US ISPs Using Push Polling To Stop Cheap Internet

An anonymous reader writes "What happens when a new ISP is started somewhere in the United States that completely blows out of the water all the other ISPs in the area, in terms of price and performance? Apparently, that question is being answered in North Carolina, where Greenlight Inc., a company started by a city government, is trying to offer faster, more reliable, and cheaper Internet service to the local residents. Time Warner and Embarq can't compete. So they are not only lobbying the state government to destroy the upstart competition, but are now using push polling methods to gain support, across the two cities that could benefit from the new ISP, for the 'Level the playing field' legislation they got introduced in the legislature." A local news outlet provides coverage more friendly to the incumbents' point of view.

Comments

Well yeah...

[phantomcircuit]

Surprise someone finally realized that the last mile is a natural monopoly and should be a utility.

This totally ruins their business model of selling something that costs almost nothing for a lot more than nothing.

Of course they're going to pull out every stop to well stop this from happening.

Re:Well yeah...

[RemoWilliams84]

They can pull out every stop if they want. But with an economy that sucks, even if most of it is in peoples heads, people are looking for every way they can to save a penny.

Now would be the perfect time for some upstart companies to gain some market share by simply pricing themselves $10 or so cheaper than the competition. Throw in the added bandwidth and its a no-brainer. The biggest hurdle is getting your name out there. They need to make sure they budget for the right kind of local marketing for it to work.

Re:Well yeah...

[phantomcircuit]

The reason that nobody has done that is actually very simple. The initial investment in infrastructure is at a minimum in the tens of millions of dollars, and too make that even worse the credit markets are currently frozen so good luck getting a loan.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is free market 101. Why government sucks. Want fiber to your house? Sorry. Johnny and Sally need new jump ropes for gym class. Your a-sync 8mpbs is good enough, now go away citizen, you had your vote, if you want change, get elected.

Re:Well yeah...

[DrgnDancer]

I beg to differ, this is exactly why government intervention makes sense in many cases. You believe that it is important to have a really fast Internet connection, but unimportant that little Johnny and Suzie have jump ropes. Someone else thinks the jumps ropes are WAY more important. Neither of you has the individual ability to afford to either upgrade the Schools (to any meaningful degree), or upgrade the Internet connection. Through tax dollars and bonds the local government has the ability to do a passable job of both and mitigates compromise. You don't get 100Mbps symmetric Internet (yet), and your neighbor doesn't get a Montesori school on every corner, but you both get some reasonable approximation of what you want.

Re:Well yeah...

[rickb928]

"Surprise someone finally realized that the last mile is a natural monopoly and should be a utility."

Um, when I moved in to the house I own now, it had two cable services and a telecom service entering the house. No monopoly that I can see, though I am lucky enough to live 1500 feet from a switch and my DSL service was very hot.

Then the 2nd cable company was bought out by Cox. A monopoly emerged. SO I'm down to two 'last miles' entering my house. I don't see Cox and Qwest getting together anytime soon.

In Maine, my house had one cable service and one telecom service. I could choose either Verizon DSL or GWI DSL, which spanked Time-Warner on speed and both TW and Verizon on cost. They still do I think.

My point is that generally speaking, ISP monopolies are created by the collusion of business and government. You will find that most communities grant the dominant cable provider an exclusive agreement. Most communities have one hardline telecom provider, an arrangement that is usually negotiated at the state level, and is grandfathered in from the time of Alex Bell.

This is not a natural monopoly. My house can tolerate several services entering it. It is an artificial monopoly, and could be broken by one of at least two ways:

- Communities permitting competition by ending exclusive agreements.
- Communities offering the service as a 'utility'.
- others?

The last mile monopoly myth keeps us from considering genuine competition. And for those who will point out that the monopoly is what gave the incumbents the practical profit margin to be able to invest in their physical plant, well, yes, but if there is truly an opportunity to create a competitor and make a profit, someone will fill that opportunity. All it needs is a free market.

This is a Keynesian era, let's have at it, ok?

ps- Consider both the taxes/fees your community levies on the monopolies, and the excess cost permitted by the monopoly agreements, as a tax. How much do the much-vaunted european and Asian ISPs pay in taxes and fees???

Re:Well yeah...

[Narpak]

This might be slightly unrelated. But the Norwegian Government decided in 2006 that full broadband coverage should be a goal for the near future. Norway is a long coastal country with some people living in places that are way into the middle of some mountainside; and villages and towns with low population here and there. However eventually it was decided that Internet was pretty much required for modern live, and in fact; was more essential the more in the middle of nowhere you live.

The immediate goal was 98% coverage by the end of 2007 and 100% as soon as it would be possible to get there. At the moment the coverage is at about 99.5% with an estimate that they will reach practically 100% by the end of the year. To achieve this goal they have so far given local governments 850 million NOK to build and improve infrastructure; and ISP and local commercial interests have contributed to; in total about 1.5 billion NOK has been spent.

If you can read Norwegian www.regjeringen.no has more info.
Here is a quote from 2007 by the then Norwegian Minister of Petroleum and Energy; Åslaug Haga
The quote is in Norwegian so I have tried to translate as best I can.

Creation of a broadband infrastructure is an important part of our [the party coalition in Government] goals for the districts. We can not accept that anyone in this country becomes losers in the digital evolution. Broadband also gives opportunities for economic development and growth. To ensure full broadband coverage the Government has decided to stimulate faster expansions of the infrastructure; especially in those areas were it isn't commercially profitable to do so.

Think of this as you will; but despite my disagreements with some of the things said and done by various ministers and the government in general; at one point I agree. Full broadband coverage is essential to modern life. It is a means of communication, of gaining information about what is happening, of paying your bills if the nearest bank is a day away, or an important tool for education or self-education. And much much more. Providing full coverage with affordable broadband should be a goal for any country that wish to ensure their citizens grain a high degree of familiarity with technology; and wish to remain competitive in the global market.

Re:Well yeah...

[d3ac0n]

this is exactly why government intervention makes sense in many cases

This is why government intervention makes NO sense at all.

Why in the world should we have to choose between funding schools (Johnny's gym jumprope) and fast internet service? The two are totally unrelated! Of course, when everything is run by the Government Monopoly Inc. (GMI) then yes, they are related because the GMI can only confiscate so much per quarter from taxpayers, so all the money must come from a single, limited pot.

However, if the schools are private and the Internet service is private then the money is limited only by the market, which means that it is practically unlimited. So in a Capitalist system Johnny gets his jumprope, and a new playground set besides, and we all get 100MB service to our homes.

Of course, in that system the local government would NOT be allowed to limit the number of ISPs servicing an area, so there would be real competition for service in that last mile. There might be a few more wires strung and/or tunnels dug to run the lines, but there would be more service, more competition, and CHEAPER PRICES.

It never fails to amaze me how many people don't understand that most of the major socio-political and economic problems we have today are directly due to the application of too much socialistic GMI and not enough application of Capitalistic Federalism. It would be funny if it wasn't so sick and sad.

Re:Well yeah...

[jonbryce]

My house has two different telecommunications cables - from BT and Virgin. Pretty much everyone in the country has access to BT, except in Hull where Kingston provides it instead, but only about half the population has access to Cable, mostly Virgin, but there are about two places where Wight Cable provides it. If you have a large business in the centre of London or some of the other large cities, you might find another company that will supply you with a pipe.

Virgin, or NTL/Telewest before them didn't cable the rest of the country because it wasn't economically viable for them to do so. Similarly, other companies don't supply pipes outside large city centres because it isn't economically viable. That is why there is a natural monopoly. If all the residents of a small village pay BT to supply the communications infrastructure, that is just about doable, but if the money was split between two or three companies each supplying their own set of pipes, then it wouldn't be workable.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what people probably said before water was a utility.

Re:Well yeah...

[Bert64]

There would be more competition in densely populated areas, and no service whatsoever in sparsely populated areas.
It costs a lot of money to run cables under the streets, and takes a long time to recoup those costs.
You would at best have limited competition, a couple of large suppliers offering you service in a densely populated area.
Small suppliers simply couldn't afford to lay the cable, and you would never have very many suppliers because that would dilute the market and even big players wouldn't be able to recover the cable costs.

Re:Well yeah...

[EonBlueTooL]

The problem with pure-er capitalism is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

You would run into a situation where the rich can send their kids to better schools, and they get better jobs, and then they make more money, and send their kids to better schools, who make more money. Later on you run into a situation where poor people won't be able to afford school. Two more or less permanent classes. The death of the American dream.

So in a Capitalist system Johnny gets his jumprope, and a new playground set besides, and we all get 100MB service to our homes.

In a capitalist system Johnny gets his jumprope and playground if his daddy is rich. Most kids would get to play with sticks and rocks.
We don't all get 100MB service to our homes. Rich people get 100MB service to their homes.

Of course, in that system the local government would NOT be allowed to limit the number of ISPs servicing an area, so there would be real competition for service in that last mile.

I don't think the government does limit the number of ISP's. I think the free market does. As long as ISP's keep their prices under the cost of implementation of new infrastructure there will never be any competition.

There might be a few more wires strung and/or tunnels dug to run the lines, but there would be more service, more competition, and CHEAPER PRICES.

This is a fantasy. In reality we would end up with 1 really cheap ISP who puts the others out of business, at which point they would either buy out or purchase the equipment from the other companies. The new monopoly would languor just as much as they currently do and could charge as much as they want for their service.

It never fails to amaze me how many people don't understand that most of the major socio-political and economic problems we have today are directly due to the application of too much socialistic GMI and not enough application of Capitalistic Federalism. It would be funny if it wasn't so sick and sad.

I agree there is too much socialism in some cases, but it is usually a failure of implementation or corruption manifesting itself. I should be able to take the money for my education and apply it to any school. But to take away public education and turn it completely over to the private sector is not only ludicrous, its downright evil.

Re:Well yeah...

[u-235-sentinel]

Of course. Read the book "The Creature from Jekyll Island". It's about the Fed Reserve however the comments are illuminating. My favorite was "Competition is bad".

Go figure

Re:Well yeah...

[wstrucke]

Small suppliers simply couldn't afford to lay the cable, and you would never have very many suppliers because that would dilute the market and even big players wouldn't be able to recover the cable costs.

Which is where the local government could step in, take out a loan, and run the cable to get a connection, then lease use to private companies equally. Free markets are a good idea -- but you do not have to go 100% free market and 0% government, you can find a happy medium. The problem is that right now we are like 10% free market and 90% government, with the big corporations running the government. I could go on about that, but that would be (-1) off topic.

Re:Well yeah...

[hedwards]

Last mile isn't a myth. I have exactly 1 cable company available and 1 phone company available. These two companies own the cabling up to my house. And the service has been getting worse with each successive buy out, I think Viacom was the last company here to do a decent job of it.

Perhaps you live in a part of the country where that isn't the case, but in many parts of the country it is a very serious problem.

Which is why the GP suggests that a third party like say a utility own and maintain that portion of service. As it is comcrap doesn't bother to maintain its infrastructure and Qwest gets money for pretty much any internet service not through comcrap or over the air.

This isn't a free market problem, this is really a problem with the free market. DSL service around here is much more reliable because the phone company provides the service and is regulated to a much higher degree.

Re:Well yeah...

[smoker2]

Virgin, or NTL/Telewest didn't cable very much at all. Most of the infrastructure was already in place due to TV service provided and installed by Rediffusion in the 70s.

Re:Well yeah...

[smoker2]

The real world proves you wrong. The fact is that there are private schools, and privately run internet services but most people don't have 100Mbps and most people don't send their kids to private school. Your post only makes sense if everybody has unlimited income, which is patently crap. If it weren't for govt. involvement, far fewer kids would get to attend school at all and the internet would be a toy for the rich (if it even existed outside military labs). Try reading a bit of history before ranting about how capitalism would save the world if only the pesky govt. would let it. Before the govt. stepped in, kids were more likely to be down a mine by the age of 8 not at a fucking private school.

Re:Well yeah...

[The_Quinn]

If people weren't forced by the government to fund government-controlled schools and use government controlled utilities, then people could vote with their dollars.

Re:Well yeah...

[The_Quinn]

I disagree - I think the biggest hurdle is getting around the stifling controls by the government that enshrine existing businesses.

Re:Well yeah...

[BigGar']

And politicians are looking for any way to improve the bottom line in their reelection funds.

Re:Well yeah...

[Dare nMc]

This is not a natural monopoly. My house can tolerate several services entering it. It is an artificial monopoly, and could be broken by one of at least two ways:

A natural monopoly describes a firm's cost structure (high fixed cost, extremely low constant marginal cost)care to choose another term? IE significant costs to get cabling, etc to your house. costs significantly to get the content, etc to their business. If those are in place it costs almost nothing to add another user...
sounds like a natural monopoly to me. A forced monopoly it is not, IE you can run 30 fiber cables into your house, NP. Combining that with your 300 neighbors between you and a nice spot to put equipment = 300*300 or 90000 fiber cables to manage to try and keep options open for several competitors. If your just adding one more, it gets exponentially harder with each previous cable they bury. IE if you only run 1 cable, then add a trench 3' away, then about the 5th one, you can't stick a shovel in the ground without breaking one. So then they go airborne, and in a few iterations the sky is blocked out.
So required Monopoly no, buts duopoly to max of 3-4 competitors, likely yes. Natural monopoly, again, yes.

Re:Well yeah...

[Alamais]

However, if the schools are private and the Internet service is private then the money is limited only by the market, which means that it is practically unlimited.
 
...pure capitalism = everyone gets infinite money? Sweet, I didn't realize. Sign me up!

Re:Well yeah...

[DrgnDancer]

Others have already pointed out the problems with this arrangement. It rarely serves the poor, people in out of the way places, or generally anyone it is not as profitable to serve very well. There's any number of reasons that someone might not be profitable to serve, but for some essential services (Electricity, telephone, education, garbage collection, and arguably Internet among many others) we as a society have decided that everyone SHOULD be served. So the government either serves them (public utility) or forces a company to do so as part of its contract (regulated monopoly). Others have gone into more detail on this above me, so instead I'll add something else.

For a good look at how things run when something close to "pure capitalism" is practiced, look at the US (or indeed most industrialized nations) in the mid to late 19th and early 20th centuries. Monopolies and trusts dominated the business landscape, the majority of people worked 6-7 days a week for 12 or more hours a day often for near slave wages. Abuses like the "Company Store System" all but indentured workers in mining, fishing, and other industries that require some level of isolation from urban centers. Illiteracy rates ran into the 50 or 60% range (some of this was due to high illiteracy rates in new immigrants, true, but they represented on a fraction of the literacy problem).

Pure capitalism has been tried, and it generally produced a level of suffering on par with feudalism. Remember that when ideas like Socialism and even Communism were initially proposed, the "suffering of the workers" was not that they had smaller TV's than the well off, or that they had crappy or limited health insurance; it was that they worked like dogs from sun up to sundown (luckily electric lights hadn't caught on yet for most of this period) 6 days a week for (hopefully) just enough money to pay the rent and feed the kids. I'm often floored when people present pure capitalism as if it will usher in some new Utopian or semi-Utopian world where competition drives down prices and increases services without any apparent consideration for the fact that it's been tried. It may have driven down prices (for the rich and middle class), and increased services (for the rich and middle class), but it did so at the expense of significant suffering for the working class

Re:Well yeah...

[DrgnDancer]

See the entire conversation above you post. History has shown that generally if the government doesn't provide some services they don't get provided to people who either a) aren't rich, or b) don't happen to live in the middle of an urban center, or c) both.

Re:Well yeah...

[Sensible Clod]

You make me laugh. The town, Wilson, NC, mentioned in The Fine Article, did exactly this. They laid fiber, approached TW and Embarq, and said, "You want to use this infrastructure we just put in for your lazy butts?"

The 2 big losers refused. THAT is why the city gov't decided to do it themselves.

Government run by corps? Of course. But there's no such thing as a free market. The entire system is broken. Deal with it.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

no problem, just buy a house and fix it up. Now go get a home equity loan for tens of millions of dollars.

it can't go wrong.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

The city I work for has this mostly finished.Its been on the works for about 2 years now. We have a wireless network for the whole city that is going to be used by residents and city employees. Right now its actually free to use once all the bugs are worked out. The price of it is still being worked out , ie free with purchase of X wireless usb adaptor or what not.

Re:Well yeah...

[jcr]

There would be more competition in densely populated areas, and no service whatsoever in sparsely populated areas.

Yeah, so?

When you decide where you want to live, you have trade-offs to make. If I want to live way out in the sticks, I have no right to take anyone else's money to run a cable to my house.

If there's a market for rural internet service, then people will devise other approaches (satellite, WiMAX, etc) to serve that market.

-jcr

Re:Well yeah...

[phoenix321]

It costs a lot of money to build cinemas, public swimming pools, underground railway lines, international airports and maglev trains and it takes a long time to recoup the costs.

You would have limited competition or even no cinemas, public swimming pools, no underground railway lines, no international airports and no maglev trains at all in sparsely populated areas, therefore I advocate government intervention to bring all that and more to my suburb, Smalltown USA and everywhere else, including rural Africa.

Well, I exaggerated, but I hope you understand: everything costs money (no free lunch, nowhere) and many investments are not profitable everywhere but densely populated cities. If you decide to build expensive infrastructure where it is not profitable, you place the burden for YOUR idea on OTHER taxpayers. I know, YOUR idea is so much better than MY idea or that of someone else, and sooo worth all that taxpayer money, but unfortunately "long term profitability" is the only real *impartial* measure to decide whether something was a good idea or a waste of money. All other measures are either skewed or can be manipulated, which is the reason socialism always ends up in bankruptcy, as emotionally and politically appealing ideas are usually easier to have than truly good ideas.

Re:Well yeah...

[egcagrac0]

If everyone has more money, money decreases in value. Everything costs more.

If everyone has infinite money, money has no value.

Re:Well yeah...

[Billly Gates]

Government is both bad and good.

Where the government needs to get involved is where we have a free rider dilemma on a public good. An example is the military. If you pay for your share for our armed services why should I pay my part? I get protection free of charge. Everything from schools to dams to roads all have this problem. Also having a natural monopoly is bad in capitalism but good in efficiency and a necessity to have things get done for cheap. The government needs to regulate these monopolies such as power, sewer, and phone. We can't have 3 seperate power lines, 3 internet fiber connections, 2 sewer lines, and 3 water for every home. That is crazy. If no regulations exists we would end up in a situation such as ... It is illegal to have an outhouse in your backyard. Well I guess you have to pay me $1100 a month for sewer rates hu? .. etc. Its price regulated on purpose because the government created the monopolies on sewers.

As outrageous and silly as sewage fees and plans sound to us this is exactly what the telecom industry is doing by forcing to be deregulated. They were handed a monopoly on the last mile that tax payers paid for. Competition does not work if a monopoly exists so there are no benefits.

How many of us can afford the $20k or so to send each kid to private school? Or how about lay fiber and buy the property rights to lay the infrastructure and pray the company that lays the cable doesn't turn into a monopoly that charges $200 a month for internet access.

Fact of the matter is we would not have education nor internet access like the rest of the world if the government didn't provide it.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason that nobody has done that is actually very simple. The initial investment in infrastructure is at a minimum in the tens of millions of dollars, and too make that even worse the credit markets are currently frozen so good luck getting a loan.

um actually loans are doing great right now... dont know where you got your credit info from...

Re:Well yeah...

[jcr]

The problem with pure-er capitalism is that the rich get richer

This isn't a problem.

and the poor get poorer. ..and this simply isn't true.

Where markets are freer, poorer people see improvements in their standard of living. Just compare east and west Germany, north and south Korea, or China or India before and after they quit trying to dictate all economic activity according to a Soviet-style central planning model.

If you honestly care about poor people, then freedom is the way to go. There's no contest.

-jcr

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, EonBlueTool, you don't understand Capitalism at all.

First as the rich get richer so does everyone around them. Yeah the richest can just keep getting richer, but what good is the money if they don't spend it? As long as the rich guy doesn't store all his newly earned money in his mattress then everyone else gets richer too.

So he sends his kids to the fancy private school, that costs money and that money goes to less rich people. Those people spend the money to send their kids to a private school too and so everyone gets richer.

The rich guy isn't stealing wealth from the poor people he is creating wealth and spreading it out through his employees. Wealth isn't going away it is being created!

Wealth is destroyed by the government which doesn't create anything and only takes away what is created from those that make it.

Government spending destroys wealth.

If you look at the history of the United States the nations standard of living has the largest gains in periods where the government isn't involved and then stalls when the government takes over.

The auto industry is a prime example. We HAD the best cars in the world until the government got involved and started regulating the market and telling manufacturers what the consumers really wanted. Way to bankrupt that industry.

Then the government got involved in banking and created Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac and said that they had to give loans to everyone so that everyone could have a home. Way to bankrupt our banking industry.

The next point you make that is way off base is that a monopoly will never crumble. That is false too. At some point a company gets to large and will collapse at this point it is canabalized by smaller companies. The problem in the US is that they have coined the term "To Big To Fail", once again the government in destroying the free markets method of regulation.

Another point being missed is that without the rich you wouldn't have the PC you're working on. The early adapters of any new technology pay a premium for that technology. As we master that technology it becomes cheaper for everyone else raising the standard of living for all.

