How Can the Stimulus Plan Help the Internet?

Wired is running an article raising the question of how a US economic stimulus plan could best help broadband adoption and the internet in general. We discussed President-elect Obama's statements about his plan, which would include investments in such areas, but Wired asks how we can avoid the equivalent of the New Deal's "ditches to nowhere" without more data about where the money would actually make a difference. Quoting: "... the problem is that no one knows the best way to make the internet more resilient, accessible and secure, since there's no just no public data. The ISP and backbone internet providers don't tell anyone anything. For instance, the government doesn't know how many people actually have broadband or what they pay for it. ... In September, the FCC found that its data collection on internet broadband was incomplete and thus ruled that AT&T, Qwest and Verizon could stop filing some reports — because the requirements did not extend to cable companies, too."

Comments

Premise guarantees failure

[MSTCrow5429]

Central planning will always lead to ditches to nowhere. Without an ability to perform rationale economic calculations, an economy cannot function. Any effort by the State to manipulate or direct economic planning will lead to increasing economic irrationality and inefficiency. The only way to maximize the efficient use of resources is to remove government coercion from the marketplace, and let voluntary cooperation and aggregate individual choices locate the closet to optimally possible solution to any problem.

Then you propose extermination

[SuperKendall]

Existence of rampant corruption is is not a reason to discard economic theories... Get rid of the corruption and try again.

So your proposal is to eliminate all human life, for as long as you have humans by any definition of "human" we have now, you will have corruption.

If you want to eliminate rampant corruption, you should try compartmentalizing the potential damage from the corruption of one person, and that means elimination of central planning where power naturally coaleses into the hands of a few.

Any other notion of merely "eliminating corruption" by pretending any group of humans can be trained to not be corrupt - well that's just a fantasy that ignores all of human history and observation.