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U.S. Broadband Access Falling Behind
EpochVII writes "FreePress recently released a report(PDF) detailing the woeful situation of U.S. broadband access. From the press release: 'By overstating broadband availability and portraying anti-competitive policies as good for consumers, the FCC is trying to erect a façade of success. But if the president's goal of universal, affordable high-speed Internet access by 2007 is to be achieved, policymakers in Washington must change course.'"
Why is it the role of the federal government to ensure cheap broadband by 2007? I'm much more comfortable with an array of choice from private sources. That's much less likely to lead to bad things like censorship and limits on free expression.
Hasn't this been known a long time now? And by long time I mean around seven years??? The US has pretty infrastructure, yet we aren't doing anything with it, and broadband remains ridiculously overpriced compared to the likes of Sweden, where synchronous 100Mbit/sec connections can be had for just few dozen kroner a month.
The real challenge is rural areas. Unless something spectacularly revolutionary happens, like somone launching a bunch of solar-powered autonomous blimps with WiMax transceivers onboard, anyone outside city areas is going to be left behind. I blame our government's lack of involvement in progressing the telecom industry here, such as a series of bad decisions by the FCC, and letting Verizon and Friends® hold the sword instead.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Where are our leaders? Oh, yeah...
Vacationing yet again in Crawford?
Have the U.S. beat . . .
Um, yeah, take a look at the globe, and compare the size of South Korea to the size of the United States (as well as the rest of the countries that have "got us beat"). In terms of infrastructure, how much do you think it costs to lay fiber from one end of S. Korea or Japan, or Austria to the other, compared to the US? Those are relatively small and densly populated countries, compared to the United States, a large country with more vast, unpopulated areas than any other industrial nation.
This report is comparing apples to oranges.
If that was the reason, you'd have the same excellent communication infrastructure at least in your major cities and associated suburbs and satellite communities.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
As far as optical fiber goes, how much "dark" fiber is already in the ground in the US from the 90's?
So your argument was kind of a red herring.
The observation in the US is that Comcast, RoadRunner, Verizon/Qwest/SBC basically control broadband deployment in the US, not the FCC. These companies, when they're not trying to slit each other's throats (wrong kind of competition), are more than happy to keep padding congressional pockets and keep the FCC under control. Oh, and a few local and state buyoffs help too, to quell any minor uprisings by the untermenschen locals who have gotten tired of eating cake.
There are other "broadband" options besides cable or telco DSL, but they're in the minority. I'm using wireless broadband supplied by MacOnline (www.maconline.com), which is for me just ends up being what I wish I could get from cable or telco DSL: Broadband internet service with no buy-in to the network provider's lowest-common-denominator bundled bullshit and their bullshit TOS agreements.
768Kbps SDSL. Static IP. Works for me.
Now, my birth mother in Lance Creek, WY, well, they'd probably have to use satellite-based service. If you know where Lance Creek, WY, is, you'll understand why cable, telco DSL, 3G, et al., will NEVER reach a good third of the US physically (i.e., between the front range of the Rocky Mts and the Mississippi River, not withstanding major metropolitan areas like Denver or Kansas City.
Hmm,
The U.S. has highly-dense population centers that are not as developed as S. Korea.
In terms of sheer wealth - the U.S. outstrips the vast majority of countries and there simply is no reason why the U.S. should ever take a back seat to technology - unless the moneyed interests demand otherwise.
The reason that the U.S. hasn't kept up with cell technology and broadband is that the last buck hasn't been wrung out of the populace.
Given the current oil price at $70.00/bbl - coupled with the ready availability of oil at that price - the U.S. ought to have people up in arms over the $2.60+ / gal. price of gasoline. The U.S. doesn't have gasoline riots and it won't have broadband riots despite overpriced monopoly limits on broadband development in the U.S.
Neither apples nor oranges....the U.S. can easily lead in any field - it chooses.
It's called mod_gzip. Maybe you've heard of it.
- Dynamic HTML is fatter still, including the page you're reading
Slashdot? Dynamic HTML? Umm.... You really have no clue what dynamic HTML is, do you? Here's a tip: Dynamic HTML is not forms, or server-side-generated pages. It usually involves a little JavaScript and something called the Document Object Model.