If it wasn't for the super rich the third would would still be without telecommunications. The earliest cell phones cost thousands of dollars and only super rich wall street types could afford them. If there hadn't been a market to the super rich then we wouldn't have $10 cell phones that could be sold in third world countries providing a wireless infrastructure.

What about Google? What about all the cool technology they are spewing out that everyone gets to use? How is it that you socialist/communist types don't see how you get all you're cool stuff. Have you noticed that none of these cool things that make your life better are coming out of Russia, China, Cuba or any other place where the government controls the market?

The US's free market drives innovation, it may not be perfect but it is still the best solution on the planet. All this new Socialism is killing it.

Re:Well yeah...

[rickb928]

Actually, the term 'natural monopoly' was used by the OP. I accepted it at face value.

And you seem to be saying that it is in fact the likely outcome of the market.

But one point... Ok, two. Or three.

How many different providers would be needed to avoid a natural (or any other type) monopoly? 2? 3? 4? I can see where two cable providers, a telcom provider, and a wireless provider could offer a market that would not be considered a monopolized market. That would have been Mesa, Arizona in 2006 until Cox bought CableAmerica, IFRC. Now you have only Cox, Qwest, and the nameless wireless outfit that exists but doesn't bother to advertise or compete. Not to be confused with the defunct Tempe municipal WiFi network.

I think you could tolerate 3 cable providers and 3 telcom providers before the DigSafe problems become insurmountable. The fix is to move the demarc out to the curb, which in Arizona isn't too hard. In Maine the envirinment is harsher, and this would mean more investment in curbside boxes, so there it may be too much expense. But remember, the cable cos pulled fiber in the cities/towns, and upgraded their coax, and somehow made money on it. The telcos, of course, got the Government to finance their digital conversion, thank you very much. Not sure that worked out too well for us, but at least we didn't get trapped with ISDN forever...

In Portland, Maine, on the other hand, the terrain is hilly, heavily forested, and WiFi is pointless. Even DSS or other 2GHz solutions are difficult and not viable. Cable and phone for now are the delivery options, and the promised WiMAX and 700MHz solutions are still dreams.

Rural areas present different challenges, related to subscriber density. Wireless will not solve that either, as density is density no matter the delivery technology. Only by lowering the cost of delivery do you get broadband into low-density residential, and much of Maine and Arizona fall into that category.

Ultimately, it seems there isn't enough financial incentive to get competitors going. No, wait, since MOST communities grant exclusive rights to one of each, it's not a free market at all in most communities. Blame City Hall.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent up informative/insightfull!

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the quote should be changed to the rich get richer and the stupid get poorer.

Then we can get back to survival of the fittest and morons who have 7 kids and live on welfare then get knocked up just for more welfare. Will slowly get removed and we can start to advance the human race again.

Re:Well yeah...

[Dare nMc]

from the wiki I linked a natural monopoly situation does not mean that only one firm is providing a particular kind of good or service. Rather it is the assertion about an industry, that multiple firms providing a good or service is less efficientBasically, if as I believe, wired ISP's are a natural monopoly, then no matter how many providers, the overall costs (to the suppliers) would be lower with one less provider. And unless the providers are gouging, then the cost to the customer would be lower with one less supplier.
I do agree that the cost would not be so much greater to our society, that adding a artificial means (which is what I think your suggestion was) to maintain a competitive market is probably not so great of a burden that it makes sense.
In a true free market, even a natural monopoly would not likely persist as a monopoly for long, IE once they price gouge enough competitors enter and force out the high cost providers often enough that you may never have a true monopoly. The issue seams to be large companies know this, and are involved. Even if they are not the low cost provider, they just take their larger losses until the monopoly comes back, then gouge enough to make up for it.
Also with ISP's, it is a service that is not a necessity. Thus a company has incentive (more customers) to not gouge excessively. But also communities have a interest (more people/houses/home values/taxes) in making sure ISP's are not gouging as well.

Re:Well yeah...

[chimpo13]

You should spend sometime in India and realize how your plan would work because that's how India works. It might look good on paper, but it's a horrible thing in action. That's the reason why even the large cities don't have drinkable tap water and 24 hour electricity. It's not worth the large cost for the benefit.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

also, most big ISPs do tiered pricing so although internet alone costs $60/mo, cable phone & internet cost $100/mo. Offering high-speed internet for $25/mo seems a little difficult.

Tiered pricing is banned in some places like France.

Re:Well yeah...

[ktappe]

This is free market 101. Why government sucks.

Are you insane? For a change a government is bringing wonderful service to its taxpayers (low-cost, high-speed internet) and you somehow still make the comment that "government sucks"?? That's not even trolling, it's certifiable.

I am not kidding when I say this: You have a mental disorder. Probably severe cognitive dissonance, but you'd need a full exam to be sure. Please see a therapist. Honestly. No joke.

Re:Well yeah...

[The_Quinn]

If there is no value in the services, then they shouldn't be provided. If there is value in the services, then a business can be created to provide that value.

Government is not required.

All the government can do is force people to do things. That force needs to be very tightly limited(as per the vision of the founding fathers)

Re:Well yeah...

[DrgnDancer]

You're seriously comparing East and West Germany as your examples? Excellent choice.it allows me to point out this excellent thing called compromise, or the middle road. You see you are completely correct that East Germany represents an example of the failure of a completely centrally controlled economy. Bad idea, you could just as easily point out the Soviet Union or China before recent reforms. West Germany on teh other hand is hardly an example of unfettered capitalism. It has significant socialist elements including a state sponsored universal health care system, significant wage and work restrictions (to ensure that workers can make a decent living in in menial jobs), state subsidies funding rail and road networks, a much more generous unemployment benefit that the US has, indeed pretty much all of the "normal" European social programs. Despite this its economy is just a strong as the US (smaller, yes, it has a much smaller population) if not stronger, and the "social safety net" that the working poor rely upon is certainly much better. It is arguably better to be rich in the United States than in Germany, but it is certainly better to be poor (or even middle class, for lower end of the "middle class" spectrum) in Germany.

Similarly, as I point out below, the United States is a much more "socialist" country than it was 100 years ago, but the lot of the poor has improved significantly. You are correct that a completely centrally managed economy is a disaster, but for a strong and viable country with a good economy, a mix of private industry with the state managing essential services and providing a fair playing field seems to be the best deal for the most people. Good example!

Re:Well yeah...

[michalk0]

so what? Is a fast internet connection a natural right listed in Bill of Rights? Naturally you don't get lots of galleries or swimming pools in sparsely populated areas. Guess why - it makes no economic sense.

Re:Well yeah...

[__aarzwb9394]

So in a Capitalist system Johnny gets his jumprope, and a new playground set besides, and we all get 100MB service to our homes.

Do you actually believe what you just said?

We all get 100MB service to our homes. How do we all get it? Because the companies will price their services so that anyone can afford it? Presumably because "we" are all 6 figure salaried people, and live in gated communities?

You seem to think that everyone will become affluent as soon as we sprinkle enough Ayn Rand-magical-market fairy dust on everything

Re:Well yeah...

[michalk0]

Pure capitalism was not tried yet. Almost-pure capitalism was tried in 19th century in America and made it the richest and most productive country in the world. Poor from around the people were migrating to the US. I would expect it to be the other way around if what you claim is true.

Re:Well yeah...

[ktappe]

It never fails to amaze me how many people don't understand that most of the major socio-political and economic problems we have today are directly due to the application of too much socialistic GMI and not enough application of Capitalistic Federalism. It would be funny if it wasn't so sick and sad.

What's sick and sad is that after the Wall Street meltdown last fall which was DIRECTLY RELATED to Federal deregulation and allowing complete unfettered capitalism that anyone would still be so blindly anti-regulation. Just what part of "too much power and greed concentrated in a few hands screws everyone else" don't you get?

Re:Well yeah...

[control_freq]

You would run into a situation where the rich can send their kids to better schools, and they get better jobs, and then they make more money, and send their kids to better schools, who make more money. Later on you run into a situation where poor people won't be able to afford school. Two more or less permanent classes. The death of the American dream.

The American Dream relies on capitalism. The idea behind the American Dream is that you can come up with a great idea or a good business and move up through the social ranks from poor to rich. If the government gives monopolies to large companies, that pushes out the possibility that someone can come along with a better idea and sell it. That is when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Only with a fair playing field (such as government owned last mile) will the poor have a chance to compete (in the ISP example, no one is actually "poor", but you get the idea).

Re:Well yeah...

[The_Quinn]

There is no need for government control of all aspects dealing with the transport of water, electricity, signals, etc. to your house.

These kind of transport rights are valuable, and if people were free from government coercion, they could easily work out effective and mutually beneficial arrangements for such transport to occur.

There are all sorts of legal mechanisms already in place for usage restrictions, right-of-ways, and other things

The whole notion that to do anything requires bureaucrats to control everything does not make sense.

Re:Well yeah...

[EastCoastSurfer]

Not true at all. The only ones that are having trouble getting loans are those that are credit risks and most likely should not have gotten loans in the first place. This includes businesses and individuals.

Re:Well yeah...

[DrgnDancer]

Is there value in running electricity to an isolated farm? Well yes, both to the farmer (who is willing to pay for electricity, but can't afford to pay for a long cable run), and to society as a whole (which over time will see greater yields from the now electrified farm, as the farmer is able to use more modern techniques). Is there value for an electric company to run lines to the isolated farm? Maybe, but certainly only across a very wide space of time. It'll be a long while before the farmer (who, owing to his lack electricity probably doesn't even have any electrical appliances yet) buys enough enough electricity to pay of the cost of running the lines, the transformers, the repairs, etc. Since there is value for the citizen, and value for society, it makes sense for the government to either run the electricity or subsidize the running of the electricity, even though the electric company probably wouldn't chose to do it from a pure profit perspective.

Re:Well yeah...

[DrgnDancer]

People migrated here from all over the world because of a perception that grinding poverty in an industrial and powerful United States was more appealing than grinding poverty in a rural and feudal eastern Europe. Whether it actually was or not I can't say, I don't know a lot about Post-Renaissance to Pre-WWI Europe to be honest. I do know a fair bit about that time in US history though, and I can say for sure that while it may have been better than somewhere, it certainly wasn't as good as it could have been. A cursory read of either the history of the period or the fiction of the period could tell you that. Some of the worst off of what we currently consider "poor people" have it better than what was "average working class conditions" then.

Re:Well yeah...

[michalk0]

and I guess you credit government with improving their situation, ignoring the vast increases in productivity and hence rise in real wages. No mister, no one can create wealth by a decree.

Re:Well yeah...

[mfnickster]

When the big power companies balked at wiring the countryside for electricity, the government formed cooperatives to get the job done, as part of the New Deal.
http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/tva10.htm

In the '20s, the average American family spent 25%-30% of its income on food. Nowadays it's about 10%.

I'm sure you won't argue that the investment, and the subsequent increase in agricultural production, were not beneficial to the country as a whole?

Re:Well yeah...

[ChrisMaple]

There's nothing essential about any of telephone, garbage collection, or internet service for the individual. I've gone 2 years without telephone service (1977-1979). I currently drive my garbage 5 miles to the dump once a month. Internet service as a need for people not using it as a base for their business is a joke.
You missed the other issues in your post just as badly, through ignorance and bias.

Re:Well yeah...

[laughing rabbit]

He was trying to get a couple of hundred from his parents upstairs so that he could by his bud's old Yugo. Wise parents told him no.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

We HAD the best cars in the world until the government got involved and started regulating the market and telling manufacturers what the consumers really wanted. Way to bankrupt that industry.

What a load of horseshit. People did NOT stop buying cars when the government regulated the industry. Americans bought 10-15 million cars per year for a long time, they just started buying more foreign cars and fewer American cars.

It's not like the Japanese were doing anything the American car companies couldn't have done. It was all about politics, control, and money.

Re:Well yeah...

[DaveGod]

Well put, except missing emphasis and explanation of "pure-er capitalism", which is a key point.

Pure capitalism would naturally solve a lot of the problems associated with capitalism: any monopolistic ISP would very rapidly face competition from a new upstart. The problem is capitalism and free markets are very rarely pure. The situation in practice is the upstart has barriers to entry and various other issues not compatible with pure capitalism. These may be effectively inherent, caused nefariously by the incumbent, caused by failure of the upstart or be simply due to customers facing costs of switching, laziness, brand loyalty, being uninformed and so on.

Currency exchanges are about as close as plausibly possible: there is a sizeable, liquid market composed of skilled participants who are very rapidly informed and influenced by even the most minor of events, and they are free to act on them very conveniently and at a tiny transaction cost. The same cannot be said for so many other things, thus we need varying balances of capitalism and socialism to try and arrive at the best practicable solution.

No country comes close to pure capitalism. The US is perhaps furthest in it's direction, the UK some way behind and France even further, but non come close.

Re:Well yeah...

[DrgnDancer]

I credit government for enforcing 8 hour work days and 5 day work weeks (or additional rewards for working "overtime"). I credit government with establishing and enforcing workplace safety and environmental standards. I credit government with eliminating child labor and mandating education. For that matter, although somewhat unrelated, I credit government with establishing and enforcing standards on the quality of buildings people live in, the quality of things sold as "food" or "medicine", and the quality of any number of other things that have overall improved the quality of life that people experience because they aren't being slowly poisoned, having roofs fall on their heads, or otherwise being made miserable, unhealthy, or dead by unregulated industries.

Re:Well yeah...

[Rycross]

That centrally planned economies are demonstratively terrible does not mean that an economy with no regulation is the best solution. Its possible for the optimal point to be somewhere in the middle. We moved to where we are for a reason, and before I throw my lot in with complete and total laissez-faire I'd like to see evidence that the original issues behind the regulation we have can be addressed.

Re:Well yeah...

[michalk0]

I am sorry to say this, but everything you list is typical socialist fallacy. Imagine that those regulations were dropped tomorrow. Would you send your child to work for those extra $200 it could possibly bring home? Or why don't businesses pay everyone only the minimum wage? They're not obliged to pay more by governments after all.

Re:Well yeah...

[Rycross]

Are you advocating we leave those 7 children to die? Are they responsible for their situation?

Re:Well yeah...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

At the risk of being flamemodded, I would like to add to this. There is a certain impropriety of government using tax money to create competition to the private sector, while relying on the private sector's expensively-designed technology to do all the work, be it last mile*, or just good old Cisco industrial routers. Government pretending to be awesome to the people by doing things like this is nothing new.

That any organization could do this, private or otherwise, using legislation forcing open others' infrastructure is bad enough. For a government agency to do this is just shameful. You tax the population, who provides the technology to begin with thanks to their private enterprises, such as AT&T, to eviscerate the profits they get, which is what drove them to begin with**. That stuff doesn't just magically appear, to be taken advantage of by an heroes.

* By the way, "last mile" is an example of rent-seeking by big business, using the easily accepted meme that it's too costly or difficult or against Jesus or something, and that The Government must come in and do it. In any case, it's hardly the "natural" monopoly one poster suggested. By accepting that position, he's already granted that which he sought to prove.

** Insert standard rebuttal here likening business charging $10 extra to thieves getting in the way of your peaceful virtual commune.

Re:Well yeah...

[DrgnDancer]

I never said they were NEEDS I said that society as whole has judged them needed. I happen to agree with society in most cases, but yes you can do without any of those things. Certainly in a place where food and water are scarce, 100 Mbps Internet is of virtually no concern to anyone at all. Electricity is probably an optional luxury. We don't happen to live in those places, and if someone is willing to pay a reasonable cost for high speed Internet, there is no reason the local government shouldn't provide it if they chose.

Re:Well yeah...

[DrgnDancer]

I know that the businesses at the time fought tooth and nail to prevent the passage of those laws. I know that every time minimum wage goes up the local fast food industry has a heart attack and claims that it will go out of business or have to fire half its employees, yet somehow never does either. Of course businesses don't pay everyone minimum wage, the market won't let them. I never said that the market was evil or never did anything good, but like every other force it must be managed and directed occasionally. Fires can burn down houses, that doesn't make them evil or even unnecessary, it just means you have to watch and control them. The market can certainly be a force for good, I'm not calling for global government control of all aspects of business, it's not an all or nothing thing. Look at Europe. They have very socialistic governments, yet their economies seems in no worse danger of collapsing than ours.

As to whether I would send my kid to work in a factory for an extra $200 a month.. Of course I wouldn't, but that ignores several key factors:

1) I'm not the sort of social class that would have done this, even at the time.
2) I have somewhere else to send my children (School, where they can learn and hopefully better themselves so they don't have to work in the factory ever. For the poor that school is provided by the government now, but it wasn't back then.)
3) I'm not watching that same child starve or do without clothes for the lack of the $200 he might be bringing in.

There are two essential fallacies in your post. First, you seem to assume that since I don't support a completely free market, I instead support some sort of central state planned economy. I don't. The government and regulation have a place in the market, and in providing certain services that society considers "essential", but the market itself also has significant value to the economy.

Second you seem to assume that the market itself loses all of it's power when the slightest regulation is imposed upon it. The market still applies, supply and demand still work. Regulation just tilts the board a bit to protect people (some times poor people, but often everyone) who can't protect themselves. To be clear, everyone has times that they can't protect themselves. Rich or poor, smart or not, there will come a time when you will not have the right knowledge, enough money, or enough time to protect yourself from some danger. That's when you hope the regulations protect you instead.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

...morons who have 7 kids and live on welfare then get knocked up just for more welfare. Will slowly get removed and we can start to advance the human race again.

Are you advocating we leave those 7 children to die? Are they responsible for their situation?

Stupid or not, I'm not about to tell them their kids have to suffer because I can't spare them a dollar a month of my tax money.

That's about how much TANF costs you.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not what should happen is a strike system is put in place. First child and you are already on welfare = recommended birth control with assistance from the government to get it. Have a second child and you were in the above category = government mandiated birth control or option for medical intervention (i.e. snip snip). Third child and the two above were in place = jail time with children taken and raised by government(or adopted) with the option that if you get medical intervention there will be no jail time and you can keep your kids.

Out of curosity what do you think happened to children before the government just gave money away to people who live outside their means? Read up on third world nations if you are not sure.

Re:Well yeah...

[michalk0]

Minimum wage fosters unemployment - that's a fact. Since wage cannot be set higher than is the product of labor contracted. You wouldn't do that yourself if you were a business owner. I was of course quite positive on that you would not send your child to work. But I hardly think those desperate enough to do so would be deferred by the weight of legislation. Furthermore, it is quite clear, that by disallowing regular businesses from hiring them, you force their miserable parents to send them to prostitute, beg or mug people on the streets. I apologise for my first fallacy. When one advocates liberty and freedom, he often finds etatism and socialism equally evil. However I am certain, that what you are utterly wrong about the second one. Regulation simply tilts the market forces towards ineffectiveness and irresponsibility. Free market is much more effective in delivering the social good than government planning. As a market is the only true democracy, where participants vote with their dollars on what is to be produced, how and in what volumes.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to see the poll. This blog only says that there was a poll but does not actually provide evidence of the poll. I am not doubting the legitimacy of the blog/point, but rather requiring EVIDENCE just like any other critical reader should be. As of now, this whole blog being referenced looks like gossip.

Re:Well yeah...

[DrgnDancer]

I can see we're going to have to agree to disagree. I have yet to see an example of unfettered capitalism resulting in anything like a Utopia, or even an improvement over what we have now (and I have studied history fairly extensively). I can point to several examples of unfettered or nearly unfettered capitalism resulting in significant suffering for many of the people in the society where the practice existed. I invite you to point me to the pure capitalist (or nearly pure capitalist) society that has a better (or even an equal) overall standard of living than we currently do. I'm quite willing to make allowances for differences in technology and such when accounting for standard of living. Obviously if this society existed in the 15th or 18th century it would not have our level of medical care and indoor plumbing. All I require is that it be reasonably egalitarian, allow for a reasonable amount of social mobility, and that the poor not be starving or living in complete squalor compared to the middle class and rich.

Re:Well yeah...

[The_Quinn]

That's between the farmer and the electric company to work out. I have no right to take your money and use it to give the farmer electricity.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

"the credit markets are currently frozen "

Do you even know what that means, or if its true? Do you have any reliable information on debt markets?

Or are you just parroting what you have been told? If so, why? Whose interests are you serving?

Re:Well yeah...

[michalk0]

i have already provided an example above - america in 19th century. I can only be sorry, that you refuse to see it. It was the best place on the globe to be, even if you were poor. It was not lincoln or roosevelt that made the country great (i am not american btw), but the hard working people who were busy with their own enterprises trying to make a living and get rich at the same time and didn't have big government on their backs telling them what to do and claim half of their income and savings in taxes and inflation. And even an employment in a robber baron factory was voluntary, and if you didn't like it - you could start your own business and do whatever you like to earn yourself a living (starting a business was waaaay much easier those times). Or you could move to the west and claim some land, where you would be free of any opression.

In my country (a typical social-welfare state), we have strong pro-worker laws, minimum wage levels. Yet there is a large group of people, whose income is nominally much higher than it would be 100 years ago, but in real terms - all they can afford is food, clothing, housing bills and perhaps one vacation per year. You sure it's that much better now? Yes one can argument that they get free medical care and education now, but they could afford that all by themselves (in a laissez-faire system) should government not slash their salaries by 40% tax and subsequently tax all goods with 20% VAT.

But I have to admit, that I enjoyed debating with you. Time for some sleep now./P

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice points, unfortunately with human greed in the picture, the capitalist and socialist models both fail.

