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WSJ Says Gov't Money Injection Won't Help Broadband
olddotter writes "According to the WSJ, The US government is about to spend $10 Billion to make little difference in US broadband services: 'More fundamentally, nothing in the legislation would address the key reason that the US lags so far behind other countries. This is that there is an effective broadband duopoly in the US, with most communities able to choose only between one cable company and one telecom carrier. It's this lack of competition, blessed by national, state and local politicians, that keeps prices up and services down.' Get ready for USDA certified Grade A broadband."
So the WSJ, viewed by slashdotters as a heavily conservative news source, is advocating a position that most slashdotters agree with?
Head explosions commencing in 3...2...1...
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You can tell the US needs a network upgrade when I'm halfway around the world away getting the first post on a dial-up?
Voodoo religion of the beltway!
The WSJ says that government doesn't work. News at 11...
Of course they do. The Wall Street Journal is a temple of supply-side economics. According to them, the government can't do anything right, except cut capital gains taxes. I would have been very surprised if they'd had anything good to say about this bill.
There was a time when the WSJ really spoke to me as a conservative Republican. I suppose it was because during my formative years in college, during the Clinton presidency, that I was trying to find recognition and validation for my smaller-government/more-freedom beliefs that I gravitated towards the high quality journalism of the WSJ. Sure, I dabbled a bit with the NYT, and I even once read USA Today, but these were only in experimentation. I never liked them and I certainly wouldn't read them again. I'm not a liberal, if that's what you're trying to insinuate.
Sure, I sometimes check the box for the Presidential campaign contribution on my taxes. And I suppose that government support for the Arts is a good and necessary thing. And yes, even I can agree that unions are a necessary organ of today's manufacturing system. But just because I sometimes hold these views doesn't mean that I'm any less conservative or somehow more liberal for it.
I have plenty of liberal friends, and I'm still not attracted to the ideology at all. Maybe I will occasionally join them on weekend camping trips in the woods and drum out my inner man-boy on bongos. And maybe I'll ride to work with them on my bike instead of driving my Prius. And so what if I take a couple days off to protest the cutting down of yet another plot of Redwoods? These are important things to me.
But I'm no liberal.
They don't think government can help with anything.
Do you think the government issuing franchises that creates monopolies backed by the power of the state has helped?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Ha ! I laugh outrageously at your assertion that the USDA would be rolling out Grade A broadband. ...
Everyone knows its the USCG (Coastguard) who have responsibility for broadband delivery!
--- This meme is memory intensive
This is nothing a Broadband Czar couldn't fix. Who needs competition anyway? :-) Many federal politicians have already _proven_ the fallacy of believing a capitalist market can sustain itself, ergo Tarp v0.1.
And just imagine all the complaints if every tom, dick and startup were given permission to plow in new cable or fiber. We'd go back to gravel roads. Then all we'd have to do is dig down in the trench with a shovel and add yet another layer of soon-to-be-dark fiber or copper.
We're a geographically big nation once you step outside of the starbucks ridden cities. The population can get pretty damn sparse. It seems easy if you're going the CLEC route and just buying access to already existing infrastructure. But you'd be in for one hell of shock if you suddenly had to start plowing out to every customer.
I hate to break it to ya, but dropping fiber to every home is very, very, very expensive. You think that a non-governmental for profit company is going to take a massive guaranteed permanent loss to give Joe Redneck in the sticks a 20mb/s connection?
Good thing Broadband money was cut from the stimulus pack.
Even $10 billion is a mind-numbing overwhelming fucking shitload of money. I don't really believe that what Congress and the President are doing right now is going to help many people (except maybe their campaign contributors) and it's fine to talk about how those 10 gigabucks aren't going to be spent wisely. But don't diss the magnitude or claim that decimating the dollar amount means it can't work. The actual reason it can't work is that it isn't meant to. The still-incomprehensibly-huge amount has nothing to do with it.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The article does a poor job of identifying two separate problems: rural areas with no broadband vs all other US areas with crappy and overpriced broadband. We need to solve both problems, and the WSJ article doesn't offer a real answer to either, so the main point of the article appears to have been to whine about the stimulus package.
How is helping broadband going to stimulate the economy? The way to stimulate the economy is to get the banks lending again and get consumers spending again. Cutting taxes on the poor and middle class does the latter, but I have no idea how to get the banks lending.
I do think that the banks need to be reregulated, and heavily. They have shown themselves to be thieves and need to be kept on a short leash. What happened to that $800b they already were handed?
Why are CEOs getting "performance bonuses" when they're doing a piss-poor job? These companies are failing because their leadership is incompetent, crooked, or both.
Yes, US broadband sucks but pouring money into the cable companies asn't going to stimulate the economy. It probably wouldn't do anything but make the cable companies richer.
Free Martian Whores!
The problem is that local governments (municipalities, primarily) have signed exclusive agreements with these companies. Because laying wires requires approval of each municipality, installing new infrastructure literally requires tens of thousands of permits, applications, meetings, etc., to get anything worthwhile installed. Our "marble cake" form of government, creates a tangled mess of conflicting rules and legislation that create such a high cost to enter the market that $10 billion could easily be spent just negotiating. That money will largely dissipate the same way it vanished in Iraq -- because everyone believes they deserve part of the pie.
If you want options, two things need to happen. First, the infrastructure -- that is, the wires that carry the data, need to be owned and operated by an entity separate from the users of that system, and that exclusive contracts be ended immediately. Secondly, we need to eliminate municipality-level and move it to at least the county level. The fewer people that have a voice in the process, the less resources wasted dealing with them. Because city-level employees are amongst the most petty, corrupt, and difficult to work with of any class of government official in the Union.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
From the article, "Maybe there are shovel-ready programs to bring broadband to communities that private providers have not yet reached, and to upgrade the speed of accessing the Web."
Inside the Beltway is not the real world, so the recession just isn't seen on the street. How many people are ready and willing to pick up a shovel (pick, hammer, etc.) and perform real, physical labor aside from illegal immigrants? I won't believe we are in a depression until I see others doing this or I have to.
Man, that would be so awesome, to have a separate phone and cable company. I would have two places I could get internet service from, instead of one!
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
They don't think government can help with anything.
Do you think the government issuing franchises that creates monopolies backed by the power of the state has helped?
Seriously. Does anyone really want to go back to the days before the 1984 consent decree?
The WSJ is a newspaper written by a bunch of war-mongering, anti-civil-liberties wankers.
There, fixed that for you.
What, they have a point. If companies were competing freely, instead of this messed up system of little fiefdoms we have now, you can bet that you'd see Comcast and Time Warner trying to outdo each other, while AT&T and Verizon raced to shove fiber everywhere. Remember - competition is good for the consumer. It forces companies to innovate or die, while keeping prices low.
But as it stands now, you basically have "The cable company" or "The phone company". Even independent DSL providers are still using the copper run by The Phone Company, and often costs more than if you got DSL from them directly.
Even the Economist points out that this stimulus package probably won't have the effect Obama is hoping for because the companies will simply sit back and wait for the government to pay them for the upgrades they would have had to pay for themselves.
The way I see it, the only way things will change is through good old capitalist competition. Someone needs to really step in with a reliable WiMAX solution for about $25/mo, and seriously start sucking business away from the DSL/Cable duopolies. In fact I'm rather surprised the cell phone companies aren't trying to jump into the residential data market. They already have the little notebook dongles, just shove that into an antenna you set on your roof (for better reception) and plug it into your router. Better yet, offer residential phone service over this as well, and really put a dent in the landline and cable telephony companies.
Why would they ever give up such a deal?
They hand out a municipal monopoly or doupoly. They get to charge a municipal "service" fee that is some non-small percentage of a bill the nobody notices. And they get several channels free and video editing and technical support to fill with non-dissenting viewpoints telling us how wonderful our local government and our local incumbents are. And with nothing that can be claimed as "taxation."
They will never give this nonsense up for anything like competition.
I wish Australia would "lag behind" like the US, maybe then we could get almost unlimited download quotas too.
Sure compared to technology heaven like Japan it might seem like you're lagging behind, most of the world is probably lagging right there with you.
But you're far from the worst off.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Right, left, what the fuck ever. There simply is no problem for which more government is not likely to be the worst solution.
Oh, and Krugman is an idiot, along with nearly everyone who seems to have a voice in 'fixing' the economic mess that they themselves created. AFAICT, Krugman's whole take so far is that we haven't pumped enough money at the problem of pumping too much money.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/12/krugman-still-wrong-after-all-these.html
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
the reason the usa lags behind other countries is that the other countries are small, compact and densely populated. like korea, or any european country
if you were to examine say, new york and new england, alone, or california, alone, the usa does fine in broadbrand penetration. but the usa is still sparsely populated in vast rural areas in the middle
want proof? look at canada. canada obviously has different governmental mechanisms, but it has virtually the same digital access ratings as the usa:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/list3.htm#dai
broadband penetration has to do with only two factors:
1. how rich the country is
2. population density
all other factors, including government policy, are neglible in comparison
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the journal of the same Wall Street that said I was supposed to keep making a bunch of a-hole fat cats richer so that some scraps would trickle back down to me? Only to find that they're so damn greedy they ignored their own self interest and completely screwed the pooch with the economy? Yeah, I really give a fsck what that collection of self-serving greedy 'tards has to say. If I were them I'd start working on getting ANY credibility back. Until then I'm working under the assumption that anything they're saying or doing involves them retiring in the Bahamas nad me being bent over a table.
Well what are you going to do? Allow every company that wants to dig up whatever infrastructure they want wherever they want?
Doesn't this seem to be a situation where you can't just have a "free market"?
...years ago? It didn't work out too well from what I hear.
I'm sure they got some nice jets, and while they can hold a tremendous amount of data, the latency on the things is terrible.
How is this flamebait? The article is an opinion piece, this is a counter opinion.
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
And if you happen to live in an area that isn't profitable to run service to I suppose you should just move then, right?
The reason everyone has access to a landline totally wasn't because ILECs were required by the government to provide dialtone to anyone, anywhere within their service region, nope. It was totally because it was absolutely profitable to run copper fricken everywhere man!
Since when has government fixed anything. Tell the children of today that they are already $50K in the red and that there is not financial hope in their future, because that is what the "stimulus plan" will do.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
But as it stands now, you basically have "The cable company" or "The phone company"
Or, as Lily Tomlin's Ernestine put it so succinctly back in the late '60s and early '70s
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
This massive injection of money, which is being obtained through printing money and borrowing, will not fix the core problems that caused this mess, namely:
All this talk about need more credit and more lending is a red herring. Over-consumption and over-spending is what got us into this mess in the first place. The US$1.5 trillion would be better spent buying up bad mortgages or just giving an equal share to every legal resident in the U.S. than what they are doing with it.
This will only put off the inevitable correction (crash), and it when it does happen, and it will, it will be even worse.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
A product of radical ideological isms. NOthing to see, move on.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The WSJ article is opinion, and is leaving out the fact that the monopolies will not be broken without government interference.
