggerates, but Chicago has a whole lot of violent crime, and this has been pretty well-known long before Trump took office. I live in a pretty nice neighborhood—there are a few blocks of $10 million homes beginning on my block and we still have people shot dead in the street in broad daylight on a pretty regular cadence.
What are you confused about? The parent said that Chicago’s violence problem is a myth propagated by the president, and I replied with my experience as a resident. Chicago has a lot of real problems.
Also not on the ballot was any discussion of how Chicago spends it's billions of dollars that led to this budget crisis, though I'm sure there are numerous programs both less profitable and less popular than this one.
There is only one notable cause of Chicago’s budget crisis, and that is deferring the expense of labor performed decades ago to today’s taxpayer via defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare. Same with Illinois, and pretty much all the other governments out there.
It’s the easiest way to promise low taxes today and shift expenses onto future generations who have no say. It almost works as long as people keep having 3+ kids and the tax base keeps growing. Not so much once population growth stalls and the tax base suffers income stagnation.
Illinois [0] is not alone but its far simpler to find good figures on how bad the state and various counties and cities are failing their employees and residents.
There was hope of a Federal bailout of all pension funds, numerous covid19 bills tried to bury them into the dollars, but fortunately that may be off the table as the Congressional elections did not pan out as needed. Yyes, the expectation was the Feds would not use the Pension Benefit Guarantee System to salvage something but actually fund them with tax dollars. The PBGS should be the default solution but is not a friendly solution as benefits are generally brought back from silly levels.
The issue with many public pension systems is that too many payouts are excessive. No pension system, notably no public, show being paying out six figure retirements in addition to health benefits. California had to use a law to cap theirs around 125k but that has faced numerous challenges and may see more in the future.
They do deserve their retirement pay but it needs to be reasonable and equal across the board to best serve the public and employee interest. The lower paid employees are not well served and the managerial and certain others are over compensated in retirement.
The pensions payouts are simply outrageous. Do the math, you'll see a 60-70% final value pension on 100k salary (60-70k/year) with a 3% cost of living increase (standard in Illinois) is worth 1.8-2.0 million dollars (25 years @ 3.5% discount rate). This is equivalent to having nearly 2 million dollars saved in a retirement account and when you retire, buying an annuity with credit quality equivalent to a promise from a major government (not a junk bond which may become insolvent).
Anyone who thinks that's "fair" really needs a reality check. 600k pensioners in Illinois [1], many of them living out of state, and the ones that live in-state aren't even taxed on their pension income. They also don't have to pay for health insurance. This is simply insane. There's really no other word for it. This needs to be indexed to private benefits or otherwise tethered to reality.
Sidenote. We need a rethink of public service in this country (US). The old bargain of "you get paid less working for the government but the benefits and job security are better" needs to go. Everyone receiving this $2 million entitlement is going to say, well, I work for the government so I deserve my "better benefits". It shouldn't matter if you work private or public sector. There needs to be some equivalence otherwise you get Illinois, where politician after politician promises great treatment to AFSCME and SEIU and to nobody's surprise, no real attempt is ever made to fix this broken system.
I'm not sure I see what the problem is with these pensions. Standard retirement advice is that one should save enough money to live in retirement at a similar lifestyle that they lived while working. If the idea of these pensions is that your salary is lower, but you need to set aside less for retirement, what is the issue?
As far as the $2 million figure, if you go to any retirement calculator and try to figure out how much you need to save to have a similar lifestyle in retirement as to working, you will indeed find they advise you to save $2-4m. In the private sector, you're expected to do this on your own, but you get a higher salary to compensate. Looking at my own career, a comparable government job seems to pay about $40k less than a private sector job.
If your argument comes down to the public pensions being too generous relative to private ones, shouldn't we instead make private pensions more generous? Why do we want old people who work their whole lives to have a massive step down in lifestyle when they retire? Is that what you want for yourself or your parents?
That's not the argument. The argument is the state and city government remuneration model of defined benefit pensions and other post employment benefits such as retiree healthcare results in a situation where voters of today, politicians, and higher ranking government employees especially in positions of power with the unions are all incentivized to dump the cost of today's labor onto taxpayers decades into the future.
I'm sure everyone is in agreement for giving everyone an awesome life. The problem is no one wants to pay for it. The proof is that voters won't vote for a politician who would compensate government employees a cash amount in their 401k equivalent to the defined benefit pension, because that would require increased taxes compared to a politician that pushes those costs into the future via defined benefit pensions. And taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare are a proven vehicle for corruption where costs are shifted from today to tomorrow.
And unless the government has the power to print money, they should not be in the business of promising people money decades in the future. That's the only way I see to prevent a repeat of IL/Chicago/Detroit/NJ/CT/RI/KY/CA/San Diego, and the list goes on and on.
I understand now. The issue basically comes down to pensions not being pre-funded, right? Although one could argue that by paying a substantially lower salary than the private sector, they are sort of funding the plan by saving money now.
It seems the real answer to this would be to have a more generous version of social security at the federal level. And the interim answer is to switch to defined contribution pension plans at the local level, I suppose. Though one thing I don't understand is how governments plan to attract workers when they pay substandard salaries and don't even offer very generous benefits anymore. I was looking at government jobs with the city here (which has a defined contribution pension pretty similar to a 401k), and across the board it was so much worse than any private sector job I've worked.
Sort of. I would say the issue comes down to it being humans being limited in how much of their wealth they want to share with others, and so will jump on many opportunities to hoard for themselves, especially if the victim is faceless and nameless such as future taxpayers. All blessed with plausible deniability from actuarial calculations.
I don't see how it could have played out any other way. Politician A offering low taxes and high services by skimping on saving for future benefits is 100% going to win versus politician B offering high taxes and a fiscally responsible government. And it still plays out that way, until the system reaches a nadir, and it is forced to change, such as Puerto Rico or some of the other aforementioned cities and states.
Government should offer people competitive pay, and the idea of it being okay for government jobs to offer less pay in exchange for more stability and retirement benefits should go the way of the dodo, as we can see it just results in long term pain.
> I don't see how it could have played out any other way.
I suppose we are getting technical here, but at some point someone working for these governments (an actual person with a calculator) has had to sit down and do the math to figure out how much money needs to be set aside in order to achieve the advertised pension payout.
Who is that "person" in most cases, and why was their math so off? The math must have been very optimistic on the ability of the pension funds to compound wealth.
And so the facetious answer to your remark would be "things would have played out much better for these governments if the person doing the math was more realistic about expected returns." Not sure how realistic that goal is in itself.
The people that figure out how much money needs to be set aside this year to pay for the defined pension benefit accrued this year are called actuaries. However, the people that sit on the board of the taxpayer funded pension plans are politicians and senior government employee union officials. So the actuary that gives them the result they want is the actuary that gets hired.