Re:Well yeah...

[yndrd1984]

When the big power companies balked at wiring the countryside for electricity, the government formed cooperatives to get the job done, as part of the New Deal.
In the '20s, the average American family spent 25%-30% of its income on food. Nowadays it's about 10%.
I'm sure you won't argue that the investment, and the subsequent increase in agricultural production, were not beneficial to the country as a whole?

And I'm sure that you won't argue that rural electrification was the primary cause of this change, dwarfing the shift from human/animal labor to internal combustion powered machinery, the introduction of hybridized seed, modern irrigation equipment, artificial sources of nitrogen fertilizer, better breeding programs, increased knowledge in several scientific fields, and the general increase in productivity during the same period.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even in a good credit situation, there's no reason to think you'd succeed.

The existing mega-companies could just temporarily price their product such that consumers wouldn't have enough of an incentive to go with the "no-name" company, and then wait for you to go insolvent.

Re:Well yeah...

[tsm_sf]

At the risk of being flamemodded, I would like to add to this. There is a certain impropriety of government using tax money to create competition to the private sector, while relying on the private sector's expensively-designed technology to do all the work, be it last mile*, or just good old Cisco industrial routers. Government pretending to be awesome to the people by doing things like this is nothing new.

That would be a great point if any of it applied to the current situation. Were you to get a little background on the situation you'd see that the people crying govt. interference are the ones being subsidized. I know, I know, major corporations and politicians lying to you... who'd a thunk.

Re:Well yeah...

[SpiderClan]

But in this case, they've already laid out the infrastructure, so that's not an issue. The only issue here is that they're competing with corporate lobbying.

Re:Well yeah...

[Chosen Reject]

Let's start with the disclaimers: I doubt the best solution is 100% government or free market and 0% of opposite. I do lean more towards free market though.

What you wrote is wrong. Let's look at the US (and all industrialized nations) in the mid to late 19th and early 20th century. For starters, they were industrialized because of the free market. Because the free market brought in the industrial revolution most people finally had more prospects than farming. Not that there is anything wrong with being a farmer, it's just that if that's not what you wanted to do in life, before the industrial revolution, you didn't really have many other options.

Those 12 hour days and 6-7 day work weeks were on the way out by the time the government got involved. Labor Unions had done a lot to change that. But even without labor unions, you eventually get people who wise up and realize that a happy workforce with low turnover is a more productive work force. In fact, it is not the government that decided that 40 hour work weeks should be the norm, it was the free market in the form of Henry Ford.

And as for your illiteracy stats, it was the industrial revolution that brought prices of paper down enough which allowed for people to learn to read and write. Also, you're stats are bunk. Illiteracy rates in 1870 was about 20% and that declines to less than 8% by 1910.

Re:Well yeah...

[martin-boundary]

There's nothing wrong with that principle if the private corporation is getting government money. See, if a company can't survive without being bailed out, then said company doesn't deserve profits either. If the people pay, then the people should get the best deal available.

Re:Well yeah...

[JackieBrown]

That would be a great point if any of it applied to the current situation. Were you to get a little background on the situation you'd see that the people crying govt. interference are the ones being subsidized. I know, I know, major corporations and politicians lying to you... who'd a thunk.

That would be a great point if you gave anything to back it up.

As your argument stands, it is the liar-liar argument.

As a comment alone, your statement is fine for this place. But you set up your comment as a rebuttal without giving anything to refute the original statement.

Re:Well yeah...

[JackieBrown]

There's nothing wrong with that principle if the private corporation is getting government money.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that does what you just did. I assume you meant

There's nothing wrong with that principle if the private corporation is not getting government money.

I do that at work many times. It is frustrating when you feel like you made the most incredible statement that would end all debates and then realize you left of one word that reversed your entire point.

I also combine parts of two words into one nonsense word. I really think leaving off words and combining words is due to the fact that our minds are quicker then our fingers. (The difference is that spell check catches the combination of words.)

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the railroad monopolies TOTALLY didn't happen because of federal land grants, it was the evil greedy rich people that did it!

Re:Well yeah...

[phantomcircuit]

Right I was talking about the general case, in my first post I said that the last mile should be a utility.

Re:Well yeah...

[The_Quinn]

There is no, and has never been any, unfettered Capitalism.

Capitalism is "A social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned"

The Renaissance marked the rebirth of reason and a focus on THIS world and YOUR life. Capitalism is the system that eliminates the master-slave relationship, enshrines reason as man's guide to reality, provides a sanction that you have a right to exist and pursue your own happiness, and protects you from "the group"

Contrast that to today where pursuing your happiness is considered selfish and evil, morality consists of sacrificing yourself for the group, and both the far left and the far right threw man's mind out the window long ago

Re:Well yeah...

[tsm_sf]

There's a fine line between [citation needed] and wanting someone else to do your homework for you...

http://www.greenlightnc.com/about/faq/

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14934

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/twc-without-data-caps-internet-upgrades-now-in-doubt.ars

This isn't an exhaustive background on the subject, but it's enough to point you in the right direction. Most of these links are available by googling "greenlight isp". Most of these links, and more like them, have been posted either in this /. article's comments or in the article that ran a few days ago on basically the same subject.


((Googling "Hetch Hetchy" or "Raker Act scandal" also makes for some interesting reading along the same lines))

Re:Well yeah...

[JackieBrown]

I can find it myself. But when you attempt a counterpoint, you are either educating or bullshitting. There is no other reason to reply.

I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you were educating. But to do that, you need to give some details other than saying the other side is just lying.

I'm sure your links are great. I'm sorry you missed the point of my post.

Re:Well yeah...

[tsm_sf]

I didn't miss it, dammit, that was a sarcastic reply!

Haha, oh well.

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not entirely, no, but once the farms went electric, they quickly reached a level of production that was dependent upon having electric power.

Without elecricity in rural areas, modern farming is not sustainable. If it disappeared tomorrow, most of the cities would likely starve. :)

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Let me see if I'm understanding this correctly. Part of the free market controls the government, but our system is set up that the government has more control than the companies that run it?

Re:Well yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent! You are spouting Rand like a good little Randroid mouthpiece.

Remember: critical thought is evasion. You will be told the truth, there is no need to seek it.

Re:Well yeah...

[lsatenstein]

They Big ISPs will succeed. The city will have to make a wholly owned corp and have it run at arms length if they are to compete. Perhaps they have already done that.

Re:Well yeah...

[yndrd1984]

Without elecricity in rural areas, modern farming is not sustainable. If it disappeared tomorrow, most of the cities would likely starve. :)

True, but that would be quite different than if farming had spent the last century developing technology and practices without grid power. With less reliable power in rural areas, couldn't people have adapted by moving energy-intensive practices (like dairies) closer to cities, and powered more equipment with power take offs or their own IC engines? If rural areas had been more dependent on wind (and later solar) power, who knows how those industries would have developed with a large, ready market.

But my point wasn't that rural electrification was bad, or that farming isn't currently dependent on grid power. My point was that giving rural electrification credit for all (or most of) of the improvements in farming for the last 90 years (which was the implication of the post I replied to) was at best an absurd exaggeration.

Push Polling

[drinkypoo]

Because I had never heard of the (incredibly vague) term, I RTFS and found in the comments a description:

Push polling is done wherever the incumbents want to inject BS in to the conversation without "owning" it...In Lafayette, La they asked a series of questions about what would people "thought about" BS like the city "rationing broadband access like they do water" and silliness about banning religious channels. It was downright embarassing.

The story submission is lame, and the story it's about is too. Anyone have a link to a good story on the same subject?

Re:Push Polling

[zigmeister]

How about Wilson, NC's Public Affairs Manager's blog It's got some decent posts, and some boring stuff. More about the push polling on the front page

Re:Push Polling

[drinkypoo]

There's less about the push polling at your link than there was in the inadequate original story. And there's NOTHING about it at your other link. I think what we've learned from this is that when your submission isn't really about the story, it needs more original material.

Re:Push Polling

[Just Some Guy]

Because I had never heard of the (incredibly vague) term

Example of a push polling question: "would you still vote for Joe Candidate if news of his secret heroin addiction were to become public?" Basically, it's a speech disguised as an opinion poll.

Re:Push Polling

[nine-times]

Well if you want to know what a "push poll" is, you could have googled it and the first thing up would be an article on Wikipedia.

But anyway, the basic idea is that polls should properly be designed to be impartial in themselves. If you're really trying to find out what people think about the President's performance, for example, you might call people and ask, "Do you approve of the President's performance so far?"

If, on the other hand, you aren't interested in what people think, and instead you're hoping to influence opinion, then you might ask something like, "Doesn't it bother you that the President is doing such an obviously awful job?" or "Aren't you bothered by the outrageous amounts of money the President is spending?" That's push-polling.

In the 2000 election, Bush's campaign called around asking something like, "How would you feel if you found out John McCain had an illegitimate black baby after an affair with a black woman?" Now that didn't happen, but the question was defended as "hypothetical" even though many of the people called didn't believe it was hypothetical.

Sometimes when doing a push poll, the idea is to affect the results of the poll so that they can publish them and say, "See, [X]% of the people see thing my way!" But then sometimes, they don't even bother to record the responses because the point is just to try to influence opinion under the guise of a poll.

Re:Push Polling

[idontgno]

Better yet, it's usually structured as slander with a built in escape clause:

"Would you vote for Joe Candidate if it turned out he was hiding a secret cocaine addiction, paid for by ongoing embezzlement at his current job and a flourishing side business in white slavery?"

When the inevitable crapstorm starts, push poller can say "Hey, I never said he did blow and pimped whores, I was just asking a hypothetical!"

Re:Push Polling

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I had never heard of the (incredibly vague) term,

That's because it does not make sense (especially given the present context of ISPs and Internet access).

Re:Push Polling

[FlyingBishop]

A cursory Google search will show that not only is the term well-defined, but it has an excellent Wikipedia article.

And it is illegal in New Hampshire.

Please try to make at least a basic attempt to understand political science terms before dismissing them. (I, for instance, learned what a push poll is in Political Science 111.)

Re:Push Polling

[SatanicPuppy]

There was a case about 5 years ago...I think it was Verizon then, fighting a Chicago(?) suburb that was trying to get fiber-to-the-door paid for through tax bonds. They called everyone in town and asked them how they felt about their tax money going to provide child pornography.

There was a more recent one in Louisiana where Cox and Bellsouth (now AT&T) called around and said that the town would start rationing TV if they owned the lines.

It's real shady crap. It's usually done politically. The biggest political one I can think of was the Republicans accusing John McCain of having an illegitimate black baby in a push poll in South Carolina in '04 (And yes, amusingly, they had to do an information campaign there in '08 to convince people that had been a lie).

Re:Push Polling

[Anonymous Coward]

Polls are often used to research context messages. Which means pollsters will often call to test which messages are effective. They will say good things about their products and bad things about the competitor. Strictly speaking this is NOT a push poll. The wikipedia article explains it very well. It is legitimate research, testing possible messages for a TV ad. Once they have found the most effective messages for various target groups, they'll run the ads.

Re:Push Polling

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're really trying to find out what people think about the President's performance, for example, you might call people and ask, "Do you approve of the President's performance so far?"

Interestingly, that's not even enough. To get (closer to) unbiased results, you need to ask half of your pollees "Do you approve etc" and the other half "Do you disapprove etc". (not precisely, but you get the idea- for more information, do your own research!)

Re:Push Polling

[Falconhell]

Even better, amusing explanation of push polling on youtube from the brilliant "Yes Prime Minister"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yhN1IDLQjo

Merit

[Capt James McCarthy]

Any company started and run by any Government is not a "level playing field" IMO. It may be a way for Government price manipulation, but then that's not letting the market determine price.

Secondly, since it is started and run by the Government, wouldn't this be considered a public service instead?

Re:Merit

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Bingo.

The government either has a role in the business of internet service providing or it doesn't.

By putting the government in direct competition with private enterprises, the government is both pricing these companies out of the market and erecting a monopoly where natural competition would be the norm.

Now, you can say that TWC dropped the ball by refusing to pick up these subscribers, but is it really the government's business to wire these folks? And if it is, how should the government turn over these subscribers equitably to private enterprise?

The government here is in the wrong for poking its nose where it doesn't belong. Either the entire ISP business should be under government control or none of it should be. By cherry picking certain parts, the government has made a very bad decision with long term ramifications for all business in the state.

Re:Merit

[erroneus]

"The Market" was rejected by the monopoly players in this case. If you had been following the story, the local government requested better service and lower prices and they simply refused. There are times when "the market" (aka, "the people") need to push ahead instead of "waiting for the leaders."

This story is quite similar to others where these players in the ISP game quite frequently refuse the requests of municipalities resulting in the municipalities building their own infrastructures which then results in the communications companies filing legal actions against it. I find it most profound when it happens that a given company doesn't want to offer ANY service to an area and yet will fight tooth and nail when a local government wants to build its own.

Re:Merit

[MichaelSmith]

Look at it a different way: why shouldn't people be allowed to build their own network if they want to? If they donate their time are they stealing from a big, for profit firm?

The article implies that the city made a profit on their network, so subsidies didn't come into it.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

there wasn't sufficient demand for the service. it would not have been profitable. Now authorities have access to your traffic, and you're paying them for the privilege. Delicious!

Re:Merit

[morgan_greywolf]

Hmmmm...here's some food for thought: city governments already run trash collection services, schools, snow removal services, real estate brokerages, electrical services, cable TV services, electric utilities, water utilities, etc. There are private equivalents for all these services (and more) that city governments provide. (Yes, including water utilities and trash removal. If you don't believe me, I will show you my water bill and trash removal bill) and in some instances these even compete in the same community.

I don't see anybody fighting over that. How is running an Internet service provider any different?

Re:Merit

[Dripdry]

My (admittedly thin) understanding is that the people of the town were fed up with TWC, got together, and made something happen. That's what government is for: By the people and for the people. Of course it has its limitations, but when corporations have a stranglehold it is actually refreshing to me to see that the government is still a way for people to take a stand, even at a tiny local level.

I think the precedent is a great one. If it shoes people that they really can do something, rather than being squashed by a big corp, then great.

Also, the all-or-nothing argument seems a bit much. Do you just propose that people continue to live under the current oppression?

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

You should understand two things here.

1) The government is NOT using taxpayer money to fund this.

2) They are PROFITABLE

It's not like their selling low, and then subsidizing the costs with taxpayer money. They're selling the service at the price they sell it, and STILL MAKING MONEY.

I think that's the bottom line here.

I see Broadband as no different an essential service to live these days. I certainly couldn't live without it, my job depends on it.

If public companies refuse to provide this, then it should be the governments responsibility to step in and provide this service.

Re:Merit

[deleveld]

It is only a non level playing field if the government *loses* money in their own ISP but keeps it afloat anyway. If the government ISP company *makes* money using the same business processes that the industry would (or could or should), how can you talk about a non level playing field?

If the governemnt ISP makes a fair and honest profit, then the ISPs have no right to complain. But of course it makes business sense for them to complain anyway.

Re:Merit

[stanchion7]

I'm not sure what your point is, but if it is what I think it is you're an idiot. The big telecoms are in cahoots with the US intelligence community. Those "authorities" have access to your traffic. Some small town in NC won't bother to sniff your infoz.

Re:Merit

[nicolas.kassis]

It's a city government, you usually can drive up to the mayors office and throw eggs at it if you want. It would be a different story if it was a far removed government. In the end AT&T has your traffic anyway. The NSA doesn't need local taps.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

are they paying taxes?

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

When I see this kind of blind faith in "the market" in a situation where "the market" has already failed, I'm simply glad I don't work with the author. I can just imagine sitting through a meeting where the author stubbornly refuses to admit that their favorite solution is simply wrong in some given circumstance.

Re:Merit

[cjsm]

You know, socialism isn't outlawed by the U.S. Constitution. I'm in favor of the government doing whatever it can do better then big business, e.g. replace the joke of a medical insurance system with a single payer government run system.

Admittedly socialism doesn't work well in many cases because the process is corrupted by the rich and powerful and special interests. But on the local level, a socialized industry might work better then on the national level, because the people will have more influence to avoid corruption then they do on the national level.

If cities can provide broadband service cheaper then private companies, I want them to. As long as its self supporting and not subsidized.

I'm tired of CEOs making millions of dollars for doing nothing unique or that a lot of other people making far less couldn't do.

And the telecoms are among the worst of the bunch in undeserved profits.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

well then you have forgotten the idea that governments purpose is made by the people to serve the people. I dont mind government making a better service than whats available as long as its in the interest of the people.

You seem to support the bullies of the market that cant compete which says much about you.

Re:Merit

[Richard_at_work]

Why couldn't the people have formed a co-operative group, raised the capital investment and gone into competition with TWC - the same way any other entity would have had to? I don't like governments doing things like this because their position immediately puts them into a better stance for competing in markets.

Re:Merit

[mysidia]

If we had adopted that thinking in other areas, half the country would still be in the dark, or only have access to 2 AMPs of power, when the areas with densest population had 20 AMP service.

The government either has a role in the business of electric power delivery or it doesn't.

By putting the government in direct competition with private enterprises, the government is both pricing private companies out of the market and erecting a monopoly where natural competition would be the norm.

Now, you can say that General Electric dropped the ball by refusing to pick up some subscribers, but is it really the government's business to wire these folks? And if it is, how should the government turn over these subscribers equitably to private enterprise?

...

Re:Merit

[drjzzz]

Either the entire ISP business should be under government control or none of it should be.

Why all or none? Both capitalism and government can be powerful forces for good and evil, depending entirely on how they are managed. A local government or semi-public cooperative might work very well as an ISP.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell is government for? It is to serve the people. When a for profit company doesn't want to serve the people because it might not make them as much profit, but the people want that service, then government should be able to step in. The big companies cry about a level playing field, but they get the their lobby to "bribe" the legislature to pass regulations in their favor, which if far from a level playing field. The more crap that I see big business doing, the more socialism doesn't seem so bad. (And I make $250k/year, so I'm not one of the have-nots).

Re:Merit

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Ah, but this is exactly where government can help: by passing laws requiring monopoly utilities to provide such services to even the most remote users.

Why do you think people in the middle of nowhere have power? Out of the goodness of the hearts of the power companies?

Re:Merit

[azadrozny]

Secondly, since it is started and run by the Government, wouldn't this be considered a public service instead?

I find this an interesting argument. Where is the line between an essential public service, like water and electricity, and something that is less essential like an Internet connection? The electric company in my area is a non-profit electric cooperative. It was started in the 1930's to supply power to what was then a very rural area. Electricity at that time was about the same as the internet is today, can you get by with out it? Yes. It is a boost to your standard of living? Yes.

I do not think there is anything wrong with the citizens of a community getting together, through their local government, to provide a service they they want. It probably would be best if Greenlight was spun off into a separate non-profit, but I am not sure if that changes much for companies like TWC. They got beat because they (allegedly) ignored the demands of a segment of customers. I really don't blame them for ignoring these smaller communities. TWC only has so much money to spend. I probably would have made the same decision, to focus on larger markets first. The even bigger shame is that the NC legislature is seriously considering this bill.

Re:Merit

[erroneus]

Those notions had occurred to me. But "authorities" have always had access to my traffic... some of it quite secretly.

"Not sufficient demand" arguments are great reasons for these telecoms to NOT CARE and yet they do. The reality is that these ISPs are trying to protect their over-sized profit model as municipalities are going to learn how expensive it is to operate and install these services versus how much they pay for them and begin to realize that the consumer is NOT getting a good deal at all. Exposing that kind of truth is a big deal and threatens their million-dollar annual bonuses.

And given that this service is paying for itself and ultimately will be quite profitable negates the argument that it wouldn't have been profitable... it wouldn't be profitable ENOUGH.

The fact of the matter is that internet service is quickly becoming a necessary utility just as telephone and electric power services are today. (They were once fancy options as well!) It is a utility that has yet to fall under regulation and as we can see throughout history, unregulated necessary utilities tend to drive prices higher and burden consumers painfully to the detriment of local economies. (more money being drained from local economies by high utility prices and less money available for local spending which ALSO means less taxed income for local government) Texas and California deregulated electric power and we experience rolling blackouts, the highest prices for power in the nation and even more complaints about their profitability. Meanwhile, in states where power utilities are regulated, no such problems exist for power, no one is going out of business and the citizenry is less burdened.

Government regulation over various aspects of commercial activity are not bad by definition. A guest on the Daily Show put is ever so simply when she explained that since the beginning of the U.S., we have had financial crisis cycles until we emerged from the great depression with strict regulations and government backing. Following that was more than 50 years of relative stability and prosperity and a defeat of the financial crisis cycle. But when regulation was pulled back on S&Ls, an S&L crisis soon followed. Some said the answer was "less regulation" and so more regulations were removed and even more crises occurred.

Here's a truth that EVERY parent knows:

Unregulated kids are going to do dumb, crazy and bad things. They WILL burn your house down if you are not careful.

I find that this truth is not just restricted to children includes adults and the adults who run businesses as well. And this is especially true when these adults who run businesses are as arrogant and narcissistic as they are demonstrating themselves to be... and they demonstrate that they don't feel at all responsible or accountable for the mess they created.

