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Former FCC Chief Touts "Big Broadband"
Anonymous Coward writes "Reed Hundt has a vision about building a 10 to 100 Mbps network for every household in the U.S. He makes a great case for why it should be done and how we can pay for it.
What's interesting about this piece is that Hundt advocates a new approach to universal service. Instead of giving away broadcast spectrum (for HDTV) and maintaining (ancient, inflexible) phone lines, we should spend money on building out a next generation fiber network to every household, and run both HDTV and phone over that network. Then we can stop funding the phone network (which is pretty much maxed out anyway) and sell off the HDTV spectrum for 10s of billions of dollars."
The telco lobbies will be swift and vengeful.
The FCC gives an excuse to the morality police to control content. I don't want the government or politicians going anywhere near my network. I'll just say no, thank you.
As someone who no longer watches TV, and only grudgingly pays for a cable modem, it'll take a lot of convincing that I should spend any of my money to increase the GIGO throughput to my house.
Even more opportunity for hax0rs to own Windoze systems and use them as warez pits.
Seriously though, I suspect our existing bandwidth would be quite capable if it wasn't for all the grabage traffic from Windoze boxen infected with virii. If you up the badwidth, you'll up the worms and the signal to moise ration will simply decrease until we still ahve the same amount of truly usuable bandwidth.
I agree, and wince at some of the outcomes.
One GOOD outcome would be that if the dirty politicians were busy with the fiber network, they might be a little less involved with plain old broadcast TV, and stop forcing changes there.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
The Iowa Communications Network provides an interesting case study in ways that networks, concieved by politicians, can indeed be built without excessive pork attached. Governor Branstead pretty much put himself in charge of it. It has revolutionized educational communications throughout the state and brought theretofore unheard of opportunities to small colleges and high schools.
So, in a word, it *can* be done without the pork and failure. *Will* it is a different issue.
See:
This is about as likely as GWB's gambit to grab techie votes by claiming to want to go back to the moon. After the election, he'll forget all about it, cut NASA's budget and strangle NASA to death. These bitches always spin these beuatiful castles in the air, and they never come through.
This is a very good point. If 3 Mbps barely works for me what is going to happen when all that other shit is on it?
Sounds like we'd need a 10Gb line, unless he means that each house would have a dedicated 100Mbps.... That might be interesting.
Bit Torrents might actually work...
Don't mind me, I'm just naturally cynical.
That being said, I do believe that FTTP (Fiber to the Premises) is where we will eventually end up. THe question is, do we make that our goal now and move directly to achieve it, or do we wander around aimlessly in the broadband desert for forty years, waiting and suffering through every concievable combination of DSL, vDSL, Fixed wireless, satellite, cable, and carrier pigeon, before we get where we're going.
I prefer the direct route.
CHeers!
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
On the other hand, if we rolled that out we'd have alot more decentralized fast networks and the internet could be about connected peers again instead of the consumer/producer model we've got now.
You are confusing the notion of access service providers with utility providers. Stop thinking about Internet access as something you get from a specific telephone or cable company. Think of it like electricity. You can have competing billing providers all offering their own distinct plans. But just one 'utility' that builds and sells the physical access wholesale to the access service providers, who then resell it to the end-users.
A DSL or cable line would give them the same (downstream) bandwidth.. and they don't need the upstream..
Why do they do this?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In true /. tradition I did read the article (doesn't render in Netscape 4.7 on this machine) but what would I be gaining over my current cable connection that delivers ~10 HD channels, a couple hundred SD channels and a 2Mb connection?
These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based on the order I joined.
Given that many, many families in the US are below the breadline, surely ensuring that all families have enough fresh fruit and other handy items rather than an effecient porn and warez deployment mechanism would be a better idea?
r .htm
Check out:
http://www.usccb.org/cchd/povertyusa/povame
I thought the article was interesting, but I have a couple of questions that the writer completely ignored.
First, as someone above mentioned, if the FCC were to regulate this in any way, would that mean that they could impose decency standards to the content delivered? I would hope not, but I can see the FCC trying to do it.
Second, would the services coming over the physical medium be purchased from the group that maintains the physical structure? Or would you be free to shop around? Would we have cable providers or would you order your channels directly (e.g. directly order HBO, comedy central, etc. seperately - a la carte)?