These are all guesses based on assumptions, of course, and no one knows the future 5, 10, 20, 30+ years from now. But as an idea of how corrupted taxpayer funded pensions are, the US government requires all non taxpayer funded pensions to calculate the liabilities using yields from highly rated corporate bonds, i.e. a conservative, safe investment class.
However, the US government exempted taxpayer funded pensions from any oversight, and so they can use whatever discount rate they want. For example, private companies have to use ~4% for their discount rate, whereas governments use ~8%+ for their discount rate.
But that's just small pickles. The big problem is there is no enforcement of even the liberal actuarial recommendations that the pension fund pays for. IL/NJ/CT/and other trouble governments simply skip contributions, i.e. don't set any money aside for the future, and that's the main reason they are in this situation. A decade or two ago, the senior union officials on the pension board didn't care about the skipped contribution payments to make a sufficiently big deal out of it, since they were going to get paid in the short term anyway. And they negotiated ridiculous pension benefits which are never seen in the private sector, such as final average pay formulas.
A typical pension formula is years of service * 1% * salary over 30 years (with a cap). That's referred to as a 1% plan, some companies might do 2%, maybe even 3%.
But in the government, you have formulas like years of service3%final average pay for the last year, or 3 years, or 5 years. That is why you see cops and firefighters working 100 hours a week when they're about to retire in their 40s and 50s, so they can secure $100k+ per year defined benefit pensions. You would NEVER see that in the private sector, as that's a laughably unaffordable benefit.
On top of which, police and firefighters in some lavish plans get to retire in 20 years, so if they start at 18 to 22, they're retiring at 38 to 42, and getting paid $100k per year for 40+ years. That's an annuity worth millions of dollars.
The only reason I can come up with for why politicians specifically exempted taxpayer funded entities from ERISA 1974 and PPA 2006 regulations is so that they can continue to dump labor costs for today onto future taxpayers.
> It’s the easiest way to promise low taxes today and shift expenses onto future generations who have no say.
I can say the same about cities borrowing money to finance infrastructure projects, but I've yet to see a political comment grousing about how a city's budget woes come solely from billions of dollars of 10-year old debt that has to be serviced.
King county just voted to take on 1.7 billion dollars in debt to renovate a county-owned hospital. Ten years from now, nobody will be talking about defaulting on it, but I fully expect them to be talking about defaulting on pensions.
With infrastructure, the fact that contractors and suppliers need to be paid today at least puts the debt on the books.
The cost of deferred compensation can be wildly understated for decades (and continues to be) by using erroneous investment return and mortality rate assumptions. Also, the risk of corruption remains for decades as you have a huge pot of money which many are fighting to get a piece of with little transparency.
No one actually considers the figures put out by IL/NJ/CT/Chicago and other distressed governments as accurate, and if they had to abide by the rules that non taxpayer funded entities have to, their debt would easily be 30%+ higher than stated (based on an assumption of a 1% change in discount rate moving liabilities ~15%).
I agree that politicians can also hide debt by not properly accounting for infrastructure and long term maintenance costs, and that is also a big problem.
I've given this a lot of thought and pretty much concluded government needs to get out of the retirement game. Not saying this as a libertarian or any kind of principled statement, simply looking at what happens time and again. We need to switch to 401(k)-style DC plans or something similar where the funds have to be contributed today and are beyond the reach of politics.
The incentives to game the system are just too strong. Whether incorrect discount rates, systematic underfunding, whatever, people always treat the pension assets as a "big pot of money" for today's emergency, and use it for the pet project du jour.
I even see this at my condo association. We have a replacement fund to stay on top of long-term replacement liability. We can't even balance that. What chance does a large government, with many stakeholders, have of getting this right?
You’re exactly right. If people want an an annuity when they retire, they can go buy it from an insurance company. Politicians should be forced to pay government employees in cash or cash equivalent (aka 401k/HSA/etc), but any and all compensation needs to happen immediately.
As a side note, defined benefit pensions don't have a place in the world anymore. It's the same thing as putting your money in a target date retirement fund from Vanguard/Schwab/Fidelity, except you also have to pay all those actuaries and pension fund managers so the expenses are higher.
Their purpose has been automated out of existence, but only exists due to politics in the government sector.
That'll be changing quite soon, especially at high latitudes, with no action from local entities. See: Starlink, and maybe later other LEO constellations.
> In Denver, 83.5 percent of the city’s electorate cast ballots in favor of question 2H, which asked if the city should be exempt from a 2005 law, backed by local telecom monopolies, restricting Colorado towns and cities from being able to build their own local broadband alternatives.
> Colorado is one of nearly two-dozen states that have passed laws, usually directly written by regional telecom monopolies, that hamstring or prevent the creation of such networks.
> But in Colorado’s case, the state’s 2005 law included language that allows local towns and cities to opt-out of the restriction if voters agree to do so.
W.r.t. Denver, the headline overstates things a bit, but the contents of the article are accurate.
Reading the words of the motion "Should the City of Chicago act to ensure that all the City's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" Says nothing about the local government running the service
"community areas" so that means just libraries council buildings or does it mean FTC or FTP for all homes?
You right that allowing the executive to cherry pick motions is not democratic.
The one "in creating its City-wide plan for continued growth and sustainability, should the City of Chicago place equal focus on the goals of resiliency, equity, and diversity?" is arguably pious and also does not propose any action.
This is incorrect. Community areas and wards are two very separate things. The "History" section of your link even explains the history of why community areas are used in place of wards.
You'd think it's precisely that: the poorer areas only have shitty DSL. The vote was over if Comcast gets the cable concession for the wealthy areas are they also required to build out the poorer ones.
I voted against that proposal re: "resiliency, equity, and diversity", largely because of how pious and hilariously vague it was. Assuming they actually did anything at all, it take the form of Chicago hiring some expensive diversity consulting agency to do nothing and get paid a couple million a year.
When I read it on the ballot when I voted I immediately assumed it meant "libraries, etc", but now that you say that I'm worried "community areas" is bureaucrat-speak for "neighborhoods". Much different implications.
It's useful for city planners and the like because "neighborhoods" have fuzzy boundaries that people disagree on, but Chicago's community areas are well-defined.
> "community areas" is bureaucrat-speak for neighborhoods.
Not exactly. "Community areas", in Chicago, represent a relatively stable division of the city, with the map drawn up by the government, in order to support city planning and suchlike. Many of them are named for the most prominent neighborhood that falls within their borders, but that's not always the case.
Neighborhoods are a popular division, and is socially constructed by people as a whole. The boundaries are amorphous and constantly shifting. At my last apartment, my own neighbors described our block as falling within about 3 different neighborhoods. (This never resulted in any argument, because everyone understands that the definition of neighborhood is fuzzy at best.) Even where you have a community area and a neighborhood that share the same name, they don't necessarily coincide all that well. For example, just about nobody who lives in the area would recognize the boundaries of "Lincoln Square" as being those of the Lincoln Square community area. To them "Lincoln Square" means the the Lincoln Square neighborhood, which, even by the most generous of standards, is still maybe 1/5 the size of the community area by land mass.