Re:Merit

[morgan_greywolf]

I agree 100%. And in this instance of Wilson, NC, this is the case. From the Mayor Brian Bowman's blog:

One last note, Wilson tax money does not fund Greenlight (ed note: Wilson's municipal ISP). Citizens who choose Greenlight buy the services just like they would from any other provider.

Re:Merit

[csartanis]

They're a non-profit organization, with 100% of revenue funding the employees and expansion of service.

Re:Merit

[csartanis]

And the users still have better service that is cheaper. That's all that matters.

Re:Merit

[acoustix]

"I'm in favor of the government doing whatever it can do better then big business"

The government can't do anything better than the private sector with the exception of national defense.

You do realize that the government's administration costs of social security, medicare, and other bureaucracies is on the order of 3-4x what it costs the private sector, right?

Re:Merit

[Moridin42]

Telecom isn't a market. The bidding process to get the local monopoly agreement, yes. The actual production of service, no. It is rare to have real choices in your service providers. You might be able to choose between the phone company and the cable company. If you have more choices, it is probably someone reselling the phone or cable company's service. Oooh, the competition there is staggering. The government went to the companies and told them that their service was bad for the price. The response was too bad, so sad. They failed to meet consumer desires and then bit the hand that fed them their monopolies. Why should they be supported in any way? Ironically, delivering service at, or just above, cost is pretty much the result you'd expect from a market with competition. And yet, you decry those results because there supposedly isn't competition; although how adding a provider is less competition, I'm not entirely sure. Not that competition is some magical talisman of progress, anyway.

Re:Merit

[ArtemaOne]

I don't believe you. Please show me your water and trash removal bill.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

Markets are not the be end and end all. Sometimes a healthy dose of government intervention (even a bit of socialism) is a damn fine idea!

Re:Merit

[GooberToo]

but is it really the government's business to wire these folks?

Yes. Otherwise you likely wouldn't have electricity, phone service, gas, sewage, or running water today.

The Internet is an important part of our economy. While it is not treated as such, it is an important utility. Even worse, in many places, ISPs (cable companies and/or phone companies) are getting legal monopolies as any other utility but are not pricing them as a utility - rather they are priced as a monopoly because nothing requires otherwise. Since its a monopoly, competition simply doesn't exist.

Re:Merit

[Burkin]

The government can't do anything better than the private sector with the exception of national defense.

And yet without any cross-subsidizing, this government is providing a level of service far beyond Time Warner's for far cheaper. As far as I can tell, that would be "doing it better" than the private sector.

Re:Merit

[Rude Turnip]

Medicare admin costs are cheaper than private sector costs.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

The government can't do anything better than the private sector with the exception of national defense.

Then your country, and by extension its citizens, suck.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

Admittedly socialism doesn't work well in many cases because the process is corrupted by the rich and powerful and special interests.

You mean it's just like democracy?

Re:Merit

[d3ac0n]

But people ARE allowed to build their own network if they want to. It's called a Co-Op. If the local townspeople want to start a community ISP, they can do so in the PRIVATE sector by forming a Co-Op that anyone in the community can join by buying shares. That Co-Op ISP can then market for capital, hire technicians (bonus for creating local jobs without wasting tax dollars!) run lines, build a datacenter, and get started. If people REALLY want to do it, they can. There isn't a need for the government to get involved!

Of course, when the local government can opt-itself out of all the onerous and burdensome taxes and regulation they weigh down private interests with why wouldn't they? But that's just Socialism, not the free market.

Re:Merit

[Dotren]

The government can't do anything better than the private sector with the exception of national defense.

In a lot of cases I'd say your right, however, this whole issue has illustrated a situation where government is doing better than the private sector.

The situation is this: the corporation in question has no realistic competition in the area, and therefore has no need to keep prices competitive for the services they offer. The prices need to only be JUST low enough to be in the "acceptable" range by most of the area's consumers. After that, they have no incentive whats-so-ever to decrease prices OR increase service.

When a government entity comes in (and remember, this one was set up by the local people and doesn't use tax money) and manages to undercut the corporation AND make a profit what does that say about the corporation?

Sure, the corporation probably could do a lot better and could probably undercut the government by a significant margin and still make a profit. The problem is, they won't. It won't look good to their share holders to make less profit (even though it still is profit) and they're far too used to working in a no-competition environment. Had this been another corporation, they'd probably attempt to buy them out, but with this being a government entity set up by the people, they'll simply try to eradicate it.

Re:Merit

[IDtheTarget]

Yeah, because city politicians can't ever be corrupt...

Re:Merit

[roman_mir]

What is 'the market' though? Isn't it the people who are paying for the service? Or do you think 'the market' is the list of current firms providing a service?

I argue that in 'the market' the buyers are at least as important as the providers if not much more important. If the providers do everything in their power to limit the choices to the people (to 'the market') then shouldn't the people attempt and get their choice of service somewhere else? If that means that the people have to get together and start their own provider, so be it.

Re:Merit

[roman_mir]

I'm in favor of the government doing whatever it can do better then big business, e.g. replace the joke of a medical insurance system with a single payer government run system.

- that would be a mistake, I live in Canada, it's no joke. Our cancer patients have to wait for over 70 days now to start getting critical treatment, our emergency rooms are filled with people who are waiting for 8-16 hours to get service and half of our people do not have a physician, forget about getting an appointment with a specialist in less than 3-4 months (sometimes 6-9 months).

You do not want to remove competition, what you do want is to add competition.

Have the government run a competing system, then you'll get somewhere.

Re:Merit

[mobby_6kl]

There's nothing wrong with people coming together and building an alternative network if the commercial ISPs aren't good enough for whatever reasons. This is pretty common here in the Czech Republic, and wile I can't find any general info pages in english, there's a map that outlines the major network nodes in Prague, and similar are available for other locations. These networks are nonprofit organizations which depend solely on their members and volunteers to survive and provide service. You buy your own equipment and connect to the nearest point for free, a nominal fee, or whatever additional equipment is needed on the AP's side.

This network, however, clearly shows that some of the arguments on the "internet wants to be free" side are bullshit. I pay about $15-20 a month for a 2mb connection which is throttled after ~150mb is transferred in an hour to about 1/3 of the full speed. And while it's not a bannable offence, torrents are discouraged, especially during peak usage times (basically, 10-22 hours). Public IPs are subject to availability, otherwise you're stuck with the private one. If the costs are almost nothing, as per the first post in this thread, than why the hell is a non-profit organization incapable of delivering a better than adequate service for a great than zero amount of money?

Meanwhile, 16mb DSL+ service with no caps, throttling, or any fair-use policies costs less than twice that price, while 8mb is comparable. Cable pricing is similar, though I'm not sure if you have to get any of the TV channels. T-mobile and other phone companies also offers mobile connections of course, but similarly priced services have a (low) transfer cap.

The problem is that the startup from the article is government-owned. It might be turning a profit now, but it could be a budget hole next year when new subscriptions dry up. If it's profitable for the city, then why doesn't it lower the prices for the citizens to the break-even point? I can't tell of course without seeing their books, but this isn't really the only concern, there are plenty other problems including competition, freedom of speech, surveillance, etc. Also, $100 for internet + some shitty cable TV doesn't sound like such a good deal to me.

PS. Government provided cable TV: circuses for the 21 century!

Re:Merit

[RobBebop]

It may be a way for Government price manipulation, but then that's not letting the market determine price.

Letting the corporation determine the price ain't so hot either.

Market price normalization only really comes into effect when there are a ton of competition and practical barriers of entry into the industry. First prices start really high... then they get really low when a flood of companies launch themselves into the industry... and then they balance out at the normalized rate when the inferior companies get squeaked out of the market because their prices were either too low or too high.

We had a "Level playing field" for Dial-up internet service in the AOL era, and I believe you've probably heard of a company called NetZero. These are examples of "high/low" pricing companies that don't exist anymore. I believe dial-up has normalized at about $4.99/month. Meanwhile, broadband internet remains at 2000 levels between $30 to $100 per month.

Secondly, since it is started and run by the Government, wouldn't this be considered a public service instead?

As for making "Communications" an utility... as soon as local emergency notification systems can surpass radios/telephones/TV with their ability to deliver information when it's needed the most, I'd say go for it. Until that point, it's not prudent to obsolete the old reliable standards ahead of their time.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

If cities can provide broadband service cheaper then private companies, I want them to. As long as its self supporting and not subsidized.

Why not subsidised? It's a public service like any other, right? If by adding public money, the citizens can get better service than they'd otherwise get, why not?

Public money already subsidises other areas of universal provision - why not block all public money going into schools, roads, lighting, police - all of those could be (and in some cases, are) provided by private business at a profit.

Otherwise, you're down the road of *all* public services should be privatised, and there should be no taxes whatsoever.

Re:Merit

[Jdogatl]

Shouldnt it be considered a public service in this day and age? Isn't the government there to make our lives better by investing in projects that are to large and inefficient to do privately for the better good of the society? I do not see why the government cannot take steps where private companies are not willing to because of costs while creating such large disparities. /.?

Re:Merit

[sam_handelman]

You do realize that's complete and utter bullshit?

  Social security has an overhead cost of about 1%, vs roughly 15% for money market funds and the like.

  Medicare has, at worst, comparable administrative costs of private health insurance: http://alankatz.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/medicare-administrative-expense-reality-check/
(read the entire article, and note that even by his assumptions, very generous to insurance companies by among other things excluding *commissions and profits*!, and other funny math, medicare is still more efficient.)

Re:Merit

[Bert64]

What they should do then...
Have a government owned non profit own the physical cable, and turn each local exchange into a carrier neutral dc, or have the non profit operate backhaul from the local exchange so some more centralized ones. Have them rent out the physical lines for the same price to anyone who wants them, and let them rent either a complete circuit or just the physical cable (so they rent space in the dc and have the appropriate lines patched through).

Re:Merit

[Cathbard]

Man it's amusing reading this crap about corporations ALWAYS doing better than government. You should take a look at other countries methinks where lots of things get run quite well by governments. I've seen many cases where a govt service was sold and the corporation that bought it ran it into the ground (like public transport for example). Government will spend money on routine maintenance when corporations will only fix it after it breaks. Some times that can be disastrous. You make these statements with what amounts to religious fervour. There are some things that the government should run and essential services are one of those. In those cases what matters is reliablity not profitability. To say that corporations ALWAYS run things better is total bollocks.

Re:Merit

[jc42]

But people ARE allowed to build their own network if they want to. It's called a Co-Op. If the local townspeople want to start a community ISP, they can do so in the PRIVATE sector by forming a Co-Op that anyone in the community can join by buying shares. ...

Well, yeah; anyone can form a co-op. But to build a network, you have to run the wires, and that is a local monopoly controlled by your friendly local government. Having a co-op isn't very useful if you can't run your wires.

There is wi-fi, of course, but that's legally limited to a low power with an effective range that's less than a city block, and it has only a few channels. So that approach isn't very useful.

It'd be interesting to read about an area where the government didn't impose any sort of controls on communication channels. Do you know of one? I know that such things existed a century or so back, before the technology had been much developed. But as soon as any comm hardware became very useful, it became obvious that government controls were needed. Otherwise the broadcaster with the most powerful transmitter would swamp all the lower-powered stations, you'd get a rat' nest of wires over the streets with poles every few feet, and so on.

So how can one build a comm co-op of any sort without government involvement? Where is it legal to run your wires without the government guys stepping in and saying you can't do that without a permit? Inquiring minds want to know. ;-)

Re:Merit

[chill]

No, legally, they are not. The IRS considers them a "government entity", and while they are tax-exempt as such they are NOT a non-profit that qualifies under 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code.

TWC might have difficulty with this because the tax issues they're bitching about aren't exclusive to governments. There is a specific clause in the Internal Revenue Code for non-profit telephone companies -- 501(c)(12) -- that would relate to any private, non-profit entity that wanted to go into business. However, we're talking about more than telephone business here as the city in question is also offering television. That is a different legal entity and can't be a non-profit.

Despite what the Slashdot-socialist crowd thinks, there is a difference between "non-profit" and "tax-exempt". Just because you're chartered as a non-profit doesn't mean you automatically get tax-exempt status.

Re:Merit

[kirillian]

I think the point that some commenters have previously tried to make is that government is ALREADY socialistic and is PREVENTING free market forces from acting in the first place. Without those forces existing in the first place, there really is not a valid means of evaluating whether or not a free capitalist environment would serve to improve the current broadband situation or not. Big businesses have benefited for a long time from artificial monopolies created by exclusive contracts with government and other subsidizing situations.

Without the ability to evaluate whether free market forces are working, however, I don't think that we can make a good determination as to whether socialism is a viable alternative or not...certainly we can look at the struggles that France seems to be having with individual rights because of their socialistic structure. I don't, however, think that we have a similar scale example of the free market regulating itself (Yes, socialism is an ECONOMIC paradigm, not a government system...there seems to be some confusion by many on that subject. It is often confused with Communism, which is a government type).

Re:Merit

[bziman]

You know, socialism isn't outlawed by the U.S. Constitution. I'm in favor of the government doing whatever it can do better then big business, e.g. replace the joke of a medical insurance system with a single payer government run system.

I've no particular problem with socialism in general, nor the government providing more and more services. However, the Tenth Amendment specifically states that any powers not granted to the Federal Government by the Constitution are reserved for the States or the People. That means that if the Constitution doesn't have a section on Federally-owned businesses, then the government can't own one.

On the other hand, it also means that any government-owned companies would have to be owned at the state level, and then it's totally okay with the Constitution.

Re:Merit

[LordKazan]

if you had read the previous article on this they're getting Tripple Play of Net, 82 cable, phone for $99/month permanent price, the company isn't losing money, and it's getting no more subsidies than the resident Monopolist Time Warner got.

They're getting better service, for a better price. Try knowing about the company in question before you run your mouth about it.

Re:Merit

[Bert64]

Time Warner could easily offer the same service at the same cost, but that would be less profitable for them, and they don't want to give up their excessive margins to competition.
It's all about greed... There is not much these companies hate more than free market capitalism.

Re:Merit

[Bert64]

There's no reason a private company couldn't have done what the government did... The government run operation is profitable, and a private company providing the same service would be too.
Big players just don't like competition, they want a free ride so they can gouge their customers.

Re:Merit

[Bert64]

The ISPs are greedy..
If it was a company making profit running this service they would just buy them out and bury the service, or just increase it's price so they made the same level of profit on it.

Re:Merit

[jez9999]

are they paying taxes?

Who gives a shit? Do you want good internet service, or not? Will Verizon, TW, etc. go bankrupt because of this? We can only hope.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

I see this as a bit of a faulty argument. You are right, completely unregulated kids will go wild however completely regulated kids will never grow. Children need choices to be able to handle the much harder choices of being an adult. Children need to get into trouble, need to break bones, need to make stupid decisions to learn. Now I have a very hard time saying that business and the financial circles are children but you have to be careful about where the results lead.

Now wether or not this financial crisis is caused by not having regulations or because these children hadn't grown up enough to deal with not having mommy and daddy looking over there shoulder can be argued. Personally, I think this crisis is a good thing. People are having to save, people are having to work harder, houses have become more affordable and people are planing for the future.

Just my 2 cents.

Re:Merit

[The_Quinn]

Socialism means the individual has no rights, but a group (or its leaders), can force you to serve the group.

This is in direct contradiction to the U.S. Constitution, which enshrines the sovereignty of the individual against the group.

Re:Merit

[gerglion]

This was a city looking at what was best for the residents. It went asked area ISPs for upgrades, due to many residents complaining of high prices and poor service. What do you suggest they should have done instead? "Sorry, not our problem?" They view internet connectivity as being nearly as important as water and electricity, and that sitting on their hands is doing a disservice to their residents. So they built up their own ISP. Do they have advantages due to being a city? Sure. Does TW and Embarq have advantages due to having near-monopolies and are already entrenched? Sure. The bean counting of the ISPs has cost them a city and hopefully they will learn from it.

Re:Merit

[giorgiofr]

The government can't do anything better than the private sector with the exception of national defense.

WTF are you on, of course the private sector can and does provide better military/security services than the gov't.

Re:Merit

[TooMuchToDo]

You're aware that Medicare has the lowest admin costs in the industry (even lower than private health insurance firms), correct? Retard.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ever studied Economics 101 you should recall that the market theories usually talk about perfect competition. All market theories go down the drain when you have serious deviations from the perfect competition. Monopolies and duopolies are not a perfect competition and the price discovery process in them is very different.

There are quite a few things in US that should be a public service yet sadly are not.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

"socialism doesn't work well in many cases because the process is corrupted by the rich and powerful and special interests."

How is this any different than what we have to put up with now? At least with socialism you get cheap internet and 'free' healthcare.

Re:Merit

[ahankinson]

Sorry, health care would suffer the same fate as the telcos if it were to 'open up to competition.'

The reason that there is so little competition in the telco space is that it has a prohibitively expensive startup cost. You can't run your own lines and maintain your own switching systems, cell towers, etc. before you even get a single customer... no VC would fund that.

It's the same with health care. It's prohibitively expensive to start up - hospital infrastructure, equipment, staff - before you even see a paying customer. So you would only get the large, entrenched corporations that are sufficiently well funded that would actually be able to survive.

Not only that, it would suffer from the natural inclination for 'vendor lock-in' that a private company would inflict on its customers in order to produce a monopoly. They would want to keep you from switching providers, so they'll keep your medical records proprietary. They would have a vested interest in making me dependent on their service and only their service. They would do this because it's easier and cheaper than actually providing a good service, and it would make their shareholders happy.

To avoid this, of course, you would need regulation, and then the private companies would try to get around the regulations, which means more regulation or de-regulation. At some point it would just be easier to nationalize the health care system, leading us back to where we're at now.

I'm happy I live in Canada where, although our system is far from perfect, at least I know that a) I can walk into any hospital in the country and receive treatment, b) that won't bankrupt me, c) the government has no vested interest in keeping me sick.

I have a relative who was diagnosed with Cancer and a week later started Chemotherapy. I have another 80-year old relative who just received a hip replacement and didn't pay a cent for it - he had to wait 6 months, yes, but it's better than paying it off for the rest of his natural life. Even with competition, there are fixed costs (doctor's salaries, equipment, staffing) that wouldn't lower the rate down past, say, $10k. I'd say that's a pretty good deal.

Your anecdote may be true, but it's not universal.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, market determined price implies the existence of a market.

Monopolies are not markets. The market expressed interest in more bandwidth and larger prices. A group of individuals delivered this to the market.

Now there is more of a market than there was before. Why does it matter if the group of people is a government or a large corporation?

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh it's pretty much the same here in the States except you get corn-cobbed financially afterwards leading to 2cd or 3rd mortgages, lost college funds, savings depletion, credit hemorrhaging and... Hey! Look! A COMPLETE COLLAPSE OF THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM!

Competition leads to "winner" and "loser" mentality, especially in corporations. Those who "win" inevitably end up hungry for more. More "wins" end up creating a mentality of entitlement ("I deserve to win because I am better than you") and as anyone can tell you, people who feel entitled are just plain greedy. Greed can only be channelled in one direction: towards the self.

And, you know, corporations have no shame (Micro$oft stands out as a shining example), so it's pretty hard to just point a finger at them and SHAME them into acting appropriately.

There are those of us here in the states who would welcome the government offering some form of medical assistance that didn't promote insurance fraud from both sides of the payment counter.

Re:Merit

[d3ac0n]

Well THAT is where local government involvement comes in. As citizen members of a Co-Op you go to the town board and demand they repeal any exclusive agreements with any ISPs, thus allowing free competition. If your Co-Op is large enough it can easily represent 80-90% of the local voting populace in a small town. Only a stupid (and quickly unemployed) politician won't listen to those kinds of numbers.

This allows your Co-Op to purchase permits and land access to run wires and build a datacenter. just as if it was a regular private company, except that as local citizens you have to votes to essentially "fire" any politician who doesn't play ball and allow free market access.

That is how a capitalistic republic works, and how the lack of last-mile access to many smaller communities could be solved. All without creating yet another government monopoly.

Re:Merit

[jcr]

The government can't do anything better than the private sector with the exception of national defense.

I'm not sure that I'd make that exception.

-jcr

Re:Merit

[jcr]

Medicare has the lowest admin costs in the industry

First of all, Medicare shifts a lot of the admin cost to the provider, and secondly, I'd like to see your source for that claim. There's a reason why a lot of doctors are refusing to accept Medicare customers these days.

-jcr

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

The letter of the Constitution ("letter of the law") prevents Federal socialism, and the spirit of the Constitution is fully against socialism.

While I think you have the general idea, I'm not convinced that you understand what socialism is.

Re:Merit

[jcr]

Ah, but this is exactly where government can help: by passing laws requiring monopoly utilities to provide such services to even the most remote users.

The question arises though, why does government grant those monopolies in the first place? I find the claim that power is a "natural" monopoly to be rather flimsy, since if it were a "natural" monopoly, there would be no need to prohibit competition.

-jcr

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm in favor of the government doing whatever it can do better then big business"

The government can't do anything better than the private sector with the exception of national defense.

All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

You make it sound like there's such a thing as a Federal Health Service. There isn't.

Health Services are provided by the Provinces, so it's not correct to say "our" patients/emergency rooms/physicians, and imply that it's a Canadian issue.

Please let people know which province you are talking about, so they can check the facts about doctor-patient ratios and wait times. Some parts of the country are better than others.

Re:Merit

[RobBebop]

The fact of the matter is that internet service is quickly becoming a necessary utility just as telephone and electric power services are today.

