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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.'"
If you are really a fan of a free market, you'd understand the reality that regulation means that it isn't free. Restrictions mean it isn't free. Taxation means it isn't free. Licensing means it isn't free.
What we really see here are Statists who use the words "free market" are just pro-State pundits who, as the anonymous reader wrote, are paid to profess support for their employers while sounding pro-freedom.
This is no different than war supporters who think that soldiers and previous war protect freedoms (they don't). It is no different than neoliberal Senators who think that minimum wage laws protect the freedoms of workers (they don't). It is no different than the Federal Reserve Board of Governors who believe that more liquidity means more freedom for the consumer (sorry, wrong).
There are two ways to conduct business: competitively, or with the help of the State. Regulations, licensing, taxations, embargoes, tariffs, duties and other "pro-market" structures are "legal" uses of force by the State for one thing and one thing only: to take care of the businesses friendly with the State.
I love the free market because I love watching markets change to meet the needs of the consumers (demand) as well as the manufacturers (supply). I love seeing both sides of a barter or exchange profit from that exchange, rather than one side gaining and one side losing. The free market is not zero sum: it is mutual gain. This is capitalism. The State-licensed mercantilistic market is not zero sum -- one party loses, one party gains. This is socialism or Western State mercantilism.
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.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Obviously, no one has an intelligent design for creating new markets where none exist.
big company won't serve some small area, fights to keep anyone else from doing so, municipalities, private citizens, the Devil...
Beware of the Leopard.
"Congratulations, I have a masters in computer science & you've managed to confuse me."
Computer science majors are easy to confuse. Just ask them how to ask out a girl.
Nobody wants to hear it but I'll say it anyway: Municipally owned and operated ISPs are a bad idea. No matter how hot your technology is today, tomorrow's technology will be hotter and the municipality won't be able to react. Governments and government contractors never can. Their taxpayer-funded presence in the market will, however, serve as a very effective means of encouraging for-profit companies to go elsewhere.
I have direct experience with this in the dialup market in Altoona PA in the late '90s. If you weren't happy with the sponsored ISP, tough luck. The small ISPs pulled out when they couldn't compete with Joe Taxpayer. I worked for one of those ISPs.
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. Servers and static IPs? Ho ho, good luck. And you'll be the last town in the nation to get anything better.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Congratulations, you are a victim of state-mandated monopolies. Government regulation got you into this mess; the city signed a contract giving Cox exclusive rights to your town. It is illegal for another provider to string up lines and offer cable service. Don't like it, petition your city council, tell them to a) make such contracts illegal and allow any company that wants to provide cable service.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
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.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
My history teacher told us that there are three keys to understanding American history:
1. Great Britain.
2. People are stupid.
3. Follow the money.
Great Britain doesn't apply here, of course, but the other two are universal...this article is news, but it isn't new. We should expect people to do things entirely for profit. And we should expect people to be blatantly two-faced. Plato or Aristotle or someone like that said that "Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being ruled by those who are stupider." Or something like that. Stupid people + money = corruption, but corruption != surprise.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
Large ISPs deploy broadband first (only?) in big cities, where there are lots of potential customers in a small area, producing lots of revenue for their investment. They haven't had a lot of interest - yet - in deploying in small towns and out in the spaces between towns.
Some towns have gotten tired of waiting for some company to decide to wire them for broadband, and have tried to set up their own, local, town-owned-and-operated (or town contracting with some company to operate but town-controlled), tax-subsidized, ISP to get it to happen sooner. This is on the model of other utilities (water, gas, electricity) which some cities operate.
Some of the cities doing this would be hugely profitable for the big ISPs that haven't gotten around to them yet. So they've gone to the state governments containing those cities and lobbied for (and sometimes gotten) state laws passed to block ALL cities, towns, villages, counties, townships, etc. from setting up their own ISPs. That includes the ones they want to wire and profit from, and the ones that they probably won't be interested in for years or decades.
Reason Foundation - a free-market think tank - came up with a report suggesting that municipal ISPs are a bad idea.
The big ISPs are using that to support their lobbying.
Broadband Reports did an editorial flaming the Reason Foundation report.
(I only skimmed the editorial and glanced at the report since I'm at work right now. The editorial seems to be ad-hominems attacking the expertese and independence of the people involved in creating the Reason Foundation report, rather than arguments on the issues. But I could be wrong.)
= = = =
Personal take: Free market theory suggests that if the big guys leave some market untapped that leaves opportunities for others. For instance: If the population is too spread out for DSL to be profitable or high-bandwidth, it might be a good spot for something else, like a WISP (WiMax or WiFI based), to provide lots of bandwidth with little infrastructure and reap a profit while providing service at decent rates. But a subsidized municipial ISP might provide enough service at low enough rates (suplemented by tax money collected whether you subscribe or not) to kill the opportunity for the WISP and leave the residents with only the municipial system (which would likely be lower quality) and satellite.
I'm seeing that in Nevada, where some of the smaller towns are being supplied by a WiMax operator. And they're about 20 miles from my place (with a mountain in the way) and aren't interested in hopping the hill to my valley any time soon. I'm left with a 28Kish dialup unless I want to subscribe to a satellite service.
So I feel for both sides of the argument. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
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.
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.
Frankly, I'm shocked that you would think that states should be forbidden to provide services THAT THE FREE MARKET DOESN'T PROVIDE. Small towns can't get high-speed, because no merchants want to provide it. It's not worth it. But if the people of that state feel that they want that service, and are willing to pay for it, what's wrong with them banding together to set that service up themselves? Should construction firms be able to pass laws preventing you and your neighbour from collaborating to build a tool shed that you can then share? A state is no different from you and neighbour working together -- it simply occurs at a larger scale.
Finally, state-run businesses don't necessarily interfere with the functioning of competitors. Frequently, governments will create an organization to supply some service that the free market doesn't provide, and then once it has been established, they split it up and sell it off to merchants who are willing to run these services now that they've been established and proven.
Socialism vs Capitalism isn't a one-or-the-other choice. There are productive balances that can be achieved between total government management of everything and slavery to an oligarchy of industrialists.
But seriously -- how do YOU think small towns should get services like broadband, water-purification plants, sewer systems, and whatnot?
Lastly -- "neoliberal Senators who think that minimum wage laws protect the freedoms of workers"?! You sir, are officially a retard. Neoliberalism is exactly the opposite of that. Neoliberalism is the philosophy that YOU are endorsing in your post -- that of total deregulation. Sorry man, but you're a neoliberal. I know, I know, anything associated with the word "liberal" is automatically evil because of that association with freedom, but deal with it.