The history of Internet provision "for all" in the UK is atrocious. Massive government handouts followed by private companies that had lobbied for them failing to meet their promises is a summary.
I can't see a nationalisation resolving the issues though, especially not with the paltry numbers being bandied around.
I could see better regulation and forced separation of concerns achieving a lot however.
That said, Internet issues are not the major problem of our times. These issues are a distraction from those of first past the post voting and a collapse in journalistic quality.
> Massive government handouts followed by private companies that had lobbied for them failing to meet their promises is a summary.
That's basically it. OpenReach is the Network Rail of ADSL. Often Openreach would take millions of subsidy for rural broadband buildouts and then do .. nothing.
While I think nationalisation may be a step too far, I think it's useful to move the conversation away from endless privatised failure. If nothing else has worked, let's try threatening Openreach until service improves.
>That's basically it.
>If nothing else has worked, let's try threatening Openreach until service improves.
That is basically NOT it and issuing random threats to incumbent telcos, whilst contemporaneously empowering them is definitely not the solution. The shameless politicking does not address how to fund the empty promises. The article in essence is debating whether or not, Labour (2030) vs Cons (2025) pledge of "full-fibre Broadband" is a plausible one ie. the former is offering free access to the walking dead, and the latter shamelessly targeting it's base minority of curtain twitching shires, and neither of these parties know how to solve the wider and complex implications of engaging with businesses or how to implement any technical plans.
Meanwhile the idea of nationalising Openreach (BT) under public ownership is a much more complicated issue (i.e. its impact upon pensions, the question of who takes on BT’s massive debt pile (the public?), shareholders, competition etc.) and one that is likely to result in plenty of legal challenges (this could hamper the fibre rollout until settled). Not to mention a lengthy debate over whether that by itself would result in a better market.
This is a well researched policy based on the government’s own analysis. I know people familiar with the current policy framework and (despite not being Corbyn fans) they think this is a good idea.
Ah, yes, of course, the super-secret 'CuRrEnT FrAmEwOrK PoLiCy' which you can't link to or share? By attributing any authority to what is essentially a loose collection of a government's ambitions, aspirations, pipe dreams and a random wish list of sorts, is rather fanciful, to say the least. The current talk of full-fibre broadband is just a manifesto pledge, which has already been downgraded to upto 'Gigabit broadband' by the Tories. This rhetoric is reminiscent of 'information superhighway/superfast broadband' buzzwords from the previous decades to capture urban/rural votes. Similarly, there are no detailed plans available on how it will be implemented or how any of this going to get funded ─ which could cost over £30 billion; then the Labour party are pledging to give it all away for free?!? In the absence of any hard facts, putting stock in any of these words uttered by someone, who knows somebody else, who then conducted some research and everybody thought it was a jolly good idea ─ rings alarm bells and means forgoing privacy in return for something perceived to be 'free', yet still being majority funded by the taxpayer.
I will leave you with the USO [Universal Service Obligation] from DCMS (Dept. for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport) as an amuse bouche on delusions of grandeur.
By “current policy framework”, I meant the way things are working right now. The person I was referring to has been involved with policy making all over the UK, and knows a great deal about the subject. I believe you misinterpreted this as “labour’s detailed plans.” Just wanted to make that clear.
If you’d have been civil, I would have been happy to ask my contact for appropriate reading and share them with you. As it is, I feel even responding is giving a nasty troll too much of my time.
Firstly, I apologise sincerely, if you felt in anyway whatsoever, that I was being uncivil. Secondly, it is extremely unfair to label someone a 'nasty troll', when they have diligently provided official sources as a basis to conduct a conversation from, versus hearsay.
Last but not least, I accept your offer of sharing the views of your legitimate contact and a source, which can be used to confirm what you say.
Since there are multiple competing fibre companies, won't nationalising one company and offering "the fastest fibre free to all" bankrupt all of the other companies?
Like healthcare in the UK, private companies presumably won't go out of business but will instead offer a more expensive alternative for those willing to pay. An example I have is my Dad who at 60 needs a double need replacement, the NHS standard is to give him a full replacement free at the point of access for his knee that is totally shot. But he'll only get a partial replacement on the one that's not totally buggered. Well he didn't want that - he wants both doing to the same level because he's still very active, so he's going private in this case. Did he have to? No. But he wanted something above what the NHS was offering. And it's no slight on the NHS, he used them when he had cataracts around five years ago without any issue - his wait time was only a few weeks from the referral too.
I would probably be willing to pay for a better connection that what the government would provide as standard if offered because I spend my entire life online, I'm sure there will still be private ISP options with USPs to suit how I use the internet.
In the end that could easily give consumers more choice than they get now in areas that have poor coverage (where they usually get the option of a <4mb ADSL connection or 3/4G Celluar). Instead of areas where they can get Virgin Media, FTTP, FTTC, or 5G coverage.