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
Don't worry! The stimulus plan will include in-vitro fertilization for welfare moms and illegal immigrants. Once they start popping out babies (8 at a time!), that $50k debt per person will drop significantly.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I'm a 10Mbps Charter subscriber who, as of yesterday, became subject to a 100GB monthly cap on my service. I really, really, really want to change providers, as much to punish Charter for its hubris as to get out from under the cap. My only other broadband option is DSL, which The Phone Company provides to our neighborhood in one flavor: 768Kbps/256Kbps. Some choice, eh?
The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected. -- Will Rogers
A mainstream media property actually "gets" something technical related to the Internet. Assuming the summary is right, they've got it dead-on.
The stimulus money should only be permitted to go to non-incumbent providers.
Alternatively, it should only be permitted to be used by a given provider to extend full wired (or fiber) service to geographic areas currently completely unserved by that provider (Eg AT&T would have to extend into non AT&T areas currently serviced by other telecoms, etc, ditto for cable)
I'm rather surprised the cell phone companies aren't trying to jump into the residential data market.
I thought that a big part of the problem you have is that the cable company, phone company and the cellphone company are actually owned by the same corporation, thus trying its best to make sure that there will never be fair competition.
c++;
A government mandated monopoly whose goal is to maximize private profit is a whole lot different than a government administered network whose goal is public service.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Ok, people need to save more instead of spending everything they earn. That's been true for a long time. However, savings accounts earn such a low rate of return that with any inflation at all it costs money to have it in savings.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
The CEOs secured the shareholders a great bail-out and the shareholders just want to say thanks.
The big idea with recession-time spending is to generate infrastructure that will help build the economy in the future. Spend now, reap later. For the Great Depression this was roads, bridges and the like. The problem with extrapolating this thinking into the modern age is that a road continues to perform its function for 50 years while broadband goes obsolete in a couple of years.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Do not engage the ism. Do not feed the ism. Starve the ism-ite the food of attention, and it will wither away.
Because there is no saw dust in my bread because of regulation. Because regulation prevents 100's of women from burning up in locked textile factories.
Because our liberties are protected better because they are not on the market.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
You cant really call it overpriced if people are buying it. Maybe try and get together some people together and have a boycott by residential users if you want to lower the price. If it was actually overpriced, people wouldnt be buying it, because it wouldnt be worth the money they are spending, they feel it is worth it, so they spend, it is the consumers choice
The focus on tax cuts by republicans is ridiculous Im all for tax cuts but we tried handing everyone a check last year and it did little to prevent this. People are saving money right now (those who can) if you give them more its not going to get spent.
The Democrats trying to use this as a do everything bill hiring more teachers, nurses, cops, and the like is *not* stimulus, its not a bad thing to do but every teacher you hire has an indefinite growing expense. Are you going to fire all these teachers when the package has run its course or have you just increased the ongoing expense of government?
--
The Tax cuts, if any, should be limited to people within 15% of the poverty line.
The Spending should only be for capital projects Build a birdge and there is a much smaller annual cost for maintenance when the package is done.
--
The Republicans are doing nothing but fighting for ground to piss on, and Obama and the Congressional Dems are doing nothing but using FUD to push though a package with some stimulus and mostly wasteful open ended government spending.
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
Bad juju.
No likey series of tubes.
Broadband not truck. Can't fill up.
Bad juju cause bad thing happen.
Paper good juju.
Old ways best.
Good juju make good thing happen.
Wi-Max really can't operate without exclusively-licensed, and there's simply not enough of it to go around. The FCC has been dragging its feet on the AWS3 band, for instance, which is prime ground for a Wi-Max network. Breaking the DSL/Cable duopolies can happen only if the command-and-control spectrum allocation process is abandoned. Tim Wu made this point in the New York Times a few months ago, but it seems that nobody at the FCC has listened to him.
Canada must be even further behind then the us then. Because our internet is slower and more expensive then the providers give in the USA.
Maybe try and get together some people together and have a boycott by residential users
Boycotting Internet access? Count any Slashdotter out!
N/T.
You may not agree with their economic policies, but they have a point here. There has been a lot of fraud, waste and abuse in the use of the funds from the universal service fund that was set up to subsidize rural communications. Chances are, this $10B would just go into the money pit and end up padding the pockets of the major telecoms rather than being pumped directly into infrastructure development.
If you want to see a real change, then get rid of the franchising laws. If the federal government could help the railroads deal with local and state laws in the 19th century, it can do so today with franchising laws that restrict access to these markets.
There, I'll bet you never thought a conservative-libertarian would champion federal intervention.
15th in the world is remarkably low for the nation with the highest GDP and a history / tremendous self-pride of being technologically advanced for the past 100 years or so. That said, you make a good point; this is yet another examples of Americans being slightly below #1, and running around screaming about it.
Years and years ago, I was in a bar, sloshed. Absolutely mind boggling drunk. I was so thoroughly intoxicated that I was seeing double. An easy solution to this was to slap one hand over one eye and thus eliminate the duality. And there was this girl. This really hot, blond dreadlocked, sleeve tattoo girl. So I gave money to the bartender to get whatever she wanted and I lurch back to my table.
The girl and her friend sit at the neighboring table and she turns to me and says, "You're going to buy me a drink and not talk to me?" I give my present state of blitzness as an impediment to conversation, but she won't hear of it. For an hour or so, we chat and she laughs and she touches and all is great. But at some point, my party affiliation becomes a topic of conversation.
"You're a Republican?" she asks.
"Yep."
She gets up and leaves the table. She would never speak to me nor even make eye contact ever again.
Ah, open mindedness.
that is not a good reason to be annoyed at your ISP, in my opinion. Having monthly caps should improve things. If an ISP has N customers that all use only 1GB a month, that ISP has lower capital expenses than an ISP with N customers that all use 100GB a month. Having caps (and appropriate pricing!) makes sense. They shouldn't be offering unlimited service to begin with, at least not without charging you for it.
If your ISP starts mucking with your packets just because your using a third party VOIP app, the it's time to be upset.
A duopoly is better than a monopoly. A pathetic amount of government intervention yielded pathetic results that were still better than what we had before. But now people have forgotten and are blaming everything on the government.
If anything, we need *more* government involvement. Letting companies own the lines to your house is a recipe for disaster. The city should own the lines, and allow any company to provide service on them. This will maximize competition.
Oh, yes. Very helpful. Don't bother attempting to address any of the arguments written about in the article; we are happy to take you on faith.
Your brain is not a computer.
You cant really call it overpriced if people are buying it.
That argument doesn't really work in a monopoly. For instance, when AT&T was broken up, nearly everyone in the US already had phone service, and yet prices came down. It's hard to argue that AT&T monopoly phone service wasn't "overpriced". At the very least, it illustrates how hard it is to determine a fair price in the absence of competition.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I don't know about that. The article has a point about the Duopoly. It's commonly cited on Slashdot whenever one carrier (usually Comcast) does something dickish.
The article seems to be tacitly implying a need for market regulation to break the duopolies, which is rarely a right-wing position.
The WSJ is one of the most predictably biased editorial pages I've ever seen. Their very raison d'être is to beat the drum of laissez-faire capitalism. This allows consolidation/ buyouts and produces monopolies and higher prices to consumers.
We need to regulate and provide broadband as a utility like all the countries ahead of us do.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
And if you happen to live in an area that isn't profitable to run service to I suppose you should just move then, right?
Yes. Just because you want the benefits of living further from other people, don't expect me to subsidize the costs that decision incurs.
Rupert Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal along with the rest of his media conglomerate, News Corp. Does this stimulus affect his assets one way or the other?
If I'm charging $50 per ounce for onions and I'm the only source of onions in a city and getting an "onion reseller license" ("building infrastructure") is really expensive (but I got mine since I used to runt the government-owned onion store wouldn't you say that my onions are overpriced?
And good luck trying to boycott someone who's got a regional monopoly, that's like when guys complain about always having to make the first move and some woman says "well why don't you guys get together and stop hitting on women? then we'd have to hit on you guys.", any sane person understands that it doesn't work.
/Mikael
(Why do I even bother replying to AC trolls?)
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Wall street is not just a place where executives take foolishly large bonuses for questionable business practices. If a recent interveiw on the 500k salary cap had accurate data, you don't have to fear anything about the money on wall street going to a couple of super rich people. According to the compensation expert they had (NPR, a week or two ago), the $500k compensation strata hits in the 3rd to 4th year of employment for the MBAs who populate the firms who live and breathe the WSJ.
These are just regular, working folks who want you to know that this money shouldn't got to broadband, especially since (1) they already get great service in New York, and (2) they lose more in $100 bills they leave in their drycleaning than they pay for broadband in a year.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The current national duopoly is the result of two extremes screaming at each other for the past 70 years or so.
One said screams that we need to regulate everything and have the government put everything in order so that everything works one way.
The other side screams that we need to degregulate everything and let companies do what they want to do in order to make more money.
Well, we've got both right now. These companies - cable and copper providers - are both regulated and deregulated and we have, in effect, a system that simply looks at numbers and says "this is good" or "this is bad" - and now both sides are screaming even louder to regulate or deregulate.
You know what we really need? More options. It's not about regulating or deregulating an industry, it's about competition.
You can regulate the shit out of an industry so long as there is enough momentum to allow new players to move in and drive down prices. Without competition, over regulation becomes a burden on the business and the consumer - by forcing a business to comply with a standard of practice, they (the monopoly/duopoly/*opoly) will pass costs associated with regulation to the consumer, either in direct billing costs, reduced support overhead, or poor infrastructure maintenance.
You can have a completely deregulated industry as well, but you still need that competitive momentum in order to keep the consumer from being raped in the ass. In a completely deregulated environment, the *opoly turn into the local Barrons of the community and become the almighty gatekeepers of the industry.
In either environment, if you have real competition, consumers become valuable again (as opposed to the business commodity they are in the telco and entertainment industries).
In the end, I think the best fit for America is a mixture of deregulation and dynamic "as needed" regulation (as opposed to the blanket industry-wide regulation that's currently enforced), and a breakup of local monopolies.
Here's a wild idea.
We need a decent rail system in the US, we have trackbeds all over the place in bad shape. Railroads ran through almost every major town. Take the trackbeds, fix them up for a new rail system. While that's being done, since you're digging up anyway, lay new commuinication cables to each town alongside the rail bed. Now you've pretty much addressed broadband and rail transportation at the same time.
Last mile can be handled either through local cables that the town can build out, OR wireless broadcasts at the railroad stations and using the local post offices as repeaters.
There, federal rail, and unified communication. Oh, and don't let the NRPC or the USPS run this, they have enough problems.
If its not worth boycotting, you are not being overcharged. If it wasn't worth more to you than the money you are paying, you wouldn't be purchasing it.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
The problem is that there's a natural monopoly because of the physical impediments to connecting a dwelling to the network. I have three wires coming into my home:
1) Power line
2) Cable line
3) Phone line
It would be prohibitively expensive to set up the infrastructure to connect me to yet another line and that's what would be necessary to have true competition.
