Bogus Experts Fight Your Right To Broadband

An anonymous reader writes, "Karl Bode of Broadband Reports takes aim at supposed telecom experts and think tankers who profess to love the 'free market,' but want to ban the country's un-wired towns and cities from offering broadband to their residents. If you didn't know, incumbent providers frequently determine towns and cities unprofitable to serve (fine), but then turn around and lobby for laws that make it illegal to serve themselves (not so fine). They then pay experts to profess their love for a free market and deregulation — unless that regulation helps their bottom line. A simple point: 'Strange how such rabid fans of a free-market wouldn't be interested in allowing market darwinism to play out.'"

Comments

It is simple

[Black Art]

Goverment helping people or doing nice things for them is Socialism. Socialism is BAD.

Throwing them to the wolves, however is not Socialism, therefore it must be good.

Re:It is simple

[dark_requiem]

Federal money... What a joke. The federal government steals money from the population, either via taxation or inflation (see: Federal Reserve). I'm not particularly impressed with an organization that's so very generous with money it stole from myself and others.

Government competing with industry ? free market

[Phat_Tony]

Strange how such rabid fans of a free-market wouldn't be interested in allowing market darwinism to play out.

Government "competing" with industry is not a free market and there is no "market darwinism" to play out. Of the two competitors here, one can confiscate any amount of money they choose from everyone to pay for their service. It doesn't matter if anyone wants it, they need no voluntary "customers." They take whatever money they want and provide whatever service they want.

Pretending that a company can compete with government, where government forces everyone to pay for their service, is a terrible twist of the word "competition." It's like saying that Wendy's can "compete" with McDonalds if the government passes a new law that everyone has to pay to eat all their meals at McDonalds, and then can show up and get the food they already had to pay for for no additonal charge. In order to go to Wendy's, you have to also buy a McDonalds meal and throw it away. That's not "free market competition."

Note that I'm not saying anything in this post about whether or not municipalities should be allowed to offer internet access, or (and this is an entirely separate issue) whether or not they should do so. I'm just saying that calling government "competition" with free enterprise companies some sort of free market is absurd. It's not competition when one of the competitors gets to force everyone to "buy" their product, can charge whatever they want, can loose any amount of money without fear of going out of business, can provide any service and quality level with no effect on revenue, and can tax and regulate their competitors. Yes, there are some areas where a company manages to service the same sector government services in a different way, and I'm not saying it's impossible that some people would pay for another internet service even after paying for the government one, especially if the government one is run as badly as many government things are. But even if a lot of people end up paying for both the mandatory government service and a second, private service, it's still not free market competition.

Re:Bad idea

[PCM2]

You want municipal wireless? Fine, but understand that means you'll ONLY get whatever products and quality of service your town's government is capable of.

The current trend is for municipalities to take bids from private companies. It's the same way a lot of government services operate ... you don't think there's an office at city hall where a guy interviews ironworkers for jobs building bridges, do you? I have faith that at least some of the companies that are interested in building out and servicing municipal wireless networks have the wherewithal to do a good job.

You're oversimplifying

[misanthrope101]

Government helping people in the US is socialism. In fact, any social spending or infrastructure spending in the US is socialism. Paying for grandma's health care is socialism.

Paying Haliburton and other US contractors to rebuild Iraq--that's not socialism. The discriminator is this--who makes the money? If money is being spread among a bunch of little people, then that's socialism. If money is poured into a few large corporations whose executives make tens or hundreds of millions, then that's the free market. If it's profitable for the rich, it's the free market, but if you're giving money to a single mother of 2, then that's socialism. If you're helping the working poor pay their medical bills, that's socialism, and probably creeping totalitarianism.

But we can brag on TV about building schools for Iraqis, and that's NOT socialism. But--you guess it--large American corporations have won contracts to rebuild those schools, along with those huge military bases over there. What is an what is not socialism has more to do with who gets to pocket the money than it does with any fidelity to Karl Marx. Care to look into how much federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans, compared to how much is spent on rebuilding Iraq? If you spend money in New Orleans, then small local firms may get some of the contracts, and the money may be spent, and most importantly earned, locally. If you spend in Iraq, all of the money goes into the coffers of large companies with sweetheart deals, such as Haliburton.

Small mom-and-pop contractors don't have contacts in the Department of Defense and White House. But if you get big enough, you get to engage in nation-building as part of someone's "vision," like PNAC, and then that isn't socialism, even if you're building the very things that WOULD be socialism if you were building it for Americans back home.

Re:You're oversimplifying

[misanthrope101]

Sheesh, read what I wrote. If money is spent to rebuild infrastructure stateside, then those goods and services are still being provided, no? Even with government-financed health care, or universal internet access, or any such service, goods and services are still being provided. Yet critics wail "that isn't the job of government--you're making government too big!" even though they'll support the same purchases for Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The only difference I can see between building infrastructure in Iraq and building it stateside is that if you build it overseas the contracts are funnelled to a few big-ticket companies, all of which have ties to the White House and Dept of Defense. If you spend the money stateside, more people benefit, but then you don't have high-paid lobbyists clamoring for infrastructure dollars anymore.

