Very good. My TL;DR take:
The American and German approach of letting incumbents build monopolies, allowing wasteful overbuild, and refusing to regulate natural monopolies is often called a ‘free market.’
But it’s not free. And it’s not a market.
True capitalism requires competition. But infrastructure is a natural monopoly. If you treat it like a regular consumer product, you don’t get competition. You get waste, or you get a monopoly.
The Swiss model understands this. They built the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and then let the market compete on the services that run over it.
That’s not anti-capitalist. It’s actually better capitalism. It directs competition to where it adds value, not to where it destroys it.
The free market doesn’t mean letting powerful incumbents do whatever they want. It means creating the conditions where genuine competition can thrive.
Some right libertarians actually believe the bullshit that free markets magically pop up out of the ground like weeds if you just don’t regulate anything. This is obviously untrue. You need the right type of regulation to have a free market. Otherwise you end up with cartels and monopolies.
Those that operate the cartels and monopolies know this, but continue to feed the propaganda machine that spouts the opposite.
Libertarian police
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me.
The American dream!
Fantastic BTW.
so capitalism good when done right - couldn’t agree more
Note This article is written by me and spell checked with AI. Many of the images are generated by AI. They are mostly to explain certain points and break up the wall of text.
Well FUCK YOU!
Use your word processor to spell check, and buy stock photos taken by humans, which have probably been ripped off to train that AI.
Your disclaimer doesn’t legitimize anything.
Yep I saw that it had AI slop and immediately closed the window.
Frankly idgaf what an AI user has to say.
Fuck comcast. Fuck 2tb bandwidth limit unless you get their fuckass router. Fuck them.
Not that it absolves them of their bullshit, but you can set their router to bridge mode and use your own. It still removes the bandwidth limit.
It is a PITA to set up bridging though, thanks to their fuckery with the software. Fuck comcast
commentary on the yggdrasil overlay network:
Yggdrasil nodes are ordinary userspace routers that intentionally forward traffic for any peer that is reachable over the overlay.
When a local node learns a route to an “Internet‑on‑ramp” (a peer that has a public IPv6 address or a NAT‑traversing tunnel), it adds that path to its routing table and advertises it to its other neighbors. Because every peer can act as a router, traffic from a device that has only a local peer‑to‑peer link can be carried through any other node that has a route to the wider Internet, even though that node is not on the same LAN.In the traditional Internet, routers are owned and operated by ISPs or autonomous systems that enforce policies such as “do not forward traffic for non‑customer addresses” and NAT/firewall rules that block arbitrary inbound forwarding. Ordinary end‑devices are not allowed to advertise themselves as routers for other users, so a local host cannot automatically use a neighbor’s Internet connection unless explicit forwarding (e.g., NAT, proxy, VPN) is configured.
Yggdrasil’s design therefore differs in two key ways:
- Overlay routing is decentralized. Each node maintains a small routing table of reachable peers and, by default, will forward packets on behalf of any other node in the overlay <citation src=“3”></citation>.
- No ISP‑imposed forwarding policies. Because the overlay runs over arbitrary transports (TCP/TLS, QUIC, etc.) and all nodes are peers, there is no external authority that blocks or filters traffic‑forwarding decisions, allowing local peers to act as on‑ramps to the wider Internet.
Consequently, a device on a local Yggdrasil LAN can reach the public Internet through any neighboring node that has an external path, while the conventional Internet prevents this kind of unrestricted peer‑to‑peer routing.
https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggstack . this is a rootless implementation which runs on any mobile(ipv6) android phone (via termux).
its best to not think of it as an immediate, full, replacement for the the entire internetThey will never give you more unless something forces them to. That could have been us, forcing them to, but we’re shit at accomplishing those kinds of things.
The author misses a few key points about the American model:
First, in exchange for the local territorial monopoly, the providers are supposed to be heavily regulated by the local (or State) government, with controls in place to prevent abuse of the monopoly and promote the interests of its residents. Of course, we all know how business interests influence government to make business- friendly regulations. Governments have the ability to enforce more user-friendly practices, if they choose to do so.