To understand the problem, compare what we have in broadband service to the way that dial-up worked. In the dial-up market there were thousands of competitors because while local phone carriers provided the phone line, they had no control beyond the last mile. You could connect to compuserve, AOL, or hundreds of independent ISP's. The result was increasing speeds (within the physical limits of the phone wires) and declining prices.
With broadband, you have the cable companies who have monopoly control over their wires and you have the phone company that has an effective monopoly. Yeah, I can get DSL from other providers, but the phone company deliberately interferes with this and because of their control of the local pipes, can generally offer cheaper service. So while you have competition, in theory, between DSL and cable, as a practical matter it's nonexistent.
There's potential for competition from wireless and that's somewhere the government can do a lot to help. However, wireless will always be slower than a wired connection, and ultimately if I want wireless I'm looking at the same companies who currently provide DSL service (AT&T, Verizon, etc).
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Sometimes I wish you free market nuts would get exactly what you are wishing for, though only after I have sufficient supplies and ammunition to ride out the ensuing dark age.
I dunno about that. I recently moved to Texas and found that their scheme of allowing multiple power companies to "compete" in the same market led to nothing but price collusion and more expensive power for the customer.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
than a government administered network whose goal is public service
You'll forgive me if my experiences with DMV don't inspire confidence in the ability of government to run anything.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I think the "authority" model might work. Let a local authority handle the connection to the home, just as they do with water, sewer, etc. Then allow you to utilize the data pipe in any way you wish - select from any ISP willing to hook up to the authority. This way it would be up to the local authority how to best connect each home... fiber, copper, even over-the-air. When it comes to these hookups to the home, you can't have unbridled competition... so why do we pretend?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Allow every company that wants to dig up whatever infrastructure they want wherever they want?
If they think they can do it profitably and clean up after themselves then why not allow it?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Right Wingers love to say government can't fix anything, and so they elect people like George W Bush to prove it.
Might not be such a bad idea. Just imagine the Reality TV that could come of this sort of thing:
"Back hoe battle! Watch the Comcast Constructors stomp the Verizon Victors! In a neighborhood near you!
Could be quite the show. Imagine the residual benefits - more jobs in road paving, more advertisements, better bonding with your neighbors (local teams could ninja the telecoms as a side show....). What's not to like?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Of course WSJ says this.
They doctrinally believe, and are paid to amplify the message that the ills of the world can be cured by giving a free hand to the same people responsible for the global financial collapse.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Doesn't this seem to be a situation where you can't just have a "free market"?
I agree, but the answer isn't just to give the existing company a monopoly.
People generally get pretty good sewer and water service... why not use that model? The government, acting as a non-profit authority with revenue from usage fees, installs and maintains the connection. Then, customers can sign up with any data service provider that they wish. Verizon can still sell telephone service, Comcast can still sell television service - but they now have to share a single fiber/cable/wireless connection into the home via the local authority.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
To beat the dead horse of the 'Information Superhighway' analogy, let us compare the Internet as infrastructure to our roads as infrastructure. The Interstate Highway system was planned and funded by the federal government and has done more to enhance the economic growth of the United States than probably any other public investment in our history. Without the federal government feeling envy about Hitler's autobahn, the Interstate highway system would NEVER EVER have been built by private investment and we would likely be much less wealthy as a nation than we are today.
Let's also take a look at the list of 'most wired' countries. What strikes me immediately is that nearly all of them are much more socialist-leaning than the United States. Denmark, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, etc. South Korea's dramatic improvements lately have been attributed to that nation's deliberate subsidies and investements. They are also geographically quite small.
I'll be the first to complain about wasteful government programs (I LOATHE the California DMV more than nearly any agency on earth) but, having dealt with Adelphia, Time Warner, and AT&T in the past, I seriously doubt that the so-called 'competition' we have in the ISP industry is going to accomplish anything except higher prices and bandwidth caps. One might recall that the 700Mhz spectrum auction -- supposedly a panacea for lack of competition -- resulted in the incumbents buying everything up.
Let's face it. There is really no competition. I live in Los Angeles and my only option is Time Warner. This is some serious bullshit.
Why not, the good people of our small towns and countrysides subsidize the ever lasting cycle of inner-city welfare recipients. (The modstick will sting for that one) All joking aside, I used to live in a rural area (northern MN), and there were/are currently no options for broadband (parents and lil bro still on dial-up). If they really wanted or needed it, they would move 15-20 miles and live near the "city" (population still less than 3k). If a demand is created, a business that wants a profit will swoop in to fill that demand, as always, for a price.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
because sweden's population is concentrated in the bottom of the country
if the population of sweden were uniformly distributed from lapland to jutland, you would be 100% correct. but if 90% of the population is concentrated in a small area near denmark, and the other 10% is scattered about the rest of the area, sweden can still rank highly even if that 10% were completely ignored
meanwhile, the usa's population, while concentrated somewhat on the coasts, is not so nearly concentrated as sweden's is
in other words, the population density of kansas is much higher than the population density of lapland, making kansans a much greater foil to a high usa rating than the sami people are to sweden's rating
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
FYI, right now I have a $25 / month WiMAX provider in Baltimore (up to $35 in 4 months). I purchased the stand-alone modem since and it's been pretty reliable. In general the ping times are a little slower than my Cavalier DSL but the throughput is consistently faster.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Let's assume for a moment that the government allocates it's money efficiently and makes the best decisions possible. Even so...
Government's goal: Increase consumer spending to increase the velocity of money without causing inflation and without changing the money supply. (M| * V^ = P| * Q^)
1. Government spends X amount in stimulus package.
2. Government must raise X amount through taxes.
3. Consumers recognize higher taxes in the future.
4. Consumers save money to offset higher taxes in the future.
5. The velocity of money decreases.
6. The government's policies fail.
Of course, we all know that the government won't allocate those resources efficiently at all. You can see how bad of a decision that "stimulating" the economy ultimately will be.
Well, compare your internet and mobile phone service to Asian countries, and let me know.
It would have to be done with the electric utilities rather than the water, as quite obviously not everyone is attached to a city sewer
Yes, I am obsessed with ellipses.
Of course they do. The Wall Street Journal is a temple of supply-side economics. According to them, the government can't do anything right, except cut capital gains taxes. I would have been very surprised if they'd had anything good to say about this bill.
So the WSJ is pro-market... that doesn't invalidate their argument. This bill still stinks. Stimulus spending doesn't work the way it's being advertised... it has little to no effect on short term job preservation or creation. While we all need things like roads and bridges, spending tax dollars on roads and bridges does not stimulate the economy in the short term... that money takes too long to percolate through the economy.
Stimlus spending didn't cure the Great Depression, nor did it shake Japan out of it's 90's doldrums. Admirers of the New Deal take great offense at the notion that the New Deal was a failure in reversing the Depression, but even left-leaning historians and economists agree that it was WWII production, not the New Deal, that finally brought us out of the depression. Shouldn't the metric of whether an anti-depression program worked be the elimination of the depression?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I thought market regulation was left-wing. I'd hate to be the eagle on the US emblems, who doesn't know his left wing from his right wing.
Yes, I am obsessed with ellipses.
wait what not everyone has water? ;)
You're forgetting that some city dwellers are unfamiliar with life beyond the 'burbs.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
No, it was founded under the assumption that the federal government is necessary for some things, but needs to be closely watched, monitored, and limited. The Articles of Confederation actually provided a weaker national-level government, and it failed.
I wish people would remember THAT.
But the Constitution was about central political and military power, not economic micromanagment. Keep in mind that just a few decades after the founding, we killed off things like The Bank of the United States because we thought government had no damn business being such a big player in our economy.
The standard has always been for a very minimal federal involvement in providing services to the public, usually when the job was too big for private interests... things like a post office. Very, very limited roles.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I thought market regulation was left-wing. I'd hate to be the eagle on the US emblems, who doesn't know his left wing from his right wing.
It is. Thus why I said that it was "rarely a right-wing position" (I almost said "never" but I am careful about absolutes)
Better question: Why do you bother signing your posts when your username is at the top anyhow?
The article fails to mention that in both Korea and Japan, the government played a major role: In Japan, by forcing the incumbent to allow multiple IP operators to use the fiber at very low rates and in Korea, by construction subsidies. This isn't really technology competition as the article calls for - all the countries with cheap broadband use fiber-to-the-home or fiber-to-the-apartment-complex, with CATV playing a relatively small role. (There's very limited WiBro, the local version of WiMax, deployment in Korea, which plays almost no role.) And, as far as I know, all those countries have deployed such cheaper and more advanced infrastructure without violating network neutrality.
The argument about population density might explain the absence of DSL and fiber in Montana, but doesn't exactly explain the high cost of FiOS in New Jersey (or its limited availability). The population density of New Jersey is very similar to that of Korea, at around 400-500 people/sq km.
How about a single "infrastructure" monopoly -- call it Ma Pole, or something -- that leases the telephone poles, culverts, and underground pipes to whatever provider asks? You could have a free market in suppliers but maintain the natural monopoly of infrastructure.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
You have two options. Cable or DSL. Period.
Usually from two companies.
Now if you go with DSL, you're STILL dealing with :|
two companies as the Internet Business is isolated
from the phone service by law. So when the DSL dies,
they point the finger at the phone company
and their deteriorating copper plant. Of course
the phone company simply points back at the DSL folks.
There ISN'T any fu**ing competition. You get to
choose between shit and more shit. It's a lose /
lose situation for the customer.
No one wants to get into the game because only
super-sized monopolies who are handed taxpayer
money to build the infrastructure to support it
can afford to do so.
It's astronomically expensive to plant fiber and
the supporting hardware to cover an area the size
of the United States. Even if you CAN, at some point
you are going to be riding on optical backbones owned
by the competition.
So even IF we ever see real competition to the major
players, they still control the data flow through their pipes.
It's going to take a full blown tear down and
reorganization of how broadband is delivered to
the end customer before we ever see any changes.
" He who controls the spice, controls the universe. "
I'm normally not a free market interventionist, but the problem with your approach is that it's not just rural customers that suffer - poorer urban areas would also suffer. Just ask anyone living in a "food desert". Of course, there's a reason such conditions exist - high crime and low neighborhood incomes are not conducive towards any sort of a profit margin. Consequently, where the free market provides any solution, it's inherently limited and expensive to make up for the associated costs and limited customer base. Unfortunately, little of this helps the poor stop being poor, which just makes a bad problem that much worse
That said, our current setup is the worst of both worlds. We have government sanctioned utility monopolies (or oligopolies) without any of the benefits that such an arrangement might provide. The result is a worst of both worlds scenario where they can cherry-pick which neighborhoods they want to provide access to, which neighborhoods they'll roll out future access to, and set higher prices with lower service to boot. Considering the relative infancy of broadband technology (consider where home-based telephone and Internet service was in, say, 1900), I'm fine with letting companies compete and sorting out universal access later, but they need to actually compete. Otherwise, if we're going to let them enjoy legally limited competition, we need to start demanding a few concessions in return.
This article is from February 1st.
Since then, that $10 billion for broadband has been cut from the bill.
Move along...
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Goldman Sachs
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/02/08/geithner_v_the_american_oligarchs/
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Did you take a shower today? The water probably came from the government, through government pipes.
