Right, but that's why we (ideally) put infrastructure costs under the control of an entity (the government) which doesn't have to operate within a system of profit and market competition.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that the government should pay for private companies to maintain their infrastructure while the companies keep all the profits for themselves.
Ah no here is where people get it wrong. Government should build infrastructure by getting bids from private companies and it should be the same for maintenance and management of said infrastructure. Then the government should set performance and price targets which are needed to be met for the contracts to be renewed. So the maintainer will charge isp for the using the infrastructure as well maintaining it and charge the isp accordingly. This way there is competition where it is efficient and effective. Instead of expecting multiple companies to spend billions on parallel and redundant infrastructure.
Basic utilities (electric, water, internet) should be run by government, not private enterprise, for the same reason we we do this for roads. Applying market forces to infrastructure has no benefit and many downsides. The value of infrastructure is multiplied by the number of people with access to it, meaning it should connect all of us. That's not compatible with a market system.
You have a bizarre perspective on history if you believe this. It is only recently that governments have tried to monopolize infrastructure developments.
And they have the unfortunate outcome that they outsource the work to private entities which don't have to behave like regular companies (ie, compete in a free market).
Governments waste money. If left to the free market, costs would be reduced because those who can't compete on costs would find themselves out of work.
Yes, infrastructure where only one provider exists means society should just run it themselves like a utility. We already do this in many or most places. The military, electricity, gas, water, roads, public transit are all “sold” (or operated at cost) by the government.
I agree there ought to be publicly-owned infrastructure.
But the infrastructure we have is privately-owned, so yeah, the owners can do what they like.
We'll never get rid of greedy quasi-monopolies unless we let them do a crap job so that people demand alternatives.
This is how market capitalism is supposed to work. (And similarly, we get rid of market capitalism by letting it demonstrate that it just doesn't work very well.)
IMO the government (the people) should own the transmission & delivery infrastructure - water, sewer, gas, electric, fiber - and companies provide the service within constraints.
Another self-serving Libertarian-themed post that works under the flawed premise that market forces can replace all natural monopolies efficiently, as well as surpass the laws of physics.
There's a whole bunch of reasons why you don't want infrastructure to be privatized, the biggest of which being because infrastructure will not be profitable everywhere, yet that doesn't take away its strategic value not the idea that there are some fundamental services that should be reasonably available to all citizens.
You don't need it to be government owned. While that is certainly one effective way of doing it, another can be to let whoever wants to build it build it, but require them to give access to competitors for a regulated fee.
Critical national infrastructure should never have been placed in private hands, their only interest lies in minimising expenditure and maximising profits for either themselves via nice bonuses, or to the shareholders. It's never been about delivering the best service to the customer for the most reasonable cost.
Power, Water, Road, Rail, and Healthcare should remain and have remained under public ownership - those are a public service and should not be run for profit. Telecoms is about the only one to have worked - ish, but it took decades and a lot of lobbying and regulation to make it happen.
Where it only makes sense to build one of some piece of infrastructure, isn't it really obvious that it should always be owned by the people? I suspect that this applies to quite a few things: cable data networks, wireless data networks (phone masts), electricity transmission grid, railway lines, roads, etc.
Historically, national infrastructure seems to tend towards becoming a monopoly anyway under private ownership. Further, when these are privately owned, we seem to end up with a lumbering private company regulated by a lumbering state bureaucracy which duplicates a large part of the accounts department of the private company to keep them in check.
This means that we have the worst of both worlds; no real choice, patchy service, high prices for the service and a whole load of hidden regulatory costs which come out of our taxes.
Anecdotally, I've consulted for a state regulated privately owned monopoly company, there is no way that private sector efficiency is driving these places, the bureaucracy is intense. Example: A decision from the company on whether it was acceptable to use a different, cheaper but better looking style of suspended ceiling took 6 months and went all the way to the board of directors of this multi billion pound company.
Something similar is already the case with other infrastructure in many countries.
For example, in my country the company providing my electricity connection is (by law) separated from the one which sells me the actual electricity. This means I can choose one of a dozen or so companies who do the whole electricity market thing to sell me power at the best price possible, and being charged a fixed fee for the hookup regardless of which company is selling the power to me. The same thing applies to gas and (to a very limited extent) telephone/internet. The companies owning the infrastructure are usually owned by the local governments, so they do not really have an incentive to generate a profit.
The same applies to railways. One state-owned company manages the rails itself, and everyone who wants to run trains on it pays them a usage fee. It's the only solution to deal with natural monopolies like this, really.
Infrastructure building is NOT an activity that benefits from free and open markets. The only way this works is if things change such that only government can build out infra, but it can be serviced by the best provider.
I think the free market proponents are harming US infrastructure and in the future competitiveness. Like roads and bridges etc are built with taxes. The internet infrastructure needs to be built or at least controled by the government federal, state or city. I like what Singapore did got bids and fixed prices for fiber deployment. Now all the isp's have to compete for providing services and the fiber deployer is paid the same by all of them. That is probably the best and cheapest way to build infrastructure. Currently in the US you have 2-3 companies doing their own fiber deployment in the same areas at 2-3 times the cost.
Yet public infrastructure requires granted monopolies (i.e. government power). It would be impossible to acquire the necessary land rights and right-of-ways needed - having to contract with every land-owner to build anything would fail due to expense.
The ideal case would be the government owns the infrastructure, taxes (and use fees from bidding out access rights) pay for construction and/or maintenance, private companies to bid for the right to run services for the public.
Do people really believe that infrastructure is not the purview of the government?
Roads, water, electrical, internet, etc. should all be built out first on a municipal level, then the state should connect those municipalities, then the federal government should connect those states. The various levels of government do not need to (should not?) be the ones to operate this infrastructure, but I absolutely believe that to foster competition they should build it out and lease it to others (and such an operational lease should never be exclusive / too long-term)
Is there a good argument against this? Who doesn't think the US Highway System has been great for our economy? Who doesn't think a US Internet System would be great for our economy too?
I don't see an inherent problem with for-profit companies owning infrastructure, but it needs to not be monopolized and it needs to not be owned by a bunch of public market shareholders and hedge funds who don't even use the product. Utility monopolies and public companies rarely put customers first.
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