Yes, I'm aware of the textbook definition of socialism, thanks, but I was referring to the seemingly obvious fact that if you want to fund infrastructure (water plants, hospitals, power plants) with public funds, the same people who have no problem rebuilding Iraq will complain about encroaching socialism. If you're so concerned about it being a "handout" to give a poor single parent money to live, then institute work programs, and then you'll have the goods and services you care about. But no one is interested in any programs whose main beneficiaries are poor people.

Of course, $100 given to a poor single mother will be pushed right back into the economy, creating just as many jobs as $100 given to Raytheon or some other weapons manufacturer. But everyone acts as if poor people burn their money in little bonfires, forgetting that a dollar spent by a bum is just as good at creating jobs as a dollar spent by a CEO. We basically just worship success, so we funnel money to big corporations as if we need more weapons. Hell, Congress just reauthorized weapons that the DoD said they didn't even need! So yes, the weapons companies are providing goods and services, but if we're buying goods and services we don't really need, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, then that's morally no different than paying poor people $2000 a month to pick up litter. It's just a wealth redistribution program, only one that gets the nod from the "I love the free market" types, while the other is labeled as "big government." Give me a break.

Re:You're oversimplifying

[Bert64]

Iraqi construction companies should be rebuilding iraq... Financed by the american government.
The Iraqi construction companies built the country in the first place, and the american government destroyed it. American companies shouldn't be profiting at the expense of Iraq, Iraq should be compensated for their losses and this compensation should go into the local economy.

Re:All Government Regulation is to serve...

[dal20402]

Without (government) regulation, reputable doctors and health care providers would likely form their own associations which would certify that people were actually competent to practice medicine. And what's more, they might actually be run by medical experts rather than politicians and bureaucrats.

I can't believe after the last 200 years of history that anyone has the gall to make this argument with a straight face.

We had unregulated medicine. Throughout the 19th century. And what did we get? A bunch of traveling quacks with patent syrup. And very little real healing for anybody.

Licensing in high-risk professions is good when the licensing bodies are visible to the public. When there are only a bunch of private trade associations competing with one another, consumer confusion is rampant, and plenty of fly-by-night operators are only too happy to make a quick buck. By contrast, the "bureaucrats" in charge of medical licensing today are medical experts. Politicians have nothing to say about the subject.

To take this as far as possible, are you willing to completely deregulate aviation, getting rid of the FAA and everything it implies... air traffic control, pilot licensing, stringent maintenance standards for aircraft, etc. and farming out those functions to private organizations that you have no way of holding accountable until after you suffer damages? I didn't think so.

The free market is not the only possible organizing principle of human society, folks, or a god to worship. It's a tool to maximize wealth in the short term, and nothing more. It does an excellent job of that, and gets us nice toys in the process. But it's simply not designed to tackle other, very real human necessities, which we expect as part of the social contract: ensuring people a minimum standard of health and safety, managing community goods sustainably, or even providing a fair structure for market participants and processes. As irritating as government can sometimes be, I really don't want to live in an unregulated society, and if you'd come off your ideological high horse and actually look at facts you wouldn't either.

It's useless to round all fuzzy values to 1

[tepples]

If it's a bit State regulated, it's State regulated. If not, it's free.

If false is the law of the jungle and true is totalitarianism, then whether a particular enterprise is regulated by the state is a fuzzy-valued membership function, not a boolean-valued indicator function. The prohibitions of murder and bank robbery are state regulations; therefore, all business is state regulated to some degree. Your way of defuzzifying this, by rounding all fuzzy values greater than false to true, makes your logic useless.

Re:Not really anything new

[dark_requiem]

Let's clarify this now: a tax-funded (read: theft-funded) broadband setup is not the free market at work. The only way a tax-funded system is comparable to the free market is if all taxed individuals consent. Tax just one person to pay for a service they don't want, need, or use, take money from just one person without their consent, and you're talking about statism, not the free market. The free market does not involve taxation, the free market relies on voluntary consent. This is not the free market versus statism, this is statism versus statism. On the one hand you have the political state working for ISPs to inhibit competition, and on the other hand you have more localized political states robbing citizens. The free market never enters the picture.

Re:Not really anything new

[dangitman]

"Competitively" is a good thing - because state help shifts the burden of business' poor planning from this business to the taxpayer. There is also no "middle ground" - either you have help or you don't, you succeed by your own merits or have assistance or gimped opponents.

But what if the State does the opposit of helping - i.e enact regulations that shift the burden from the taxpayer to the private corporation, and make corporations responsible for actions like pollution and product safety? That's not "free" and it's not "helping" - so I guess there must be more than two options, huh?