Did you drive to work? You probably drove on a government road.
Was your country occupied by a foreign army? That's probably because of your government funded Army.
Do you have electricity? It probably came to your house through a wire that was installed on a government mandated easement.
I could give you more examples... a lot more examples, but I think I'd be wasting my time.
The WSJ is severely biased towards the wrong right.
The Federal Reserve?
Your brain is not a computer.
Please describe for us the wildly successful and efficient government bureaucracies you seem to be holding in mind as counter-examples to, oh, just about any government office I can think of. I worked with various government family and child service agencies for a number of years. Bite me, you and all the brainwashed mods who are going to help send us all straight down the shit-hole.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
would block all teh intertubes oO"
...you choose to live far away from where the food, water and energy comes from, don't expect the people there to subsidize your consumption, they should be able to step in and have fair market rates and be able to sit on supplies until they get what level of profit they can extract.
It works both ways friend, unless you think your food is magically produced in the back room of your favorite restaurant or deli, or that your water comes from the magic pixie dust tap, or that your energy supplies all come from the magic Mr. fusion plug in the wall, or that manufactured goods all come from the walmart replicator trucks.
All of those things and more are heavily dependent on a "commons" approach to extraction/production and delivery. No water would get to you without a commons run pipeline system and water being taken from the rural areas without compensation, zip,nada, it is just seized and diverted and taken, food comes from there, and is delivered to you on the commons maintained highway system, we don't have universal toll roads where every piece of property maintains their own roads and can charge what the market will bear. And so on. If the power company had to negotiate a transit fee with every property owner that their electric lines cross, and cut them a check forever, what do you think your electricity bill would really be today? All the buildings you hang out in, they just magically sprang into existence, or did they get built with materials extracted and then formed into modern building materials in the rural areas first? Can we just keep all our resources in the rural areas and force you to move there if you want an apartment to hang out in, or food to eat or water to drink, at our rates we get to set without any governmental oversight or interference? To cut to the chase in this thread, just to make it even simpler, how about what we are talking about, copper wires or fiber in various forms for data? How about each property owner gets to negotiate if this data line is run through their property or not, then we'll see what "broadband" would really cost.
See?
A little bit of reverse caring and sharing and understanding would sure help with a modern more or less necessity now, advanced communication. The only reason we have a government is to negotiate the big picture things, and in the 21st century, communications are now part of the big picture.
Colonialism is the suxors, man, folks who are outside the major urban areas just want a bit more of a fairer shake in things. It isn't a whole lot to ask *at all* considering the bulk of your life's necessities come from there, and so many of them are subsidised in your favor already by government mandate and commons investment.
Okay, if you wanted broadband in a village, I would understand. But how would distance affect a densly populated downtown area. Densly populated area in US are no better off than sparsly populated areas
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Excellent post. Unfortunately there's a third option to the innovate or die system. #3: Ask for a bailout. This screws everything up. Wish the gov could see that.
I would like to add to your point about rural broadband. People need to quit saying it isn't offered. It's offered, just not at a price they want to pay.
In Dec. I was in the middle of rural jungle in costa rica and found broadband. They used line of sight dishes opposed to cables to make it all work. It wasn't cheap to setup, but that's the price you pay to live out in the jungle.
1. Throw all the cable and telecom lobbyists out of Washington.
2. Revoke the corporate charters of Comcast, Verizon, et al.
3. Strip Comcast, Verizon, et al of their right of ways.
4. Ban any politician that complains from holding public office.
5. Restructure the nations communications infrastructure to encourage competition and private investment.
The root of the subprime meltdown was the semi-government agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They alone created a market for the subprime mortgages. Lenders simply have to make the loan and then they are able to cash the loan out by selling them to Fannie or Freddie (this is why both of these agencies are now bankrupt and has been taken over by the federal government, feds had to give them several hundred billion dollars in bailout immediately and possibly more in the future). So yet again, government intervention was the cause of the economic crisis. I can't imagine more government intervention (bailout package) would do any good, it would probably just prolong the depression.
What if several people want to dig up the same major road at various times. You don't want any kind of regulation there? No attempts to protect existing infrastructure from damage, or force companies to publicly document where their lines are going? Just nothing... a wild-west mentality toward building infrastructure. That sounds like a good idea?
I think free market is a great thing in many if not most cases; but I also think there are some situations that the free market can't handle. Infrastructure - be it roads, telephone, fiber, sewage, trash collection, water lines - falls into the latter category. If any one company controls these things to the exclusion of all others (especially up to the point where a new provider can't enter market to offer competition), the consumers pay the price.
[pedantic]Although she used that character on "Laugh-in", that particular quote is from her character's appearance on SNL, in 1976.[/pedantic]
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Hey, now... my brother is on a well. :)
I'm just pointing out that, where people are connected to water and/or sewer, it tends not to be much of an issue because it works and isn't too expensive.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Advanced broadband (gigabit or multi-gigabit bidirectional to the end user) is a natural monopoly. Once you have the fiber and a basic complement of bandwidth installed, the marginal cost of adding more bandwidth is near zero. That makes the competitive price near zero. It also makes competitive market entry very difficult or impossible.
Cable companies are part of the entertainment industry. They built their bandwidth to deliver entertainment, and their limited bandwidth makes it a scarce resource and justifies their business models. They want to keep the bandwidth dumbed down to preserve their business models and those of their content suppliers. They want everything bundled and very limited end-user choice in what content they pay for.
Telco's had been common carriers -- providing bandwidth only -- but they want the profits of the entertainment business models and even if they install fiber they dumb the bandwidth down to preserve its scarcity.
If we want real, high-speed broadband the policy should be to prohibit providers of bandwidth from providing or selecting content or services. They should be strictly providers of bandwidth.
Content and services should be competitive. That punctures some existing business models, but opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, with bidirectional, gigabit or greater speed bandwidth any end-user can become a content or service provider. The only limit is how innovative people can be in producing content and services.
Achieving the separation of content/services from bandwidth can be done by making bandwidth a regulated monopoly, by having end-user ownership of the last mile of bandwidth, by municipal or non-profit ownership of the bandwidth, or by other alternatives.
If the bandwidth is high enough, competition in bandwidth will not work to make it offered more broadly or increase its use.
Nope, our system pumps water straight from the ground, and sewage goes to a tank which gets pumped by a private company every couple years.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
Yes. Those 3 people are the only ones to blame.
"But this one goes to 11!"
So if you want speeds faster than France, move to the one of the places listed above. It's that simple.
Wow, I really don't want anything to do with a solution you would consider complicated!
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
If Obama is the saviour and is 100% certain that this pork spending bill is the answer, why does he keep begging and pleading with the American people and the republicans to support it? He has the votes already. He's just looking for a place to spread the blame when this whole thing doesn't work.
I think one of my other posts might be more up your alley. I wouldn't suggest that we abandon the idea of allowing market forces to come into play, but I'm also not in favor of a wild-west mentality toward building infrastructure.
I think what lots of people fail to understand is the "governmental intervention" isn't always at odds with the idea of a "free market". Sometimes the government need to act in order to open a market to make it free. I think the idea should be to make the infrastructure (actual cabling and associated hardware) public, but probably charge a fee for using it. However, even that work of building and maintaining the infrastructure could be contracted out to a private company. It could even be owned by a private company, but in that case it should be *heavily* regulated to avoid unfair practices.
Verizon shouldn't be able to own the network and provide voice service in the same market. They also shouldn't be able to give preferential access to their business partners. If they're allowed to do anything like that, it will lead to an inherent conflict of interest which will eventually be abused.
Did you get turned away from an emergency room because your heart attack isn't serious enough of an injury to warrant you cutting everyone else in line? You're probably a customer of Canadian government-provided healthcare.
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I don't know. Jokes aside, around here, the DMV has gotten remarkably efficient.
My wife was from New Jersey, we live in New York. She had a car and a Drivers License.
It took her a whole day at the DMV in New Jersey to get the paperwork done (waiting in lines) on their end. It took a half an hour to do the paperwork ("waiting on queue" time included).
Shocked her almost as much as when she found out her insurance rates would go DOWN moving to New York. ;)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
What if several people want to dig up the same major road at various times. No attempts to protect existing infrastructure from damage, or force companies to publicly document where their lines are going? Just nothing... a wild-west mentality toward building infrastructure.
WTF? I say "If they think they can do it profitably and clean up after themselves then why not allow it?" and you think I'm in favor of a wild west mentality?
I should be obvious to anyone who isn't pushing an agenda that I wasn't advocating just letting any old slob with a jackhammer and some cat5 start tearing up the roads. I would presume that they'd still need to meet local codes and get building permits. I would presume that they'd have to pay to have the street repaved after it was torn up -- in the same manner that my existing natural gas or water utilities have to pay if they rip up the road. I would presume that they'd have to respect existing infrastructure in the same manner as anyone who is building anything has to respect existing infrastructure.
What you seem to have missed or just ignored is the fact that even if you had a business plan that would meet all of the above requirements and wanted to enter a new market you would be shut out from doing so by a government backed monopoly.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
There's a reason for that, and that reason is that the right-wingers aren't interested in admitting what a resounding failure free market economics is when practiced without sufficient regulations.
I mean obviously Adam Smith was a commie, pinko bastard, because who else would acknowledge that deregulation is anything other than necessary. The hypothesis of deregulation as a means of generating wealth has at this point been pretty thoroughly debunked. It just doesn't work, capitalist societies with a complete free market will always move to a full and complete monopoly over absolutely everything.
Deregulation can help certain things depending upon what the regulations were. More often than not when deregulation is the answer it's because the regulations were grossly ill conceived in the first place.
Really regulations which unlevel the playing field or artificially restrict competition between rivals are the ones that need to be thought out. And those are typically the regulations that the right-wingers have been resistant to clean up.
I so wish I still had my points from a few days ago...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
"A duopoly is better than a monopoly"
Of course it is. Nothing better than having a choice of who bends you over and rapes you.
"But this one goes to 11!"
WTF? I say "If they think they can do it profitably and clean up after themselves then why not allow it?" and you think I'm in favor of a wild west mentality?
Maybe. If you're really saying "allow absolutely anyone who *thinks* that they can do it profitably and clean up after themselves." Otherwise, you're dealing with governmental regulations that will limit who can enter the market, which goes back to my question as to whether you can truly have a "free market" when it comes to building infrastructure.
You mean education?
Yes, I am obsessed with ellipses.
I recently got a Drivers License from scratch after moving to another state and having had a suspension. I walked in, took a ticket, waited 2 minutes, took the writing test, waited 5 minutes, took the driving test, walked next door to the Treasurer, waited 5 minutes, had my picture taken, and walked out with my license in my hand. There was literally nothing I could find to complain about.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Counterpoint:
Quick summary: Creekstone wanted to go beyond USDA regulations and test all of its cows for mad cow disease. The USDA, beholden to the interests of larger meat packing companies who donâ(TM)t want to compete on safety, told them they couldnâ(TM)t. A lower court had ruled in favor of Creekstone, but now it looks like the company wonâ(TM)t get the chance to market their product with greater assurances of safety. Thanks, USDA!