- CSS simply adds to the problem by oversending code/data
So instead of loading style.css once per site, and keeping it in cache, and defining per-tag styles and, when that's not enough, using neat short little class="" attributes... we should instead use big ugly tags on everything? And tables and images for layout, I suppose?
- XML is another bucket of overkill; every page sends a new schema, and a bunch of unneeded, duplicate info
Umm, I'm not about to call XML a 'compact' file format (until you pipe it through gzip or something) but do you really have any idea how XML is typically used in Internet applications? I'm interested to know how you think the XML page sends a schema in a neat little HTTP attachment or something.
The idea of using more compression in more places isn't a terribly bad idea, you just don't seem to have a particularly good grasp on the reality. It's in decently widespread use already.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I wonder how much longer your relatives will be happy though. I, myself, have only had a home internet connection for a little more than a year now (and yes, it is on a 56k), but I have been noticing a gradual shift in the internet. Web pages everywhere seem to be getting to be more expectent of broadband. Even a friend of mine (who initially brought this observation to conversations that we had during physics class) who runs a cable modem has noticed the added bulk of web pages.
I often find myself waiting more and more for web pages to load now due to increased adds, picture intesive web page interfaces, and flash (I see flash a LOT more often now). Whats worse it that adds are starting to be in flash and moving gif formats more often as well now. Some of them moving gifs take anywhere from 1.5 to 3 minutes to load all the way.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not sobbing into my keyboard or anything. The loading time is still far from unacceptabel. I just wonder how much longer it will be until it is.
Vol~
90% of the Canadian population live on the edge of the Canadian/US border. :) So we're actually pretty dense. And no, our broadband penetration rate in northern Canada, is nothing that high either :)
All retarded bureaucracies overstate their achievements - don't you read Dilbert?
More BS to inflate the numbers -- see above. Personally, I don't view anything slower than 768/256 as broadband.
Seeing as Japan's land is all densely populated, it won't cost much to run fiber, copper, or WiFi to everyone. The US has a much more dispersed population to reach.
People with little money to spare don't spend it on faster internet access, and companies are more willing to run broadband where it's economical. No duh - next?
Mmmm... don't even want to go there. As usual, Washington whores itself out to the biggest campaign donator. This will happen as long as money is considered a form of speech.
There is nothing anyone can do about having to cover a large expanse of rural areas. The only thing we can do is force corruption out of government and reign in the monopolies, allowing competition to benefit everyone. Until then, we will see broadband access intentionally mismanaged to benefit monopolies.
Until there's even high speed (20+Mbit) Internet available in the big cities *at all*, for less then $5,000 a month, you can't say we're limited by land mass.
Right now, it doesn't matter where you live in the US. You can't get it. So until you can get these speeds in the highly populated areas you can't use the last mile arguement.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Must they supply you with food and toilet paper too?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
But our country is a LOT less efficient than any european nation I've been to. With a few exceptions, everything is within walking distance in europe (for example stores, libraries, etc).
... "petrol", when I lived in europe referred to CRUDE oil, not gasoline.
Up here, if you decide to walk somewhere, you'll return just in time to be late for work the next day, unless you're in the city, then you'll probably get mugged or raped unless you look like you can take care of yourself...
The other downside is that the quality of gas, and the metering at stations here in the states is no longer properly regulated. I've gotten less than 1 gallon for the stated "price" of 1 gallon at quite a few gas stations.
So for the current price of $2.75/gallon (and I'm talking about EAST coast, not california here) you may not even be getting 1 entire gallon of gas for your $2.75 My car used to fill up on 14 gallons of gas (official ratings for the tank, and it has NO leaks) and the receipts I got from it back in 99 before bush and the oil crisis show this. Now, in the post bush world, the car's gas tank has been getting progressively bigger. I can pump nearly 16 gallons when it nears empty. Quite amazing feat on behalf of my car, to increase its storage capacity... someone must've replaced my gas tank in between my commutes to work with a larger one. (Or maybe we're all just getting cheated and don't know it.)
Couple that with the fact that the USA was designed by people who assumed that driving would always be practical and not too expensive... and you got your current situation, with Dubbyah and his crew wanting to probably reduce the human race to serfs again. Make moving around hard, and requiring black gold (oil) and you got your new feudal-christian system back in place. Served with a healthy dose of talking heads and 4 star general talking heads to help you feel better about giving it all up to "the man" (C).