Aldermanic wards are yet another thing, and their boundaries really don't have much to do with neighborhoods or community areas. For starters, there are officially 50 aldermanic wards and 77 community areas.
I tend to avoid politics but I really can't believe such a question was asked to voters.
With how vague that question is, its almost entirely useless. Like another poster said, it essentially could be boiled down to "do you want good thing or not?"
I feel like something that vague has no business being "voted" on.
It's true that the Chicago referendum is non-binding, but worthwhile context is that Chicago this past June has already made moves to develop free high-speed internet for public school students [0]. The success of even this palliative referendum will, ostensibly, give them political cover to push for additional initiatives and referendums:
> CHICAGO – Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot today announced the launch of ‘Chicago Connected,’ a groundbreaking program that will provide free high-speed internet service to approximately 100,000 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students in their households. This first-of-its-kind program will be one of the largest and longest-term efforts in the nation to provide free, high-speed internet over the course of four years to dramatically increase internet accessibility for students and help build a permanent public support system for families in Chicago.
Interesting. That really stinks that Cook County can block. It seems like there needs to be a change where the 3 referendum with the most signatures is what is on the ballot.
And even if the referendum had included a call for the city to build broadband, there was no price tag listed. People love programs that are free and don’t involve trade-offs with things that cost money.
I instinctively do not vote for things that show me the price tag and duration. Do XYZ for X years from a bond of Y paid at Z percentage rate for blah years to be financed from a increase in taxes of somenumber percent for X years.
If that is not on there that is an open ended contract to waste everyone's time and money.
Most municipal broadband projects I've heard about have either ended up quite a bit cheaper/faster than the commercial broadband that was already in the area, or have been in smaller towns or rural areas where there wasn't any commercial broadband.
I know many HN commenters have a strong anti-public-service bent, but consider this angle: if the government is providing your Internet service, then your service is protected by the constitution. The bar for restricting what you can access, and for what reasons your service can be cancelled, becomes much higher when it's governed by the constitution instead of the whims of a private media company with a massive conflict of interest.
I can totally understand people’s reluctance to government run internet. The biggest argument I see is that the government can compete unfairly against private companies because they don’t have to make a profit. Usually when this debate about government run internet comes up, there’s two discrete options: the private sector ISP and the government run ISP. However, there’s an option that rarely gets mentioned: the public infrastructure + private ISP model.
I used to live in middle-of-nowhere central WA, and they had fiber internet all the way back in mid 2000’s. This was a town of <20k people. Other smaller towns around the region also had access to fiber as well. Basically it worked like this: the county public utilities district was responsible for laying the fiber and connecting it to the building. Once the fiber is hooked up, you can call any one of a dozen or so ISPs to provide you with service.
As a side note, because of this relationship between the ISPs and the public utilities district, some ISPs also operated point-to-point wireless networks to reach customers outside of the fiber network. The ISPs would typically place a tower with several radios at an existing customer’s site, in exchange for free service. These tower sites were usually connected directly to fiber for minimal latency. I mention this because I don’t see how these wireless networks would have been viable without a public fiber network backing them.
> The biggest argument I see is that the government can compete unfairly against private companies because they don’t have to make a profit.
I've seen this too, and my reaction is always to ask why that's unfair. The "free" market is supposed to be open to competition. Why is it "unfair" for public bodies to compete? Public bodies are, after all, funded by tax payers. Who in this case would be the recipients of the service. So we have individuals desiring of a service, funding said service through a public body. Now, the public body is not set up to pay a dividend to shareholders - instead it implicitly returns all profit to its consumers (presumably through reduced costs/better service/whatever).
Why is that unfair? It's not preventing commercial entities from competing. If their business model is such that they can't do so - e.g. because of the need to pay away dividends - then that's their problem.
Now: I know there's a lot more to it than that, e.g. public bodies accused of being propped up unfairly. And I know Govt in the US is treated very suspiciously by a large cohort of society.
But that notwithstanding, why is it "unfair" if a community-oriented entity decides to compete with a commercial organisation?
> But that notwithstanding, why is it "unfair" if a community-oriented entity decides to compete with a commercial organisation?
> Public bodies are, after all, funded by tax payers. Who in this case would be the recipients of the service.
Not all tax payers are recipients of the service. The government run entity can collect revenue from all taxpayers regardless of which ones are their direct customers.
That's what makes it "unfair." The private entity has to turn a profit or break even on their sales alone. The government run entity can subsidize their operation by taking funds from general tax revenue.
If one entity is allowed to take always take a loss on their operations how could another entity that needs to pay their employees ever be able to compete?
> If one entity is allowed to take always take a loss on their operations how could another entity that needs to pay their employees ever be able to compete?
So, you're saying that regional loss-leading, and the typical VC business model should not be allowed to exist?
A city's constituents have democratic control over their budget. If they want to use that budget to buy broadband for everyone from a local supplier, that's their prerogative.
Who is the private sector to dictate how I, as a constituent, choose to spend my tax dollars? If I want them spent on a vanity sports stadium project, they'll be spent on a vanity sports stadium project. [1] If I want them spent on providing better broadband to the city, they'll be spent on providing better broadband to the city.
[1] For some reason, nobody ever complains that cities subsidizing the construction of sports arenas is bad anti-competitive behavior that destroys the business model of private sports-arena owners...
> nobody ever complains that cities subsidizing the construction of sports arenas
They certainly do. Many people object to this sort of thing, and say "if it's such a good idea, a private business should be willing to do it." Strangely they tend to not make this argument about things like public transport, even though it's exactly the same thing.
The arguement is that these arenas, convention centers, transit systems, etc. enable more economic activity and generate more tax revenue than they cost. I don't know if that's always (or ever) the case but that's the rationale and it's not insane.
The real issue isn't fairness, it's outcome. The problem with municipal ISPs is that they are very likely to end up providing worse service and being more expensive than private options, but hiding the true cost by using tax money to subsidize the operation. Thus, you end up with a very expensive, low quality option that makes alternatives non-viable (as most people won't be willing to pay for the true cost of the service on top of all the taxes being used to pay for the municipal one).
Yes, you're right that the 'public option' is unlikely to destroy all the private ones, though internet provision has better economies of density (related to scale) than schooling. I would guess that the effect on private providers will be more extreme in this context, i.e. only the highest tiers of internet service will be available privately, likely to businesses in dense areas.
> The problem with municipal ISPs is that they are very likely to end up providing worse service and being more expensive than private options, but hiding the true cost by using tax money to subsidize the operation.
The private sector has pretty conclusively proven that in the absence of municipal competition, their offerings are expensive, and provide terrible service.
In fact, it has proven it so conclusively that people are clamoring for a public alternative.
There is zero reason to oppose unsubsidized, zero-margin municipal broadband.
