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Broadband War & an Interactive Municipal Map
Ant writes "Broadband Reports mentions a CNET News.com story on the U.S.'s growing debate over municipal broadband. Across the country, acrimonious conflicts have erupted as local governments attempt to create publicly funded broadband services with faster connections and cheaper rates for all citizens, narrowing the so-called digital divide. The Bells and cable companies, for their part, argue that government intervention in their business is not justified and say they are far better equipped to operate complex and far-flung data networks.
There is also an interactive municipal broadband legislative map that details the major battlegrounds on the issue. At stake is the fate of high-speed Internet access for millions of Americans, hinging on a fundamental question of civics and economics--whether the government or private industries should take the leading role in building out what's considered this generation's critical infrastructure challenge. Its map shows a breakdown of muni-projects in each state, which have or are developing fiber or Wi-Fi projects, and are facing (existing or pending) legal barriers to doing business."
They appear to be suggesting that the municipal will compete unfairly; in truth, they simply fear a large buyer with the clout to get a better deal from them for the end consumer.
Wikileaks, no DNS
This will eventually (hopefully) be tested at the Supreme Court level. Cities that want to provide this service, as they do any other utility, ought to be allowed to do so.
http://www.busyweather.com/
I mean, look what that's gotten us so far.
We could do it ourselves if we really wanted to.
- Are incapable of doing good things
- Are always after power, above all else
- Must butt out of everything because tax payer subsidized services ultimately will not compete with non-subsidized services, so they undermine the freedom of the individual (or business) to sell services
Against that, I have to say that I don't see a problem with municipal governments doing this kind of thing. Given their priorities, and the closer accountability they have to their tax payers, I don't see this kind of thing as anything but a "last resort" effort for the majority of them, and I think they have a moral right to involve themselves in things that county, state, and Federal governments really don't have. But many people do not share the same opinion.You will see many people arguing against you in this thread. They're not Verizon employees (well, most of them aren't), they're just more likely to lean on a pro-Business side if they see an area where governments are likely to make it more difficult for a business to operate.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Wouldnt the philosophical analogous argument be that libraries are publicly funded, and provide free information and entertainment to anyone and everyone?
Bookstores still thrive, book publishers still thrive even though probably almost everyone in the United States could get through life never having to buy a book personally.
Well if the The Bells and cable companies are better equipped to roll-out cheap broadband for everybody, when the hell are they going to do so.
What's wrong with the local governments by the people, for the people, deciding how to spend their dollars in a democratic and free way?
For me, this (and any other subject of public services) is not a problem of government vs businesses. It's a matter of small, economically efficient distributed units providing goods required by their clients, versus bloated and highly centralized institutions.
If the efficient providers are managed by a transparent and public process instead of the power of the dollars in a few hands, so better for them.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Why not allow private companies and governments both to setup wireless networks? Whichever one can do it more efficiently and effectively will win the business. I do not agree that everyone will automatically flock to the "free" wireless networks provided by municipalities, which are just paid for with taxes or even by charging fees. Most people are very willing to pay for superior services, and this kind of competition would only drive the offering of such services.
To me, it sounds like the private companies want to repeat the cable scenario. Namely, they want to be granted an effective monopoly in a municipality to avoid any competition whatsoever. The difference now being that the capital investment of implementing a wireless network is getting cheaper and cheaper, thereby eliminating the high cost of entry (and capital investment) that has been such a barrier in other network access methods. Competition, therefore, has less obstacles on the technical and business side. It seems that the only obstacle left to build up is a governmental restriction.
"...bills preserving their effective monopolies..."
You know, 'effective monopolies' are not necessarily a Bad Thing(tm). Imagine a world where electricity and landline telephone service still had the 'last mile' problem that current high speed internet service has. When an endeavor is not profitable on its own merit, sometimes the government does have to get involved for the benefit of the people. For that matter, many places electricity is still a regulated industry, because it's such a fundamental service that we cannot afford for anyone to be without it. Left purely to 'market forces', many places would never have gotten wired.
For some people, like myself, it's utter paranoia.
