A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers
Seriously, I feel like I say it every time it comes up: WHY aren&#x27;t people taking action against ISP monopolies?<p>It seems like such a cut-and-dried political issue: they&#x27;re utilities and they overcharge you whether you&#x27;re a Republican or Democrat. And taking action doesn&#x27;t require <i>new</i> antitrust concepts, because it&#x27;s just your garden-variety utility. It&#x27;s the same established principles as electric or natural gas.<p>Yet <i>bizarrely</i> this doesn&#x27;t show up as an issue on Republican <i>or</i> Democrat platforms. Going after Google and Amazon and Facebook&#x27;s free products is the sexy new issue, but the fact that we&#x27;re all overpaying hundreds of dollars a year for broadband is just <i>massively ignored</i>.<p>And I&#x27;m not talking about politicians being bought. It baffles me why <i>voters</i> aren&#x27;t writing letters to their city councils, their mayors, their state reps, their governors. If voters actually care, politicians <i>do</i> respond.<p>It would seriously be so easy to change if the voting population actually <i>did</i> care about it. But, <i>inexplicably</i>, we just pay the fees and deal with the crappy customer service and complain, but it never seems to occur to anybody to actually organize local political action against it.<p>It&#x27;s utterly baffling.