Your post was well-written and I agreed with all your points, but I'd like to add the emphasis on the above quote to highlight that internet service is still more comparable to Cable Television than Electricity or the Telephone. Consider, it took over 100 year between the invention of the Telephone (1876) and the deregulation of AT&T in 1984.

A significant portion of the population still doesn't need Cable Television. And the vast majority of this group can probably get along just fine without Internet. Thus, while I agree that taking away monopoly rights from internet and cable companies is in order (via regulation, like you argued), I don't think it should come in the form of making Internet a utility.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

- that would be a mistake, I live in Canada, it's no joke. Our cancer patients have to wait for over 70 days now to start getting critical treatment, our emergency rooms are filled with people who are waiting for 8-16 hours to get service and half of our people do not have a physician, forget about getting an appointment with a specialist in less than 3-4 months (sometimes 6-9 months).

You do not want to remove competition, what you do want is to add competition.

Have the government run a competing system, then you'll get somewhere.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

it's an unfair advantage. Good service? When was the last time you got good service from the government? Government is inept, the reason is clear. They are not accountable for any of the bad things they do, though it seems a bureaucrat always seems willing to "Take Responsibility".

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Belgium. We have one of the most elaborate Social Security systems in the world. All of our healthcare is pretty much organized by the government. Over here we don't have the problems you describe. In fact, lots of British and Dutch people come here to get their surgery because at home they do have similar capacity problems. So I guess these problems are not necessarily symptomathic of a government run system. It just seems like Canada's particular implementation is to blame.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you! Could not have been put simpler than with your analogy about unregulated kids. That's exactly what many of these businesses are--only on an extremely damaging scale that affects many (employees, etc).

Re:Merit

[Uberbah]

I think the point that some commenters have previously tried to make is that government is ALREADY socialistic and is PREVENTING free market forces from acting in the first place.

1) So? laissez faire isn't in the Constitution.
2) The "free market forces" weren't interested in "acting in the first place

Without the ability to evaluate whether free market forces are working, however, I don't think that we can make a good determination as to whether socialism is a viable alternative or not...

Sure we can. We've managed to progress from postal roads to multi-lane interstate highways just fine, and socialized medicine provides better care for less money.

The idea that private enterprise is always better than the public sector is as foolish as thinking the public sector is always better than private enterprise.

Re:Merit

[Intron]

but they get the their lobby to "bribe" the legislature to pass regulations in their favor

True. They should just go back to the old way of doing things. "Accidentally" cut the competition's cables.

Re:Merit

[yachp]

roman mir, you do not understand how the system in Canada works. Doctors in Canada function as self employed businessmen. They are running a business. What a single pay system does involves only the part about who pays for everything. With the single payer system you remove all the bureacracy and complications of have hundred of different insurance companies (i.e doctors having to learn how to fill out hundred+ types of insurance forms). The single payer system has very little to do with competition in the field of medicine. As to the doctor shortage issue, that is a completely other different question. Many years ago governments severely cut back on the funding of medical schools in Canada. And therefore, schools for quite a long time were bringing forth fewer new doctors. This is less of an issue of how medicine is done in the country and more of issue mistakes made in the educational system. As someone who has lived in both countries. The American system ony has advantages if you are rich. If you are an average person you are much worse off. Better waiting for medical treatment than not getting any medical treatment at all. Some thirty million Americans are without medical coverage. That is about as many people as there are Canadians. And good luck changing jobs, moving to a new state if you have a preexisting medical condition, because you will not be able to get any insurance companies to provide you coverage for it. This is something no one ever mentions when comparing the two medical systems. Peter

Re:Merit

[Uberbah]

Ah, but this is exactly where government can help: by passing laws requiring monopoly utilities to provide such services to even the most remote users.

But why fiddle fart around with "private-public partnerships" when the government can do a better job for less money:

March 6, 2009 | Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital, FDR boldly chose to make all other forms of energy in the U.S. uneconomical, by slapping high taxes on kerosene and coal. With the money from the new federal Kerosene Cap and Trade system, President Roosevelt and Congress funded a small-scale federal research program, in the hope of attracting much greater private investment ...

Wait. What's that you say? FDR didn't do that? He poured federal money into the all-public Manhattan Project and created the first atomic bomb in a couple of years? He didn't tax kerosene to make it uneconomical and to encourage private investment in atomic power?

Oh. OK. Never mind.

But what about Social Security? In 1935, FDR signed the historic Social Security Act. It created a complex "retirement mandate" system, forcing all elderly Americans to buy expensive annuities from private insurance companies, without, however, imposing price controls on the insurance companies ...

What? FDR didn't force the elderly to subsidize private annuity brokers? He imposed a single, simple, efficient tax to pay for a single, simple, efficient public system of retirement benefits?

All right, then, forget FDR. He was a socialist, anyway. Let Dwight Eisenhower serve as a model for the Obama administration. President Eisenhower authorized the biggest infrastructure program in American history, when he signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. The interstate highway act created an elaborate system of private tax incentives and public-private partnerships (PPPs) to encourage private corporations to build national highways. To begin with, all U.S. highways were leased to domestic and foreign corporations for a period of decades. Second, all U.S. highways were set up with toll booths, so that American drivers would be forced to repay the corporate owners of the national highways every few dozen miles. Finally, a system of high-speed lanes with higher tolls was created, so that the rich could whiz down the road while middle-class and poor Americans were stuck in traffic jams ...

Re:Merit

[Uberbah]

The letter of the Constitution ("letter of the law") prevents Federal socialism, and the spirit of the Constitution is fully against socialism.

It does nether. General Welfare. It's in the Constitution. Twice.

Re:Merit

[Uberbah]

Socialism means the individual has no rights, but a group (or its leaders), can force you to serve the group.

Which is of course baseless nonsense, but that's never kept a good conservative argument down. The only "right" you have with free market capitalism is the "right" to look for another job.

Re:Merit

[Uberbah]

I've no particular problem with socialism in general, nor the government providing more and more services. However, the Tenth Amendment specifically states that any powers not granted to the Federal Government by the Constitution are reserved for the States or the People. That means that if the Constitution doesn't have a section on Federally-owned businesses, then the government can't own one.

Yes, the 10th Amendment is in the Constitution, but so is General Welfare. Twice. And it's funny how you never see 10th Amendment fans apply that argument consistently, and rail about the unconstitutionality of the Air Force and the CIA. Because if you go with a strict interpretation of the Constitution, it only gives Congress the power to fund an army and a navy, and the USAF and CIA are neither.

Re:Merit

[Uberbah]

that would be a mistake, I live in Canada, it's no joke. Our cancer patients have to wait for over 70 days now to start getting critical treatment, our emergency rooms are filled with people who are waiting for 8-16 hours to get service and half of our people do not have a physician, forget about getting an appointment with a specialist in less than 3-4 months (sometimes 6-9 months).

Then I'd say it's too bad Canada has so many goddamn liars, as your claims are complete BS from stem to stern. But the other flaw with this defense of the status quo is that the United States has horrible waiting periods. Defenders point out how easy it is to get an appointment with a general practitioner and pretend that applies to the whole medical system, when that is not the case. Try to see a specialist for a non-emergency condition and you are virtually guaranteed to schedule an appointment some time in the future, or go on a list of some kind, where you can wait for an opening.

Re:Merit

[Uberbah]

First of all, Medicare shifts a lot of the admin cost to the provider

To make sure people are eligible. And of COURSE private insurance is going to have higher administration costs, since they employ thousands of people to try and find ways to deny you the coverage you are paying for.

There's a reason why a lot of doctors are refusing to accept Medicare customers these days.

Because they don't know if they'll be paid.

Re:Merit

[infinite9]

- that would be a mistake, I live in Canada, it's no joke. Our cancer patients have to wait for over 70 days now to start getting critical treatment, our emergency rooms are filled with people who are waiting for 8-16 hours to get service and half of our people do not have a physician, forget about getting an appointment with a specialist in less than 3-4 months (sometimes 6-9 months).

You do not want to remove competition, what you do want is to add competition.

Have the government run a competing system, then you'll get somewhere.

I'm sure that Canada has its health care system problems, but I don't think you realize how bad it is here in the US. I'm an independent consultant. My wife doesn't work. I can't go out an get individual health insurance because they refuse to cover three of my kids because they have asthma. They're happy to cover the rest of my family though. Just don't use the coverage or they'll drop you. And if you have a major claim, they deny it and force you to sue. Oh, and the drugs for my medical condition cost $1200 a month. But prescription drug caps mean I exhaust that in a few months.

So I've created this convoluted business relationship with this other company. They employ my wife as their employee and give her group health insurance. Then bill my corporation for her services. Works great. But it costs $3000 a month, up from half of that two years ago.

So I'm currently negotiating a salaried job with a significant pay cut because I actually end up taking home more... all because of health insurance.

I'm sure your system sucks. I'm sure our system sucks more. A lot more.

Re:Merit

[ChrisMaple]

General Welfare is written as an explanation of purpose, not as an excuse to be used for whatever you want. See the Federalist Papers.

Re:Merit

[jez9999]

When was the last time YOU got good service from a monopolistic telephone company? The municipality is, at least in theory, accountable.

Re:Merit

[ChrisMaple]

Socialism is a system in which the government has complete ownership of all property. (That socialists will not admit it is another issue.) Capitalism is a system in which a person owns himself and his labor, has the right to trade his labor and property for other things. In other words, he has the right and responsibility to support his own life, which he does not have under socialism.

Re:Merit

[Uberbah]

When was the last time you got good service from the government? Government is inept, the reason is clear.

Since government is always inept and private enterprise is always more efficient, Time Warner will just come in and crush this municipal ISP with the magic of private enterprise, puppies and rainbows.

Or, maybe this idea that government is always more inefficient than private enterprise is just as stupid as thinking that government is always better than private enterprise. As evidenced by the fact that the reason this ISP got started in the first place is because the telecos weren't interested in providing competitive service.

Re:Merit

[Uberbah]

Communism is a system in which the government has complete ownership of all property.

Fixed that for you. You know there's private property in France, Sweden, and even (gasp!) Venezuela, right?

But in any case, thanks for providing more evidence of how conservative thought has no connection to reality.

Re:Merit

[Rycross]

Well the other day I mailed some important documents to Japan through the US Postal Service. I then used the government-sponsored buses to ride to my apartment on the government-maintained roads. All around, excellent service. Oh, and the much-maligned DMV has often been an efficient experience for me, sans one community where it was under-staffed and under-funded.

Re:Merit

[Uberbah]

See the Federalist Papers.

The Federalist Papers are not the Constitution. See: the Constitution.

General Welfare is written as an explanation of purpose

And that purpose is of course served by providing better services for less money than private businesses are capable or willing to do.

not as an excuse to be used for whatever you want

Straw man. But it's a free country, and you're entitled to your opinion if not your own set of facts. So when are you going to start protesting the USAF, NORAD, the CIA, the Border Patrol, the NSA, and of course our system of spy satellites? None are a part of the Army or the Navy, so they're obvious violations of the 10th Amendment and must be stopped immediately.

Re:Merit

[Rycross]

Care to prove your statement that it can't? In my experience, it certainly can, as long as we quite appointing people who believe the government is evil, inefficient, and worthless to positions in the same government that they seem to despise. Certainly the US postal service has worked well, as well as the roads. Public transport works well in places in which people believe it can and should work well.

Re:Merit

[Rycross]

Back in college I had to see a specialist and had a 2 month wait. My insurance company refused to let me see anyone else except for the one guy, and he was booked solid.

Re:Merit

[shutdown -p now]

Why couldn't the people have formed a co-operative group, raised the capital investment and gone into competition with TWC - the same way any other entity would have had to? I don't like governments doing things like this because their position immediately puts them into a better stance for competing in markets.

Maybe they could, but why should they. Indeed, what does your like or dislike of governments even matter here?

As GP has rightly pointed out, this is a textbook example of a government directly implementing the will of the people, expressed via proper democratic process. If locals really wish government monopoly on their Internet, then why shouldn't they have it?

Re:Merit

[shutdown -p now]

On the other hand, it also means that any government-owned companies would have to be owned at the state level, and then it's totally okay with the Constitution.

Which is precisely the case here, isn't it? It's even smaller than state level, it's one particular town.

Re:Merit

[Rycross]

The Federalist papers were written to argue for and explain the logic behind the Constitution, so they are immensely helpful in clarifying certain ideas. In this case, the GP is right: the general welfare clause was never meant to give the federal government blanket permission to do these things.

That the government does things that violate the Constitution is no surprise. If these things are necessary at the federal level, then we should follow proper legal procedure and amend the Constitution. Otherwise, I don't see why its such a problem to let state and municipal governments (through the 10th Amendment) handle these things. The internet service in question, after all, is being handled by the local government, after all, and local governments tend to be far more responsive to their constituents' needs than the federal government.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair though, you have to admit that "A new ISP" and "A new ISP with the bankroll of an entire tax base and payroll/benefits/retirement funded independently of the business" are not the same thing. If you yourself started the business, you might find your insurance payments too great. For example, you would probably have to insure your employees against property damage they might inflict while trenching cable. For government, it's already done and pre-paid. Same thing is true for payroll, health benefits, retirement plans, and the vehicle fleet.

So it's really not as level a playing field as you think.

Now it does sound like Time-Warner et. al. do need a swift kick in the butt. So do I think the idea that Ashland Oregon did is better: pay for the fiber upgrade as an infrastructure expense (out of the general fund, directly paid by taxes). Then let any/all ISPs buy the capacity from the city. If you like TW - buy from them. If you like Local Johnny's ISP - buy from them.

Re:Merit

[Rycross]

Apparently there was enough demand to take out loans, lay out the infrastructure, and then run it break-even without using any tax money, all at better service and reduced cost. I guess claims of insufficient demand are bullshit, eh? That TW is a lying, greedy, hypocritical company shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's ever dealt with their service.

Re:Merit

[roman_mir]

I think all of the people who replied to my comments have completely missed my point: do not remove competition by introducing a single player and getting rid of the rest.

I suggest that introducing a government system to compete with the proprietary systems would provide a better result in the long term. In Canada we do not have a good system either way, people still go untreated and die. I am suggesting that similarly to municipally ran ISP, a government (doesn't have to be federal) ran insurance company that wouldn't turn people down if they have a problem and wouldn't bankrupt them in case of an emergency would provide exactly what is needed in the US: competition to the fat insurance companies that are running (and ruining) your health-care system now.

I am not saying your system is better than ours or another way around, I am saying that German style system is superior to either.

Re:Merit

[roman_mir]

"The reason that there is so little competition in the telco space is that it has a prohibitively expensive startup cost. You can't run your own lines and maintain your own switching systems, cell towers, etc. before you even get a single customer... no VC would fund that."

- your argument makes no sense, there are already plenty of private insurance companies, I am proposing that there also should be one or more government ran insurance companies whose reason to exist would not be to gauge its customers but to provide insurance (and possibly health-care) at cost. People who opt into it should not be turned down, they should pay premiums that must not grow to pay larger and larger bonuses to the directors, this should be a competition provided by and for the people.

This would force the private insurance companies to rethink their existing policies and they would have to compete on prices and quality, I don't see why you believe this is a flawed assumption.

Re:Merit

[mooingyak]

It's also non level if the gov is exempt from various taxes that the private ISP has to pay.

Re:Merit

[xDraveNx]

I strongly suggest you perform a simply google search before simply assuming the grass is greener. Without even taking into context how long the wait is for cancer treatment, cost alone (in the US) would assure most people cannot afford treatment Link, so I guess you are correct wait time does go down. Lucky for you, you can simply cross the border dip into your pocket and see how that treats you.

Re:Merit

[roman_mir]

roman mir, you do not understand how the system in Canada works. Doctors in Canada function as self employed businessmen. They are running a business.

- just roman is sufficient. I understand how doctors in Canada work and this has nothing to do with the fact that health insurance in Canada is completely government ran. You can by some supplementary insurance for critical illness, disability and life, but you cannot go to a private insurer. All claims are through medicare, which is governed by the Canada health act. You don't understand that how doctors work has no consequences on the quality of care here because we simply do not have enough of them specifically because their practices/wages are so regulated by this act.

In Canada the only game in town for insurance is the government and this is killing the system here. I am not suggesting that US has it better, they just have the exact opposite problem: oligarchy of the insurance cartel as far as I am concerned. They need competition from government ran programs just like Canadians need private insurance companies to be allowed to do business here. Simply look at Germany for a working model.

Re:Merit

[roman_mir]

I don't believe we have met, but I am sure it would not give me any pleasure. GTA - here people do not have access to specialist in timely fashion and emergency rooms are filled with people waiting for 8-16 hours at a time. People die from cancer because their testing is scheduled too late and even when it is not too late for testing, their appointments for treatment may take many months.

Women cannot get to a gynecologist sometimes within 9 month, that's enough to give birth!

I have not lied about a single bit here, you are an imbecile ignoramus though.

Re:Merit

[roman_mir]

One more comment with no understanding of what is being said?

By the way, I use Buffalo medical group (it's expensive but immediate and offers procedures not provided in Canada).

But that's not the point, the point you have missed - I am proposing that US should not forbid private insurance companies like Canada does, I am proposing that US should have some government ran insurance companies to create competition and then you will get somewhere in the US that would be at least acceptable if not great in this field.

Please learn to read and understand the point of a comment and stop wasting time, thank you.

Re:Merit

[kirillian]

I'm sorry if my post was read to mean that I felt gypped that free-market forces weren't at work. Whether I prefer the concept of laissez faire or not should not matter. My point was that commenters had already determined in their heads that one was better than the other.

The history of the economy of the United States is extremely mixed insofar as the reigns of free-market capitalism and socialism are concerned. Any semblance of capitalistic self-governing in the markets have been farcical at best - regulations and government oversight have twisted even the most "free-market" environments that the United States has enjoyed into artificial ones that resemble socialist structures even as we practice "freely" in them.

For this, I trot out the example of China's recent attempts to capitalize within a socialist structure. While an exceptionally different example, it highlights the struggle that any country has between trying to maintain the lifestyle that the inhabitants expect and the amount of control over the inhabitants that the government expects to have. China is attempting to maintain the same level of control while raising the standard of living while the United States is going the opposite direction at the moment - trying to maintain the same standard of living while raising its ability to control the present economic/social conditions. I'm curious as to whether the end goal is actually shared between the two

It's easy to see the differences between the two countries...however, it is often difficult (because of prejudices, differing cultures, etc.) to see similarities and lessons that can be learned from them...it's certainly a big question that deserves its own discussion, another time, another place...

Maybe the real problem is that we have too many politicians that are either dumber than rocks or have no balls at all from Big Businesse stepping all over them while no intelligent, self-respecting politicians or motivated persons are willing to step out into the line of fire to change that. Perhaps THAT is a culture thing - for some reason, I, personally, grew up thinking that politicians were idiots...so I never wanted to be one...anyone else?

Re:Merit

[SideshowBob]

Then what's the problem? If the private sector can do it better, cheaper, and faster, why would they be worried about a little competition? Surely the market will sort it all out, right?

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

Is your wife's poonie still broken? Time for a trip to Buffalo to get it fixed up!!!

Re:Merit

[u-235-sentinel]

Why couldn't the people have formed a co-operative group, raised the capital investment and gone into competition with TWC - the same way any other entity would have had to? I don't like governments doing things like this because their position immediately puts them into a better stance for competing in markets.

You have to consider who does it benefit more. The cable company or the people when a monopoly such as this appears.

I'm in a situation where I can go with speedy concast or slow Qwest DSL.

After being abused by Concast we have only one option and it's not terribly fast.

competition?

This is like asking two people to race on a track. One guy is on a motorcycle and the other on a bicycle.

Re:Merit

[xDraveNx]

Seem like quite a few people did not "understand" your original point. Seems like one of two things is happening here: You're smart and the rest are dumb OR your point wasn't clear. So perhaps you should learn to make your point clear and stop wasting time.

Re:Merit

[roman_mir]

Really? Your comment score does not seem to indicate this.

You do not want to remove competition, what you do want is to add competition.

Have the government run a competing system, then you'll get somewhere.

- if you can't get a point from these simple statements, then maybe it is time to reevaluate your abilities.

Re:Merit

[roman_mir]

What's with the sour grapes? Isn't it time to give up already?

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

Those local competing water/trash services are not NEARLY as lucrative as an ISP, nor are they owned by HUGE companies that control monopolies over that sector of business. The services you refer to are often provided by local companies who do not have the money or power to fight back like the ISP's are doing. I find it disgusting how hard they are fighting to maintain their monopoly.

Re:Merit

[cjsm]

- that would be a mistake, I live in Canada, it's no joke. Our cancer patients have to wait for over 70 days now to start getting critical treatment, our emergency rooms are filled with people who are waiting for 8-16 hours to get service and half of our people do not have a physician, forget about getting an appointment with a specialist in less than 3-4 months (sometimes 6-9 months).

I think your cherry picking a few worse cases. Do you have evidence that's the average? You could cherry pick a million horror stories about the U.S. private insurance system - cancer patients denied treatment or being dropped by their insurance companies, etc.

I any case, I don't mean to advocate getting rid of private insurance. I just want a government supervised insurance plan to be available.

But if you don't like Canada's health care system, by all means, emigrate to the U.S. I just hope you don't lose your job or are self employed.