Source (plenty others available): http://www.jacobgrier.com/blog/archives/1326.html
So there may be no sawdust in your bread, but there may be mad cow lurking in your burger. In your case it is already too late, psycho, but the rest of us would like the opportunity to choose beef that we know has been tested. USDA is preventing that.
You also falsely assume that government regulation is the only kind of regulation there is, and you are also the one who started spouting off about regulation when GP was discussing the massive debt that the spending plan will incur.
I seem to have misread your introduction; here I had assumed you were talking about GP, when I see now that it was a warning against the ism-laden content of your post.
Your brain is not a computer.
The mortgage industry hardly ever had a free hand. When you have government assuming significant risk by guaranteeing loans, you don't have the necessary risk vs reward considerations that keeps markets healthy. So yes, the government was complicit but hardly the only ones to blame. You do have companies and individuals that took advantage of the situation to increase profit. You also have individuals that took advantage of the situation to get more home than they could afford. There is plenty of blame to go around. What I think is funny now is that you had unsustainable deficit spending by consumers that lead to unsustainable economic growth. That bubble has burst. To fix it we are now going to inject unsustainable deficit spending by the government. What a laugh!
"Written on the pages is the answer to the never ending story..."
Yes, I think that someone who has a potentially viable business plan should be allowed to try and execute that business plan with a minimal amount of governmental interference. Make them put up the money to repair the streets in trust and then get the fuck out of their way.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Competition or no, the "fair price" is always the one both the buyer and seller agree to. To call something "overpriced" you have to compare it against some preferred, subjective reference price.
In this case you're comparing the AT&T price (which itself was far from a free-market price, being the result of monopoly privileges established by the government) against an average of future prices established through further coercion. Naturally this latter price can be made a low as you like by simply applying increasing levels of force -- but only at the expense of greater costs elsewhere, many of which are not easily measurable (e.g. what is the dollar-value of the loss of liberty?).
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
People keep saying this, but my experiences with the DMV have been about the same as my experience with AT&T, Citibank, and most the major airlines (long lines/on hold forever, mistakes that take forever to fix, completely unhelpful costumer service, etc.). And I'd rather deal with the DMV than Acer or Well's Fargo.
From TFA:
We're told that we now live in an era of more regulation and more government spending, but neither approach is how problems get solved in technology...
What we need to get the U.S. back into the top ranks of wired countries is more competition, not taxpayer handouts. That would be a real stimulus.
What this guy doesn't seem to get is that we only get more competition through more regulation. As was the case when Carter launched the case that broke up AT&T.
We need to stir the pot every once in a while and break things up. It's time to break up AT&T again to create more competition in local exchanges.
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
That's like saying telephone service can't be overpriced. The internet has become one of the most crucial communication venues just because people are paying for it does not mean it's not overpriced. In any situation where there is a monopoly or duopoly on a utility level service prices can and will be fixed, by the providers, to a point of maximum strain unless otherwise regulated.
People are greedy and your isp is not your friend they make money from you it's what they do. If they can squeeze 30 bucks more a month without you giving up completely and going back to dialup or quiting the internet they will.
While I won't say you're wrong, I dislike this line of argument. Poor connectivity hinders American interests. Discourse on *why* it's poor, instead of the *effects* of it being poor, seems like a distraction at best.
At worst it's special pleading.
I know that's not your argument (cause I've read your posts for a while), but if you'd posted it anonymously I wouldn't know it from yet another "don't tread on me, America is different" excuses.
Who's spread out and who isn't is a waste of time. How we're going to get every American the best connectivity in the world matters.
Well Kudos for you. Let me outline my last experience with DMV. I walked into the office to renew my drivers license. Two clerks working behind the counter. One of them announces that she's going on her lunch break and puts a closed sign on her desk. The other one makes eye contact with me and then proceeds to pick up the phone and make a really "important" phone call: "You won't believe what my boyfriend did! He ran up my cell phone bill texting his ex girlfriend and now I can't afford that tattoo I was saving up for!"
A private business would have lost me as a customer at this point, but alas, Governmental monopoly so I don't have the luxury of doing business with someone else.
Patriotism is bigotry.
Love of my country makes me a bigot? Quite the sweeping statement you've made there.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
1. Cut spending. We can start with the failed War on Drugs, or perhaps even cut military spending. We spend billions of dollars a year on military projects that get canceled. Or we could even (Gasp!) start pulling out of Iraq.
2. Revoke the tax-exempt status of churches. The really big mega-churches are pulling in millions of dollars a year, and yet so many religious types are violating the rules by inserting themselves into politics at any given opportunity. If those fuckers want to be relevant politically, they should pay.
3. Cap CEO pay lower than $500k. You shouldn't be getting hundreds of thousands of dollars for sitting around all day with your thumb up your ass and only occasionally appearing to give a few speeches.
4. Stop with the doom and gloom media stories. If you want people to have confidence in the economy, stop acting like it's the end of the world. Compared to the recessions in the 80s and 90s, we aren't so bad off as they were then. It just seems bad because the dollar figure is higher (inflation notwithstanding).
5. ????
6. PROFIT!
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
A fair amount of fiber already runs along the train tracks, because the train companies already have the rights to that land. See this for more info: http://www.telecomramblings.com/2008/08/fiberrailroad-rights-of-way-case-finally-settled/
Think Deeply.
Yes because the inner city people can easily grow all the food they need inside the wonderfulness that is a city. Rural farming and development exist for a reason and it's not just so people from the city can have somewhere nice to live. That really only happens in areas close to a major city anyway. Humans need food, and lumber, and stone, and a dozen other things that come from rural communities.
I pretty much agree with you. It's very similar to what has been done in the electric industry. We'd have to be careful not to under-fund the infrastructure, as many feel has happened with the electrical distribution system.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You have options, don't let yourself be bullied or be labeled a victim.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
A government mandated monopoly whose goal is to maximize private profit is a whole lot different than a government administered network whose goal is public service.
Well, yes, and horses are different from unicorns.
If you add the word "stated" in front of "goal", then at least you're comparing real-world entities. But then the truth of your statement becomes debatable.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That's how I get my broadband (100/100), the city owns the fiber and private ISP's offer internet service over the fiber, I have a choice between 7 ISP's, 2 phone service providers and 3 cable TV companies, all operating over the fiber.
You're kidding, right?
Densely populated areas subsidize sparsely populated ones. Inner city "projects" are an exception, but from highway spending to general government services, urban areas receive less return per capita for their tax remits than rural areas do.
This is especially true at the federal level, where "countryside" amd "small-town" states receive far more funding, both per capita, and as a proportion of taxes remitted, than urban states (like MA & NJ) do.
Assuming that the barriers to entry don't make the cost of providing that service too high (you know... like building out cabling infrastructure).
It is quite common for their to be unfulfilled demand for services because of factors that tend to create a natural monopoly... such as broadband internet service.
Look at it this way -- even if your parents were willing to spend $1000/month on high-speed internet, no one would buld out cable to them, because even at that price, it would be unprofitable. It's even worse if we begin talking abou truly remote areas, or islands.
Whether it's important for all to have access to high-speed internet is another question, but we felt that way for telephone... and I feel high-speed internet is as important to changing our way of life as the telephone was.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Yes. Just because you want the benefits of living further from other people, don't expect me to subsidize the costs that decision incurs.
You already do.
And BTW, this was the argument made against Rural Electricification, one of the most successful social programs in U.S. history. The initial investment was paid back in spades by increased farm productivity.
Whether that lesson can be applied to Internet access is debatable, but you're just avoiding the debate.
By your standard, vacations on the moon are offered, just not at a price I want to pay.
There are, in fact, places in the U.S. where rural broadband is not offered.
They sure as hell aren't innocent in this mess.
I'm not not licking toads.
Did anyone give local loop unbundling a try?
I don't have a sig.
"If anyone agrees with the demoncrats in Congress the terrorists win!!" Seriously, the WSJ isn't even good for fishwrap these days...
so why are you making this argument? It's already been refuted every friggin time one of these lagging-broadband articles pops up. Fact: there are countries that are neither richer nor have greater population densities but DO have better broadband speeds/prices. Meanwhile, even the more densely populated areas in the USA are not up to par.
Even the Economist points out that this stimulus package probably won't have the effect Obama is hoping for because the companies will simply sit back and wait for the government to pay them for the upgrades a second time they would have had to pay for themselves.
Fixed that for you.
I'm not not licking toads.
Cool. So those jobs would be "Shovel and Tong Ready"? Neat!
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
And they sure as hell aren't the only ones to blame for this mess.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Offered at a price they're unwilling to pay?
Verizon wanted $24,500 to run 1.1 miles of cable to my house. There is no way I can afford that, and my neighbors who are making $20,000 a year working on a farm are never going to afford it.
Oh, I'm sorry, you were referring to satellite or wireless, not actual broadband. Both have such high latency that they are useless for games or VOIP, and such slow download speeds that they are worthless for anything besides email. If it's rainy, cloudy, or overcast you can bet that you'll only be getting about twice dial up speeds. Even better, the local monopoly on wireless runs an unbelievably shitty service. Downtimes are frequent and can last 24 hours or more.
Give me this ten billion (or even a fraction of it), and I'd set up locally owned cooperatives (max size 2-3 DSLAMs) that split the cost of operating directly amongst their members. Government subsidies would be necessary only for initial purchase of the backbones, workers (and policies like packet prioritization) would be elected on a short-term basis, and I'd have a 24 hour help-desk set up that would provide support for every coop in the state. A non-profit business could provide good competition to the big telcos while avoiding the problems brought up here about a government run service.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
You do realize, of course, that it's government regulation which maintains the duopoloy.
So are you going to craft laws which regulate the existing regulatory laws?
Except that cities and states have created monopolies which give those company ownership of the lines rather than retaining ownership themselves.
Those government entities have created the problem, so how do you expect the same government which fucked everything up to now fix it?
Where is the beef? Broadband is as much a delivery 'pipe' as these strategically important networks:
Electric Grid.
Interstate Freeways.
Railways.
Air Traffic Control.
Rivers and Canals.
The $10 billion investment will *not* bring about the degree of change possible if broadband networks do not get treated as a strategic asset with equal access. A government/private-sector non-profit consortium should be given the money and tasked to bring this about. There are many ways of achieving a policy objective. Now that there is money to do something, it should be put to use defining what will bring about the biggest bang for the buck, and then putting the investment there. It has to be a deliberate and coordinated effort, and not some relatively vague destination this $10 billion has taken.
The policy can direct the implementation of 1gbps connections, as Japan has set out to do, with the consortium tasked to determine how to bring it about. At an extreme, what can be achieved today is demonstrated by the world's fastest Internet connection. http://www.thelocal.se/7869/20070712. At 40gbps it blows away my puny 10mbps fiber connection. I'll be satisfied with 1gbps to match my wired home network.
