Slashdot Mirror
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."
a little known provision of the stimulus bill will cerify shaved pussy as USDA Grade A. Landing strips and squirrel tails may also qualify.
WSJ is parroting Right Wing talking points.
Anything government spending -> Bad.
Anything Tax Cuts -> Panacea for all ills.
Don't listen. Read a real economist instead Here http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
The WSJ is a newspaper written by a bunch of neocon wankers. They don't think government can help with anything.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
...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
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
The WSJ is severely biased towards the wrong right.
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
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.
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.
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..
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
You mean education?
Yes, I am obsessed with ellipses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...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.
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.
Question is, are you morally supreme, a utterly rational being of wonder; all who oppose you are stupid and evil?
CodeBuster's main point about cost still stands.
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 $14.22.
If only I would have paid attention to the Wall Street Journal. I would have known so much more than I do now.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
I somehow thought this was a WSJ article, known for, y'know, actually supporting the thesis with underlying facts.
Instead we get an advertisement for a WSJ editorial from L. Gordon Crovitz. Mr Crovitz doesn't seem to be a far right flunkie, but *I* don't see anything on his resume showing any particular technology skill, and really his only support is from the pew research center. A reasonable think tank, but a fairly well debunked report.
Must . . . restrain . . . fist . . . of . . . death!!!
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
There are more than 4,000 competitive high speed wireless ISPs in the US alone. See http://bennett.com/blog/2009/02/thought-you-had-no-alternatives-for-broadband/ (which was Slashdotted last week, by the way).
Actually, the major problem with the US is distance.
The lack of broadband in some areas and cities belies that statement. There are areas of major cities that do not have broadband access.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Simple. So simple I find it hard to believe that no one else has mentioned the reason yet:
Japan and France (and places like them that score consistently high in terms of connectedness and bandwidth) have significantly higher population density than the US.
Loads of people in a tiny space makes it very easy to justify running fibre all over the shop, for example.
Where free market is a market without artificial barriers to entry, collusive price-fixing, monopolistic prevention of competition, etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(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 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.
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.
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".