There are some reasons to oppose subsidized, negative-margin municipal broadband, but if >50% of the electorate supports it, that's a pretty strong signal that its better than the private alternatives.
Well, there are less reasons to oppose unsubsidized, zero-margin municipal broadband, one of which is the likely scope creep and eventual subsidy. That said, I would be very interested to see it would work out.
50%+1 of the population voting for something doesn't make it good; the public overwhelmingly supports farm subsidies, and those are terrible.
The same can be said about private providers. Even if they temporarily lower rates and improve service in your area, to prevent entry from competitors, they will ratchet the rates up, and start cutting corners on customer service as soon as they no longer feel threatened. This is not a theoretical concern - this has happened over and over and over again, across the country.
> Farm subsidies
That's not a great comparison.
1. Farm subsidies are terrible for economic efficiency, but fantastic for economic and political resiliency. [1] Lack of bread very quickly leads to regime change. It's why every single country in the world subsidizes their agriculture and encourages overproduction.
2. The reason farm subsidies exist is not because 50%+1 of the public supports them. The reason farm subsidies exist is because the federal government was designed to give excessive amounts of political power to rural states. This means that something supported by ~20% of the public can easily turn into national policy.
3. Municipal referendums are nothing like it - they are direct democracy.
4. Municipal governments are not direct democracy, but they do not have multiple layers, or were designed to give disproportionate amounts of political power to regional minority groups. What a municipal government wants is a lot closer to the pulse of their constituents.
[1] Efficiency (which is what marketeers want) is often at odds with resiliency (which is what anyone looking past the next quarter's financials wants). Remember the start of the COVID pandemic when all of our incredibly efficient just-in-time global supply chains went to hell? Efficient systems have no built-in slack to absorb temporary shocks. When it comes to food supplies, a temporary shock can leave us with millions of emaciated corpses.
Farm subsidies are very popular; public choice is a real thing, but not the cause for farm subsidies.[1] Steel tariffs are similar.
I am not a democratic fundamentalist. This is to say that I don't value democracy as an ends; it is a valuable means, but saying that something is democratic doesn't change my view on the policy. I don't care how direct it is.
It is correct to say that just because a decision was reached democratically, it does not mean it was a good decision.
But it is also correct to say that when a when a decision was reached democratically, it is generally speaking, not the business of anyone outside that group to second-guess it.
There's a very high bar that you have to clear in order to tell some other group of people what they can't spend their communal funds on.
> Why is it "unfair" for public bodies to compete?
There are two halves to a business - how much value it creates for its customers (which can be roughly estimated from its revenue) and how much drain it places on society (represented by the cost of running the business). There are arguments that revenue doesn't measure the full benefit and costs don't measure the full drain. Disregard them for the moment, because this part of the thread isn't arguing about that and revenue/costs catch a lot of the value/drain.
The government can compete unfairly because they aren't constrained by costs - a government body can provide marginally better service by placing vastly more drain on the community. They have a lazy option which is (1) damaging to the community and (2) unfair because their competition can't legally force taxpayers to cover their inefficiencies. Thus it is unfair, and also bad.
As an example, the Australian government in 2008 decided to roll out fiber-to-the-premise to around 90% of Australia, an expensive undertaking that no private company would attempt in one big push. All the telecom companies cancelled their infrastructure upgrades and rollouts effective immediately and I got to spend 2 years without internet because I was moving to a newly constructed area. The telecom companies couldn't compete fairly (they couldn't justify a gold-plated rollout based on actual projected demand) so they just left the market. Access was prioritised to rebuilding existing infrastructure in swing electorates.
It is possible, but very unclear, that the Australian government offered the best option. I personally as a customer would much rather have spent less on the network and lived with a cheaper, more quickly available product. So I would rather have gone with other providers, but they had left the market because they couldn't fairly compete.
"Unfairness" has to be put in context. How many people benefit by working for the cable company? How many people would benefit by universal access to fiber/internet? I think we all know the answer there.
Why would I, as a citizen, give two figs about fair competition?
All I want is good service, on the cheap.
If the government can provide good service, and have zero-profit margin, that's fantastic. That's actually the best possible outcome. If the government service sucks, then their zero-profit margin should not be a significant enough competitive advantage to drive out competitors.
In addition to all that, all the criticisms of the zero-profit margin model fall apart in a world where VCs and conglomerates frequently operate local services at a loss, in an effort to capture market share (So that they can later raise prices).
> If the government service sucks, then their zero-profit margin should not be a significant enough competitive advantage to drive out competitors.
Except it's not just a zero-profit margin; it's the money that you pay in taxes for that municipal ISP, which you cannot decide to allocate instead to another ISP. If you want to use an alternative ISP, you have to pay both.
If the public ISP doesn't actually receive tax money, then why would the government need to start it? Anyone can start a non-profit ISP.
(Note: I'm not saying I'm against the idea, just arguing a specific point)
Depends on the extent to which internet access is a fungible commodity, as opposed to different ISPs having different products.
If you had a choice of 10+ ISPs you could choose between a low-low-prices ISP that sells your browsing data to marketers, has a contention ratio of 50:1, and tries to shake down Netflix for peering money; a premium ISP with a great contention ratio and good speeds for netflix and youtube; an uncensored, privacy-loving ISP; a family-friendly ISP with powerful porn-blocking options; and so on.
Has anyone who's been violating the constitution with regards to NSA, DEA, FBI metadata collection and hacking been punished? Have the programs been stopped - how can we know/verify?
Has James Clapper been punished for lying under oath to congress? Is he paraded around as an example of what happens when those in senior leadership have violated the rights of millions or is still acceptable to interview on TV or have politicians reference?
There's basically no way a city could create the NSA on their own. If you think a city is violating your constitutional rights, you sue the city (which is way easier than suing the State or National Government).
With luck, you can get national forces on your side. If anything, if the city is violating civil rights, you might be able to get FBI on your side (Department of Justice after all) to leverage the heavy-lifting.
Federal funding for internet connections at schools and libraries specifically requires content filtering.
They can get away with it because it's for children. I would not be surprised if you see something similar to what was tried in the UK - block pornography by default and require an embarrasing support phone call to lift the block.
On top of that there have been more than a few stories of over zealous school systems who have demands of computers used to access online content. So one would expect that a similar entry point would be uses to restrict content if not sites.
The real threat is tracking that will exist but "wink wink" protected under the rule of requiring a court order to reveal; or if your in the political arena just someone who doesn't like you and leaks it.
At least with a private provider there is a remote possibility of suing them or using the government against them. Against the government there are just too many barriers and would require very robust legislation to protect us.
Municipal governments are subject to the same cost-consistency-performance tradeoffs as a private company. In a situation where a private ISP would not have been able to meet its obligations, the cost to force a government ISP to meet them would not obtain a meaningfully better outcome.
Additionally, there is no constitutional right to municipal utility services.