Third, what about tying in cellular phones? Basically like using VOIP and wireless access points. If you have the fiber everywhere, just add the access points to act as cell towers.
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
Why do you need more video streams than there are people in the house?
Without those who live in the country where do you think your clothes, food, and other staples of both consumer and commercial life would come from. Those outlying regions are crucial for maintaining your life in the city. Should they suffer from lack of access to the fine things you have simply so that you can save an extra couple of bucks? Seems like a narrow minded viewpoint to me.
"...we should spend the money..."
Who is "we" here?
"...we...sell of the HDTV spectrum..."
Who is "we" here?
I'll wager the first one is the Joe Taxpayer, and the second is not, no matter how they spin it.
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
Cable, phone and internet over the same line?
Does it come with a free carrier pigeon to contact tech support when there are problems?
Now imagine every household being connected to the Internet with a permanent broadband connection. Most people use unpatched Windoze boxes and don't get the idea that their infrastructure could do any damage to the Internet. With broadband access and powerful PCs, they don't even notice any abusive performance loss or bandwidth consumption. Not to speak of Windoze Media Center, which barely requires any IT knowledge to operate a PC.
So broadband access for every household might be a good idea, but only if infrastructure is safe enough (e. g. require routers/firewalls) and ISPs' abuse staff would be able to prevent trojaned customer boxes ASAP from polluting the Internet.
... Such fees go into a pool to provide the needed incentives to network operators to expand their broadband networks out to those who otherwise might be cut off. .
. .
Isn't one of the benefits of the internet it's access to everyone? Shouldn't we help bring such access to all of those in our country who otherwise might be cut off from it and who are willing to pay for it?
Uhhh... no. I actually pay quite a bit to have my internet and cable pumped into my house, and you're saying I should have to pay more so someone in podunk South Dakota can have broadband internet access? I mean, it's great that the schools can have a T1, but you choose to live in these places, why should I have to fund your internet?? I know people in suburban Boston who base their house-buying decisions on whether the area is broadband-connected or not. If it's not, it's a serious detraction. If you want to live in that area, you deal with the fact that there is no broadband.
Besides, it's not like the internet is not avaialble to these regions. There is still dialup, or even Satellite internet service. I'm sorry you live in the middle of nowhere and there's no infrastructure for broadband, but it's still a luxury in my eyes, not something that taxes and fees should be paying for. You say these fees benefit consumers, but from your example they're benefiting the small minority of consumers while the majority that are paying are left with no benefit at all.
Every time I download the .iso for the latest and greatest distro, I am quite glad I have my high speed access.
You can never have enough bandwidth, that would be like Bill Gates saying he had too much money.
Taking care of public networks -- whether they are roads, water, power, telecomm, etc -- is exactly what local/regional governments should do (preferably with federal support). They have the necessary scope for the job, and unlike commercial interests they don't have disincentive to spend money on routine maintenance and expansion.
Let private enterprises compete fairly at the back end to provide whatever goods and services are sent down the pipes. Let government provide said pipes for all to use, unlike our current highly cutthroat but also highly inefficient networks.Yup, you might consider it narrow minded, but thats my viewpoint.
The cost of living in those areas are substantially less than in the cities and major metropolitan areas. The problem isn't the idea of people in those rural areas having Internet access or digital cable, its the assumption they make that they should pay the same as I do. Thats's BS, because the cost to provide the service to them might be 10x what mine is. So charge them $400 for their broadband connection. They're paying $2000 a month less in mortgage cost than I am, so I have no sympathy for them. If they don't like that, then they ought to take a good hard look at cheaper delivery methods. Satellite TV, longer range wireless Internet access, wireless phone service are all technologies that are far cheaper to deliver than the equivalent wired technologies. Remove the subsidies for the build out of these rediculous physical infrastructures, and all of that stuff would rapidly come in to fill the void, and remove a enormous source of corporate welfare in this country.
Example: China has 3G wireless phone service and internet access throughout most of the countryside. Why? Because it costs too damn much to run wires everywhere. They were intelligent about it. I've seen it with my own eyes -- people most Americans would consider peasants with satellite TV, and high speed internet access via their cell phones living in cinder block houses with no windows.
People in the country shouldn't suffer from lack of access, the rest of us just shouldn't pay for it, thats all I'm saying. The world was a different place than it was in the early 20th century, these 100 year old concepts of how to bring technology to the rural areas are antiquated and holding us back.