The broadband private sector will likely 'rant and rave', to the degree this effort will be labelled 'socialism', ignoring the fact that it is quite the opposite - a 'capitalist' investment designed to bring about much bigger and better markets. Socialism tends to restrict free and open markets, which at times is the private sector's indulgence and delight. Philosophically, companies resistant to the idea are, by this definition, the 'socialists'. They do not see the bigger profit and are therefore of disservice to their shareholders.
As an example, Comcast has become the free marketer's laughing stock by deciding to 'close the runway to certain kinds of aircraft' http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9800629-38.html - instead of taking the more sensible approach of promoting and lobbying for the coordinated research, development, and adoption of higher bandwidth technologies in order to eliminate the bandwidth issue. A broadband network outside Comcast control eliminates this kind of inevitable private sector 'gaming'. Your SUV cannot be blocked from the freeway because Comcast objects to it carrying Firefox T-Shirts.
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
agreed. i agree with you about the "but the usa..." type bullshit whining deflections of valid criticism
but its different from holding the usa to say, the directive not to torture prisoners of war, than it is to hold the usa to ideologically neutral standards
well... unequal access to communication and media is not ideologically neutral, in results. but in cause, what is contributing to the problem, geography and population density, really is ideologically neutral
your goal is noble, i'm not criticizing that. but you must include the fact that the goal is harder for the usa. genuinely, ideologically neutrally, harder
criticizing bolivia for not having a strong navy is invalid for a landlocked country, while criticizing bolivia for ethnic strife (lowlanders versus uplanders) is valid. a bolivian has every right to scoff at your first criticism, and no right at all to scoff at your second criticism. not all criticism of a country is the same and bound to the same level of excuse making
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Don't listen. Read a real economist instead Here http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
Krugman, as in Paul Krugman, author of "Conscience of a Liberal" and unabashed supported of the welfare state?
Apparently, one isn't a "real economist" unless he holds neo-liberal/social democratic POLITICAL views? I call bovine manure! You're no better than a Fox News commentator spitting "Krugman is parroting Left Wing talking points".
Political, social and economic opinion influence each other but do not dictate each other. Krugman might be in your good books because he is Liberal, but you might not like all his economic stances. He is against rent, wage and price controls, and he considers opposition to global free trade/protectionism as the economic equivalent of opposition to evolutionary theory/support of "creation theory".
Look into Krugman's views on telecom policy in the US. The WSJ article in fact agrees exactly with Krugman. WSJ says the single biggest problem in the US is that there is an effective "Duopoly" and that in many places only one of the two "duopolists" serves the area. Krugman has for years blamed lack of broadband penetration on the botching of the telecom act for protecting incumbent monopolists from competition by treating internet service as a separate service from "telecommunications" in the traditional sense (phone and cable). Krugman himself said the same thing as the WSJ YEARS ago--the root of the problem is that the feds enabled a monopoly to form!
Krugman would absolutely agree with the WSJ that these billions would be pissed away. He advocated one of two solutions:
* regulation whereby telecom companies could not participate in "cross ownership" (owning content like newspapers/tv stations and multiple delivery mechanisms like internet and cable), and ordering the incumbents to provide access to their cable and phone networks at sustainable wholesale rates to ISPs, OR
* breaking up the monopolists, but not like how the RBOCs were formed that just produces a bunch of smaller monopolies. Instead, force companies to sell off some assets where they hold regional monopolies and regulate where needed to preserve at least limited competition in all markets.
Krugman's advocacy of regulation won't win over the "right-wing" but though they might not agree on the solution, I'm willing to bet that Krugman would agree that simply spending billions to build onto a system that is already flawed wouldn't be effective use of money without giving much more thought to the problem.
If you want to provide service in unprofitable areas you could provide incentives to make those areas profitable without forcing any particular company to run service there, and without granting a perpetual monopoly on service.
Let's say a phone company would lose $X/customer-month given expected customer revenues on an amortized basis over the life of the installation by running service to customers in town Y.
So if the government offered a tax credit of $X + $0.01/customer-month to anyone willing to run service in town Y, wouldn't the area become profitable to service? And since no particular company would be required to run the service there would be no need to grant a monopoly, and therefore the market would remain open to competitors.
Now you can argue about whether or not the government should be involved in phone service in the first place, but even if you maintain that we should have universal service, it hardly follows that we must have monopoly service providers.
"Densely populated areas subsidize sparsely populated ones. Inner city "projects" are an exception, but from highway spending to general government services, urban areas receive less return per capita for their tax remits than rural areas do.
This is especially true at the federal level, where "countryside" amd "small-town" states receive far more funding, both per capita, and as a proportion of taxes remitted, than urban states (like MA & NJ) do."
While I agree with your premise, this does have limits. For example, being from MA I can assure you that the bulk of our tax dollars are spent either state-wide or in Boston... the former roughly benefiting everyone equally (as in, per capita) and the latter benefiting the sea-board urbanized area almost exclusively. This is possible because both of our state legislative bodies are strongly loaded against Western Mass, the House by there being a higher population and the Senate by there being more (and geographically smaller) towns in the Eastern portion (also known as the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area), thus creating a huge power divide between the different regions of the state. We've been subsidizing Boston for decades, and it is pretty common to see changes in taxation which effectively lower them in Boston while raising them in the rest of the state.
There's definitely a case to be made out here for giving Boston to Rhode Island and merging with Vermont.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
1) We keep talking about lending. What about PRODUCING? If I take a tree (worth, say, $50) and cut it down, (and then plant a seedling, I'm a good, green lumberjack!) and make it into a $500 table, haven't I created wealth?
And isn't money just a representation of wealth? And if we want to get rich, isn't the wealth more important than the money that represents it? We don't need to stimulate lending. We need to stimulate PRODUCTION.
2) We don't have a duopoly. In most areas, it's now at least a quadropoly or a pentopoly of choices for broadband, and the choices are multiplying. For example, just the other day, there was an article here on slashdot about wireless ISPs. I use one - Digital Path in Northern California. Reasonable service, good prices, available in most areas where DSL/Cable aren't.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
yeah... a government body whose goal is public service.
There is no such thing as public service when money is involved.
As far as service is concerned.
Private company benefits shareholders.
Government network benefits public sector employees.
The public always gets screwed.
The only good thing about going the private way is at least the money is not stolen from me via taxes and I have the choice to opt out.
This was an incredibly insightful comment and deserves better. Just more of the left-wing nutshits on Slashdot that get mod points too often and abuse them, I guess...
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
Installing a lot of redundant "last mile" paths is hard. Redundant == inefficient. Maybe there's more competition in Tokyo because of the density, whereas in the US, how many different ways can we afford to wire the same suburban subdivision? Having copper pairs and coax cable at the same time is already better than just one or the other.
The future is probably wireless. In a decade or two these arguments about whether there is enough fiber going to every house, and what the government ought to do to encourage it, will seem quaint.
The FCC should have the proliferation of wireless internet services as its top priority. There needs to be a huge chunk of bandwidth (like say a couple of those sweet VHF TV channels) that is not sold off but really belongs to the people, dedicated to free and open networks (WiFi with longer range) and let companies and individuals share that band, just as with the coexistence of commercial hotspots and open routers today. Then let the companies who bought licenses for narrower bands try to compete with that. Some of them will find lucrative niches, but everyone will have the lowest-common-denominator open network at low cost. And let the ground-based networks (fiber, cable etc.) compete with that too. They will have to offer really insane bandwidth to stay ahead of the cheaper wireless services. For a while they will offer an advantage. But wireless will take over eventually.
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Why not, the good people of our small towns and countrysides subsidize the ever lasting cycle of inner-city welfare recipients.
Touche.
we wanted to work. As a people we had a goal. We were working towards a goal all could agree upon.
Frankly I am not willing to suffer another world war to change our perspective back that of our grand parents.
Now it is all about getting our "fair share" which apparently for many does not require personal sacrifice let alone work. The problem today is people figured out they could vote themselves other peoples stuff.
Until we change the attitude of Americans no amount of stimulus, let alone this giant lie of a bill, is going to fix the economy. Americans as a whole need to realize that every person's work is to be valued and the primary method of demonstrating the value of a persons work is not to take the fruit of it to provide for others who won't work.
There is no real spending on infrastructure in this bill because it was never meant to stimulate the economy. It was all about paying off groups that supported those in power. It is all about ensuring those in power stay in power. American reinvestment act my ass, more like Incumbent Rescue Act.
This whole thing is a crock. Worse they are sneaking in universal health care through the back door using the bill. The major sponsors won't even discuss it. Yet people aren't rallying over that?
This bill will haunt us for decades. The fact we had a chance to do things like fix our infrastructure, both electronic and physical, but didn't will hurt us more than we are willing to admit.
My grand parents our of the generation that you do it yourselves. When my grandmother needed a wheel chair she went out and bought it. It never occurred to her to ask someone else to buy it. When I went for a PSA I was surprised that insurance would cover it. Insurance is all wrong in this country, it should cover catastrophic issues, not daily required stuff that I should be doing. Its not like most of can't find the money for the latest tech toy, phone service, or super fast internet, yet ask many and they are offended they have to pay for the daily maintenance drugs - let alone change their habits so as not to need them
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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...readers will ignore this data, the same way a christian ignores 1 million-year-old rocks with fossilized animals. It's easier to cling to religion than think.
Looks like it's also easier to toss strawman-punching insults than stay on-topic.
Could we stop with the identifying Christians with Evolution-deniers already? Yes those sets overlap, but they are not the same.
indeed. although the fed reserve aren't the only part of the fed or its hybrids that are in part responsible. The CPA and its revisions for example were quite likely to have had a major distortive force on the market. As well as the perceived "negation of risk" that happened with Fannie and Freddie having their risk socialized and profits privatized.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
We need to create a LIMITED monopoly. Basically, have a community grant a monopoly to a SMALL company. They bring in fiber from the home to a block or even subdivision level greenbox. THey would do NOTHING else. Just that one item. It would mean that they would charge the homeowner say 15-30/month, but then all else would be competitive. That is the ONLY way that we will get out of this and have a future that can jump.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_profit
Lrn 2 economics, n00b.
I don't think the cell carriers want any bit-torrent activity (or similar bandwidth hogs) on their networks just yet. When they've got 3x capacity in 80% of their served markets, then they might consider looking for other customers. As it is right now, they're commanding much more than $25/mo for much less than 1Mbit/s, why would they want to get into a low-margin business like home data?
From TFA:
Firstly, note the loaded language, with words like "controversial" and "radical". The bias is obvious. It implies that anyone who would have the audacity to believe that our main information arteries should not be throttled and/or censored is some kind of unrealistic dreamer. Never mind that this openness itself has been the primary reason why the internet has been such a success. Without the internet, we'd be paying exorbitant sums for proprietary services such as AOL. Their bias is short sighted, shallow, and mechanical.
The idea that competition will solve all of our problems in regards to the internet is a fallacy. Network access will always be a monopoly/duopoly or and oligopoly. The idea that the network business could actually sustain enough market players to allow true competition is laughable. And they know it. Other countries that have better network infrastructures have highly regulated duopolies/oligopolies, with strong enforcement of the regulations. The market players in other countries know that if they abuse their monopoly power, they will be punished. Their apparent bias against net-neutrality indicates they are likely against other regulations too.