This argument does not apply if the re is no competition, local telcos have a comfy monopoly / duopoly and collect the same fees without making any further investments
We would expect neither a public nor private monopoly to invest magnanimously in an effective way. Keep in mind ISPs still charge for multiple tiers of service, add-on products, etc. So asking for investment beyond that would be beyond consumer demand. That is something that could be mandated by ordinance, but would be scrutinized just as any disproportionately large budget section would be.
> The bar for restricting what you can access, and for what reasons your service can be cancelled, becomes much higher when it's governed by the constitution instead of the whims of a private media company with a massive conflict of interest.
Just to note: the government has whims and conflicts of interest also, as demonstrated over the last decade or two with recent wild swings in high-level elected office and shifts in the courts.
The populace has different levers for different controllers. Votes for politicians and dollars for private firms. In both cases the lever is imperfect and we don't always get optimal results.
“The populace” doesn’t really have dollars as leverage for private firms. Certainly not in a fashion similar to voting, however imperfect voting may be.
Especially not for monopolies.
Plus, as folks in tech from the days of IBM/Microsoft dominance can attest to, simply having multiple options doesn’t necessarily create the same kind of level playing field that we (imperfectly) inspire to in the electoral process.
Plus of course there are the non-customers of said private firm, who, in the case of massive companies like Amazon, Google, telecoms, etc.
While with voting the only barrier is (ideally) being a citizen of voting age.
They cannot drop you as a customer for what you 'say' digitally (or IRL.) You cannot be 'cancelled.'
Not sure if that has happened previously on the individual level, vs the organizational/corporate level though.
Technically, though, if they offer commercial service, the organizational/business orgs taking it up would be protected completely in any of their speech (other than things like child porn.)
TL;DR because the Constitution was written to protect us from the government, there is a lower bar to sue and win under both federal law and constitutional challenges.
And note 1338 calls out that the federal laws prohibiting businesses from discriminating against individuals are instead rooted in Congress's broad latitude to regulate interstate commerce.
And here's another similar reference:
> As a general rule, the Constitution does not give power to the federal government to pass laws to protect people against private actions. For example, the Equal Protection Clause guarantees equal protection for all – it protects against discrimination. Under this protection, the federal government may pass laws to enforce this guarantee. However, while Congress may pass a law to regulate states or other public actors, it may not pass a law to regulate private citizens. Your police department cannot discriminate against you on account of your race. However, your neighbor in the house down the block can be as bigoted as he so desires.
This made me wonder if the bill of rights applies to state, local governments. According to Wikipedia, yes. A series of court decisions in the 1920s (re-)interpreted the 14th amendment as applying the bill of rights to state governments.
Except my provider isn’t doing any of those things. (I have fiber via Comcast but I’ve also got Verizon available.)
Meanwhile, our other public services kinda suck. I used to ride the Metro to work before pandemic hit. It was designed in the 1970s to be a fully automated system, but the equipment was allowed to deteriorate so much that the automation was turned off permanently in 2009. What used to be a smooth, fast ride when I grew up in DC in the 1990s is now a slow, jerky one. Trip times are also 20-25% longer than they used to be. What used to be 6 minute headways is now 8, because it was too hard to keep up 6 with the manual system. And DC is a very well funded system.
Government Internet would be built by basically the same people. Why would I expect it to be any better?
I think the evidence points to municipal internet being far better managed than transit infrastructure. Not all government projects are doomed to failure and IMO we should learn more from those that are because the government having no capacity to actually do anything is not good for us since the demands for governments to do things are not going to go away.
> if the government is providing your Internet service, then your service is protected by the constitution
I don’t know how convincing this argument is. Certainly local law enforcement will, on average, have an easier time accessing these data.
A better argument is this is a temporary measure. Broadband is expensive to build out. Once built, it is cheaper to operate. I imagine these municipal operations will be built well and privatised when the next municipal finance downturn rears its head.
That's not correct. It's not protected by the Constitution, it is protected by the laws passed. The only way it could be "protected by the constitution" would be a judge saying "this falls under section xyz of the constitution. so shall it be". That would obviously probably be overturned in short order but it's really the only way.
> The government can throw you in jail, seize your assets, raise your taxes; AT&T can't
The irony being that, if there wasn't a government (of the people) enforcing law, then, AT&T would have zero issues/problems with doing any of those things.
I'm not saying our government works great. I'm just saying it's, flawed as it is, run by the people. While a company is not.
How much of a separation is there in reality though? AFAIK ISPs have continuously handed that kind of data over as a standard matter whenever the government asked and even gave the government direct taps in their network to run as they pleased.
Private firms have sold sensitive location data to anyone who asks, including borderline criminal bailiffs / 'bountyhunters'. They have left databases exposed for the whole world to see, enabling billions of losses in identitfy theft. And they have suffered basically no consequences.
The evidence so far suggests that government agencies are better stewards of personal data.
Personally I don't trust either which is why I think it's important to have a democratic government, on the federal level, with robust consumer-protection laws, which is progressive, and ideally where it's easy for everyone to vote - voting holiday, etc.
well now I'm hearing more of plans to "begin healing" and to combat hate. I see the government using "hate" as a reason to implement backdoors and monitor citizens, just like the Patriot Act.
Whenever I bring this up, I'm accused of being "for hate", when I really just am a big fan of Snowden and don't people to give up safety for security. Most people would see a measure to combat hate on the internet and vote for it, not realizing its giving the govt the right to monitor all data or crack down on something that isn't even hateful (e.g. Free Palestine, Hong Kong etc).
Give the local "community government" the right to run the internet and now the federal govt will be spidered throughout all local govt ISPs.
> The bar for restricting what you can access, and for what reasons your service can be cancelled, becomes much higher when it's governed by the constitution
I wouldn't put it past Biden or Harris to issue and executive order for the sake of "hate speech". I couldn't imagine Sanders or even Trump doing that.
That's a bit of a leap. Rights can be infringed regardless of whether the government or another entity is involved, if it's done the right way (Edit). In this case, the constitution does not mention any right to broadband internet. It does guarentee rights under the first amendment which could be applicable here. The same way that corporations could restrict that right would likely be used by the government - contract law and a service agreement. This is similar to the government placing restrictions on people when they sign up for the military (Edit). The government also has a conflict of interest when it comes to things like surveillance.
I worded it incorrectly. What I'm saying is that the government can restrict you the same as another entity via contract law. Perhaps the best example of this is when someone signs up for the military - there are many restrictions on what a person can do or say, even off-duty.
> What I'm saying is that the government can restrict you the same as another entity via contract law. Perhaps the best example of this is when someone signs up for the military
That's probably the worst example, since most of the restrictions that apply when that occurs are via special law (e.g., the UCMJ) applicable only to that situation, not contract law to which private parties have recourse.
The Constitution mentions no right to drive cars. Nevertheless, attempts to limit drivers' licences by arbitrary criteria would receive a cold reception in the courts. The government is required to treat everyone with due process.
