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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.

4 comments

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.

And it should be added than ultimately the tech companies will benefit most from this: larger markets for streaming and other services.

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.

They do strike me as the sort of teachers pets who used to little playlets at assembly about "issues" who they have vaguely heard about.

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