But the more important point is that in the US, we hand out different monopolies based on the connection type. For instance, where I live we have one company that owns the twisted-pair POTS landlines, a different company that owns the coaxial cable TV service, and another company that owns the direct fiber to the home. Three companies, three connections to each home, all three (theoretically) capable of delivering the same services, since there is no longer any real differentiation between voice, video, and data service: it’s all just bits.
We just got our FTTH provider only recently. Before that, our choices were only the cable company or the telco’s astonishingly show DSL. So I subscribed to the Cable company, and their pricing model tried to force you into a bundle for the other services. Their speeds were also quite slow for broadband, until the Fiber company started digging. Then I got all sorts of emails saying “we’re increasing your speed – for free!” And sure enough, I was getting better bandwidth. But all that did was piss me off. These losers could have given me that better service all along, but didn’t bother until they were forced to.
So I’m on the fiber now. But I know how it works, this service will be awesome at first, but once this company finishes building out they won’t sign on any new capacity and it will gradually get shittier over time. It’s the American Way!
(And I still pay the local telco way too much money for a POTS landline. What can I say, I’m an old.)
Now we just need some decentralised stuff so that we can communicate directly with one and another.
Interesting!
Do you know where people discuss things like this? ( I have my own similar protocol.)
Unfortunately I don’t. I’ve only seen a couple youtube videos covering it and other similar mesh networks (LoRa). I’m getting more and more tempted to buy some hardware and find out how it actually works though.
I sifted through the site and checked out the git repo but the only real information I found is that it’s made by some Mark Qvist. The search goes on, I’m very curious about how they do the “DNS”/address propagation.
Lemmy is so volatile, I’d love some old forum where information like this piles up 😁.
On a side note, here’s my shameless plug for my “P2P” sharing protocol Tenfingers if you would like to check it out ☺️.
is it because Switzerland is like 2% the size of America with like 4000% the GDP because of all the banks with illegal funds there?
Or because the US, the richest country ever to exist, is squandering its wealth on weapons and kleptocracy instead of improving its citizens’ lives even a tiny amount?
top 10 richest countries on the world adjusted per capita.
notice something missing from that list?
oh wait…look who is on the list?
Is per capita appropriate in this context?
very much so. poor people don’t buy things that aren’t necessary like internet access.
edit: just to clarify, poor people don’t have the expendable income to pay for both home Internet AND a mobile phone.
The poor parts of Eastern Europe like Romania are awash in cheap, fast internet though
you mean the parts that are a part of the EU that directly benefit from support from some of the richest countries in the world?
The EU is still poorer than the US
I’m sure this will be lost in the comments but you CAN get 25GBit here in 'murica. My ISP offers it… But this ISP is also considered one of the best in the world so… https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/#choose-your-plan
Lol $1500 a month. JFC.
Just for reference Init7 offers 25 Gbit/s for 65 CHF a month. Thats about 83 USD.
They have the same monthly price for 1 Gbit/s 10 Gbit/s and 25 Gbit/s. Only the initial install for the higher speed optics costs 77 CHF or 222 CHF more respectively.
I’m still on their 1Gbit/s service because I’m too lazy and cheap to replace my router and LAN with 10 Gbit/s equipment.
Most hardware does 2.5Gbps out of the box these days.
I’ve had 1Gbps for 13 years now (in Denmark) and can comfortably say: it’s plenty
Google tried to break regional US monopolies with Google Fiber, which to my surprise is still going despite Google’s best efforts to kill off projects that aren’t immediately successful and is active in 19 US states or around 40 different cities.
The only way I can see this catastrophe ending is one of three ways:
- Satellite internet - Elon Musk would need to massively drop the price of Starlink to encourage others to switch, or a competitor would need to pop up and offer similar service at a lower price point, likely through Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic.