That's not true at all. There are states that restrict concealed carry permits by issuing on a may-issue basis, which uses arbitrary criteria. This shows that the courts don't care.
We're jumping around a bit. Even in a may-issue context, if it were clear that a particular sheriff only issued CCW permits to e.g. Asian-Americans, other people would have their day in court.
It kind of depends on how well the sheriff dressed up their reasoning. We've seen recently from voting cases that if the state can come up with any reason that isn't directly discriminating on race super disproportionate impact suddenly can't be considered by the court because there's a non-racial fig leaf covering it.
That would depend on how egregious the bias is and how much bias is permitted by the law. People who are wealthy and have connections are more likely to receive permits. There has even been bribery discovered.
It depends on which courts we are talking about. For example, a court in NJ may ignore a case but federal courts may take it up. You can even have split circuits depending on the part of the country the cases were filed in. This leads to one court stating that something is a federally protected right, while a different circuit may rule th opposite. In some of these cases, SCOTUS may decline the case. In that event, you have part of the country being guaranteed a right while the other part might not be, and I believe that would violate equal protection under the law. Not settling the matter in this sort of scenario would in my eyes be "not caring".
You just gave a whole bunch of examples of various courts caring, but disagreeing.
And SCOTUS declining a case doesn't mean they don't care either, their decision not to accept the case is a choice in and of itself and a reading of the law.
More so than "not caring", IMHO, what you are describing is disagreement.
Now, you may disagree with what I just said, but that doesn't mean that either of us don't care ; ).
> If the constitution protects a right, it does so regardless of whether the government or another entity is involved
That's blatantly false. The Constitution only protects against government action. Until the civil war amendments, it did so almost exclusively for the federal government; it now also does so for state governments, but it doesn't extend beyond that.
I worded it incorrectly. What I'm saying is that the government can restrict you the same as another entity via contract law. Perhaps the best example of this is when someone signs up for the military - there are many restrictions on what a person can do or say, even off-duty.
Longmont, CO has municipal broadband and it is awesome.
50 USD per month for symmetric 1Gb service. Service uptime has been outstanding... much better than the service my work gets in Boulder, CO (Comcast).
I pay $50 for 10Mb down 1Mb up. It sucks. They are constantly increasing prices by improving the speed of each plan for free (until they set the prices the next year). This speed increase eliminated some of the lower priced tiers, like 25Mb. The next step up for me is I think 40Mb at $80.
These no competition here since providers are forced to pay a franchise fee to the local government. With lower population towns, it's just uneconomical for a second provider to come in. Seems like the law is anticompetitive.
I have Centurylink 1Gbps fiber, and I get 1Gbps up and down sustained. The installer said that my neighborhood had a 10Gbps connection shared between 30 houses.
Are you actually willing to pay for a service that doesn't oversubscribe? 10 Gbps for 30 houses seems reasonable, as not all of them will be using the service at full speed at any given time.
If you wanted 30 Gbps for 30 houses, then you'd have to pay triple. For something that you wouldn't even notice because you were probably getting 1 Gbps when you actually needed it.
Let me tell you a story about adelphia cable in 1999. The government paid them to install fiber optic networking in my rural neighborhood we were told we were near a backbone so we were going to be a test bed for extremely fast internet 99. 2001 rolls around these trucks are everywhere installing glass in the ground. 2003ish Adelphia cable goes through a legal battle with the larger cable companies they're accusing them of all kinds of stuff. Adelphia cable is bought out by Time Warner Cable the fiber optic network is never turned on even to this day every once in awhile I'm digging in a flower bed and I un Earth the glass wire that's been there for 20 years. Fastest internet available here is from former TWC which is now spectrum $80 30/10mbps.
> "Colorado is one of nearly two-dozen states that have passed laws, usually directly written by regional telecom monopolies, that hamstring or prevent the creation of such networks."
From a European perspective, this just seems crazy. Regulations should be designed to promote competition, not restrict it. Incumbent networks already enjoy a huge advantage. Why would you want to entrench them even further by writing laws that make it difficult for startups and newcomers to compete?
Denver voter here: wer'e very excited about this! Our neighbours in Longmonth and Fort Collins both have similar situations, and we're jealous over here. Excited for some competition to ISPs, and excited for our government to be, ya know, building things that help its peoples. =)
Fort Collins just started rolling our broadband out and we voted on it three years ago. It's been a little bit of a boondoggle, behind schedule and over budget, like most of these kind of projects tend to be I guess. It's been just within the last quarter that Fort Collins is finally getting the number of paying customers into the thousands which should help the financials some. They pulled the fiber throughout my neighborhood a couple of months ago but then it seemed to stall. Occasionally I see a work truck doing something at one of the boxes, but we haven't heard anything as far as being able to get hooked up yet. Our cost is $59.95/month for gigabit up and down so there are many of us chomping at the bit. For anyone interested in the rollout of a municipal broadband program, the quarterly financial reports Fort Collins has been releasing during their rollout are kind of interesting:
Vital infrastructure should be handled by government, and internet is obviously vital at this point. Municipalities build out the last mile, state governments connect municipalities, the federal government connects states (as with our highway system).
Now if we could only do the same for high-speed rail!
There's infinite nuance and meta game to referendums, but that aside...
(1) Referendums seem able to produce highly decisive vote counts on otherwise controversial political issues. Interesting, in itself.
(2) Issues that parties are at odds about aren't necessarily 50-50 issues.
(3) Referendums can (sometimes) produce democratic legitimacy in ways that representative politics cannot.
All interesting, in terms of enabling decision making. Referendums seem to be gaining a little momentum. I think one hidden advantage is the fact that referendums structurally enforce a separation of idea and execution.
There are 725,000 people in Denver. If we naively assume that one sixth of them pay for an internet subscription at $100/mo each, that's $145,000,000 annually that the people could use to fund their own ISP.
The people are held captive by a combination of forces that appear to have nothing to do with economics. If they could all communicate together they could easily fund their own alternative. Appallingly, the place that they are being held captive is a communications network!!
That is on the high side for a connection in Denver -- I think you are overestimating costs.
I looked in a poorer neighborhood in Denver (700sq.ft. house), which is clearly close to fiber, and from Centurylink for $65/mo they can get 940Mbps, for $49/mo they can get 100Mbps.
Looks like for $20/month, xfinity will do 25Mbps at the same address.
I don't have access to Centurylink billing standards, but in my experience actual dollars billed by Comcast are routinely 30% higher than the sticker price of the service. I assume other services are similar. I don't think your numbers are too far off.
Also that Comcast number at the end is for sure an intro price. Actual cost after the first year will be much, much higher.
> Looks like for $20/month, xfinity will do 25Mbps at the same address.
I live in Denver (and a poorer neighborhood at that), I had this plan before coronavirus sent us all home. This is the price for the first year, after that, they charge $60/month. Switched to century link for 1Gbps up/down for $65.