I know I'm answering a troll, but gas/petrol is much the same as bandwidth... those who need it, often don't have alternatives, and must pay for shitty service and a shitty/neutered/braindamaged product... otherwise they're stuck in dialup hell.
I don't pirate files, but I do stream bittorent gentoo images off my server, relatively nonstop. I've had to throttle it so it won't cause too much interference with one of the IP phones in the house, which leaves us at about 12kbytes up out of the 37kbytes upstream max cap. I don't know WHERE you 128 kbytes guys are... but neither Cox nor Comcast in VA or MD offered it to me when I was there.
WHERE THE HELL are you
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
But if the president's goal of universal, affordable high-speed Internet access by 2007 is to be achieved, policymakers in Washington must change course.
Nah, just redefine "universal".
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
You need to install an RTFM interface.
Not only are you seeing more flash, animated images, and other "heavy" items on web pages, but you are seeing sites move away from keeping seperate "light" versions of the same page. Many also don't take the time to make sure a page degrades well (remember back in the day when most pages would still load acceptably in a text-only browser?).
I recently had the singular joy of web browsing on a high-latency (1600ms average), high packet loss (usually about 60-70%), low bandwidth (128kbps or less) connection. Most web sites were downright unbrowsable unless you had a LOT of time on your hands. But some, such as those with text-only versions or which at least degraded well with images and such turned off, were still fine.
If that was the reason, you'd have the same excellent communication infrastructure at least in your major cities and associated suburbs and satellite communities.
We do.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
I'd agree with you that email is the main Internet app. However, as we move more and more to Internet-based laws and regulations (the paper copies are being phased out) we will all have to have access at higher bandwidth than dialup to register our vehicles, file our taxes, register for school (yes, even primary and secondary school) etc.
Streaming video is good enough today to demonstrate simple tasks (where to put the sticker on your license plate - how to fill out the tax form). POTS lines have limits - though I've lived through many "limits" from sub 300 Baud through 56kbit - and spent quite a bit on modems over the years.
I had an ISDN line for years - but true Broadband has made a great difference in my business life - I use the bandwith to file documents with government agencies. It couldn't be done any other way today...
As soon as the majority of personal business transactions and government-citizen transactions are moved to the Internet then a citizen's access to Broadband will define the digital divide.
What the article fails to realiza is that in other countries people pay WAY too much for telephone hence they are hard pressed to opt for broadband access where you have a flat monthly fee. Plus broadband at arround 200kbps is hardly considered broadband by most people in America...
WTF? I want some of what you've been smoking (not for myself, mind you, but for evidence when I rat you out to the DEA).
... NOT! Just recently, one of the dial-up ISPs (regional/national) began offering 3x accelerated dial-up speed (compressed cache proxy servers) for only $15 per month. What is the better deal, huh?
I do not live in a rural area. I live in a bedroom community 16 miles from the White House. The only broadband service provider "way out here" is Verizon. (The cable company has "broadband" that requires Windoze 98, an open ISA slot, and a phone line for the uplink.) I live 18,000 feet from Verizon's closest Central Office, and due to the crappy underground POTS wiring had to use an ADSL modem instead of DSL. The line quality, as well as the amount of multiplexed "traffic" provided me with little better than 85kbps DOWN and 65kbps UP -- all for $39.95 per month. What a really great deal
Verizon, our regional rape-and-pillage pigopolist, is now trying to "buy out" Cox Cable one county over -- apparently to eliminate the competition they cannot compete with. The few "islands" of DSL broadband in this county is due to new housing construction where the builder wired the homes for FTTP (Fiber To The Premesis) and made their own deal with Verizon (, a service which the HOAs gladly adopted).
The regional telcos did not build out most of their POTS infrastructure -- it is a remnant of the national AT&T monopoly that was bought and paid for long ago by taxpayers and "Ma Bell's" customers. The difference today is that it is not the Federal government (excepting the corporate whoring FCC) that determines rates versus service for the telco customers -- it is the individual states' corporation commissions, and they are a LOT cheaper for the telcos to buy off than the Feds ever were.
