Do you mean in a sense that you'd like to see such service provided as a necessity service and owned publically? I'm not sure I understand the private equity part.
Private Equity is well known for exploiting markets for profits without regard for much else.
They will do things like enter a niche market, buy up all mom & pop shops (or in the case of ISP, even replace an existing monopoly), then once they own the entire niche, commercialize the niche and extract as much money out of the niche as humanly possible (usually at the expense of customer experience, quality of product, etc)
Private equity is almost by definition profit driven. There's a high likelihood that they're using the low introductory cost to build out a network before jacking prices up and up in a bid to become the new monopoly.
Private equity typically starts with rhetoric along the lines of, “Look at how much good we’re doing!” and then will ultimately end up a race to the bottom.
They don’t expect financial sustainability with reasonable returns, they expect significant profits over that and the product is typically gutted in this race to the bottom.
Everyone believes this weird narrative that the only thing PE does is buy successful businesses, load them with debt and then cause them to shutdown.
The reality is that PE does not buy successful businesses; they are already struggling. No one else will touch it. Thus, when it comes time to recoup the investment, there is normally a sense of enshittification, which is reality was either already destined to happen, or the business would just close anyway.
I mean, I'm sure there are some very nice, friendly, competent private equity firms, but certainly the classic view of how private equity works is taking a thing, raising prices and cutting costs until (ideally, from their pov) they reach some sort of maximum profitability point or (often) it just collapses.
You can understand why this might not be behaviour you'd want of your ISP.
cj|1 year ago
They will do things like enter a niche market, buy up all mom & pop shops (or in the case of ISP, even replace an existing monopoly), then once they own the entire niche, commercialize the niche and extract as much money out of the niche as humanly possible (usually at the expense of customer experience, quality of product, etc)
foobarchu|1 year ago
toofy|1 year ago
They don’t expect financial sustainability with reasonable returns, they expect significant profits over that and the product is typically gutted in this race to the bottom.
soperj|1 year ago
richwater|1 year ago
The reality is that PE does not buy successful businesses; they are already struggling. No one else will touch it. Thus, when it comes time to recoup the investment, there is normally a sense of enshittification, which is reality was either already destined to happen, or the business would just close anyway.
rsynnott|1 year ago
You can understand why this might not be behaviour you'd want of your ISP.
daveguy|1 year ago
See also: dental, medical, veterinary