We still have insurance companies and private healthcare here, it's just most people don't use it because what we pay for any way is good enough. So then the private ISPs just have to offer something better.
At a guess, I would hazard the thousands of people who would become unemployed? And not all be able to immediately go and work for the 'British Broadband Corporation'? That's one negative side effect.
So we should have worse, more expensive internet instead, to keep people in positions that aren't necessary? That seems like a terrible idea. Presumably a Labour Manifesto with this policy in it, would also include a bunch of provisions for unemployed people.
Presumably taxing people more to support them? I don't have a dog in this fight. But probably wise not to infer there aren't negative consequences if all bar one broadband companies get shuttered in a country.
I would gladly vote for paying all employees of all ISPs their current salary from taxes for a while, if it meant free, nationalized fast fiber in every home.
I was quoting directly from the article "It’s time to make the very fastest full-fibre broadband free to everybody, in every home in every corner of our country".
Well BT is available in all areas in the UK except for Kingston-Upon-Hull which has it's own broadband provider called KCOM which is enjoys a complete monopoly in the area with the city having fibre-optic in all areas.
I wonder if this policy that given that it creates free-access to the internet but in the end it also creates a huge monopoly similar to KCOM that kills competition with the added bonus of only the biggest earners footing the bill + taxes dramatically rise due to this. As for the competition, Labour is fine for bankrupting them and what happens if the FAANG companies cannot pay any more or start to relocate due to other economic events such as Brexit, financial crash, etc? How will they continue to fund this initiative?
The astronomical cost of this on the tax-payer and with the current UK economical uncertainty due to Brexit makes this sound hopelessly utopian for a Labour Government to implement I'm afraid.
Thing is, wires are a natural monopoly. In fact, all the wires in the UK are owned by BTOpenReach which is a highly regulated and audited government sanctioned monopoly. I bet if you looked at the current costs of auditing and regulating it, a nationalised BTOpenreach would not cost a huge amount more to run.
Some of your broadband bill is going straight through your ISP to BTOpenreach. A bit goes to a billing provider; the ISPs all probably license the same back end software. The rest is spent by the ISP on marketing, graphic design and cold calling, all to try and differentiate something that you can't differentiate because pretty much everywhere its the same wires.
You bring up KCOM in Hull. Before it was privatised (the council built a new stadium for the local football team with the profits) this was a state run municipal broadband system that was light years ahead of anything else in the UK and provided either free or ultra cheap when it was introduced, if anything it was too ahead of its time, people didn't know what to do with it.
I don't know how much it would cost to maintain the wires if we strip out all the admin expenses of marketing, contracting and billing everyone, but I would not be surprised if it was less than £10/house per month. Whether I pay that to a nationalised service or through my tax I don't care, but I don't think it should be dismissed as it would make the UK more competitive against other countries. Think of all the time wasted with every household in the UK having to phone their ISP every year and negotiate a better deal for what is essentially the same thing.
Look at the UK railway system as another example of a natural monopoly and compare it to France where it is state run. UK is twice the price, half the speed, half the legroom, shit wifi and nasty food. Surely the market is not set up right here as it it not optimising for a great outcome compared to a centrally controlled system like SNCF.
Markets are a tool and should be modelled before they are applied to see if they provide a more efficient outcome. It is not a given that they will do so, especially where they are artificially created by ideologue politics.
"astronomical cost of this on the tax-payer" is absurd. Who's having costs go up significantly as a result of free internet service being provided? You already have to pay for internet from a private provider, if you replace that with government-operated internet your internet is funded by taxes - but the government can tax corporations instead of individuals to avoid raising direct costs for any individual taxpayer, which they're doing!
Everyone's costs are going to go up significantly as a result of replacing broadband that mostly uses existing infrastructure with a program of ripping up every street in the country and installing new fibre optic connections to every house. Making it "free" and taxpayer-funded just means that there's no way to opt out of paying if the existing broadband is fast enough.
This program isn't "taxpayer funded". It's funded specifically by taxing tech companies, as is literally stated right below the headline in the article.
Literally 7% of people have fibre in the UK. How can you defend the behaviour of the companies involved? We need a radical solution; feeding market demand has been tried and it has failed.
Labour was quite upset when the porn block was canceled:
> Labour attacked that announcement as “proof that an important policy issue has descended into utter shambles”.
And in 2013:
> David Cameron must bring in laws to restrict access to internet pornography and stop images of child abuse from being available online, Labour will say today.
> However, Labour is challenging the Government to go further by bringing in new legal protections, including an automatic block on online pornography unless users "opt-in" and a tighter obligation on web companies to weed out images of child abuse.
I would expect Labour to put in place more blocks around things to protect the population against "extremist" content but porn would probably be ok for a while.
It would probably remove barriers to censorship. Both main parties are reasonably hostile to free speech but Labour (or it's supporters) seem to me to be more hostile to "fake news" etc
This is AFAICT the only genuine argument against the policy. But it’s being drowned out by hysteria over nationalising openreach, an omnishambles of an organisation if there ever was one.