IMHO, the states, counties, and/or municipalities should sieze the existing POTS infrastructure under emminent domain and force the telcos to compete with newer service providers. The telcos have been having it all "their way" -- restricted competition, fixed profit margins, and minimal governmental oversight is still a monopoly (by my definition). If the counties were allowed to treat telephone service the way cable service is treated, the government controls the (cable) infrastructure and contracts to one competitor or another for their limited monopoly rights to provide service. In many areas, government takeover of the POTS infrastructure and using taxpayer funds to build out a modern FTTP infrastructure will come a lot closer to bringing inexpensive universal broadband internet to their citizens.
But only in an alternate universe, because (most of) the governments are corporate whores to the monopolists/pigopolists currently in charge of our telephone service -- both landline and cellular. I will leave my rants about fractious incompatible cellular service in the USA for another time.
This is one of those posts that's going to end up sounding like a troll, but that's not my intent.
When you get deep down to it, what's the purpose of really high speed Internet? The bulk of the features for the public in the Internet can be experienced with low-speed (dialup) Text for information, forum discussions for local issues, or simple things like access to online shopping are all pretty low bandwidth intensive services.
The types of things that actually require high bandwidth for the average citizen are either commercial (companies offering a large amount of content where high speed is needed, like movie previews and the like) or questionable (such as music and movie downloads).
In other words, it's difficult to make the case that broadband Internet is a necessary part of the nation's infrastructure, since every aspect of the Internet that's in the public interest can be handled quite well with dialup.
This is for the home user, of course. Corporate needs might be higher (like being able to send large spreadsheets over the Internet, or lossless video conferencing to meet the needs of business meetings). But for your average Joe sitting at home broadband is a luxury item, not a necessity. As such, it's difficult to justify large (publicly funded) outlays for improving high speed Internet for the masses.
Of course, it's a luxury I'm willing to pay for, because I'm impatient and like having information come to me that much faster. But I'd rather it is me who pays for it, not some poor working slob whose only experience with the Internet is helping his daughter download a text file from her school explaining her homework for the week, which he could accomplish just as easily with dialup.
This is, of course, an opinion. Don't take it any further then that.
The Internet is generally stupid
Why is this a Big Deal (tm)?
Around these parts, this might be debatable, but broadband Internet is NOT a necessity. It is a luxury. People don't NEED it. Why the hell is this "news" every few months on Slashdot?? Why is boradband access considered as some kind of poverty measurement?
There's plenty of people here (in the U.S.) who can't afford to pay for necessities like rent, utilities, food, and medicine. Let's fix that before we take on the plight of people who are forced to download pr0n at 56K.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
the U.S. can easily lead in any field - it chooses
(in Britain)
It makes no difference whether he's vacationing in Crawford or Washington. The end result is the same.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
A lot of people are perplexed at why broadband sucks in the US. They blame the government. They blame the size of our country. They blame the market. But look who's primarily behind broadband over here: Phone companies and cable companies.
Let's start with phone companies. Does it really benefit phone companies to have great and cheap bandwidth? Not when everyone switches over to VoIP killing their high profit long distance service. Not to mention that businesses pay for EVERY call they make. If broadband was great and cheap, the phone companies would disappear.
Let's move on to cable companies. Pretty soon you'll be able to watch movies via broadband. E.g., Netflix is about to offer movies. In a few years you'll probably be able to watch any movie and any TV you want with a simple clicks. Does this benefit cable companies? Nope. Because they make tons of money, nearly all their money, selling premium movie channels and content via pay-per-view. In other words, if broadband was great and cheap, they'd also be out of business.
Thus, the ONLY way we're going to get real broadband in the US is by wrestling control of it from the current status quo. That's why I'm really excited about broadband over power lines. The power companies have nothing to lose with broadband.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Whether there's anything wrong with me is strictly between myself and the voices in my head, thank you very much.
As for relying on the government ("of the people, by the people, for the people" ... hey, maybe that's where the voices in my head come from ...), yes, I do expect that. Our government -- local state and federal -- set policies that dictate how companies provide internet service to our homes.
