i work for a smaller cable company and it has been getting very deep lately.

sad thing is management doesn't seem to get that the grunts don't care. we never profit from the monopolies. every year we get some bs excuse why we won't be getting a raise this year even though reading the quarterly earnings and know what were spending on upgrades and know there is a lot left over that goes somewhere.

knowing how high the margins are in the industry, how little they pay, how lean things are already run its going to get bad.

if competition is somehow injected into the market and they are happy with a fraction of what the incumbents are currently enjoying would be devastating. there is very little left to cut at the bottom, and those at the top can't possibly be expected to not get their rockstar paydays.

what also could happen is the exodus of employees from existing cable companies to the new ones that would sprout up. even though the grass isn't always greener somewhere else, it won't stop those from finally having a choice.

don't get me wrong. I have zero problem with someone making a 100 million a year, but only when that comes after everyone from push broom and toilet brush to company car and private jet are all paid the highest for their position for a company that size. unfortunately almost everywhere you can go that isn't the case.

I've heard a lot of discussion how making ISPs a utility would just entrench the monopolies even further... what od you think?

In my town and I'm assuming most, whoever laid the lines, gets the monopoly. Maybe Comcast could have gone around and buried new lines, but it would have been too cost prohibitive, so they waited for this company to finally die (people would switch to DirectTV and AT&T DSL), and now everyone in town can get actual high speed internet and television.

This is the biggest problem I have with cable companies, they go into a town, lock it up, and don't innovate.

But I also understand wanting to protect your investment of 10s-100s of millions of dollars in a town, expecting to earn it back over 30+ years.

If cable companies had to compete to keep business, they'd offer better service and treat their employees better. Southwest airlines is a good example of a company that has to keep costs low, but does this in part by treating their employees very well.

Notice that they charge ever higher and higher fees, in part because the municipalities are on the take here and get a cut of the fees, but also because the demand is inelastic. If you live in Austin and you want cable, they have your business.

So, there's no reason to spend the money to have enough technicians to ensure they are able to do a good job and a timely one.

A big part of the reason this never improves is that everyone blames Time Warner. TWC is just maximally allocating resources, which is what they should do. Namely, out of areas where they have a monopoly protected by the violence the city of austin will do to any other cable company that tries to compete.... and into areas where they have to compete for customers.

But you don't hear this issue at election time. Why do people not hold their city council peeps accountable for imposing this overpriced monopoly on them?

My guess is that most don't realize it is a government created monopoly, and the ones who do, many think that there would be no cable if the city hadn't given those rights away as an incentive to install all the cable. (not the case... places where this doesn't happen, still get cable because it isn't that expensive to put in the cable.)

By way of analogy, having clean water is important, but water infrastructure is not high-value-added ("buy Water Premium Max Plus! only 79.99/month!"); it's a basic utility. The alternative to Comcast isn't "no internet", it's a public utility wire-owner. Which would provide roughly the same level of service that Comcast actually provides, in the vast majority of areas.

And exploiting a monopoly on infrastructure is almost the Platonic ideal of rent-seeking.

The only company I know who does it is RCN, and they only do it in big cities.

And the issue isn't whether the companies are struggling. Nobody feels bad for Comcast's CEO's kids. The issue is the incentives to build telecom infrastructure relative to other opportunities in the economy for the billions of dollars needed.

There's no free lunch. If the writing is on the wall for wireline profitability, companies like Comcast will take their capital and buy companies like NBC instead of investing in their network. If you make it illegal for them to do so, their shareholders will force them to do stock buybacks with their capital, then take that money and invest in whoever does buy NBC.

If it's deregulated, then they can enter the market and compete on service and price, not buy up the competition so there's no chance of anyone else ever being able to enter. TWC has been pretty active in trying to prevent municipal fiber in NC, and I suspect with even more money/muscle/lobby power behind them, it will be easier to squash any semblance of competition in any form.

And it isn't really implicitly evil, because they just own the coax in the area and it obviously is not worth the investment to lay redundant wires.

Which is not really the case.