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$6 Billion Proposal For High-Speed Internet Grants
witherstaff writes "House Democrats have proposed $6 billion in Internet investmentsas part of a sweeping economic stimulus bill that the full House is expected to vote on next week. The $6 billion is considered a down payment on efforts Obama will make in this area over the next several years. Of course let's not forget the $200 billion broadband scandal that the large telecommunication companies have been paid but never delivered on."
As long as we get some return on the investment I'm all for it, but as the FS says: we've sunk a lot more than $6bn into this same thing already and got nowhere.
Fool me once, shame on you...
ANYthing you pay to any private telco company, will be pocketed. pockets will be so deep that you wont be even finding a nickel when you plunge your hand in. Remember how did the money given to banks vanished just 1-2 months ago ?
well. these are telcos. they have numerous times tried to scam/suffocate public in terms of cash and choices and even freedom of information before.
it would be stupid, stupid to trust them with anything.
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Any chance we could look to put some REAL oversight into this round of spending?
If the oversight committee was a total of 5 people with backgrounds in actual accounting that ended up costing $1 million a year, but prevented the "loss" of billions in funding, I'd say it was money well spent.
Obama, you could prove your salt here by putting some REAL Common Sense behind MY money.
After all, the big bank bail out is not by just giving money to the banks. The government has bought loans from the banks.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The $6 billion is considered a down payment on efforts Obama will make in this area over the next several years. Of course let's not forget the $200 billion broadband scandal that the large telecommunication companies have been paid but never delivered on.
I'm so glad that the Democrats are so generous with MY money. Of course, the Republicans before them were basically the same, as were the Democrats before those Republicans, and so on going back quite a ways.
Seriously, why is the answer to mismanagement of money (tax payer or private money as the recent market troubles have shown) always to give away tax payer money?
School run out of money? Here is more tax payer money. Spent too much building your pro sports team's venue? Here is some tax payer money. Make bad choices in the marketplace? Here is some tax payer money. When is this going to stop? When we've mortgaged how many generations' future earnings on today's ridiculous growth of government?
When the government invests X billion into something, they should come up with a list of specific items to be accomplished by the investee, put it into the contract, and send auditors to check up on the progress on a regular basis.
Anything else is just charity.
The is no doubt a direct result of intense lobbying by representatives of Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner et al. Don't think for a second that this type of spend directed at a specific industry happens unless those folks are doing some heavy-duty knob-polishing.
It's sad that it's that easy for our government to spend BILLIONS of our money with that little oversight, process, or public input or debate. People really deserve the type of government they receive.
As if the economy isn't in bad enough shape, let's redirect billions towards another thing that's completely unnecessary. Who cares, we won't have to pay for it, our grandkids will. Since reckless spending and investment was the problem, let's do even more of it see how well that works out. /sarcasm
When will people learn there is not an endless supply of money for the government to spend? There are limits to how much you can steal from the future.
Nobody in the private industry seems to want to open their pocketbooks. Consumers aren't in the mood either.
Somebody has to do it... the only entity that really can is the government. Would you rather they do nothing and let our economy sink into a huge downward spiral?
I'm curious what your idea is to get our economy moving?
However, I don't see the benefit. If everybody is responsible for the access point then nobody is. If there is no ultimate responsibility, the finger pointing would be staggering.
Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.
I've come to terms with the fact that our government has no conscious about spending ever increasing amounts of taxpayers' hard earned money. What I don't understand is how this could be considered economic stimulus. Sure, it'll help in certain marginal ways, but the only thing that can fix the US economy is if the government quits taking half of what everyone earns and lets the earners of the money figure out the best way to spend it.
If you give tax breaks to the lowest earners, they buy more tv's and mcdonald's... give the tax breaks to the middle and upper class, and they end up investing in new business and current business expansion. If the greedy bastards in DC would quit thinking of tax revenue as their "income" and just cut taxes across the board, including corporate and capital gains taxes, I'd bet you a non-free beer that you would see IMMEDIATE stock market growth, followed by strong GDP growth, dropping unemployment, and REAL opportunity.