The state I live in has a Public Service Commission that represents the interests of consumers with regards to utilities including telecommunications and cable. I don't have exact figures but out local phone company petitions the for rate increases three or seven times a year. They argue that each of them are necessary, yet, they somehow manage to remain profitable even though only one out of seven or nine actually get approved.
Everybody knows it's a game. But, who should we depend on if not the government to protect us from companies that will gleefully take the shirts off our backs if they thought we're willing (to extend the metaphor) procure an new shirt every month?
So let's say I abandon my commie pinko ways and join the rugged individualist Libertarians and do it without no stinkin' lousy guvmint ...
Ah! I'll use the free market! I'll take advantage of a competing services! I can use [drum roll] satellite! I'll be free of the stifling oppression of the govmint! OK, so it costs nearly twice as much and has a disastrous latency problems and a pitifully slow upload speed. Hmm, what else can I do?
Get rid of those interferin' guvmint agencies and wait for Private Industry to fight over each other to invest millions of dollars that they can recoup after only eight years ... if they charge triple the rate I pay now ... hmm.
I got it! I'll set up my own local wireless network! Sure! If Andy Hardy and Judy Garland can do it, so can I! All I need is a few hundred bucks and a land wire connection to the internet. OK, so I'll need to pay commercial rates ... but I can share the costs with my neighbors! So, all I need then is a hundred dollars or so from each, just to start out, but we'll pay less in the long run. Yeah!
Of course ... I'll have to do some trouble shooting. And make sure everybody pays their share for the service on a timely basis. Upgrade and replace equipment now and then -- everybody would be willing to pony up some extra cash when that happens. And it'll only cost me some of my spare time!
OK ... maybe I'll charge everyone a little bit extra each month to compensate me for my time -- it's only fair, right? Sure, I'll have no time to mow the lawn or go see a movie, but at least I'm being compensated; I'll still be making big bucks at my Real Job ... at least until it gets shipped overseas.
But, hey, I'll can still collect unemployment!
[I smack my forhead with heal of my hand]
Gee, I guess I really don't need no guvmint! I could have starting do this years ago! Yeah, this rugged individualism is great stuff! Thanks, Mr. Libertarianism!
Now all I gotta do is tackle those potholes in the road. Let's see ...
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
The most spread out and least densely populated Western country is Finland. Now guess who's doing better in this broadband survey, Finland or the US? Of course, it *does* matter somewhat and you can see it in this (ie. Finland, which traditionally declares national emergency when it's not number 1 in IT and telecom charts, does not do very well on the list - but still, the embarassement of being behind in very high speed connections is getting a lot of discussion here), but the US is still behind, even when accounting for that effect. (It hurts Finland more than the US and we're still ahead!) Besides, RTFA! "...controlling for both income and population density, we find eight nations performing better than the United States. They are Korea, Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Finland, Norway and Sweden."
Here is how things went down.
The United States had a much different reaction to World War II than Great Britain. While Britain was mourning its dead*, rebuilding its infrastructure, and thinking deep thoughts about What It All Means in a world where such wasteful death and destruction can occur, The U.S. patted itself on the back for saving the world, then went out on a three decade long economic kegger.
Our GI's went home, got married, copulated like rabbits (sometimes in that order), and started looking for big houses with huge front lawns and wide streets far away from the hustle and bustle and slight garbagy smell of the cities. Vast swaths of land were converted into suburban tract housing. Everyone bought a car so they could live and work and play exactly where they wanted.
As the rich kids moved out to the 'burbs, they took the money and jobs with them, leading to a vicious economic downturn that turned our most populous areas into barren ghettos. Major city centers still had all the problems they had before, but lost the tax base and education base needed to do anything about them. As things got worse, the idea of living in the city became less and less attractive to most people.
Meanwhile, the ugliness of the networking problem came to the forefront: the need to link everything to everything else in our suddenly sprawled-out landscape necessitated the building of ever bigger roads. Eisenhower started the Interstate Highway System, which is a wonderful thing if you want to drive from L.A. to New York without stopping to ask for directions, but it proverbially duct taped America to its automobiles.