I would argue that internet access can be helped by "competition", but that such competition will in actuality be a highly regulated oligarchy. As soon as the regulations disappear, the system will break, and the oligarchy players will show their true colors, charging whatever the market will bear for as bad a service as possible. The Wall Street Journal is hypocritical for promoting competition, when they surely must know that true competition is impossible in this industry.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
They doctrinally believe, and are paid to amplify the message that the ills of the world can be cured by giving a free hand to the same people responsible for the global financial collapse.
Are you just trolling, or is this a serious response to TFA? Are you seriously arguing that the government-imposed (in many areas) cable monopoly and DSL monopolies are good things? That allowing multiple cable companies to compete in a neighborhood would somehow be worse than a legally imposed monopoly?
As far as the banking collapse - how does the government moving to preserve the jobs of the very CEOs who destroyed their companies help anything? The free market was all set to drive those companies into bankruptcy, preserving their operations but jettissoning the terrible senior management, leaving only those companies that were well managed owning the parts that made sense. Sure, the executives, shareholder, and probably bondholders would have gotten the shaft, but that's how capitalism is supposed to work. Now we've propped up the losers, and the crappy management we remain in charge forever!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I agree somewhat. The free market is only applicable when there isn't a natural monopoly. Wired telecommunications is limited by physical space on telephone poles and under ground.
You wouldn't call for competition on how many different road providers can pave up to your house. Or how many water utilities you can hook your house up to. Natural monopolies are where government does best and is completely necessary. Instead of seeking more companies to string their own lines along the public right of way, local governments should own the lines and be bidding out the contracts to provide the maintenance and the Internet Service to connect to.
Question is, are you morally supreme, a utterly rational being of wonder; all who oppose you are stupid and evil?
Oh, I'm sorry, you were referring to satellite or wireless, not actual broadband. Both have such high latency that they are useless for games or VOIP
So what you're saying is that I should pay the $24,500 you chose not to, so that you can play computer games? Imagine my enthusiasm.
Do you think there was a huge markup in that $24,500? I suspect that was about what it would cost Verison to pull the line (telco costs are pretty high - they're not exactly models of efficiency). Why should I, or anyone, subsidize your choice to live in a sparsely populated area? Heck, if you think you could do it cheaper (and I bet you could), start a business to do just that!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
CodeBuster's main point about cost still stands.
You (the government) paying $24,500 to run a pipe to my house would be better than paying that same money to the pocket of Verizon's CEO.
I suspect that there wasn't a whole lot of markup; Verizon wanted me to pay $50 a month after installation. But, here's the thing: I don't live in a rural area. There's at least a dozen people between the last mile and me who would have benefited from having that last mile put in. There are lots of problems with starting your own ISP/backbone:
So it's really not practical for me to take on the big guys at this point in time. If someone has a big chunk of cash to throw at me, I'll happily help coordinate (in a PHB fashion) such an effort on the weekends.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
The Fed is a cartel. Who are its contituent members?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I agree, a duopoly is better. For example: Doowop! Doowop! Shoowop! Bop bop bop bop!
It's interesting. The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s predicted the demise of Apple. I'm still chuckling about the stock purchase I made when I decided that if you broke Apple up into component parts, it would still be worth what WSJ was saying its stock was worth.
I purchased the stock at $14.22.
If only I would have paid attention to the Wall Street Journal. I would have known so much more than I do now.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
I somehow thought this was a WSJ article, known for, y'know, actually supporting the thesis with underlying facts.
Instead we get an advertisement for a WSJ editorial from L. Gordon Crovitz. Mr Crovitz doesn't seem to be a far right flunkie, but *I* don't see anything on his resume showing any particular technology skill, and really his only support is from the pew research center. A reasonable think tank, but a fairly well debunked report.
Must . . . restrain . . . fist . . . of . . . death!!!
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Bullshit. Pure bullshit. You have no idea what you're talking about.
You know, in a way I can't wait for the shit to hit the fan. Then I can say I told you so. You have your socialist President. Enjoy it while you can because everybody's lives are about to get a lot tougher. Rationed health care, long lines for fuel and food, skyrocketing electric bills (Obama's own words), inflation, tax increases, etc..
Enjoy!
More like George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Herbert Hoover, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Bob Barr, and any other Republican nut-job and their libertarian lapdogs. The free market has failed too many times. Socialist countries are proving socialism does indeed work.
All because 2 trillion were given to banks - no strings attached. Socialize risks and privatize profits.
You were raped, and think that means someone LOVES you!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If they think they can do it profitably and clean up after themselves then why not allow it?
And who will enforce the cleanup? Think real hard now. Yep, that's right, guys with baseball bats with nails sticking out on the end. We couldn't trust the government to enforce the cleanup or even mandate it. Right?
Just callin' it like I see it.
There are more than 4,000 competitive high speed wireless ISPs in the US alone. See http://bennett.com/blog/2009/02/thought-you-had-no-alternatives-for-broadband/ (which was Slashdotted last week, by the way).
Secede if you want to (we'll just take back Maine), but any talk of putting us together with Rhode Island and it's a fight to the death you've got on your hands.
And who will enforce the cleanup? Think real hard now. Yep, that's right, guys with baseball bats with nails sticking out on the end. We couldn't trust the government to enforce the cleanup or even mandate it. Right?
It may surprise you, but there's a concept that's been around for a long time that addresses situations like this. If someone can demonstrate a viable business plan and is willing to purchase a performance bond or put some money in trust to repave the streets if they fail then what exactly is your objection to letting them try?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
...and WSJ's position is backed by evidence. Typical Japanese Internet users were blazing at 50Mbps at about $30 a month in 2007 while U.S. users were paying about $50 for 6Mbps. Why? Government infusion of cash and competition. See http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/04/04/HNjapbroadband_1.html
Actually, the major problem with the US is distance.
The lack of broadband in some areas and cities belies that statement. There are areas of major cities that do not have broadband access.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
"Of course WSJ says this."
If I'm not mistaken, Rupert Murdock owns the WSJ
No wonder they would come out with something like this
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Simple. So simple I find it hard to believe that no one else has mentioned the reason yet:
Japan and France (and places like them that score consistently high in terms of connectedness and bandwidth) have significantly higher population density than the US.
Loads of people in a tiny space makes it very easy to justify running fibre all over the shop, for example.
Realizing you're attempting humor, in an ill-informed trollish sort of way
But actually the 2000 - 2001 congress were the ones that authored and passed the legislation that resulted in the global financial collapse.
Oh, and Greenspan was involved as well, just FYI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance)
http://www.sec.gov/news/testimony/ts072000.htm
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1837154020080918
http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/testimony/2000/20000210.htm
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
How about the Postal Service?
They do a damn good job for a mere pittance. $0.42 to mail an envelope anywhere in the country within 1-3 days is an absolute bargain, considering what's involved.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
'In fact I'm rather surprised the cell phone companies aren't trying to jump into the residential data market. They already have the little notebook dongles, just shove that into an antenna you set on your roof (for better reception) and plug it into your router.'
They are and they do. But they have a more flexible service and believe its worth more than that of the phone company and cable company. In the US today there is no real competition, realistic competitors in most markets amount to a handful of companies and those companies are in the same industry. They don't even need to actually collaborate to realize that the last places they should compete are those beneficial to customers. The things which benefit consumers would result in a decrease in their profit margins, the free market (particularly the stock market) has already valued companies by anticipated profit growth rate and it isn't enough for companies to make boatloads of money anymore. As a result companies don't increase quality and reduce price, they add 'perceived value' and only resort to those other areas as a last resort.
The free market is a rigged system in which all wealth slowly sifts to the top. Everyone who isn't at the top spends their money on goods and services owned largely by those who are at the top. Some of that money is spent elsewhere but the large corporations always make a profit and the top 10% increase in wealth so they are always taking in more than the spend, siphoning off the system.
The reason they hate government spending is that it creates jobs and benefits for lower to middle class americans and pays for it with tax money (the tax system is designed to take most heavily from the top). This effectively takes some of that 90+% of our nations wealth and redistributes it back to the bottom. If there were too much of that going on then the top 10% might actually stop pooling wealth or in the true extreme we might all be well employed and middle class and gravy jobs and independent wealth didn't exist in private hands! The horror!
It amazes me that there are people with the conflicting idea of harsh criminal penalties (the theft of individual liberties to subject individuals to the moral rule and command of society) and the idea that disposal of personal wealth and greed is a liberty that society has no right to touch.
There are people who work hard in all walks of life and while an executive controls the flow of more wealth he works no harder and exhibits a talent no more rare than that of a hardworking and talented carpenter. Why should society allow the executive to hold enough wealth that he must be a fool to not accumulate assets and wealth and yet the carpenter must work, scrape, and be lucky (or at least not unlucky) to save enough to own his own home just in time to be too old to enjoy it and in time to waste it all on health care.
Fast access internet isn't just about access to pr0n, its about access to information. Literacy, widespread and universal deployment would benefit the nation (public, private, and individual) much the way the public road system does.
Those who don't want this make all sort of arguments but what it really comes down to (at least for those who have a couple brain cells rattling around) is that when private industry does something the cost is spread equally among the wealthy and the poor. Whereas if the tax system pays for and supports the infrastructure then the cost will come from individuals in proportion to their means. Roughly 90% of the cost will come from those who hold 90+% of our wealth.
This is the same reason government organizations charge fees. If you think about it, by definition there should never be a fee for public services of any kind. The tax system exists for the purpose of funding all public services to the best of societies ability without overburdening those with little means. Fees exist (aside from a few exceptions that exist to block entry to a market) to screw with that balance and shift a disproportionate cost of public services back to those who can't afford it.
'You (the government) paying $24,500 to run a pipe to my house would be better than paying that same money to the pocket of Verizon's CEO.'
That's the funny thing. It's people like Verizon's CEO who hate this idea because the tax system is designed to spread the burden according to means. That means the fact that he earns 200 times what you do means he'll pay 200 times (nto that he works that hard) what you do toward running that pipe. Everyone with internet service subsidizes everyone else anyway, they just don't do in a way that matches their means.
internet infrastructure is probably better compared with the road system. Since better infrastructure will enable free flow of information and open (or at least expand) a new route for commerce. Just like the interstate system supports billions of dollars in private commerce.
Hopefully it will follow the path of roads too. There are a couple of big companies (which are by nature detrimental to our nation) that are ubiquitous on the interstate systems but a large portion of the commerce is spread in a healthy competitive way among the small and medium sized companies that are beneficial to our economy.
I've been to the DMV 3 times in the past year for various reasons. None of those took more than 30mins. Once I made an appointment online and the other two times I walked in and waited. The appointment was faster but really none of it was a big deal.
The only problem I had with the experience is that everything requires a fee. Public services should be paid for with public funds (ie, taxes).