Re:Merit

[roman_mir]

Well, if I am cherry-picking then Germany is cherry-picking and it's cherries are mighty tasty.

Re:Merit

[mysidia]

Power utilities are very profitable to deliver to areas of high population density

But the cost of building out infrastructure to outlying rural areas of low population density is very high, a lot higher per customer than in the high-density urban areas.

So power companies would naturally tend to only service the highly-concentrated areas, all things being equal.

If company A tried to service everyone, the ongoing costs would be much higher, so they would have to charge a much higher price to everyone in order to be profitable.

When they did that, without a monopoly right: a competitor, company B, could then come in, and takeover all the high population density areas by offering a much lower price a price that is still highly profitable to company B, but company A can't possibly match due to the high costs of infrastructure maintenance for the rural areas.

The only response is for company A to either die, or match company B's prices for the urban customers that company B is trying to steal. The result is a massive price increase for rural customers (they won't be able to afford the utility anymore).

There are several things that serve to counter this natural tendency:

Some local governments make deals with corporations. The power company agrees to service everyone in the area, and in exchange, they are granted an exclusive monopoly.

Sometimes utility companies are cooperatives or provided by non-profit/quasi-government entities owned by the users of the utility, instead of for-profit enterprises with a franchise.

Re:Merit

[The_Quinn]

Those countries are not fully Communist. Not sure what that has to do with Conservatism (I am not one.)

Re:Merit

[The_Quinn]

Having your life belong to the group (community, tribe, race), is the hallmark of collectivism, which is the basis for Socialism, Fascism, and Communism.

On the other hand, owning your own life, being free to exercise your judgment freely and self-responsibly (respecting others equal rights) is the hallmark of Capitalism, and was an end-product of the Enlightenment.

Capitalism is the only system consistent with a morality in which your life is an end in itself (which is true for all life).

Re:Merit

[Uberbah]

Those countries are not fully Communist.

Communism != socialism. Take a vacation to North Korea and I'm sure they'd be happy to show you the difference.

Not sure what that has to do with Conservatism (I am not one.)

If it looks like a conservative, doesn't know what it's talking about like a conservative, it's probably....

Re:Merit

[Uberbah]

Having your life belong to the group (community, tribe, race), is the hallmark of collectivism

And how does your life belong to the group, in any way shape or form, a part of socialism?

which is the basis for Socialism, Fascism, and Communism.

Do you frequently confuse complete polar opposites?

On the other hand, owning your own life, being free to exercise your judgment freely and self-responsibly (respecting others equal rights) is the hallmark of Capitalism, and was an end-product of the Enlightenment.

Here's some nice antidote to that Laissez faire kool aid you've been drinking. Regulation and government services weren't started up for shits & giggles, but because the lack of regulation & services were getting people killed and wasting money.

Re:Merit

[The_Quinn]

And how does your life belong to the group, in any way shape or form, a part of socialism?

In Socialism, most of what you have, create, or produce belongs to the group (the collective). You are a serf - a servant - existing for the sake of the group. You are not a free individual, living life for your own sake.

Communism is the complete abolition of private property, i.e. complete socialization.

Fascism is similar, except the state (government) leaves a pretense of private ownership, while the actual, de facto, ownership belongs to the state and those who control the state (bureaucrats).

In all cases, the only justification for your existence is as a sacrificial animal for others.

Re:Merit

[Anonymous Coward]

In Socialism, most of what you have, create, or produce belongs to the group (the collective). You are a serf - a servant - existing for the sake of the group. You are not a free individual, living life for your own sake.

Unlike, say, modern America, where most of what you "own" belongs to banks and credit card companies, where most people sell their labor to a corporation or other such collective, and donate most of the value of their labor to the higher-ups and spend their days doing a job they don't enjoy, sacrificing time that could be spent with their families, or spent enriching and educating themselves.

Where most people do not produce anything they consume themselves; are dependent upon someone else to produce food, clothing, fresh water, means of transportation, entertainment, education, etc.

But hey, at least capitalism allows you to live in the illusion that you are an island - a free, self-sufficient individual, living life for your own sake!

corportate behavior, government dependency

[xzvf]

The corporation is just using the tools available to them to maintain a favorable condition. I've seen Time Warner use its 24 hour news program to push its agenda in a dispute with content providers over fees. Same with the content providers scrolling messages at the bottom of the screen. While questionable ethically, the real problem is we have a government structure where it is too easy to "bribe" legally. Campaign donations and lobbyist activity craft nearly every bill, and when something passes that isn't liked by some group or institution, conflicting legislation soon follows forcing courts to decide. If we had a culture of common sense and integrity in our legislators then we would have to come up with a way to by-pass "free speech rights" of corporations and collective organizations to give the right back to individuals.

Re:corportate behavior, government dependency

[Tenebrousedge]

I think you need a different country. This one has been the way it is for a long time, and there isn't any motive force for change, despite B. Obama's fine rhetoric.

A more populist government, it seems, would naturally follow from changing the voting structure to something other than FPTP. The chances of that are negligible, as are the chances for any real change in the causes of the issues you name. I think it's more significant even than 'the devil you know'; the corporate culture has become a cornerstone of the national identity.

If anyone can produce a convincing argument otherwise, I have some hope I'd like to affix to it.

Re:corportate behavior, government dependency

[EastCoastSurfer]

A more populist government, it seems, would naturally follow from changing the voting structure to something other than FPTP.

Is a more populist government really what you want though? I'm sure it would be popular to never have to work and have the government send you a weekly check, but is that what's best for the country?

Kids would think it's popular to skip school all the time, but their parents do what's right for their long term future and make them go anyways. We need people in the government who are willing to do the unpopular thing if they think that it's better for the country in the long term.

How can they win?

[Rooked_One]

It sounds to me like internet is becoming more and more of a "needed commodity" than it used to be. Consider, if you will, roads. The taxpayer dollars go towards those and in turn, the government hires private contractors to do the work - this article doesn't sound much different.

However, this would make the internet a public service more than a paid for service, so, unfortunately, there is a large gray area there - and the companies making the pretty penny are going to fight in that gray area.

Re:How can they win?

[Ritchie70]

Its not just roads. As an earlier post pointed out, many city or county governments handle garbage collection, electricity, and/or natural gas.

All of these are handled in other places by private companies.

City of Chicago handles garbage collection.
In the city of Darien, BFI handles garbage collection.

City of Naperville does electricity.
ComEd sells me my electricity.

Re:How can they win?

[jc42]

Consider, if you will, roads. ... this would make the internet a public service more than a paid for service, ...

It's not really all that different. Consider that in most places, a large part of the funding for road maintenance comes from fuel taxes, which are really direct user fees that are proportional to how much you use the roads (and how efficient your vehicle is ;-).

The subscription fees charged by ISPs run by local governments or set up as a government-assisted "nonprofit" co-op aren't really anything new. As with roads, electricity, water, sewers, etc., we're seeing that the big comm companies fundamentally want to supply service only where it's highly profitable, and will use the political system to achieve a monopoly position rather than competing in a "market". This should come as no surprise to anyone with even a small knowledge of the history of such services. And it should come as no surprise that a local government or a government-supported co-op might be a better system for customers in smaller towns or rural areas.

Re:How can they win?

[Anonymous Coward]

The road analogy is perfect. Roads are installed and maintained by the tax payer, but if you want to drive on them, you need to pay for your own insurance and fuel from one of several companies available. Since the insurance companies and fuel suppliers do not own the roads, they have to compete equally.

Corporations trolled

[Zsub]

And I fucking RAGED.

*You* didn't want the customers, fuckers, *YOU*. They came to you begging for service. You denied. Now they did it themselves and you blame unfair competition? Go jerk off in some cold closet, incompetent bastards...

Re:Corporations trolled

[Anonymous Coward]

I concur. I don't live in NC but i do want to make it clear that I want the Internets to be a utility. How do i go about this?

Please stop

[hansraj]

What in the heavens is the matter with kdawson? Is everyone on slashdot so dumb that they need to be "led" to the right opinion about whatever the fuck the story is about?

This story was already published here without the kdawsonishness and the response was overwhelmingly what the editor seems to be leading everyone up to anyway. But you still can't resist putting the drama in the summary. Can you?

Please, really. If we want an editorial, we would ask for one. Just give us the story and let the discussion unravel. Slashdot has quite a homogeneous viewpoint of many thing already. There is no need to try to lead up the discussion somewhere you like even before it has started - especially if you are (most probably) not going to be in the discussion. Furthermore, just the thought that you think you can change the wordings of a sentence and fool anyone into making a different opinion than I would make otherwise should be quite offensive for them.

Re:Please stop

[stokessd]

WTF?!?! You actually READ the article before posting here? Are you lost?

Hello...This is Slashdot...People who read articles are one door to the right... :)

Sheldon

Re:Please stop

[Anonymous Coward]

John Katz was a great contributor as I recollect.

Amazed me howe a competent writer upset a small group of the old timers.

I am sick of the bitching about kdawson I do not see the problem at all. Stop whinging and whining and try to stay on topic.

Explain push polling to me?

[RandoX]

Tried to RTFA, but blocked from work as P2P.

Re:Explain push polling to me?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

What is your opinion of NC's attempt to socialize internet access?

Do you think the government should be in the business of competing with private business?

Re:Explain push polling to me?

[MichaelSmith]

You ring lots of people on the pretence that you want their opinion. Then you ask leading questions like Would you vote for candidate X even though he has voted for higher taxes in your city, or some such. The idea is to promote an idea about candidate X, not to find out where the votes are going.

It is a very popular political tool.

Re:Explain push polling to me?

[dejanc]

It's a loaded poll. You call as many people as you can, and ask them questions like: Q) How do you think introduction of socialism into our community that is caused by cheap Internet access will affect our already fragile economy? a) Very badly. b) Somewhat badly. c) Not that badly.

Re:Explain push polling to me?

[mysidia]

It's a "political poll" delivered under false pretense with prejudiced questions.

A poll designed not to collect your answers but to feed you misinformation (FUD) and influence your opinion.

Generally, they are very effective. People investing time in taking a poll believe the pollster is an authority on the subject, so there is a strong tendency tend to believe all the misinformation, and many people's opinions can be influenced dramatically.

(Especially if they were neutral on or unaware of the subject beforehand)

The practice is actually illegal in some states.

Re:Explain push polling to me?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll give you an example of a "push" question that might well be in this particular poll:

"Is it fair for a city government to tax a local business, then turn around and use that tax money to compete with the local business they're taxing?"

The Time-Warner guy working the statehouse there has "asked" that exact question on a local TV station. The station is owned by Time Warner and has been spewing biased propaganda for weeks.

What a racket

[mc1138]

I talked about this before, but its a real shame seeing this sort of behavior out of companies. I know they're backed against a wall a bit, but really, if they'd been taking the time to upgrade and provide better service all along then they wouldn't be in this position in the first place. It's almost as bad as giving people a crappy service and then trying to charge people for "extra" bandwidth...

TW pays a bribe for access; Greenlight benefits

[gelfling]

At least in the Triangle area in NC, TW pays the local municipalities a bribe, I mean an "Access Fee" that can approach something like 15% of the revenue. While their methods are all unsavory, they are rightfully angry that their bribe is underwriting a competitor.

Re:TW pays a bribe for access; Greenlight benefits

[tychovi]

Exactly, you highlight the point perfectly. If they can afford to pay an "access fee" just how much of a margin are they charging? In this day and age communications are closer to being a utility than a luxury. The need for unfettered communication access in our society is something required so we can, as informed citizens, make intelligent, informed choices. Access to media/communications should be considered a utility and regulated like other services (power, transportation, municipal). The handful of companies that control the communications/media in the U.S. have proven again and again to be greedy, controlling, selfish and manipulative bastards. This is just one more example.

Re:TW pays a bribe for access; Greenlight benefits

[Anonymous Coward]

The project in Wilson, NC isn't costing tax payer money. It was financed by bonds. Only the credit of the town was tapped to get the infrastructure built. Users of the service are paying its costs and paying on that bond.

Bonds help spread a utility investment cost over time for the people who use it over time.

Re:TW pays a bribe for access; Greenlight benefits

[Whorhay]

TWC might have to pay that bribe or access fee but that money isn't subsidizing Greenlight. Greenlight's infrastructure was paid for with a special bonds issue. And it currently operates at a profit on it's revenues alone. It is not funded or supported by funds from anywhere but it's self.

It is a good arguement that they have a competitive edge if they aren't paying the same fees that the private companies have to pay. But those fees can't come close to closing the gap in their prices. In a previous discussion someone showed that a still inferior service package (six less channels, decent channels not fluff, and notably worse internet connection) from TWC costed close to $50 more per month, and it was an introductory rate.

No Sir!

[bogaboga]

The government here is in the wrong for poking its nose where it doesn't belong. Either the entire ISP business should be under government control or none of it should be. By cherry picking certain parts, the government has made a very bad decision with long term ramifications for all business in the state.

Then let's privatize the Fire Department and all other services exclusively run by government.

Or even better, let's put the entire issue to a public vote. This would be the ultimate form of democracy. How about that?

You are one of the folks that thinks that anything run by government is bad as if, when you find yourself on the death bed...being bamboozled by insurance companies...as if who provides the service you need at the material time matters. What would matter to you is how you can get the help you need. I do not care who provides a service as long as I am satisfied.

People with your thoughts are partly responsible with the current financial crisis. It's insane. I would like you to call for a referendum on this issue instead of ranting around here.

Remember, a drowning man will cling to a reed with the hope that it will offer a lifeline of some sort.

Re:No Sir!

[TubeSteak]

People with your thoughts are partly responsible with the current financial crisis. It's insane.

You forgot to call out the GP for his false "all or nothing" dichotomy.
I swear, sometimes the intellectual dishonesty displayed by free marketeers is stunning.

And even that ignores his bit about cherry picking, which is exactly what private ISPs did until local/state government forced build-out requirements upon them.

I would like you to call for a referendum on this issue instead of ranting around here.

As we're seeing with the slow-motion implosion of the Republican party, given enough rope, the ideologically pure would rather hang themselves than use the rope to make a bridge off their mountain top.

Re:No Sir!

[chill]

Then let's privatize the Fire Department and all other services exclusively run by government.

There are many places in the U.S. that have private fire departments. Many others are contracted out by the government to private businesses, just like ambulance service and many other "public" services. The traditional method has been for government to contract out this way and not set up shop themselves

Or even better, let's put the entire issue to a public vote. This would be the ultimate form of democracy. How about that?

We're not a Democracy, we're a Republic. It is in the Constitution.

Your model doesn't scale. Local governments are Federal tax-exempt. If you start incorporating more and more functions into the local government, the revenue generated from taxes on the private businesses who used to do te job will fall. It is a balancing act. Look to the Federal Highway Trust Fund for an example. When the price of gas jumped to $4 / gallon and all those people cut back on driving, the government didn't have enough money to pay to maintain the Interstates and other roads. Oregon is in a similar situation.

The lying left is using logic like yours to push everyone to electric cars. The current administration already admitted no one is going to buy them at the prices they actually cost. They pointed out the Chevy Volt is basically DOA because of sticker price. So they're going to subsidize it and get them electric cars for "cheap".

Except "cheap" it isn't. Guess what happens to road maintenance when everyone starts driving electric cars? Since the gasoline tax is what pays for all that, they're going to run out of money. And the government will raise other taxes to make up the difference. They're shifting this stuff around like a 3 Card Monty game in hopes people won't notice.

You want service? Pay for it up front by contracting out to a private business who has to pay all the existing taxes, fees (Universal Service Fee anyone?) and costs instead of playing 3 Card Monty with taxes.

Re:No Sir!

[The_Quinn]

Government has a legalized monopoly on the use of physical force. The purpose of the Constitution is to very strictly/narrowly define how that force could be used (Military, police, courts). In this view, you, the individual, are sovereign and have rights - and no other person or group of people can infringe on your rights.

Putting it to a vote is irrelevant. Even if 51% of the people want to infringe on my rights (take my money, force me to pray, force me to work), they have no right to. The "democracy" part of our country applies only to elections - not to "unlimited majority rule".

Re:No Sir!

[bogaboga]

Putting it to a vote is irrelevant. Even if 51% of the people want to infringe on my rights (take my money, force me to pray, force me to work), they have no right to. The "democracy" part of our country applies only to elections - not to "unlimited majority rule".

Why do you fear the vote? Isn't that democracy? Oh this reminds me of former president (Bush). He pushed for "democracy" in Palestine but when democracy put a "terrorist organization" in power, he did not like that....Oh so it is only democratic when the outcome is favored by people like you?

On that last bit you mention about democracy, elections are run about policies and one of these can be majority rule...good or bad.

Re:No Sir!

[egcagrac0]

Guess what happens to road maintenance when everyone starts driving electric cars?

The government changes the road maintenance tax to be per mile, instead of per fuel gallon. Annual registration probably gets slightly more complicated (submit current odometer reading with renewal, plus semi-random auditing).

Some things get harder, some things get simpler. Vehicles used primarily in interstate travel get very interesting, suddenly.

The market for dyed diesel fuel dries up, too.

Re:No Sir!

[chill]

Are you referring to the soon-to-be highly valuable skill of odometer (or other mileage sensor) tampering?

Personally, I'm expecting an increase in taxes on electricity. Possibly a second, metered-differently outlet for automobiles. Many cities have this sort of thing for water that is used for outside, like watering lawns and the like. They're metered differently because there is no sewerage charge.

However, knowing the government, I expect them to do both and possibly something else I didn't think of.

Re:No Sir!

[The_Quinn]

What you are talking about is mob rule - the ability for the gang (51%) to enslave the other 49%.

I am saying that each individual should be free, dealing with other individuals voluntarily, by mutual consent.

It doesn't matter how many people want to take your money, your time, your life - they have no right to take any of it.

Re:No Sir!

[Uberbah]

There are many places in the U.S. that have private fire departments.

That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

We're not a Democracy, we're a Republic. It is in the Constitution.

We're a Democratic Republic. Spare us from the pedants who think democracy == pure democracy.

If you start incorporating more and more functions into the local government, the revenue generated from taxes on the private businesses who used to do te job will fall. It is a balancing act.

Wait, so we're supposed to tax businesses now? Wouldn't you be hopping up and down over that in any other context?

The lying left is using logic like yours to push everyone to electric cars. The current administration already admitted no one is going to buy them at the prices they actually cost. They pointed out the Chevy Volt is basically DOA because of sticker price. So they're going to subsidize it and get them electric cars for "cheap".

My brain hurts after reading something this stupid. Slashtards said the same thing about the iPhone upon it's release, it's too expensive, waaaaaa - and it sold out anyway. So the Volt is projected to cost $40,000 or more - LOTS of cars are sold at that price. And when - not if - gas rises to $4 a gallon again, being able to save $150 per month in fuel costs will take a big bite out of those monthly car payments.

Guess what happens to road maintenance when everyone starts driving electric cars? Since the gasoline tax is what pays for all that, they're going to run out of money.

If everyone starts driving more fuel efficient vehicles, it will reduce maintenance costs because they weigh less than your F-150's and Suburbans. As as for the Highway Trust Fund, either raise the fuel tax some more or find another way to pay for it.

Re:No Sir!

[chill]

We're a Democratic Republic. Spare us from the pedants who think democracy == pure democracy.

And Democratic Republic is redundant. We elect representatives to run government as opposed to running it directly. I'm being pedantic because people like to use phrases like "we're a Democracy, let's vote on it!" and that isn't true. Referendums are rare in this country and aren't always binding. We're a Republic, which means we elect people to make decisions for us. If they don't do a good job, we're supposed to elect different ones. We don't directly run the government or vote on most laws.

Wait, so we're supposed to tax businesses now? Wouldn't you be hopping up and down over that in any other context?

It depends on the amount of tax. In most cases, no. I'm not saying get rid of all taxes. There are legitimate functions of government and they have always been supported by taxes and tariffs. I just prefer smaller and more local government.

Slashtards said the same thing about the iPhone upon it's release, it's too expensive, waaaaaa - and it sold out anyway. So the Volt is projected to cost $40,000 or more - LOTS of cars are sold at that price. And when - not if - gas rises to $4 a gallon again, being able to save $150 per month in fuel costs will take a big bite out of those monthly car payments.

Surprise, surprise, we agree. Take some aspirin for your head and re-read what I wrote. It was the gov't that decided that the Volt would be DOA because of the price, not the market. Honestly, I'd be interested in an electric car at that price depending on several other variables. Hell, if I had the money, I'd be happy to pay the $100K+ for a Tesla!

We're getting there on electric cars, but the gov't is planning on forcing the issue now. Are they also going to subsidize the needed electric infrastructure upgrades? What about battery technology? Planning on invading Chile and Bolivia for lithium supplies?

The entire thing reminds me of dealing with a corporate executive who comes into my office after a long-distance flight. He read some article in an in-flight magazine about some pie-in-the-sky technology and WANTS IT NOW! Since he has no grasp of the details, the infrastructure or anything else, it ends up being one giant money pit. That is how I see the gov't bit with the auto industry, except with an almost unlimited pit in which to throw OUR money.

And "find another way to pay for it" was my point. They're not being honest in the cost of the vehicles when trying to make them "cheap". Soon they'll have to find another tax to make up for what was lost on gasoline. That was my 3 Card Monty analogy.

Re:No Sir!