Now we're in a situation that I don't think we'll be able to pull ourselves out of unless oil hits $300/barrel (which I expect to occur in June 2007, right in time for Labor Day). Given the area that needs to be covered, no city can convince its taxpayers of the necessity of a really effective mass transit system. It's just too expensive to field the sort of system that car-owners would consider a viable alternative to their own private vehicles. The only people who really use mass transit are those too poor to buy their own cars, and if you're too poor to buy a car, you're certainly too poor to buy a politician.
So instead we field crappy mass transit systems that can get the poor to their exploitative jobs and back, and call it good. In my home town of Salt Lake, buses run every half hour, and most routes shut down after 6PM. So from an arbitrarily chosen departure time, the bus commuter waits fifteen minutes per connection, and has no alternative but to come straight home after work. In order to make the mass transit system something that car owners would consider, I think buses would have to run every ten minutes on most routes, with full service running until 9PM (and buses every half hour until midnight or 1AM). Routes would have to be added, so people on the outskirts wouldn't have to walk seven blocks to the nearest bus stop.
To most people, it sounds like overkill, but overkill is barely enough if the goal is to make mass transit a convenient alternative to private vehicles. Hence, we're never going to wean ourselves from our automobiles. Looking at the hundreds of thousands of cars, hundreds of gas stations and repair shops, thousands of miles of pavement, scores of car dealerships, etc., it seems pretty clear to me that a good mass transit system would be far cheaper than the current solution. But we're too heavily invested in the current solution to give it up without a fight.
I believe that fight is coming soon.
* Yes, the U.S. had casualties. But they had about a fifth the per capita military casualties of Britain, and suffered no losses stateside after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The whole thing was just less traumatizing from our perspective. For the U.S., World War II was a successful military operation. For Great Britain, it was a near-fatal brush with nasty, pointy death. Hitler taught Europe a lot of hard-won lessons about the horrors of war. All he taught us Yanks was, "Being an economic superpower kicks ass!"
Somehow, I think this goes a long way towards explaining Iraq.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Very, very well put. You are spot on with your assessment of transit frequency - people would rather wait 50 minutes or more in their car in gridlock than 25 at a bus stop, and that's hard math to change unless you can get the bus wait down below 10 or 15 minutes.
One more thing you should put in that mix is that the second half of that postwar period saw the rise of a strongly anti-statist party and movement in the US that has absolutely refused to consider government planning, of which transit is a subset. Transit been thrown to the wayside, and sustainable land use has as well - sustainable not just in the environmental sense, but in the sense of building communities that can afford their infrastructure over the long run. For example, look what happens to bedroom communities as their populations and infrastructure age - they don't have the tax base (which requires density of both residents and businesses) to pay for school systems and fixing sewers. So not only are we lacking any decent mass transit, we are also lacking the networks of people, government agencies, and the popular understanding that would allow people to begin to build those systems. Fortunately there has been some revitalization
The same anti-government sentiment and absolute refusal to engage in any coordinated efforts to keep markets sane has hobbled competition in many of the US' important marketplaces, with communications being the obvious leader in backwardness, but the finance (housing bubble), energy (Enronesque deregulation), automotive (fuel efficiency standards that feed the industry's addiction to poorly built SUV's), and airline (pension fund sophistry and slow response to commoditization) industries are doing their respective best to stamp out functional, transparent marketplaces as well.
I agree with you that it'll take a fight to make people think seriously about saner building patterns, but I'm not optimistic about it getting resolved soon, and in the interim I see our standard of living getting hammered by it. One scholar of poverty recently pointed out that while a car is a status symbol in most poor countries, in the suburban and rural US it's a necessity even for lower-income people - you simply cannot hold down a job without a car, and that makes people very vulnerable to rising energy prices. Combine that with our severely weakened support for education and scientific research, and you see some serious potholes in the US' economic road.
Cool. What section of the constitution covers the subsidization of giant corporations?
Check out the documentary "The Corporation" sometime; it's out on DVD. After the 14th Amendment passed, which banned slavery by granting the right for all citizens to own property, a Supreme Court decision determined that corporations were in fact "persons" and could therefore exist perpetually and own property. Before this, corporations could only exist through legislative acts (for the public good), they usually had a finite lifetime, and what happened to excess profits was spelled out in the legislation.
It's pretty twisted that an Amendment designed to ban slavery ends up being used to justify the perpetual accumulation of wealth by a non-physical entity.