The DMV is operated by the state, explaining the difference in experience (not to mention the tiny DMV office you refer to). While I'm sure employees are entitled to lunch breaks as a matter of policy (just like you or me, and just like us, the customer will have to make do with whoever is left) I doubt they are entitled to chat with boyfriends as a matter of policy anymore than at your privatized business. If you boycott either the business or the DMV for this you are a moron, this is something you report to a supervisor so they can enforce the company policies.
Of course, I've seen far more of this in private industry than public. And certainly seen the supervisor ignore the behavior more often. Unfortunately, companies have grown large enough that only the wealthy have the luxury of boycotting companies with low prices.
'"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have."'
Not in a contrary with a tax system that taxes proportionately based upon wealth like that here in the U.S. Wealth is how we measure the benefits of our society, it makes sense that those who have benefitted the most should pay the most. As opposed to private corporations who charge the broke an increased rate because the wealthy can afford to create a market for goods at a higher price. Or the fees the 'free market' junkies insist on having at the DMV and tag agencies that actually force the poor to drive illegally because they are required by law to use a public service that isn't funded by public funds.
Where free market is a market without artificial barriers to entry, collusive price-fixing, monopolistic prevention of competition, etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The reason we have regulated monopolies on last-mile service is that it's impractical to have thousands of start-up companies all ripping up streets to lay their own cables. We only want a handful of people to do that, and preferably not very often.
I do agree that if wireless broadband gets more widespread, this will be less of a problem, since there's enough spectrum for at least a dozen or so competitors.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'll grudgingly accept that one person needs to rip up my street once to put in some cables. Then maybe once a decade or so they need to upgrade them. But I sure as hell don't want 5 different people all ripping up the street independently, even if they clean up after themselves, just because my local government can't get off its ass and install its own damn ethernet.
There's a reason we don't let random companies run their own electric or sewer lines to your house, either. Even in "deregulated" electric markets, there's still a last-mile monopoly on the physical wiring.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Can we just somehow get better broadband service in this country? I'm using Cox Communications and its a crappy ISP. I was gonna switch to Verizon Fios, but they were not available in my area. With cox I keep get disconnected and I......... (Trying to establish connection with host)
The USPS is a private company. So is the Federal Reserve for that matter... a private bank that can purchase currency from the U.S. Mint and the real source of our weak dollar. Scary that.
I see, so the top 10% are taking their money and stuffing it under the mattress where it never sees the light of day. Your understanding of capitalism was born and remains in the 19th century.
Gerry
"The Chicago School say that Gov't Won't Help"
Please also make the distinction between the editorial and the reporting parts of the WSJ - they're entirely separate operations and sometimes disagree fundamentally, e.g. on climate change.
We don't want government in our fucking communications. Otherwise you get bitches like Feinstein who don't know TCPIP or how to operate an ISP or legal uses of copyright media, trying to Fast Track her fucked up plan over and over until it gets through.
But don't just take my word, read up some,
and go Write the Bitch and tell her why you know she's wrong.
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1984
Last time I went to the DMV, all the employees were protesting out front. (California)
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, once they finally opened (On another day) if you wanted to buy some meth, all you needed to do is go to the first parking spot on the left (when facing the building.) (this was the FLORIN RD. dmv) But I have used other DMV's and this nonsense about blagh 30 min is pure crap. Try the fucking DMV on Broadway in Sacramento, a three ring circus.
Hope you sprayed with deodorant you stinky motherfucker!
Bring your own lunch!
Think I am kidding?
Search google for california dmv shut down
Get back to me when you figure out that fast tracked legislation by Feinstein to make your ISP more expensive, and snoop on all the rest of your traffic.
Na fuck the government running broadband, in any way or form. You want your voice silenced. Jump in for the slaughter.
You'd be better off turning your fucking TV set off and learning some real news. Then maybe you wouldn't pop off with the mouth like that.
It's stupid shit like this that has us stuck with these fucking electronic vote tabulation devices--which are the reason for ALL our problems right now.
Straight from the mouth of the psyops.
By the way the lines to my home was fine until the motherfucking FISA bill.
Check it out, if we ever manage to get electronic vote tabulation devices outlawed, you had better not be this stupid as you are right now, to vote the same fuckers that caused all these problems back in.
Cause you know what.
We are out of time.
The piper will be paid.
Your lies will be exposed.
Yeah but somehow you got peanut butter in my salmonella. I still can't smoke pot for pain since I have no medical at all. And the blue collar jobs are being filled by Mexicans because we are too fat and lazy to repair roads and make bridges. And Liberties, you mean the liberty the government takes with our constitution?
--
A Bad Troll is more powerful than a Good Human
Of course WSJ says this.
I think they're mostly afraid that all that money would plug the tubes and people couldn't get their Internets any more.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Did you take a shower today? The water probably came from the government, through government pipes.
(Probably?!) ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS, Bureau of Reclamation, And Others to Private entities. Through LEAD and IRON PIPES. (Some add fluorine (where did that come from), some add chlorine)
All in all it's water. I kind of wish the fuckin fluoride wasn't in there. but hey, bottom line, YOu can drink from a garden hose, and not die today.
HOWEVER.... If you REALLY want to fucking get it on and get down to it, USACE now contracts EVERYTHING OUT. they don't even fucking HAVE equipment anymore, and while there are some bright people there, it's moving towards these stupid fucking yuppies that have to do computer simulations as opposed to good old fashioned engineering.
Did you drive to work? You probably drove on a government road.
(cough, cough) Turnpike? http://video.dot.ca.gov/ freeway. Oh what's that road by SPAIN?
Was your country occupied by a foreign army? That's probably because of your government funded Army.
USAF, NAVY, MARINES, COAST GUARD. And yeah apparently we've had our country occupied by a foreign host. And attacked (if we believe the bullshit) What was that white streak on that shitty camera at the pentagon? What happened to the third tower?
And again want to really ask questions? How about the OATH OF OFFICE. seems we have some Domestic Terrorists.
By the way I am a veteran, so actually I helped, and even though nobody listens, keep trying to help.
Do you have electricity? It probably came to your house through a wire that was installed on a government mandated easement.
Like when the Army Corps Of Engineers takes it from someone (usually an idiot) with legal bullshit. Eminent Domain. Or were we talking about Enron, pete wilson grey davis ArNoLd?
I could give you more examples... a lot more examples, but I think I'd be wasting my time.
"Ditto!" You should check yourself. Your not watching too much NCIS, and CSI are ya? Get help. Go dig up some truth.
I don't want the federal government wiring up my house, but I'd be willing to let the county do it. Hell, I'd probably know the guy in charge in the town I grew up in. Not in NYC :)
I like Feinstein ALMOST as much as I like Pelosi. Writing to either of them won't do any good, because they are not my representatives and they don't seem very pragmatic anyway... very ideological and tied to their party (and their lobbyists).
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
what neighborhood in NYC do you live in that you can only get 512k upload? RCN, TW, and Cablevision all have MUCH higher options available without even breaking into business pricing.
Actually no, it's using PTP wireless ground connections that act just like broadband. We had no trouble at all using skype over the connection.
I live close enough to rural areas to know people who have to have wells and septic tanks. The reason? The cost is too high for them to get the lines put down in order to change it. Should the government come in and put them on the grid too?
You have internet options, just not any that you like. Why should I pay for you to have the ones you want? Next thing you'll be complaining about the cost and that I should help you pay for that too.
Having broadband != Literate
As far as fee based systems for public services, I see no problem with that, if you don't use the service you shouldn't have to pay for it. I would prefer it if all roads were subject to toll rather than they current system.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
currently available ISPs != Monopolies
It's people like Verizon's CEO who hate this idea because the tax system is designed to spread the burden according to means. ... Everyone with internet service subsidizes everyone else anyway, they just don't do in a way that matches their means.
Right. From each according to his means. To each according to his need. Sounds like a great plan.
Second, they should legalize pot for all I care. Eating fast food regularly is more dangerous than pot, and it certainly doesn't harm others.
Your last point I think is probably true, but to what extent, is debatable.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I believe we are referring to the same wireless. I am just out of range for my town, and would have to put up a tower (that I'm OK with, it'll be expensive, but worth it in the long run). What I have heard from everyone who uses it is that if the weather is off you will get massive lag, similar to satellite. You're the first person I've seen who was able to use Skype, as well. How far are you from the central broadcasting tower? What ping times do you get? Up/down speeds?
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
I'd be interesting in seeing a map of MA using color density or something to represent the ratio of net [tax receipts/spending] to population density... for all combined government spending, including highways, and all government receipts, including sales tax.
I think the map might surprise you...
In NJ, for example, it's the suburban areas that subsidize both the rural and urban areas. The urban areas, however, provide both a source of cheap(er) labor for business, and employment for people in the 'burbs... the rural areas, not too much economically.
I'd be willing to bet the farm that rural (and small-town) areas are subsidized far heavier per capita when you factor in the tax receipts from urban areas.
Of course, I'm lumping in urban commercial and industrial zones with residential zones...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
'Right. From each according to his means. To each according to his need. Sounds like a great plan.'
Right right, burn those damned commies, they threaten our way of life! ;)
Aside from the plea to emotion by implying an association with communism do you actually have any substance to add to the conversation? Perhaps an actual reasoned argument to counter the one I gave?
Somehow I don't think using the tax system designed to pay for public services and infrastructure, to pay for said services and infrastructure, is going to mean we have to start calling one another comrade just yet.
I was surfing in costa rica when I came across that option. Sorry I don't have all the details, but we were pretty much in the jungle (no paved roads, no public police, etc...) and I was talking to an ex-pat who lived there about stuff I take for granted like internet.
He said you could wait for a line to be run that could take *years* or just put a tower on your house. Most people did the tower thing. We bought wifi ($10 for the week lol) from someone who had the tower and had no trouble skyping back home (voice, didn't try video). Although we did see someone else watching live video from the pipeline classic over the same connection while we were there.
It's possible their options in the PtP tower are better simply because people pay for it regularly. If you have money there you can pretty much get any and everything you want when you want it.
All we need is to fund a lot more WISPS (Wireless ISPs). Get broadband out to many more people much faster and cheaper than burying cable. The government and communication industries seem to think that "broadband" can ONLY mean "cable or DSL".
'I see, so the top 10% are taking their money and stuffing it under the mattress where it never sees the light of day. Your understanding of capitalism was born and remains in the 19th century.'
Of course not, they are investing it in other profitable ventures. Which is nice, its a recycling of sorts but unless you pretend that there are unlimited resources to go around and not a finite number of resources to be shared you realize there is a problem with this system.
In a healthy system, there would be a million small and medium sized businesses and 90% of the wealth would rest in the hands of the middle class. After all, the wealth in this nation is not limited by spending and investment, it is limited by natural and cultivated resources. You don't need super wealthy individuals and massive corporations to build on either of those things. You need a work ethic and a good education system (something the wealthy made sure was cut from the stimulus bill despite the creation of teaching jobs).
Taxes take the wealth that pools at the top and redistribute it to the middle and lower class. In the current system it will still eventually filter back to the top of course.
Posting to undo a mod. Sorry, meant to get you out of the zeroes but I can't read.
Corporations are guaranteed liberty?
Small towns subsidize cities? Something tells me you didn't bother to look that one up.