Why Your Internet Sucks

A transcription of a segment on The Indicator from Planet Money, "Why Your Intenet Sucks." 

One question that comes up regularly in one form or another from listeners: Why does our Internet suck so badly? And I can understand if you live in a rural area where, you know, it's inevitably patchy service, you know, it's hard to connect people. But 80% of people in the US live in urban areas, where we're all clustered together, which means we should be easy to service, right? And yet, our Internet sucks, too. Why is that? 

Camille Petersen: Your problem is competition. The lack of competition is an enormous problem in the US Internet market.

Benton Faculty Research Fellow Christopher Ali: Cable companies can still say, well, there's competition because look at all the cable companies that exist. There's Cox. There's Charter. There's Comcast. We're not a monopoly. But if you drill down to the individual markets, you start to see these kind of local monopolies exist.