--pete
Standard chicken and egg problem... No one's going to invest in developing a product that requires 100Mbps to the home because it will take years or decades for that to become widespread. And since there are no applications that require that much bandwidth, there's no demand for 100mbps to the home, so no one will invest in it.
However, you're right that the ideas in this article would have much more merit if there were even *plans* for such services on the drawing board. Our current voice and cable networks are apparently "good enough" for the vast majority of users, and VOIP and TVOIP would not be that much better than current services to justify the cost of switching. Hunt is also neglecting the fairly large time during which *both* networks would have to be maintained; the old voice and cable networks couldn't be shut down until the new 100Mbps network approached their penetration levels, which would take years or decades.
Infrastructure always helps economic growth. In the last century the government spent millions on roads, even though most people didn't have a car or a horse. These roads facilitated increased trade which in turn created millions of jobs. More commerce is always a Good Thing. The government already subsidizes the comunications industry we might as well spend the money on making it better rather than supporting the same old crap.
Very true. OTOH, that figure of 1000+ seems a little high. Here in Alabama, we can usually get a T line dropped for 5-700 a month. If T lines or frame circuits are all tied to a central location, and then an outbound pipe is connected, managing bandwidth and monitoring traffic requires a single set of resources. More economical in the long run. Makes Websense easier to pay for too. Dsl can be hard to get in some of the more rural locations, but I've always been able to requsition a T. And I've personally has multiple DSL carriers drop from under me on 1-2 months notice.
.02
As an aside...the eRate money used to fund a lot of this for schools can't be repurposed for non technology needs.
My
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
Your wireless network is not switched. Your cable couldn't deliver a good HDTV stream (well no cable modem I've heard of, the cable itself is capable), if you are the luckiest person going it just might handle a full quality DVD stream/DVB broadcast in PAL (8mbs). You also cannot compare the speed of your wireless lan with the speed of a potential wan connection, it's like someone saying, now I have a 10mbs hub, there's no need to upgrade my 19200baud modem, there just isn't a connection or if there is one it has the opposite effect of what you want, where the desire is to have a wan connection as broad as your lan could take! Finally the difference between a symetric network and a asymetric (like dsl) cannot be underestimated, it makes the difference between having a network of peers or a network of leeches. Do you want to be able to use your hdtv videocamera for a video call?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Right.
And once we've all got bandwidth coming out of our frickin' ears thanks to a 100Mb connection to our home, who exactly is going to be prepared to spend 10s of billions on that part of the spectrum?
Because its not the TV companies (who will use the network). Nor 4G phones, as there are bound to be plenty of spare wi-fi sites around once no-one cares about how much bandwidth is being stolen by them.
The bubble seems to have burst on the 'selling your spectrum' bonanza, as it was only mobile phone companies doing this, and half of them are broke after getting carried away with 3G licenses and overvalued mergers.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
RTFA. The network he proposes is a "next generation fiber network". The idea is that each home will be able to get about 100mbps at least. Fiber bandwidth is much higher than 100mbps, and that's quite an understatement.
100mbps *is* enough for you. A couple of HDTV streams would take at most 10mbps (I'm sure it's a lot less than that, but let's give it the benefit of doubt). Voice conversations..puhleeze, I get crystal clear quality from Vonage running at 96Kbps either way. I could handle 30 of those comfortably on 100mbps and I wouldn't even notice it!
Exactly which part of your brain did you use to think before posting this, by the way?
Am I a hipster-doofus?
wait wait wait...
you trust the CABLE COMPANIES but you call the government "big brother"?!
Next, thanks to our FCC, the taxpayer has given about $70 billion of free spectrum to broadcasters and the consumer has been ordered to pay about $20 billion for over-the-air digital tuners for 200 million televisions over roughly five years. That's $90 billion out of pocket for taxpayers and consumers. It is not too late to redirect that money toward paying for the Big Broadband network. On that network broadcasters can get free high definition TV carriage. They have that on analog cable; they are inside satellite packages. Why not give them free access to the Big Broadband network. That should make broadcasters and TV households happy. In return we can get back the high definition spectrum, sell it, and use the proceeds to help pay for Big Broadband to high cost rural and poor homes. And we could even repeal what I call the "tuner tax." We are all tax-cutters in Washington now. Not gonna happen. The pentagon and executive branch as well as some congressmen will protest because of reasons of 'Homeland Security' Seriously. It is necessary for homeland security to maintain a distributed wireless communications system in times of emergency. In order to provide for the greatest possibility of success in this mission a variety of private and public broadcast sources must be encouraged. 'Big Broadband' will develop like and alongside cable tv as an addition to the wireless infrastructure. So they license the spectrum for free to encourage the broadcast medium, and have the citizens pay for the radios and televisions.