Good to know, and I'm not surprised... that one reason I don't use them. Bait&switch, datacaps, and horrible customer service. Come to think of it, they are probably why the ballot measure was passed to start with.
Do all or even a meaningful majority of people in Denver have access to Centurylink fiber? Every city I’ve seen it in is usually restricted to small areas or newer developments.
When purchasing a house, I would type in the address to centurylink’s website to find out if fiber was available. I didn’t see any old houses (even built in 2000) with it. All the ones that had fiber were developments built in 2015+
True. If enough people put money they can even produce, Movies and TV shows and they no longer have to depend on big bad Hollywood studios for entertainment.
What does a comment like this achieve. We're talking about something thats about as essential as other utilities particularly during Covid. Go lick boots elsewhere.
One of the linked articles [1] describes the arguments in favor of pro-ISP restrictions as concerns that municipal broadband would either be a waste of taxpayer money or an "unfair" threat to private-sector ISPs: "'The general rhetoric behind these laws, from the incumbents, is that cities are too incompetent to run their own networks, so it's a risk to taxpayers,' Craig Settles, a broadband consultant who works with cities to create municipal networks told me. 'But then, the other side of it is that cities are so competent that they represent unfair competition.'"
Is this a relatively accurate and complete characterization?
Not as contradictory as the speaker is making it out to be. The organization can be poorly managed but still price out competition via a state subsidized business model that would be unsustainable for anyone else.
Why do they feel a different monopoly will be better?
There's no reason to believe that the local government owned monopoly will be more efficient or more effectively managed.
It could be, but not necessarily.
These 'grass is greener on the other side' type referendums are difficult if they don't really capture the issue.
The 'root cause' is the single point of access and we could all feasibly use more intelligent laws there.
They tried that 20 years ago with the concept of 'CLEC' and there were all sorts of laws put in place, it didn't work out very well. There may be other opportunities.
For example, it may be possible to make the 'last mile' the responsibility of the city or county, to the point wherein they get the wiring to a proper exchange where there's compeitition.
Then if people want fiber to the home, they can pay for it themselves kind of thing.
The small city where I live has been looking at community-owned fiber and I have enthusiastically supported it because right now it’s Comcast or nothing for broadband.
But a couple weeks ago, a bunch of Verizon trucks were stringing new cables on the poles in my neighborhood. I asked if they were finally bringing FiOS to my neighborhood. They said no, FiOS is being sunset (!) and this new fiber is for 5G residential, which will replace it. They’ll eventually mount antennas on some of the poles and then provide an in-home 5G hardware appliance, analogous to the cable modem. They said speeds should be about the same as FiOS.
All I want is broadband competition. If I can choose between Verizon and Comcast, that competition should help drive down costs, which is the main reason I want community broadband.
ISP market is rigged. Free market competition would make citizens never interested in this, unless it was rigged. If Google w/Google Fiber can't enter markets, then nobody can. Customers are locked into contracts for no good reason, except breaking competition. Good prices only go to first time customers, in order to rent seek and rig prices as customers stay.
Maybe someone who understands FCC laws/regulations can help enlighten me on this point and clear up my understanding.
My understanding is that the reason the network/over-the-air TV in the US (e.g. ABC, NBC, Fox) has relatively strict regulations about curse-words and sex-stuff and violence being shown is because there's a risk that a child could be watching, and the airwaves belong to everybody, meaning any kid could go purchase a TV and watch it.
Cable channels like HBO and ShowTime and whatnot get around this because they require a paid membership to get into, and thus the responsibility for the kids watching it falls into the hands of the parents who signed up for the services, not the networks.
Now, if my logic is correct, what's to stop something like this to leading to increased regulations? As of right now, in virtually any network I connect to, it's relatively easy for me to go to pornhub.com, and even if you ban outright porn sites, websites like YouTube and Netflix allow for much more cursing and violence than what the FCC currently allows on network television.
I'm sure I'm misunderstanding something, and I'm not a lawyer, so maybe someone with more training on this kind of compliance can explain my problems.
EDIT: Just to avoid downvotes that are unnecessary, I should make it clear, I don't support the FCC making these regulations, and think these tasks should fall onto the parents. I'm just saying what the current rationale is, or at least my understanding of it.
If you are interested in doing something like this I'd love to chat! I run a website about related topics[1]. I'm working now with a few different organizations on a kind of franchised ISP model.
AT&T, Xfinity, RCN, etc are all here, competing with each other. If you live in a dense part of the city, you've got half a dozen other providers to choose from as well. Google-owned WebPass can put a microwave dish on your roof and offer 100+ mb/sec for $50 or less per apartment. Mine is a local company that runs a huge fiber line direct from the nearest exchange center and puts a managed switch in the basement, with each unit having a cat5 line direct to the switch. It's $25 per month for 250 mb/sec symmetrical with direct peering to Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and a few others, and all the common areas like the pool deck and gym have free wifi running at those speeds. I can upgrade to gigabit for an extra $25 per month, which I did for the first few year. But it works so well that I don't bother anymore.
The current subsidized low income internet package is something like $10-15 per month for Xfinity and it's 10-20 mb/sec.
The issue is not rich vs. poor. My internet is cheap because our building has contractually guaranteed a single monthly payment on behalf of the many units in the building for some number of years. You can make an investment based on that.
The City of Chicago is contractually guaranteeing payment on behalf of an even larger number of people. Any private company can make an investment in better infrastructure based on that. But the City is content with letting Xfinity provide garbage service in exchange for that money. If they City said "we will guarantee payment of up to $15 per month to any entity that can provide gigabit service to low-income families" there would be multiple bids from local companies, and they'd all be able to do it profitably.
> The issue is not rich vs. poor. My internet is cheap because our building has contractually guaranteed a single monthly payment on behalf of the many units in the building for some number of years. You can make an investment based on that.
Also because the economics of making your building a live, on-net premises are much more favorable for the ISP. Their capex to make your building live is based on a calculation for the expected number of units that will sign up in years 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and the revenue projections. In the telecom industry this is an "MDU" - multiple dwelling unit.
The cost per unit served in a 65 or 95 unit apartment/condo building is much more favorable as compared to building a new GPON FTTH network (even when 100% aerial on poles) to every house in a neighborhood of individual wood frame houses.
You mentioned Webpass above. Where Webpass got started, in the SF bay area, they did precisely what I described above because they could make the economics work by focusing exclusively on MDUs.
Here's a super interesting thing: Chicago is getting ready to embark on a major project where they replace the water line between every single house and the water main, for the entire city. If they had any brains at all, they had better be telling all the ISPs to follow right behind them throwing a fiber cable into the trench they dig between the house and the street. And they should be starting the project in the low-income neighborhoods first.