Muncipal governments are luckily mostly small, but wait until this hits a bigger area. I can just see it now: having to go in front of the municipal broadband board and justify my hosting of an unpopularly sentimented blog, or having to answer to the city council about why I am using so much bandwidth.
Ultimately, government control of information will lead to censorship, and monitoring. Information that is illegal will be pro-actively searched for and destroyed.
The problem with government is that good intentions are behind it all. "We want to cut down on evil monopolies and eliminate the digital divide".
Great. I am happy for that. It's a laudable goal.
Something will happen. Let's say, a parent comes home to discover their teenage daughter has left a runaway note. "Mom, you suck, I am running away to be with my older boyfriend. He loves me!".
Well, of course, here comes "Little Angelic Angela's Law", which will require that local police have access to IM records that pass over their networks if they involve minors. Who wants the government providing Internet access to predators so they can bait helpess impressionable children? "Not with my tax dollars!"
After a bit, that will not be enough. Something else high-profile will happen. A school shooting will be co-ordinated. Or a bomb threat e-mailed in. Or whatever.
And all of the sudden, the rules start piling up. It'll only be a matter of time until citizens decide that they don't want to subsudize Mr. Creepy Pants porn habit, and so, the broadband they provide will filtered against ONLY the most extremely nasty pornography network wide.
Good intentions and government are sometimes a very dangerous mix. Most people involved are great, civic minded people. But. The expansion of government most often leads to very, very, very tricky questions.
It'll be a few years, and a county government will want to take over the network. Why should all these inefficent little networks exist, when they can benefit from econimies of scale? And then the State.
And then it's over. And then, your Internet will be used as a weapon against. It'll be a privelage, like driving. Why should we let people who haven't filed their income taxes on the Internet? It's a privelage of living in the state. Why should people on welfare have access to entertainment sites, it's our tax dollars! Why should people be able to publish websites on this connection, this is for non-commerical use only! The latest e-mail trojan is spreading like wildfire, block all ports in the infected range for the protection of the many!
Of course, all this could happen with private Internet access. But. In my smallish town of 30,000 I have two cable offerings, nearly a dozen DSL offerings, a handful of ISDN offerings, a handful of dial-up offerings, national offerings from AOL and similiar folks, and two wireless ISPs. That's a pretty decent slate of choices.
The temptation to throw myself full fledged onto the free/low-cost municipal broadband is great! It'll be great as long as it's got THIS. And THIS. And THIS. But how long until they get trimmed back, one by one, till what we have is less than what we have now?
Not only is it unwise to let private monopolies in broadband develop because of the excess costs to support lobbiests and bribes to elected officials, it's also unwise to institutionalize private monopolies as the gatekeepers to our information. Democracy may be cranky and ineffient, but the alternatives are much worse.
The problem is, the "digital divide" is a big fucking myth.
Anybody with a garage sale PC or Mac from ten years ago can get on the net at a decent speed for less than the cost of cable TV.
For that matter, any laptop with a PCMCIA slot and a $10 802.11 card will let you access the Internet from any of dozens of free wireless hotspots in every major city.
The total monthly cost of being connected is far less than the total montly cost of owning a car, and plenty of low-income folk manage to own cars, even if they don't need them to get to work.
So let's all just drop the "poor Timmy has no chance in life because his family can't afford the Internet," wailing and gnashing of teeth, shall we?
The reality is more likely that poor Timmy is a "Top Seller" of HK anime bootlegs on eBay.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Unfortunately, free markets rarely seem to work well when it comes to the fringes of personal freedom. Businesses will try to attract the largest market, which doesn't entail catering for people doing things outside of that remit. If you doubt this, look at the number of localities where you can't run a server on any of the available broadband solutions. Right now, the only thing that's keeping that choice open is the FCC's insistance that the ILECs sell the ability to sell DSL, which means groups like SpeakEasy and Earthlink can sell access. The ILECs themselves generally ban the running of servers on their own services, and cable operators are just as draconian, often more so.
With it being difficult to provide high speed services without existing wired infrastructure, that bit of intervention by the FCC is pretty important. But, of course, even with it, there are areas that just aren't served. Until a few months ago, my own area wasn't by virtue of there not being DSL available, period.