Interesting, but there would be challenges getting the administrators to agree to make a move that would cut into the school's revenue stream. Tickets to sporting events and graduation help cover the costs involved with having these events. You could offset with a pay-per-stream policy, but this might be tricky and require additional costs to implement
I'm sure the teachers, parents, and kids would love it...it might just be a matter of convincing the bean counters to play along.
FIVDon't worry, the government will decide that for you.
Newsflash, urban centers pay more in federal taxes than they get back. Stop your gloating. Additionally, if you honestly think it's feasible to suddenly have us all move out to the country you're a loon. Tell you what, come back here with some hard numbers, and research, showing how we can all live this idyllic life and i'll give you some credence. Until then you're just another elitist spouting off the virtues of wherever he happens to be. Solutions are elusive, esp. when it comes to massive paradigm shifts. I find it discouraging that you were upmodded so high.
Photos.
MichiganDan writes:
The Iowa Communications Network provides an interesting case study in ways that networks, concieved by politicians, can indeed be built without excessive pork attached.
This is absolutely incorrect. ICN has been a terrible failure, and is actually being prepared to be sold off to rid the state of Iowa of the nightmare. Here in Des Moines, it has become a third rail in the legislature for many years because of the increasing budget impact. It already takes much of the state's cigerette settlement as well as a large demand on the general budget. Worst of all, it's so poorly run and the fiber technology increasingly outdated that there is no end in sight, other than dumping it.
Some facts on the ICN disaster:
1. It's just about to be put on the block. See the ICN website for details on legislation being drafted to sell off the pieces of the ICN to whoever will bid on them.
2. It has been an administrative mess. ICN has had issues in the past several years with telecom fraud (they apparently weren't equipped to prevent toll fraud). Their IP service to schools has been so poor (due to budget issues, inefficiencies, competence challenges) that many schools have simply left, only to find faster service at lower costs from the private sector. My children's school has a T1 connection through ICN, but sees typically 50-80 kbps speeds on the ICN piece (as tested from their router - we had to look at why the classrooms were getting faster speeds on dialup). Upstream, the word is that ICN just hasn't purchased the necessary capacity to service what they have sold. This is further indication that they are not truly representing costs, even though they're terribly in the red.
3. The original design was a pork barrel benefit, which doomed the project out of the gates. I worked for a carrier that was asked to bid on the original RFP in the early 1990s. The RFP was puzzling - it appeared that it was intended to fail. Upon further inquiry, we learned that a coalition of incumbent telephone providers had manipulated the RFP design in a manner to ensure the project would fail. They expected they would end up with the network (built at taxpayer expense) in a few years. Given the present asset sale proposal, this may indeed be finally happening.
it *can* be done without the pork and failure.
ICN is nothing but pork and failure, unfortunately. Please, don't make our state's mistake in yours!
It's ill-conceived. He makes a lot of statements that are merely conjecture, and that completely sidestep reality. For example:
This network would be optimally efficient. It would be a platform for new innovative services, such as rich interactive gaming.
We already have rich, interactive gaming. And ironically, the more "rich" and "interactive," the more it will cost- not just a "buy once play as many times as you want," but "but once, and keep paying" a la Planetside, Everquest, the upcoming World of Warcraft, etc. Further, it's not going to be cheap to install and maintain the infrastructure necessary to support "rich" and "interactive" gaming- for either side. Even if you had a network that could handle whatever you throw at it, say, a stream of 10K vs the typical 5K for an online multiplayer game, it won't do any good if the indivdual's computer can't handle it.
It would greatly increase e-commerce, producing higher gdp.
Nice thought, but he says nothing about how this would actually happen.
It would create new jobs in the United States.
See above.
It would ensure broadcast penetration
at nearly 100%, local voice penetration at nearly 100%, and push Internet access at least to 90% if not 100%.
See above.
