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.
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 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.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/11/2020-labour-pa...
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.
Hard to argue with that conclusion when there's only one option.
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.
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.
There idea of employee shares is held in trust and taxed at 75%
But if we are renationalising the UK's telecom system then cough I have a few questions what about the crown guarantee, Section A Pensioners,
And of course those of us like me in Tymnet getting "screwed" by hr out of pay and the BT pension scheme - maybe Vint Cerf could get subpoenaed
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/broadband-tim...
It hopes to connect .5 million rural homes (private ISPs won't touch them generally) for about €3 Billion Euro over the next few years.
It's insightful to compare the two approaches.
They’re trying to connect every home in rural Ireland at great cost even through research found that only a fraction will take it up.
> 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.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10114845/La...
No forethought to what a future Tory government would do after the nation’s infrastructure are put under direct governmental control?
okay but where does the money come from?
I would suggest reading the article, even the subheadline right where your eyes first focus had you even opened the link.
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".
Doubling down on predictions: Labour loses.
What's needed is some light regulation to push the market towards being fully competitive.