The govt can't grow the economy by spending tax revenue on infrastructure (the most deserving of tax dollars). If you allow more of those tax dollars to stay in circulation, the private sector CAN create real, sustainable growth.
J
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
Here's something for the audience to chew on. If access to the Internet is the end and not the means? Then why should Universal Broadband be the means instead of a Universal connection to the Internet? In other words why can't a subsidized slower speed connection be pushed instead of High Speed this, and High Speed that? The former exists, is nearly universal, already paid off, and it works. The latter is neither, and has issues coping.
Telecom *services* are not a natural monopoly. Telecom *wires* are a natural monopoly. What we need to do is separate the service providers from the wire provider.
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1.Force any provider wishing to service a given region to service every customer. Regions would be defined by the government and the FCC. (so it might be "all customers in " or "all customers in ")
There would be an exemption for co-ops (e.g. a group wanting to run a fat pipe into one members shed/barn/etc and then run something from there out to the rest of the co-op). Municipal efforts run by a local government would be required to service the entire local government area.
2.No provider (cable, DSL, fiber, wireless, whatever) would be allowed to have any monopoly agreements with anyone (state, local govt, residents association, owner of townhouse complex/apartment complex/etc). No authority (state, local govt, residents association, owner of townhouse complex/apartment complex/etc) would be allowed to have any kind of rules/laws/by-laws/whatever that granted monopolies to anyone. Oh and providers would be prohibited from making any kind of complaint or legal action (to the courts, to local authorities, to state PUCs or whatever) in an attempt to stop someone else from providing service. (no more "I dont want to provide service in because its not profitable for me but I dont want someone else running service either because it might become profitable for me in the future" like we have seen from some providers)
3.New rules would be put in place that define what constitutes "broadband". (with minimum speeds set at say 1.5Mbps) For rule #1, the requirement would be that everyone in the area be served by "broadband" as defined by this rule (so no running 256Kbps DSL to some customers and 20Mbps FTTH to other more profitable customers in the same city or town). ISPs WOULD be allowed to apply traffic shaping and bandwidth quotas (i.e. "you get 50GB per month on your plan, once thats gone your speed gets cut back for the rest of the month unless you pay more money"). Net neutrality law would ensure such shaping didnt discriminate (so no shaping of YouTube or BitTorrent whilst allowing CNN videos or netflix movie downloads at full speed)
Worse still- Comcast has just started getting really nasty about incoming SMTP and HTTP; they've shut me off twice, despite best efforts to sneak under their radar.
This is what amuses me as a slightly miffed Comcast customer. That little residential service ToS document that you agree to has (for at least the past five years) carried language that says "You _cannot_ run servers. Not even SSH or RSH." and "If you use too much of the network, we _will_ terminate your connection.".
WRT excessive usage:
Comcast's recent quantification of "too much" is a *really* good thing (Even if I think that "too much" is *REALLY* not enough). It removes any ambiguity... you now *know* when they're gonna start throttling you this month. You also know that you're gonna be at full speed next month.
WRT servers:
Did you not read the terms of the contract? Did you not understand them? If you think that they are unreasonable, then you should either not have signed up in the first place, or you should get a new ISP now. If more folks start jumping ship, then your current ISP will have to do something. Don't delude yourself. This is the only tool at your disposal.
Funny--last time I checked, the President didn't have a f*cking checkbook. It was the liberal senators that took over in the last 2 years that passed the bailouts.
The poster wasn't talking about TARP, he was talking about our misadventure in nation building known as the Iraq war.
Although it's worth noting most of congress, including the Democrats, went along.
Although Bush doesn't get off scot-free--he didn't veto the f*cking thing.
Not only did he not veto it, his administration (primarily the Treasury folks, headed by Goldman Sachs alumni Paulsen) basically went to Congress and said "The economy will die within weeks (if not days) if you don't give us this program." So, again, you can fault the Democrats for not having the backbone to tell them to go to hell or even that they had better damn well be reporting back weekly for approval, but placing primary responsibility on them is incorrect.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.