The other thing he neglects to mention is that a significant part of the cost of certain broadband services are derived from fees and taxes. That will not change merely because the method of delivery has changed. Another real downside is that as providers gain and weild more and more control over what travels across those wires, I see the potential that everything will be commoditized - down to the individual protocol.
Color me cynical, but I suspect we won't get true broadband (10Mbs to 100Mbs) to the home any time soon (by 2010 years, for under $50/month, in any reasonable US geographic region) for the following reasons:
1) The cable guys don't want to cannibalize or lose control of the distribution channel for TV/HDTV video which requires such bandwidths.
2) The telco guys don't want to cannibalize their business T1 sales.
3) The satellite guys can't provide that bandwidth on a bi-directional, many-to-many basis.
4) The wireless phone guys may get there someday, but it'll take a while to improve their network bandwidth 1000x to do this.
--LP
No offense, but I'd say that your quality of life is one of the benefits you weigh against having access to things like high-speed internet. Those who live in the city not only have to pay so that you can have access to such niceties, but they ALSO have to wrestle with higher crime rates, more noise, etc. Sounds like people in rural areas want to have their cake and eat it too.
Yup..I appreciate it. I think the few things Govt. should be responsible for is :Defense, Infrastructure, Education..etc. Things that are for the common good of all....and necessities.
However, I just don't see broadband connectivity, and HDTV or any TV at all as a necessity!! Nice to have...sure. Helpful..you bet. Am I addicted to them..YES. But, they are luxuries. So, its like anything else in that category. If you want space...less pollution and crime...live in the more rural areas. But, don't bitch because it doesn't have all the luxuries you can get in a more metropolitan area. There are trade offs in life....you can't have it all..
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Better Uncle Sam than Comcast, in my opinion.
Of course, in the modern-day push to privatization, the most likely outcome of any such measure to "help" US citizens would be to fund billions of dollars of construction on the taxpayer's bill and then immediately turn control of it over to a profit-maximizing local monopoly to further soak money out of all the new utility's customers. (... Make that "consumers" -- customers are people you have to treat with dignity.)
I'd rather have the government in control of content over the private sector. The First Amendment allows for court challenges to the overreaching hand of the government as does the ability to vote-out egregious offenders. There's absolutely no recourse against people like Comcast who can do whatever they want to their network and tell you, "Like it or lump it."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I get worried whenever Internet access gets put into context with TV and voice delivery by the "wrong" people. To those people, uplink is how you transmit your requests for data to be shipped down. To those people, highly asymmetric links are just fine because they're all that anyone "needs," even good because it limits the bandwidth resources available to crackers and spammers.
The Internet was originally about end-to-end, and peer communication. Some peers were bigger, and had more connections than others, and were called servers. But in a more fundamental way, they were still peers.
Look at Wondershaper. It exists because cable (at least, don't know about DSL) ISPs have broken the end-to-end model. Cable ISPs "optimize" for download to the point that multiple streams have difficulty sharing the link. It's tweaked and tuned to become a 'broadcast on request' medium.
I have little hope for "Big Broadband" to be significantly better. That's in nobody's interest except us rabble.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Currently, when routing tables get screwed up, the appropriate netadmins are able to alert each other and figure out how to fix things...via the telephone. Once the entire POTS network is discarded, and everything runs VOIP, what's to be done when it breaks? I'm not so much concerned about a power outage in my home (I don't have a landline anyway; a cell phone is much more versatile, and costs about the same) - I'm much more concerned about a network outage that can't be fixed without the help of it already being fixed.
Yes, it's silly to run multiple physical networks to the same places. However, that makes things a lot easier to fix...
What really got me was not the issues you point out, but the fact that of "all this money" he claims to see as "available" for this conversion, very little of it really is .... most of that $400billion or so is going to have to be paid into the current system to keep it operating AT THE SAME TIME as the conversion is being made. We can't just turn off the current systems for five years, keep paying as if we are using them, and then turn on a brand new system. It just doesn't work that way....
Nay, regulations are often quite useful and can benefit consumers.
...Benefit *some* consumers, at the expense of others.
Here in South Dakota, we've got a few big cities (by SD standards) and lots of small ones. Even in some of the medium cities, there is little financial incentive to build out broadband networks to consumers. Such fees go into a pool to provide the needed incentives to network operators to expand their broadband networks out to those who otherwise might be cut off.
