The $200 Billion Broadband Rip-Off

Jamie noted that Cringley has a piece about the US Broadband situation. He talks about where we were and where we are: 'not very fast, not very cheap Internet service that is hurting our ability to compete economically with the rest of the world' and about the $200B the phone companies got to make it that way.

Comments

Re:more evidence

[Wonko the Sane]

Except this isn't an example of "unbridled market capitalism". The original copper network was a private/public compromise built on private property seized by the government with its power of immanent domain.

The federal government allowed monopoly control of the copper by one company, as long as it agreed to follow certain rules that a normal company would not need to. That is why multiple phone companies were allowed to compete on the same copper.

Now we have the case where companies are not fulfilling their part of the bargain and the government isn't enforcing it any more.

Re:Umm... have a look at their taxes....

[abigor]

Not the Netherlands - they have a +$45 billion trade balance and a budget surplus. Financially, they are golden. The only G7 country that is in similarly great financial shape is Canada.

Re:Don't blame Canada

[m.ducharme]

Corporations aren't people and aren't treated legally as people, except insofar as their owners are people. Bzzzt. Wrong. A corporation is treated as a person in the sense that the corporation as a whole is legally responsible for its actions, and not its constituent parts (the people who make up the corporation). This is what protects the average joe at the bottom of the heap from being personally liable for what his employer tells him he has to do. Neither he nor his employer is responsible for those actions. This is what is wrong with corporate personhood. When a bunch of people in the corporate body behave badly as a representative of the corporation, it's the corporation that gets punished, not the people doing the wrong thing. This absolves everyone from the employees to the board, to the shareholders, from responsibility for their collective actions. Corporations have rights to free speech qua corporations, not because of the rights of the constituent parts. You will notice that the right to free speech of corporations is curtailed in ways that a natural person's right to free speech isn't (i.e. false advertising laws, etc). You should also have observed that your rights as a person are much broader than your rights as a part of your corporation. Various forms of financial entities are granted rights of possession and litigation in line with their purpose as financial entities, but they aren't treated as people in general. The supposed "person-hood" that financial entities have is an extension of the actual, physical person-hood that their owners have -- corporations have rights to free speech because their owners have rights to free speech, and I don't see any pratical way to change that, short of opressing the person-hood of business owners.