The idea of "dig once" is a good one but it requires extensive coordination, and municipal planning, for addition things like fiber vaults and pedestals. The feasibility of arranging for telecom contractors to 1:1 shadow the water pipe crews also depends greatly on scheduling and availability.
I've lived in three different neighborhoods with single family homes / small apartment building (all in fairly nice parts of town though).
You almost always can get both RCN and Xfinity--and they compete pretty hard. AT&T is always available, but its shitty DSL. Supposedly some parts of the city have fiber, but I'm 0/3 at my locations.
I'm paying like $50 + tax for 500 mbit down / 20ish up. I'd trade that for 100 mbit symmetrical, but that's not happened on cable anytime soon.
I bet like 20% of houses at most are networked well enough to even use 200 mbit.
Internet in Chicago is unregulated; it's a completely open market.
Many years ago, people got really tired of companies digging up roads, putting in utilities and then repaving the road, only to have some other company come in and dig up the road again a few weeks later. So the city now has an ordinance - if you are going to dig up the road, there has to be an advance public notice, and anyone can lay utilities once you are done but before you've repaved. And once you've repaved, there is some time limit before anyone is allowed to dig up the road again. This makes it pretty cheap to lay dark fiber that will someday get lit up, and now Chicago is reaping the benefits.
Yes, the HOA signs a contract and makes the payment, and then adds the per-unit fee to the monthly assessments.
These small local ISPs are super efficient - they concentrate on infrastructure and support, with 1 or 2 people for sales and billing: one sale equals hundreds of customers, and hundreds of customers equals a single payment.
Thanks. I looked at doing the same but got scared off as I wasn't sure about how practical it would be to keep up and running. Maybe I should try harder again. :)
Because it’s more cost-effective to lie to the population about their internet quality and hire lobbyists to manipulate politics than it is to actually upgrade the network.
Ugh Vice... I love that they use the image of people celebrating the presidential election to imply that people are dancing in the streets because of some vague ballot initiative about "ensuring access to broadband internet".
Saying "we want community broadband" is good. The pent up demand is clearly there. And there are a great many mediocre last mile near-monopoly ISPs which are, in my opinion, borderline abusive to their customer base.
ISP perspective: There are physical limitations to how many discrete, independent facilities-based last mile carriers can be built in a city to individual residential premises. In many cities this ends up with being the local telco, and the local cable company running two parallel overlapping networks. For instance, in Seattle, Centurylink (former USWest/Qwest) running a GPON FTTH network, and Comcast or Wave running a hybrid fiber-coaxial DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 cable last mile plant.
This ends up with a defacto duopoly for many consumers. If you are in a less optimal situation you might have something like the terrible choice between 10Mbps ADSL2+ over degraded, long loop length copper POTS wiring, or 100-800Mbps service from Comcast, Charter, RCN or similar. In which case it's not really a choice at all, you effectively have a cable operator monopoly.
Much like how it is impractical and impossible to have more than one last-mile electrical grid operator in a city, it's highly impractical, costly and expensive for more than 2 to 3 maximum facilities-based ISPs to run parallel competing overlapping networks serving end user premises.
If a city is going to have a 3rd carrier run by the municipality, it needs to be an open access network that sells layer 2 transport to a myriad of independent ISPs. In this arrangement, the city and municipality builds a FTTH network, but only sells wholesale capacity to ISPs.
The city is responsible for the OSI layer 1 outside plant cable, running the drop cable to each house and the termination box, and a basic GPON CPE. Individual ISPs can sell layer 3 (IP) services on top of that and provide the billing, customer support and value-added features like triple-play TV/phone etc. In this arrangement the city ISP runs what is effectively a layer 2 network only, and hands customer traffic in aggregate to an ISP at an NNI.
I have to admit that I am much more skeptical of the concept of cities suddenly developing the deep, long term knowledge base and experience to run last mile access IP networks at a scale of hundreds of thousands of customers. I just can't see many cities successfully getting their own ASN, setting up infrastructure at major IX points, acquiring significant chunks of ARIN ipv4 and ipv6 space, and so forth. Not unless they really throw a lot of money at poaching network engineering talent away from ISPs. If you take a look at peeringdb and pick a random residential last mile broadband specialist ISP with 50-100Gbps+ of traffic, I've literally never seen in my life a city government with the on-staff skill set to successfully implement something like that.
If you want to see how this has been done successfully on the municipality-as-wholesaler end, take a look at Grant and Douglas counties in WA state, which operate 1Gbps FTTH last mile networks much as I described in the above paragraphs. In those two cases, the local county government is also the electrical grid last mile operator. So they already have on staff crews of bucket trucks, pole placing equipment, all of the lineman-related stuff required. Not to mention the support infrastructure like HR/admin/accounting is shared between the county last mile fiber network, and the last mile electrical grid service. There's economies of scale in doing something like that as a combined effort.
While in an ideal world it would be better to provide dedicated strands of dark fiber from each house, back to a neighborhood traffic aggregation point, that can be considerably more costly than a GPON architecture build.
A compromise is to use a single stage splitter PON architecture. Each ISP is provided dark fiber to the splitter and each ISP can use either splitters or WDM muxes at this flexibility point.
When police departments are requesting access to live video feeds from doorbell cams, what will stop them from requesting access to everything else if the city is directly providing the service?
Municipal broadband makes sense in many areas with shitty internet service. Where I live the growth is so absurd fast, possibly the second fastest among major US cities, that we can't get the city improve the highways between housing neighborhoods and freeways or keep up with other basic services. Everything is a struggle for the city to keep up with the growth. In this rarest of cases municipal broadband would probably be a nightmare. Fortunately I have 1gb up and down to the house from my local ISP at $70 per month.
Hi, Chicago voter here. The question wasn't about public utility, it was "Should the City of Chicago act to ensure that all the City's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" which can imply a number of contradictory policies, from Chicago setting up municipal broadband to Chicago giving tax incentives to the existing national broadband providers.
Illinois limits ballots to three referendum questions, and questions chosen by higher-up political entities have precedence over smaller, more local ones. The three questions on the ballot for Chicago are chosen by the Cook County Board of Commissioners. (For these purposes, Cook County is equivalent to the city of Chicago plus a couple neighboring suburbs.)
Background established and into personal opinion: The question is in fact deliberately vague. The Board's goal is not to ask three divisive questions getting at the heart of urgent political matters. It is to fill the ballot with three questions to preclude local, less connected authorities from putting inconvenient, compelling questions on the ballot. Here's a 2018 court case reaffirming that (Calumet City is in Cook County): https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/opini...
These questions are deliberately worthless and it's a waste of time to analyze them for policy guidance.
If you're curious, the other two questions this cycle were: * In creating its City-wide plan for continued growth and sustainability, should the City of Chicago place equal focus on the goals of resiliency, equity, and diversity? * Should the State of Illinois restrict the sale or possession of firearms that have been defined as assault weapons or of magazines that can hold more than a certain number of rounds of ammunition?