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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.
These companies can sell you an 8 meg broadband connection, they'll sell it to 100 people and the line they're selling this on is an 80meg connection (example, not right numbers but right point). Any industry that can do this legally (or just get away with it) is clearly going to screw any consumer they can.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I know an economics professor, incidentally, who noted that regulations on trade are generally put in place by the rich and powerful and act to keep the little people down. This is a textbook example.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
We in way shape or form have "completely unbridled market capitalism." Thats impossible when you have government granted monopolies, the FCC, etc.
Telecoms are using government regulation in their favor. They don't want capitalism.
Gone!
Let me tell you 'bout my friend in Holland. And, no, I don't mean Holland, Michigan. I mean Holland, Holland.
He pays some ridiculous amount of money monthly, 10 or 20 Euros, and gets high speed broadband, TV (including the porn channels) and phone. His mortgage is 3.8%. Sex of any kind is not against the law and he can travel to any country in the EU without even slowing down as he drives across the border. At the risk of going off topic, do I need to add that health care and education are free.
Could it be that there's something not quite right here in America?
I would happily pay double my existing taxes to get a country with effective universal health care, a modern and well-maintained infrastructure, a people-focused government, and the financial condition of the Netherlands. Instead, I get low taxes and... nothing at all to show for those low taxes, because the people are so ignorant and apathetic that the government long ago stopped bothering with trying to serve them.
What is needed? We need some politicians with ethics who aren't in the pocket of the telcos to actually stand up and hold them to their promises.
Then end corporate personhood. In fact, why not write your Congressman about it today?
I got ADSL In 1996 , back when it was 1.5 Mb download and 120Kb upload, today, eleven years later
I get 8 Mb download and 385 Kb upload, at about 30 percent higher pricing.
Basically broadband in the US is crap. If those various companies mentioned in the article
were forced to refund the money they got for giving us nothing, and I agree we got nothing,
they would be singing a different tune. I say send them a bill for the money they received, but did
not spend on actually providing that which they said they would, PLUS interest.
Broadband should be defined at 20Mb down and 20 Mb up. Period. Too much time has elapsed
with basically zero quality or quantity increases.
You can't watch live video of any quality; you can't use any sort of interactive video link; you can't use any remote desktop solution with any level of fluidity; you can only participate in collaborative development with a very limited number of participants; you can't participate in e-commerce of any significant volume; you can't download software updates or revisions without tying up your connection entirely for minutes or hours; and, perhaps most significantly for the economy, you can't consume new, bandwidth-intensive applications such as sophisticated online gaming.
The irony here is that, despite the heavy-handed government regulation, that's actually not true in telecommunications. The lack of competition would still exist without the regulation, because once one participant has built infrastructure, other participants will usually not find their return on building duplicate infrastructure to be worth the very intensive investment it would take. The regulation simply forestalls the natural solution to this problem: making the capital-intensive infrastructure a public utility and allowing providers to do the much less capital-intensive job of competing on the public infrastructure, which would still provide the benefits of competition to consumers.
When it costs in the neighbourhood of $200 million
Well, it will do when you make the campaign season last over a freaking year. I always cringe around election time in the US. How much productivity and money is wasted in this regular orgy of popularity contests?
Go for the British model. Announce elections, campaign 5 weeks, over and done with.
Forget campaign finance laws and lobbying problems. Just drastically shortening the election season alone would make a huge postive difference in the US.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
You are focusing on the tradition way to build a telecom infrastructure. What unregulated competition encourages is "lean and mean" telecom providers that can survive by creating a cost-effective infrastructure... even if it requires them to mountn $10 hubs on telephone poles.
Since no where on earth (no country I have ever read about) has had a company build the infrastructure from scratch if there is already an existing infrastructure, it strongly suggests that the situation you desire for "true" competition is impossible and this crippled regulatory "competition" is the best we can manage. Idealists (as capitalists are) tend to neglect data and lean heavily on appeals to emotion, authority, or down right repetition. True unbridled capitalism is impossible due entirely to not making the right assumptions about people. Just as Marxist communism is impossible because it fails to account for the same thing. Given the ability to really compete or to bride, cheat, and monopolize all companies would prefer the later.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
This is exactly what I argued at the CPUC hearings for the AT&T-SBC merger. I started off by saying that a mistake was made thirty years ago, when AT&T was forced to divide itself King-Solomon-like. What should have happened, instead, is that AT&T should been forced to become a nonprofit corporation or pseudo-governmental agency, similar to the Postal Service.
Our postal network and roads and highways are generally recognized as common shared infrastructure; we don't allow the construction companies that build and maintain them to OWN the sections upon which they work, do we? Given that telecom and data networks are every bit as much shared public infrastructure, why then have we allowed the corporations that built those to own the pieces?
We fucked up many decades ago, perhaps as far back as the first telegraph lines, when we failed to recognize that the components that make up electronic (and now digital) public networks are common infrastructure, of the same sort as highways, and thus infrastructure which should be publicly owned. This is one instance where MORE socialism, not less, would be an enormously good thing.