- The US collectively vote the Republicans out of office by a landslide and bring in a left-wing Democrat leader. Won’t happen for so many reasons.
- Mesh networks. Something like Freifunk but on a much bigger scale.
Not only is Google Fiber still going, it actually has begun expanding service again after being stuck in limbo for a while.
It’s a strange one, to be sure, but I guess they see a benefit to the infrastructure they built.
.
Here in Sweden I have over 20 choices of providers, many with specific a focus. One that is superb, which is the one I have, don’t do any tracking or information gathering at all. They are fully focused on privacy, an open Internet and have helped countries in need, like Ukraine, with hardware to keep Internet access on. They’ve been raided and taken to court over not following the required IP address storage laws and some other things of deliberately not collecting information. Their newsletter is so good too, all about privacy and relevant tech news. Seriously couldn’t dream of a better ISP.
25 Gbit Internet
Sounds like they overspent massively on infrastructure. This is a waste of taxpayer money. You have to run some top tier industrial service from your home to utilize even 10% of that. There’s literally no use case for avg Joe.
Here’s how this works in poland: Infrastructure is private, but law mandates that telecoms share with each other. The result is extremely competitive industry that delivers cheap internet over entire state. I’m running 600Mb down/30Mb up at equivalent of $20 a month, 23% VAT included.
It’s possible to get 1Gb+ but at that point most common networking hardware and cables are becoming bottleneck.
I know literally noone who needs more than 1Gb symmetric connection.
Market delivers what’s mostly in demand, and it isn’t 25Gb That needs extreme infrastructure on both sides, provider and user
Honestly, fuck American ISPs, but what on earth would you need 25 gig fiber in your home for? We have a gig line that actually runs at a gig 99% of the time, and I can be downloading a steam game while 3 separate videos are being streamed and I won’t have stuttering. 25 gig sounds cool, but also utterly pointless
Home e-business and you run your own servers. Or cohousing, one building where multiple families live under one address.
A bluray remux of a whole series can run in the hundreds or thousands of gigabytes. I want to be able to download and watch it the same day I decide to do so.
Blueray bitrate is lower than even 1gbps so even full remux is downloadable at a speed you could begin to watch it the same day while later episodes continue to download. You wouldn’t need the full series downloaded up front.
Switzerland is fucking tiny.
That’s why.
Well, Austria is right next to it. It’s tiny, too. So why is it not as good?
Oh, I dunno. 🫨 Why don’t you tell me why what applies to a subset doesn’t necessarily apply to the superset.
I love how that’s always the cop out for any advancement.
How exactly are facts and maths cop outs?
There are states with better fiber deployment than Switzerland.
But generally, think of it as highway design. That’s the American way, after all, and it also stinks.
Switzerland: mostly point-to-point where each home gets its own dedicated fiber strand. Upgrading to 25 Gbps can be as simple as swapping optics(multi spectrum) on each end. Some places in USA do this. Some offer 100 gbps, symmetrical.
United States: mostly point-to-multipoint (PON: GPON/XGS-PON) One fiber is split among 32–64 homes. Everyone shares the bandwidth.
And they say Americans don’t have socialism. But that’s the problem. When there’s socialism it’s the public subsidizing corporations.
No, read the article
By that logic Tuvalu’s internet must be amazing.
That’s absolutely logic, certainly.
By which logic do you mean? My guess. You don’t know.
Oh, that’s where you go dark.
China has a bigger landmass than the US and China’s internet is insanely fast. Just like the 5GA. The US is like dialup compared to China. Especially now only Netgear is allowed in the US compared to the innovate technology from the likes of Huawei.
The us internet situation sucks but the author has a complete misunderstanding why. I dont k ow if they are very young or no from the united states but there is big misunderstanding of whats wrong. Its all bad but you need to go back to wwii. You need to talk about the nsa. You need to talk about 9/11.
Also we have fiber, its not shared and they rip up all the roads they want. They are a local company, locally owned.