Consumers will pay, and not only the direct ones but all people through inflated prices same as with oil taxes.
The funny part is those marxists already know how much they will steal - 20bn and 'scheme' is a new word for theft.
What exactly makes 'rich people's money' a finite resource? Where do you think their money comes from? If you look at the average billionaire, their wealth trends up even if they're giving big chunks of it away - Bill Gates is richer now than he was when he started giving away huge piles of his money, because for a rich person wealth is (unless you're literally lighting it on fire) not trivially exhaustible.
Many countries previously have had high tax rates on the rich (upwards of 50%) and those rich people still managed to avoid being poor.
It would be another matter if their plan was proposing to cut off rich people's income - but their plan doesn't even touch rich people, it is funded by corporations. Even if you were to institute a 2% wealth tax to fund public internet, the rich would still stay very, very rich because it's possible to keep earning money off your remaining wealth through investments and other means.
Presumably that money goes back into the pockets of everyday people who then spend it in an ever revolving churn of money which keeps capitalism working.
If your economy is held up by rich people and rich people alone, your economy probably sucks.
Maybe scrap HS2 and spend the money on this instead? Seems a better use of however many billion we're up to and would probably make more of a difference...
Why suddenly giving 100% of Britain 100mbs BB wont do much for the national productivity.
That money would be better spent else where, better vocational training - Rebuilding the countries ability to say be able to make its own pistol or rifle
Can you see the spending round where the Postmaster General competing against the other departments for more funding for police or the NHS vs subsidising BB.
This isn't an entirely new idea. BT was privatised in the 1980s, and before that had been run as a government department, and later as part of the Post Office, a public company but still under the control of the Government. At that early stage, the UK had some of the best internet infrastructure in the world, and had plans to roll out FTTH. Then Thatcher became PM, privatised BT, cancelled the fibre rollout plans, and encouraged more competition in the hopes that would improve investment. Well, 30 years later and we still have < 10% FTTH coverage. (Source: https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-l...)
Internet infrastructure is in weird state here. Thanks to BT's legacy as a public/nationalised company, they still own the vast majority of infrastructure and cables. This was sort of spun out into a separate company (Openreach) to BT the ISP, but they are widely considered inefficient and disinterested in improving the infrastructure, and they're still a subsidiary of BT. In theory this move was to increase competition, but it hasn't done a lot. There's only one major ISP (Virgin) that truly competes with BT, built their own infrastructure, and ran their own cables, almost every other ISP just leases the lines from Openreach and sells their own services on top of that.
I tend to agree that nationalising Openreach (the infrastructure and cables) is a good idea, to increase internet speeds and coverage across the country - rural areas tend to have very slow speeds as it's not in the interests of BT and Virgin to improve the infrastructure for a handful of customers in that area. I'm not so convinced that providing free high speed fibre internet connections to everyone is a necessity or a good use of government money. I feel like nationalising Openreach but keeping the existing model of ISPs building services on top of the infrastructure makes sense, and public infrastructure would reducing the costs of leasing those lines, a saving that could hopefully be passed on to customers. I'm not sure how this would affect companies like Virgin who do own their own infrastructure though, would they then be competing with the government?
There's of course a privacy concern to the government owning the internet infrastructure too. While the UK government has already had some pretty draconian policies, and they can force ISPs to comply, they've struggled to implement some of their more "ambitious" censorship policies, in part due to it being difficult to get all of the ISPs to come to an agreement on how to implement them. If the government owns the infrastructure, it's easier for them to implement surveillance and censorship at a lower level, harder to circumvent with VPNs and the like. Internet surveillance and censorship are generally policies of the Conservative party, rather than the Labour party who are proposing this, so I don't think there's any malicious intent with this proposal, but if a left wing government nationalises the internet this year, what's to stop a right wing government of the future using this new found control to implement stronger surveillance/censorship in 5 years?
All in all, I'm on the fence about this policy, although I do think some steps in this direction would be positive. And if you've been paying any attention to British politics in the last few years, you'd know there's even more complexities that what I mentioned here.
I very much support their search for an alternative to monetarism (surely now completely discredited), the inevitable gross inequality of pure capitalism, the failure of markets to deliver good societies, and so on, but this just reeks of a return to "old socialism".
When will people understand nothing is free. There will be no true equality until we're all equally poor.. that is until free energy / replicators, Star trek technology.
This is not a good idea. We are very close to having a competitive market for broadband in the UK. Efficient markets are better than central government planning.
What's needed is some light regulation to push the market towards being fully competitive.
I can't see a nationalisation resolving the issues though, especially not with the paltry numbers being bandied around.
I could see better regulation and forced separation of concerns achieving a lot however.
That said, Internet issues are not the major problem of our times. These issues are a distraction from those of first past the post voting and a collapse in journalistic quality.