Like I said, I don't believe it should be implemented wider than a municipality. When it goes into State or even County level, the potential for abuse appears. Having it on a municipal level helps not just because there's a degree of accountability instilled by the fact the implementation is clearly a last resort, but also in that, at the very least, those in liberal areas will be able to help out those with more draconian terms and conditions, until the ACLU and EFF are able to intervene.
Finally, the risk of a Little Angelic Angela's Law exists anyway. We saw much of this during the late nineties with projects like Carnivore. ISPs will always have to obey the law.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
In some European countries, one may receive cheap services and products from the municipality if it proves the income is lower then a certain limit.
Why not apply the same for internet access? These days, having access to global knowledge is as much as important as food and shelter.
Don't be confused by the companies saying that this is government interference in their business. Local governments passing statutes regulating their activity would be government interference. This, on the other hand, is outright fair competition -- providing more and cheaper access to people who want it -- and the broadband companies just can't take it. They should stop whining and improve their services and prices before the end gets near.
The mistake that everyone seems to be making is conflating the telecom giants with the free market. This is absurd. The reason telecom giants exist is because the telecom industry is heavily regulated. As the industry deregulates, we will see more competition. For instance, isn't it great that Vonage and Skype are now competing with AT&T and Verizon? If we saw increased regulation of VOIP, these nimble, innovative companies might die out and AT&T and Verizon would become further entrenched.
It is apparent that many people here are disappointed with the quality of ISP services provided by market at this time. They think the government could provide better service. That may be true. But I am certain that government could not provide better service than a truly free, dynamic market in telecommunications, and that is what we geeks and nerds should push for.
I worked on that program too. Let's just say no one had any idea how to use the things, but don't blame it on the laptops.
As $1000 toys, what could they be other than a distraction? And how could they be anything else, when you had them locked down tighter than OS/2 at an ATM kiosk?
These kids sure as hell couldn't learn anything from an IT standpoint, which arguably might be their most useful function. Terminal was locked out, which means all the unix tools, period. Did you bother to have the Apple developer tools on them (forget what Apple calls the damn things, not an OSX geek, I'm just typecast as one). Again, no. So they can't learn programming at all, either.
And while I never stepped foot in a classroom, I put the odds at 100 to 1 that more than one teacher in the entire school district quit giving out paper handouts. And assuming that is the case, you can't even claim to have saved money on xerox costs.
No Macromedia Flash, they weren't going to learn animation.
No 3d tools, they weren't going to learn that.
No MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Filemaker. Guess they weren't going to learn DB skills.
Did you have some G4 towers and firewire camcorders in a lab that I never heard of? No? Then they weren't going to learn video editing.
So, you turn a $1000 laptop into essentially what is a piece of paper and a pencil, and you wonder why it's nothing more than a distraction? Oh, the new Dells won't do any better, btw. Not to mention the virus, spyware and general windows crashiness problems you'll soon have.
Spoken like someone who's never had to deal with the digital divide. It *is* real, especially in rural areas. Without government subsidy or initiative, there is an excellent chance that many communities in our state (NE) will never see an improvement in offered digital services. There simply isn't enough population density for any company to deliver in a cost effective way. Continuing (or restarting) education is a real priority to help people that have lost access to 'blue collar' jobs, and that would otherwise be suckling from the taxpayer's teat. High speed internet access is key to cost effectively providing retraining. Go hang out in Salem, Nebraska for a day or two, and let me know how satisfactory you find the Internet service to be, after you are done paying long distance charges for 19.2K dial up.
In all these areas where Verizon, SBC, etc... haven't rolled out high-speed service, or are cost-prohibitive, etc... and the government wants to set up municipal WiFi:
Step 1: Have a vote in the municipality that wants to set up such a service, to determine that it is in line with the public interest.
Step 2: Let the companies in question have a crack at it. Find out how long it would take the government to roll it out, and how much it would cost, and give the companies that much time to get it rolled out at that price. If they won't or can't, tough noogies, let the local government do its job and perform the will of its people.