[Uberbah]

And Democratic Republic is redundant

Not when it's possible to have a republic without a democracy.

Take some aspirin for your head and re-read what I wrote. It was the gov't that decided that the Volt would be DOA because of the price, not the market.

I'm afraid aspirin isn't going to help much, as I read your article and couldn't find any harsh criticism of the Volt, much less "DOA". The comments were muted, such as:

"Additionally, while the Chevy Volt holds promise, it will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short-term.... GM is at least one generation behind Toyota on advanced, "green" powertrain development. In an attempt to leapfrog Toyota, GM has devoted significant resources to the Chevy Volt. While the Volt holds promise, it is currently projected to be much more expensive than its gasoline-fueled peers and will likely need substantial reductions in manufacturing cost in order to become commercially viable."

...which seems entirely reasonable, as the Volt will be competing with cars like the nth generation Prius and the Civic Hybrid, both of which cost $22,000 and get 45+ miles to the gallon. But the article also talks about

The Obama administration believes in the long term necessity and prospects of plug-in vehicles. They are offering financial support because they recognize that the cost of batteries as well as other system components must come down substantially for the vehicles to be commercially successful.

Hell, if I had the money, I'd be happy to pay the $100K+ for a Tesla!

Something else we can agree on. Just as soon as I win that Powerball...

We're getting there on electric cars, but the gov't is planning on forcing the issue now. Are they also going to subsidize the needed electric infrastructure upgrades? What about battery technology? Planning on invading Chile and Bolivia for lithium supplies?

What I don't understand is why no one is talking about slapping on solar cells on EV's or plug in hybrids. If it extends your range in sunny states like Arizona, why not? And million of Americans don't have offstreet parking or garages where they can plug their cars in, so might as well let them charge up if they have to park on the side of the road. I'm sure there are some technical hurdles, but that hasn't been a deterrent to EV development.

Re:No Sir!

[chill]

What I don't understand is why no one is talking about slapping on solar cells on EV's or plug in hybrids. If it extends your range in sunny states like Arizona, why not? And million of Americans don't have offstreet parking or garages where they can plug their cars in, so might as well let them charge up if they have to park on the side of the road. I'm sure there are some technical hurdles, but that hasn't been a deterrent to EV development.

Simple math. Look at the total surface area available, realizing no one wants to drive a wedge of cheese shaped car. All those curves mean the sun is going to be at the wrong angle for optimum results. And considering you aren't going to be able to use sun tracking, they are always going to be off-angle. Then look at the load drawn by the bank of batteries and even the best solar cells wouldn't really make any serious difference. Have you ever charged a car battery using a plug-in charger? Solar cells would be the equivalent of the cheapest unit you could buy on the lowest setting...and then some. Finally, compare the cost involved and the point becomes moot. The car would jump from $40K to $60K+.

A better bet would be to put solar cells on the roof of your house/garage to supplement your power usage. For those that don't have off-street parking, I see a market for charging stations and battery swap stations. Sort of like they do with propane bottles now.

Only one way for city and citizens to win

[WindBourne]

They should not set up a single company which brings the service. Instead, set up a monopoly that does the fiber from a block (or possibly subdivision) green box, AND a separate company to connect these that will have future competition. If they approach it in that fashion, then new tech can be brought in quickly and cheaply, EXCEPT for the link to the home. But with a small limited monopoly, it would be possible to do that when new tech requires it. In fact, the could simply make that box-home connection be owned by the city and then do competitive bids on the servicing of such. It limits the monopoly to just the ownership of the lines.

Re:Only one way for city and citizens to win

[Phroggy]

The city of Ashland in southern Oregon operates a fiber-optic network that's open to multiple ISPs. The city does not operate its own ISP at all, and they don't sell Internet access directly to residents; you have to sign up with an ISP, and the ISP pays the city for access to the fiber network. The city sets the speed and charges the ISP more for faster speeds, but the ISP provides the Internet connection, tech support, etc.

Re:Only one way for city and citizens to win

[MartinSchou]

Isn't that exactly what the city offered?

They built the infrastructure nescesary and then went to the incumbants saying "we built this nice fat infrastructure, and we'd like to let you use it if you give us a better service than we're getting right now".

The companies declined this offer and then gut pissed that the city decided to use the infrastructure anyway.

Re:Only one way for city and citizens to win

[WindBourne]

That current fiber will get SLOW. Not today, but down the road. By the city owning the full thing, they will not want to upgrade. OTH, if they control from some greenbox (either block or even subdivision level), then allow companies to come in with new updated tech from the box back to their service area. That would encourage new tech all the time. The hard part is the house to the Block level box.

Re:Only one way for city and citizens to win

[Anonymous Coward]

AFN also lost $15 MILLION. This debt is financed at approximately $1.4M/year, of which AFN pays about $350K, if they feel like it. The rest of this financing is paid for by the City, who has to cut positions to balance the budget.

How did this happen? Charter cable offered a "sale" price (for years) that was cheaper than AFN...

Re:Only one way for city and citizens to win

[mosch]

I really like this idea.

I'd like it even more if they included a wind-down clause in which the city agreed to sell the network if a carefully designed measure of efficiency and reliability stopped being met. This way if private firms demonstrated that they had become superior to the city, there would be an automatic end of the government's venture.

Re:Only one way for city and citizens to win

[Phroggy]

That current fiber will get SLOW. Not today, but down the road. By the city owning the full thing, they will not want to upgrade. OTH, if they control from some greenbox (either block or even subdivision level), then allow companies to come in with new updated tech from the box back to their service area. That would encourage new tech all the time. The hard part is the house to the Block level box.

Do you mean that as more people begin using the service, demand will exceed capacity and speeds will slow down for existing users? Or do you mean that as people's expectations increase, the speeds currently offered will begin to seem inadequate?

AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[transporter_ii]

What really stinks, especially in rural areas, is that you have to buy your back-end bandwidth from a person you are competing against.

They get their money either way, charging a fortune for a 1.5 Mb T1 line, again, especially in rural areas.

So they make a killing off of a bunch of bonded T1 lines or a partial DS3, and then you have to compete with them against their own offerings (i.e. 19.99 and 29.99 a month DSL).

So you get the headache of customer support and make a little money, and the phone company does good either way. Your niche market in a rural area is areas not serviced by the phone company, which means when the phone company does go into a new area, you lose your customers in that area because you can hardly compete with the people who own the infrastructure.

Again, I know there are more options in larger cities, but there is a reason a business likes to be a monopoly.

Transporter_ii

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[Chrisq]

A similar thing happened to some "community internet" initiatives in the UK. In villages where there was no broadband, people costed out getting a T1 line to their village and splitting the cost. It usually came to slightly more than broadband from the big providers - but with the choice of that or dial-up people would sign up for the service.

The community projects would get the money together and order the T1 line. What British Telecom did, of course, was install a much bigger trunk than needed for a single T1 line, as the extra cost is pretty low and then offer broadband in the area. Many people would then say "I wouldn't have signed for the community project if I knew that broadband was coming here anyway" and try to get out of their commitment. Usually after a year which people had signed up to the project would fold because everyone would switch to BT rather than renew. So BT gets paid to install a line and then uses it to give cheaper competition.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[zerocool^]

This happened at a place that I used to consult for.

We would pay verizon about $30/mo per customer to get access to the physical infrastructure, and on top of that, we had to pay for the throughput bandwidth and support costs. We sold DSL at about $50/mo.

Then Verizon came in and started direct selling DSL to the customer for $30/mo.

I mean, we were paying them for local loop access, AND we were buying our upstream bandwidth (a fractional DS3, i think?) from them.

They get their goddamn money either way.

Now, someone like a city of 40,000 people probably has the clout to have a major ISP like Cogent or Level3 or someone trunk a connection at a much cheaper rate, skipping Verizon entirely.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[Shark]

Actually, our company is in exactly this situation. But there are other factors that you do not take into account. Large companies also like to screw their own customers. We found that plain hatred of the competition has driven a lot of customers our way, merely because we like to treat them like human beings.

Very large corporations also compete within their own department. Our bandwidth salesman makes zero money off of his company's DSL customers. Any customer we get is more bandwidth sold for him and he gives us a very decent deal.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[nine-times]

What really stinks, especially in rural areas, is that you have to buy your back-end bandwidth from a person you are competing against.

That's not just a problem in rural areas. In everyplace I've ever been in the US (including some major cities), all Internet connections go over either the cable infrastructure or Verizon's infrastructure. So any other ISP is basically paying Verizon to be able to provide DSL or a T1 or whatever else, and meanwhile they're competing against Verizon's offerings. In some cases, the ISPs are buying access from another company that's buying access from Verizon.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[Jellybob]

At least in theory this was dealt with in the UK by making BT (the company which maintained the infrastructure, and worked as an ISP) split out the infrastructure side into a separate company (BT Openreach) which is required to sell bandwidth at the same price to BT and their competitors.

As with anything like that it hasn't been a complete success, but on the whole it seems to be working, with some excellent competition between providers.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[LandDolphin]

Couldn't that have been avoided with better oversight on the project you are paying them for? Althoguh, it seems to have worked out in the end if you end up with lower cost internet overall.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

But if the objective is to get affordable broadband to that locale, rather than making a profit, isn't that Job Done? Community Project can then retire having succeeded.

(Note: This only applies to England & Wales, as all Scottish & Northern Irish telephone exchanges are broadband enabled)

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[Bert64]

It's standard practice to install more capacity than necessary, the extra cost is marginal if you already have the streets dug up and it makes it much cheaper to service upgrades in the future.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[Chrisq]

(Note: This only applies to England & Wales, as all Scottish & Northern Irish telephone exchanges are broadband enabled)

This was happening a few years back, there aren't many places in England without broadband enabled exchanges now.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[jlmale0]

Better oversight? Oversight of whom? It's not clear, project oversight or telecom oversight?

Regardless, while people feel cheated I think they're looking at the situation wrong. Inherent business conservatism keeps BT from putting fat pipes to all the little villages. However, if said village shows the initiative to back their grumblings for better service by seeking it out themselves, BT knows there's a market. Digging up the dirt, and not the fiber itself is the cost in growth, so naturally they're going to bury more than necessary. Once the fiber is there, it's likewise obvious to turn it on for customer use. Like it or not, this is the face of capitalism; it's money at work.

Does it give the end-user warm fuzzies? No. Should it? Well, that's another conversation. But, as LandDolphin points out, in the end, consumers benefit with cheaper service.

How could this be done differently? BT offers to lay the pipe to the community once they get X subscriptions. But be warned, X will be inflated because BT knows that 15% of the "subscribed" customers will back out (or some other significant percantage. as this is slashdot, no research into percentages was done). This inflation is may be enough for small towns to think that BT won't come into their area and the same thing still happens; they procure it themselves. In addition, BT isn't likely to want to promote such a program because it means answering questions and training staff when the actual implementation rate is very small.

No, it's not pretty, but it's real. In the end, what's there to cry about? They're not on 56k anymore.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[smoker2]

The place my father lives had no phone lines, let alone broadband. He asked BT how much to run a line to the village, and they asked for £20,000. There was no way my dad was paying that by himself, so he got maybe 20 others together and tried to raise the money that way. In the end after negotiation with the BT rep. it turns out that the £20,000 was a headline rate and with grants and subsidies from BT themselves it worked out substantially less, around £2000.
Spread between 20 people this didn't work out too badly at all. They dug their own trench for the line to save money as well.

All figures are from memory so they could be inaccurate, but he didn't pay more than £100 personally. In fact I seem to recall that BT are obligated to provide a service if more than X people wish to subscribe, so it may have ended up being free to install (not including normal subscriptions) A T1 isn't worth the hassle.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

This one is kind of amusing.

In a thread started because a small company is outbidding a big one, someone would need to cry foul when a big one outbids a collective.

All the village did was provide the telco with marketing demographics by showing serious interest in a service the telco already provides.

The hardware "cost" would be a drop in the bucket to a multi-billion dollar company so I don't really buy that argument and all they needed was a justification for installing it. (no sense if no customers)

Had the villagers gotten together and negotiated with the telco directly, then there probably wouldn't have been an issue, saved some money, and one hell of a headache.

It's sad when the same idea or decision is glorified or vilified not on that idea or decision, but who actually comes up with it.

what a crock.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

there is a reason a business likes to be a monopoly

What's ironic is that these monopolies (phone and cable) were created by government in the first place. The concept is absurd: a "quasi-private" business, with a pure objective of profit like normal private business, yet created and sustatined by government through a mandated monopoly? Does this not immediately raise the red flag to anyone else? Common sense tells me that the solution is EITHER government OR private business, not both. Allowing them to operate as "both" is a recipe for corruption, poor service, and outrageous prices. It's no surprise that phone and cable services are exactly that: a ripoff.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[xaxa]

Back in about 2002, a small print shop in the village I lived in put a sign in their window. It said something like "We have asked for broadband, but BT say they don't have evidence of demand for this village. If you want broadband, phone BT on xxx and request it. When they get 400 requests, they will install broadband to the whole village".

We got broadband a few months later.

IIRC, BT had a counter on their website for every exchange in the UK recording demand, the higher the demand the sooner ADSL was installed.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[HeronBlademaster]

As a counter-example, my dad's office building is in the middle of Midvale, Utah, which is effectively part of Salt Lake City. He wanted to get Comcast internet service for his office building. They wouldn't provide it, because they would have had to run a cable across the street (literally). He offered to pay for it himself, and they still said no.

Instead, they wanted him to get some percentage of the tenants of that business park to sign up for Comcast - they wanted him to do their marketing for them! As a busy accountant, my dad hardly has time to do that kind of thing.

He ended up getting Qwest DSL instead.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[HeronBlademaster]

Had the villagers gotten together and negotiated with the telco directly, then there probably wouldn't have been an issue, saved some money, and one hell of a headache.

I think you missed the last article about this situation - the city did ask the telcos to provide service (after providing marketing demographics), and the telcos said no. They then took the next logical step - they set up their own ISP to serve their needs. I don't see what else they could have done.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[HeronBlademaster]

That's why I'm not bothering to get a landline when I move to my new apartment this weekend. I see no reason to pay $25/month to save $10/month on a service bundle from Comcast, especially when I'm already paying quite a bit more than that for cell phone service.

If Comcast weren't practically giving me a year of Cable TV for free, I wouldn't even get that from them (I'd get DirecTV instead, which is significantly cheaper with more channels).

I only wish I had an alternative ISP.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of dealings I had with Verizon about 8 years ago.

There was no Comcast broadband yet. Verizon had DSL to most of the area, except our new area, where they had installed fiber to box next to the transformer. They had fiber to the CO, same CO they had DSL running out of. Phone lines ran over pair loops even though the physical line distance was well less than 5000 feet (I measured).

All they had to do was link the fiber to inside the house and plug in to a DSL box. I confirmed it with 2 service techs when we had the telephone lines hooked up. I offered to pay for the installation and equipment.

No go. I even found 2 other contacts that ran the line running at the poles in the area, who were friends of friends. They sort of tried, said to look into ISDN, which I tried to buy and then was told no.

A year later, Comcast offered their broadband (which is decent but their service sucks--constant passing the buck). To this day, no DSL, no FiOS, only Comcast in that area. Pretty pathetic. Now, we only have Verizon for one phone line, everything else isn't. What's really pathetic is getting mailings saying sign up for FiOS or DSL, but when you call them up, they can offer neither.

Last mile? How about last 50 feet. Where they are given permission to dig, gain service, and I'd pay for the trench, and they still say no. That's not business, that's just a monopoly.

Won't work

[Addict-09]

Don't be fooled... other Municipalities have tried this

they build it
they never get it profitable
they then sell
millions of tax payer dollars wasted

Re:Won't work

[Whorhay]

Except that in this case it's not funded by tax payer dollars. Greenlight's infrastructure layout was funded by special bonds. It operates at a profit completely independant of tax payer dollars. TWC is in a hissy precisely because of that, they've been shown that what the community asked for was and is completely possible.

Re:Won't work

[DrgnDancer]

Several cities in Louisiana seems to be doing alright with it. Lafayette hasn't started service yet, but has a significant pre-sale already, and EATEL run by Ascension Parish (A much more rural Parish a bit north of Lafayette) is doing very well by all accounts. I lived in Lafayette until recently, and I was ready to switch to LUS for data as soon as it became available. My neighborhood got crappy service from COX, I had repair techs out to my house more there than anywhere else I've lived. LUS was promising us more bandwidth, for around the same amount of money, and their service would have been seriously hard pressed to be any worse.

Re:Won't work

[Rycross]

Cite please?

Slashdot arguing for bigger goverment?

[raymansean]

I am not saying that what the big ISP's are doing is right, but I do not want the govt to have direct control over my packets. The duality that we live in (in slashdot world) is amazing. We hate big govt when it comes to certain issues, and yet when it comes to beating big ISP's into the ground we have no problem with a larger govt. For me it is a matter of principle anything that makes the gov't larger than it needs to be is bad. You can choose to not buy the ISP's services. I'll let you figure out what a need is.

Re:Slashdot arguing for bigger goverment?

[Dog-Cow]

I would say I was amazed that you're a complete and total moron, but I'm simply not.

We already know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Government already has complete access to all telecommunications. We already know that privatization makes no difference at all. We have laws that provide immunity to these companies for breaking the law.

You are a complete idiot. Congratulations on reaching such perfection.

Re:Slashdot arguing for bigger goverment?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dislike big government, local towns providing internet service their residents have explicitly requested when the big isp's won't is the local government doing what is in the best interest of the residents. Significantly different than the big government types doing what's best for the businesses.... Is this really that difficult to understand?

Re:Slashdot arguing for bigger goverment?

[RobertLTux]

You see the trick is if the DOJ or any DO? type folks want to have access to a network line all that has to happen is

1 That TLA (lets say its the NSA) rings up the FTC and makes sure that there is some sort of law they can use
    1 (optional substep) the needed law gets written
2 a "special agent" goes to the NOC and says " i have a form B25673-X14 for you we are doing a network tap. Please inform any workers in this facility that the tap and any connections must be left in place and tampering with them violates the following Federal Laws (insert list of laws) and may be considered a Violation Of National Security* (insert threats of Gitmo or worse).

*in this era VONS is a God level cheat code to get anything if you are a Fed type person

REALLY misleading title

[fishdan]

Read the senate bill: http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/Sessions/2009/Bills/Senate/PDF/S1004v1.pdf I hate the telcos as much as anyone, but this bill says that when the city enters into the communications business, it should have to pay all the same taxes and fees as private business would, and be burdened with the same oversight. They also say that other fees the citizens pay (trash, water etc) cannot be used to fund the communications business. I don't see how this bill is unfair at all. The telcos are essentially saying "If we didn't have to pay any fees to the city to provide service, we could be competetive." If government wants to set up a business, they should have go compete with other businesses on a level playing field. If municipalities want to open up their own ISP, I am all for that, but then they should stop collecting fees and taxing the other ISPs they are competing with. Municipal government should not be using taxes and fees to provide a commercial advantage for themselves. I think the "level playing field" is actually a good title for this bill, and not an unreasonable request. We're all hopped up on this because it's something that's near and dear to us, but imagine if the city set up a taxi service, but then did not have to pay gasoline tax or hackney licenses. Obviously it benefits the public who uses taxis, but is it fair to the taxi drivers and cab companies that they now have to charge more than the city taxis.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[schon]

I don't see how this bill is unfair at all.

I guess you missed this bit:

Establish a separate enterprise fund for communications service and shall
use this fund to separately account for revenues, expenses, property, and
source of investment dollars associated with the provision of
communications service.

Is a telco or cable company required to keep separate accounts for their internet service? Why are they not required to keep their internet and other services separate? Why is a cable company allowed to leverage it's existing monopoly by subsidizing it's internet service (like it might do to drive it's internet competition out of business), but a city isn't?

If it was *REALLY* about "leveling" the playing field, I would assume that the bill would say that *ALL* internet providers would be subject to these rules, not just cities.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Moryath]

And there's the rub.

When I was growing up, we used to have two choices for cable TV - Warner Cable (later became Time Warner) and Viacom Cable.

Warner was the "newcomer". They started running "specials", subsidized by their monopolies on OTHER cities. For a while, you got a basic cable package for $15/month and the pay channels like HBO for another $5 or so.

Then, Viacom folded. They couldn't compete any more, they were losing customers in droves to the "specials" because at that price, Warner was actually selling the service below cost (but claiming it was a "special" and a "sale", so getting around state laws against below-cost permanent pricing).

What did people find out once Viacom was dead? TW did what they do to everyone once they have a monopoly - they started running TV ads with the "happy king" declaring "I declare Warner Cable for my entire kingdom!" with a shit-eating grin on his face.

Meanwhile those "special" $15/month rates were expired out, and within 3 months the base price was $80/month.

Look at the prices you're offered for ISP service. If you are in a "competition" area, one of the lucky SOB's on a border (and the borders move as they put each other out of business), you can probably swing some ridiculously cheap pricing. Otherwise, what do you get? Comcrap pretty much has a monopoly on our area. DSL service is technically "available" if you want roughly the same data rate as a pair of 33.6 phone modems (no seriously: they haven't upgraded their equipment in 10 years or more).

Comcrap, 10 miles down the road, offers their "high tier" speed at $40/month. For us, "low tier" is $50/month. That's because 10 miles down the road, Verizon owns the lines and is offering FiOS to compete with Comcrap. Meanwhile, Comcrap's own internal memos show that they could double the speed to EVERY USER IN THEIR NETWORK, both up and down, for a mere $6/customer one-time cost, and they refuse to do it.