State-imposed fees, on specific services, that are designed to extend those services to areas of that state that might not otherwise be able to support them, aren't necessarily a bad thing. But how far do you carry it? In 2002, your state received $1.61 in federal expenditures for every dollar paid in federal taxes, which makes it 9th on list of states that receive such largess. That extra $.61 per dollar, of course, comes from the states that pay more in federal taxes than they get back in federal expenditures -- including mine, New York, which is down at #40, well into negative territory.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxingspending.html
Isn't one of the benefits of the internet it's access to everyone? Shouldn't we help bring such access to all of those in our country who otherwise might be cut off from it and who are willing to pay for it?
Laudable goals. I can think of lots more, and like yours, they all cost money. The question is, who pays? South Dakotan's apparently have no problem with the concept of other people paying to benefit them, but you shouldn't be too surprised it others don't always see it that way.
--Michael
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
Ok, either you missed my point, or you're pushing my buttons on purpose. I'm trying to say that technology is changing the world all the time, and teaching kids computer skills may be more important then teaching them to read shakespeare on paper. If the children of the futre ever want to read shakespeare, they may not use PDF's but they almost certainly will *not* use printed books. The landmarks of todays technologies and methods of information dispersal are not the boundaries or even necessarily similar to the way things will be done in the future. If most kids, in most schools (someday, not next week or next year) are familiar with online classes, then those without that in their classrooms would be at a comparative disadvantage. It has to start somewhere, so why not in Iowa with T1's to every school? There is no good argument against distributing infrastructure today that may now seem excessive. After all, 10 years ago, someone may have said 'I think we should put a 486 in every class room.' To which you may have replied, "Why so kids will be able to play games at recess?" I myself recount long hours of actual learning in front of Apple IIe's in a "state of the art" computer lab in my junior high school. It's because of these 'unneccesary wastes of taxpayer dollars' that most of my classmates and I are more computer literate than our contemporaries from the smaller surrounding towns who didn't have such advantages. If you want to think that we shouldn't embrace the internet for education, then you may do so. I believe that the internet allows for the distribution of many millions of textbooks worth of valuable (as well as junk) information. It's up to the IT guys to makes sure that nobody is getting 'Paris Hilton' videos during recess. That's another issue altogether, but I don't think that the difficulties involved should preclude the expansion of technology, and working toward ubiquity of the technology by starting kids out on it young.
Speak for yourself.
I think that ignorance of the populace is definitely a problem.. but not our biggest one.. apathy of the populace, and a corruption of the system are two bigger problems. By "apathy of the populace" I mean that the populace doesn't care to know what is really wrong with society, or what could be done better. And if they do know, its not so bad to them (in comparison to other issues in their lives) that they feel they must do something about it. So they don't do anything about it and the wrong that they know about is not addressed, or at least not in a manner grand enough to cause it to be rectified. Everyone falls into this category. We all have our issues, we all have our causes that we think should be addressed to make the world a better place. And for the most part, we're right. But the corruption of the system, our biggest problem, is what really keeps things like this "Big Broadband" idea from happening. If the system wasn't corrupted and bought out by corporate interests bent on maintaining the status quo, we /.'ers wouldn't have a lot of things to complain about, and the world would no doubt be a better place.
Why else would ANYBODY balk at the idea of a government buying voting machines that had any doubt of their accuracy?
Why else would ANYBODY even think of burdening an efficient and cheaper method of communication with taxes and regulation simply because it would be taking money away from the current system?
Why would ANYONE dismiss the idea of promoting cleaner burning fuels in our cars and homes, at the expense of maintaining the polluting fuels that we currently use?
Why else would ANYONE think that society is better off by extending the period that it cannot use a creative work by any amount of time?
For just those four examples, among a myriad more, the answer is money. In all of those cases, if they were to be followed to their complete and logical conclusion, the lives of members of our society would likely be improved, but somebody is going to lose their cash cow. So they use the proceeds of their cash cow to keep it going by buying our government, and suppressing the knowledge that could be given to our apathetic populace that there is a better way; the knowledge that will empower them to collectivize and effect change.
So to some extent it is propaganda and ignorance, but I think more so, it is the corruption of our process that keeps things that are so obviously beneficial from coming about sooner, and exposing their benefits to society.
Hax.
http://www.haxwell.org