That's the kind of shit you deal with. They all want a monopoly so they can gouge the crap out of you.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Whorhay]

I also seem to remember a line of the legislation, from the last time this was brought up, that seemed to be saying that the municipality couldn't price their service below what the private ISPs were charging. Much of the bill makes sense and won't matter to Greenligh because they already operate independantly of tax dollars and such.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[fishdan]

>provision of communications service

They used that language because it's internet today, and VOIP tomorrow.

>Is a telco or cable company required to keep separate accounts for their internet service?

Geez. http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/2296405/

>...the bill would say that *ALL* internet providers would be subject to these rules

That is an excellent suggestion, and I agree that would be the perfect wording. On the other hand, I doubt that the current Telcos are collecting much in the way trash and water fees.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Nukenbar]

This is similar to why in may jurisdictions, there is actaully a minimum that a gas station can sell its gas for (usually cost). This is to prevent large corporate stations from undercutting the mom and pop stores and running them out of business, then raising the price because there is no more competition.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[fishdan]

I'm with you on this -- the monopoly is completely anti-consumer. The problem is that with significantly lower operating costs, the city will be able to drive the telcos out, and then THEY will be the monopoly. I hate private monopolies but I hate the state as monopoly equally. Simple solution here. Tell the city they cannot collect fees/taxes on the ISPs we're all good. I definitely want the city to come in and bust up the Telco monopoly -- I just don't want one monopoly to be replaced by another.
"
I agree the way the telcos are going about this is wrong though. I'd rather see legislation like: Where municipalities set up their own ISP, they cannot assess city taxes or fees on competing ISPs."

It's all about operating costs -- make those as equal as you can, and THEN let everyone compete.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[dcollins]

Read the senate bill: http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/Sessions/2009/Bills/Senate/PDF/S1004v1.pdf [state.nc.us] I hate the telcos as much as anyone, but this bill says that when the city enters into the communications business, it should have to pay all the same taxes and fees as private business would, and be burdened with the same oversight. They also say that other fees the citizens pay (trash, water etc) cannot be used to fund the communications business. I don't see how this bill is unfair at all. The telcos are essentially saying "If we didn't have to pay any fees to the city to provide service, we could be competetive." If government wants to set up a business, they should have go compete with other businesses on a level playing field. If municipalities want to open up their own ISP, I am all for that, but then they should stop collecting fees and taxing the other ISPs they are competing with.

Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. The government is not running a business; it is providing the best service it can to the citizenry. If that prices out some private ISPs, fuck 'em. If they want to establish taxes specific to the ISPs, fuck 'em. If the people _vote to make private ISPs illegal in their community_ (perhaps because they have a history of gouging, monopoly, and privacy-breaking practices), then they can do that too!

Municipal government should not be using taxes and fees to provide a commercial advantage for themselves. I think the "level playing field" is actually a good title for this bill, and not an unreasonable request. We're all hopped up on this because it's something that's near and dear to us, but imagine if the city set up a taxi service, but then did not have to pay gasoline tax or hackney licenses. Obviously it benefits the public who uses taxis, but is it fair to the taxi drivers and cab companies that they now have to charge more than the city taxis.

Awesome, sign me up for that taxi service. Democracy comes first, capitalism comes second.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Dare nMc]

also it seams cleverly written, to force the citizens to subsidize the counties internet usage. IE all those departments mentioned are likely internet users as well, (and sounds like being paying customers, would be forbidden) so either the county sets up completely separate ISP services at a significant additional cost. Or setup one, and just count the cost of providing internet for all county services as a overhead to their subscribers.
I would think it would be enough to force the county to disclose all costs publicly, so that the citizens can decide to end this service if it is more costly than TW.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[timeOday]

I hate private monopolies but I hate the state as monopoly equally.

I dislike both but I hate private monopolies more. Why? Because I live in a democracy. You CAN influence your local govt, you have a vote. A private monopoly is more like a dictatorship - you can't see the books, you don't get a vote... nothing.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[The_Quinn]

There cannot be a monopoly unless the government forces it into a monopoly through special franchise rights, subsidies, etc.

In the absence of government coercion, companies have to keep their prices at the market level - or will go out of business by raising their prices too high and bringing in competition.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't like you water and sewer service then, I take it?

Re:REALLY misleading title

[DarkBlackFox]

From the techjournalsouth article-

"If the cable/phone companies really want a level playing field, they'd open their books just like we do in the spirit of open meetings and open records law. They don't want a level playing field. They want to be the only team on the field."

It seems the community internet operating books will be transparent, so people can see what costs are, and where the money is going. It's a public service, not a for-profit business like Time Warner is.

While it's true a monopoly is generally anti-consumer, a publicly open/owned monopoly is far less likely to be in a position to price gouge for crap service, where the larger, established private monopolies already are.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Anonymous Coward]

That actually makes sense. And I agree.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Dan667]

These same telcos are getting government subsidies (tax payers are paying that too) so it is not a level playing field, the municipality is at a disadvantage. This is just bullying by the telcos to try and save a broken business model.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Whorhay]

One item in the bill I find especially objectionable is under the accounting section. http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/Sessions/2009/Bills/Senate/HTML/S1004v0.html "The annual accounting shall reflect any direct or indirect subsidies received by the city owned communications service provider, and any buildings, equipment, vehicles, and personnel that are jointly used with other city departments shall be fully allocated to the city owned communications service." It requires that if the Greenlight equivilant utilizes a resource shared with another part of the municipality then Greenlight has to count the annual cost of that resource as a subsidy.

For instance, if Greenlight has a cubicle in a large municipal office building they are sharing the building and have to count the cost of the building as a subsidy. That's the entire building, not just the space and resources that are necessary for that one cubicle but the whole building. It applies to buildings, vehicles, personnel and equipment.

It also applies to any direct subsidies. Such as Federal subsidy money directed at improving infrastructure. Which TWC of course will recieve and not have to count as a business expense. When you combine that with the innocuous sounding bit about pricing "In complying with this requirement, a city owned communications service provider shall not price any communications service below the cost of providing the service." It's saying that a program like Greenlight would have to price their product as if the subsidies they recieve are a cost of business.

In the case of using city workers to install fiber this makes sense, when you prorate it. But it makes no sense whatsoever when talking about federal subsidies for infrastructure improvements that private companies like TWC also recieve.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems you've never heard of a natural monopoly.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[The_Quinn]

I was referring to a coercive monopoly. Yes, there can be an earned monopoly. See the case of how standard oil kicked everyone's ass simply by being better than everyone else

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a good analogy, though - they have to set aside a separate fund for "communications service". That would include Internet, phone service, cable television, and so forth. The only caveat is that they would have to basically create a whole "company" to do this, and that "company" would have to act just like a private company, and not just, say, take advantage of the money they earn selling electricity to fund themselves. That's still the same as most telcos, which only offer communications service, and similarly cannot subsidize themselves using public electricity, if that were possible.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[He who knows]

imagine if the city set up a taxi service

I think they are called buses.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[VGPowerlord]

I hate private monopolies but I hate the state as monopoly equally.

I dislike both but I hate private monopolies more. Why? Because I live in a democracy. You CAN influence your local govt, you have a vote. A private monopoly is more like a dictatorship - you can't see the books, you don't get a vote... nothing.

The simple solution to that is to buy stock in said company. Then you to vote as well as receive financial statements and all sorts of other fun things.

Of course, that's assuming you trust the company enough not to lie to you (i.e. it's not like Enron or AIG).

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Khisanth Magus]

Or buy out all their competitors, as has happened repeatedly in the ISP and telco business.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[The_Quinn]

More competitors can always come in, if it would be profitable for them. Capital flows to where there is profit potential.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Rycross]

Unless there are significant natural barriers to entry, such as requiring large amounts of up-front capital, at which point larger companies can use price dumping and other predatory tactics. The new company cannot both compete on price and pay the up-front capital at the same time, and so goes out of business. The prices are then raised back up to their monopoly amount.

Plenty of monopolies have managed to form and maintain themselves through anti-competitive tactics without government intervention. That's exactly the reason we have anti-trust laws. History simply doesn't bear out your argument that monopolies cannot be maintained without government interference.

Re:REALLY misleading title

[The_Quinn]

You are partially correct - monopolies can sustain themselves: Here is an example of how Standard oil kicked everyone's ass simply by being the best at everything it did.

However a business cannot keep out other businesses by constantly raising/lowering prices - that's a fictional scenario that would bankrupt anyone who actually tried it. (See 'Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal' for a thorough debunking of common fallacies about Capitalism)

Re:REALLY misleading title

[Anonymous Coward]

Next thing you know all the major cities will be building walls topped by barbed wire and surrounded by a moat. Then they'll charge an admission fee....
The argument that a local government can't spend tax dollars on something that makes their environment more attractive eludes me. Whose tax dollars are they? The point is that the Telecos haven't been playing in a level playing field and their greed is catching up with them. Cities DON'T want to go into the Teleco business but they see an area where they can better serve their citizens.

Greenlights rates

[SpzToid]

So this is what they are offering, at a profit right? (No govt. subsidies putting TWC out of business in the area, right?)

http://www.greenlightnc.com/home/internet/internetonly/

$59.95 for 20 mbps UP AND DOWN? 2UP? And they do this profitably right? Then is it possible everyone else is getting screwed over by their ISP Monopolies/Duopolies?

"The 20Mbps speed includes both uploads and downloads and is the fastest residential speed available anywhere in North Carolina."

Go Greenlight go! I wonder what the real estate is like in the area served.

Re:Greenlights rates

[mikael]

If you go to Time Warner Cable website, enter the area code and order just Cable and High Speed Online, the total price is around $102.85 month (Digital Cable + Road Runner Turbo @ upto 15 Mpbs download / 2Mbps upload).

Now, despite being begged to introduce Cable service in this area, Time Warner refused. Now they are being undercut by someone offering a better service for half the price. No wonder they are steaming.

"Levelling the playing field" my ass

[elrous0]

The funny thing is that almost all of these ISP's (cable providers, telco's) already HAVE government-granted monopolies themselves. Time-Warner has certainly never objected when a city has granted them an exclusive monopoly to provide cable service to a city (such agreements cover close to 100% of their market), nor has AT&T ever been shy about their monopoly. If these companies were so serious about "leveling the playing field" how about they agree to lease those cable and phone lines to competitors and forgo those exclusive agreements with cities and counties?

Re:"Levelling the playing field" my ass

[overlordofmu]

I need to point out that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 made it illegal for a municipality in the United Stated of America to grant an exclusive franchise agreement to any telecommunication company, especially cable companies. There is no city, county or state government-granted cable monopoly anywhere in the US and there have not been for over a decade. Any such franchise agreement would be in violation of Federal law. Your post is wildly inaccurate. It is unfortunate that it was modded insightful, because it is not insightful in any way.

Re:"Levelling the playing field" my ass

[elrous0]

That would be true, if that law ever had any actual teeth. The physical lines still remain in the hands of the same one cable company/one telephone company. The only "competition" that this law really helped was the satellite companies. Otherwise, unless you plan to lay all your own new cable (like FIOS and other small-scale operations), what difference does it make?

Re:"Levelling the playing field" my ass

[overlordofmu]

Any competitor to cable must run its own lines as the inherent structure of the cable network is such that two companies cannot share the lines, in the same way the two radio stations cannot share the same frequency.

Anyone is free to run competing cable at any time. The question is, "Then, why is this not being done?"

The reason that cable companies do not compete in the same market is that there is already competition from multiple satellite TV companies and DSL.

The incoming cable company has to overbuild the existing cable company. This is a gargantuan expense. Then they must compete with several other companies (the multiple satellite TV companies, the original cable company and one or more DSL companies) all while attempting to recoup their enormous, initial investment in infrastructure. As the company will only attract a fractional number of the homes to which they built infrastructure, being profitable is next to impossible.

Cable companies don't compete with each other because they DO NOT have a monopoly. They are fiercely competing with satellite and phone companies.

How many local phone providers are there in a single location? Probably only one.

Satellite does not build infrastructure, phone and cable do. Ever looked at speed and pricing on satellite internet? It exists. It is slow, pricey and too laggy for anything realtime like gaming or Skype?

My whole point is that "elrous0" is perpetuating a big lie which detracts attention from the reality we are attempting to fix. There is no cable monopoly. Address the reality of the situation and stop with the emotional ranting that has no basis in reality.

Link to City of Wilson Public Affairs Manager Blog

[rlinkbass]

In case this wasn't already posted: http://savencbb.wordpress.com/
Brian Bowman, Public Affairs Manager for the City of Wilson, NC is keeping everyone up to date with the city's point of view.

Contact NC State officials!!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really feel passionate about this, and you live in North Carolina, please contact your state representatives here (look them up by county):

http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/gascripts/members/memberList.pl?sChamber=House
http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/gascripts/members/memberList.pl?sChamber=Senate ...and let them know how you feel. Here is something -like- what you could say:

(Representative or Senator) XXXXXX,

I'm a voter in XXXXXXX county, and I am deeply troubled by a bill introduced in the house to stop the Internet service being offered in the City of Wilson. Internet service providers have failed to offer adequate services to Wilson for years, and now want to restrict the choice of citizens in the name of a "level playing field".

I ask you to please vote against this bill, and encourage your colleagues to do the same. As a professional who depends fast, reliable, and inexpensive internet to compete, this matter is very important to me.

Thank you, regards,

XXXXXXX

The bills in question are H1252 and S1004.

http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/gascripts/BillLookUp/BillLookUp.pl?Session=2009&BillID=H1252

http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/gascripts/BillLookUp/BillLookUp.pl?Session=2009&BillID=S1004

Especially critical are the sponsors of the bill (i.e. the people you should vote against in the next election):

House
Primary: Harrell; Jones; Avila; Tillis;
Co: Bell; Cole; Crawford; Current; Dollar; Earle; Guice; Gulley; Hilton; Holliman; Johnson; Justus; Lucas; Neumann; Sager; Steen;

Senate
Primary: David W. Hoyle;
Co: Debbie A. Clary;

Different Communities

[Anonymous Coward]

The urban county where I live (no city) doesn't provide many of the items you listed. Private companies do.

trash collection = Private
schools = Public, best in the state
snow removal services = Public, but 1 day a year with 1" of snow doesn't really matter
real estate brokerages = Private
electrical services = Private
cable TV services = Private with pub utility commission oversight
electric utilities = Private
water utilities = Public

It is a little crazy that my small neighborhood has trash collection every day of the week since different trash companies visit us on different days. Of course, that means on any weekday, 20% of the homes have their 50 gal trash bins on the street.

We tried to get everyone together (50 homes) to get a contract for the community, but we couldn't agree on the required services. Some wanted grass clippings, others recycling, others Monday pickup. My provider charges $8/month extra for recycling. No thanks.

I have plenty of compost area in my back yard. Half the homes have a similar setup, so grass clippings aren't needed. Everyone here should use a mulching mower anyway. I haven't picked up clippings in over 10 years.

I ran some numbers for providing ISP services to my community. I could do it cheaper than 50 x $40/month = $2000, but the headaches from customer services wasn't worth it. Soon after the infrastructure was paid for, everyone would demand price cuts since I'd have to oversubscribe bandwidth just like the big guys. What happens if 20% of the people use IPSec VPNs? Netflix, VoIP? I'd probably purchase 5+ business class cable connections to do this at about $500/month.

Ahh - ye goode olde American Double Standard

[meist3r]

When free market capitalism lets you kick competition out of business -you support it.
When free market capitalism lets competition kick you out of business -you fight it.

It all makes so much sense.

Re:Ahh - ye goode olde American Double Standard

[east coast]

Don't assume that just because a business exists in a free market environment that it supports the free market ideology.

Just like with the Arlene Specter switch; the man has no more dedication to either side of the fence than he does to keeping his own job. While he is truely better described as a Democrat the fact is that if he wasn't on the verge of getting the boot from a primary election loss he wouldn't have done a single thing about his party affiliation.

The same goes for companies. They'll support whatever environment supports them. When their existence becomes threatened they go on the offense. It's not a question of what is right but a question of doing what's best in the name of self preservation.

So I live I'm a subscriber to Greenlight...

[Anonymous Coward]

I live part of the year in Wilson, NC. My family is a subscriber to this service, and it is one of the best services we've ever had. It has worked wonders for our community and the economy around it. Our schools have a much faster connection etc.

It is unsettling that someone would ever consider taking this away from us.

By the way, the bandwidth for this is not bought from any of the competing companies, rather the bandwidth is purchased directly from Level3.

I wish more cities would do this.

[webdragon]

Currently in the city i live in we have 3 choices for broadband, cable, DSL and wireless. the problem being none of them offer decent service for under $80 a month and in a majority of the area wireless and DSL are not even a option.

Utilities!

[errittus]

FTFA: "Local governments buy gas and diesel fuel for their vehicle fleets, so "What's to prevent them from competing with gas stations and convenience stores? They have landscaping departments for parks and such, so what would keep them from offering landscaping services?" "

Internet, phone, and cable services are also under the eye of the PUC, and are viewed as utilities.

Something silimar was discussed quite some time ago in Lafayette, LA

http://www.lusfiber.org/

can't compete?

[rev_sanchez]

"Time Warner and Embarq can't compete"

I could be wrong but I read that the city running Greenlight asked Time Warner Cable if they would offer better, higher speed service to the city and when they didn't the city started their own ISP. It seems like they aren't interested in competing.

Re:Can't compete?

[Yvanhoe]

We are damn lucky to have Free Telecom here. When they entered the ADSL business, we became in a few months one of the cheapest EU country in term of broadband connectivity. When competition really happens, it is good. But remember all the hassles it had (and still has) with France Telecom, the then monopoly who used many illegal techniques to keep the small guy out of the arena.

The bigger the companies involved, the less probable it is that real competition would occur.

/. is not a blog

[conspirator57]

but the good people covering this issue in NC believe it is. FTFA:

The matter is getting national attention in tech media and on blogs such as Slashdot.com.

Re:/. is not a blog

[sjaskow]

Um, since /. is a .org, not a .com, perhaps slashdot.com is a blog site. :-D

Re:/. is not a blog

[conspirator57]

silly geek, those two-three characters on the end of URLs don't mean anything. They're just filler.

Re:/. is not a blog

[Diss Champ]

If they are just reading kdawson stories like this one, they are justified to classify it a blog.

North Carolinians, write or call NC Congress.

[randomaxe]

Most of us are outraged about this, but few of us can do anything about it. If you live in North Carolina, I urge you to contact your state congresspeople and let them know just how you, as a voter, feel about this.

The bills in question are NC Senate bill 1004 and NC House bill 1242. You can find contact information for your state congresspeople here:

http://www.votesmart.org/index.htm

And remember, even if you're a NC resident who doesn't live in Wilson, this is a *state-level* issue, and your opinion counts. Not only that, but if these bills pass, it means no cheap internet for you, either. Be heard now, while it matters.

Re:North Carolinians, write or call NC Congress.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you live in North Carolina, I urge you to contact your state congresspeople and let them know just how you, as a voter, feel about this.

Dear Congressman,
I'm writing to inform you that I live in North Carolina. I am deeply saddened and dismayed by this tragic fact. I had 50 states to choose from and ended up here? What was I thinking? The climate is atrocious, the people are obnoxious, and the sports teams are abysmal. At least Idaho has Napolean Dynamite. What have we got, Krispy Kreme? That fad is so over.

The only good thing I can say is that at least I don't live in South Carolina. That place makes Pyongyang look like Rio.

Please Congressman, send me some of that federal bail out money so I can bail outta this dump.

Sincerely,
Joe Sixtooth

The actual bill in question

[J'raxis]

Has anyone actually bothered to read the bill in question? All it's doing is making sure the city-owned ISP isn't---or doesn't in the future---engage in the kind of abuses I just posted about. It's specifically to make sure they can't lower their rates by subsidizing themselves with tax dollars, exempt themselves from paying telco taxes, and similar. Here are the relevant pieces:---

(1) Comply with all local, State, and federal laws, regulations, or other requirements that would apply to the communications services if provided by a private communications service provider.

(2) Establish a separate enterprise fund for communications service and shall use this fund to separately account for revenues, expenses, property, and source of investment dollars associated with the provision of communications service.

(3) Shall not subsidize the cost of providing communications service with funds from any other noncommunications service, operation, or other revenue source, including any funds or revenue generated from electric, gas, water, sewer, or garbage services. In complying with this requirement, a city owned communications service provider shall not price any communications service below the cost of providing the service.

(4) Shall, in calculating the cost incurred and in the rates to be charged for the provision of communications services, impute: (i) the cost of the capital component that is equivalent to the cost of capital available to private communications service providers in the same locality; and (ii) an amount equal to all taxes, including property taxes, licenses, fees, and other assessments that would apply to a private communications service provider including federal, state, and local taxes; rightsofway, franchise, consent, or administrative fees; and pole attachment fees.

(5) Shall annually remit to the general fund of the city an amount equivalent to all taxes or fees a private communications service provider would be required to pay the city or county in which the city is located, including any applicable tax refunds received by the city owned communications service provider because of its government status and a sum equal to the amount of property tax that would have been due if the city owned communications service provider were a private communications service provider.

(6) Shall prepare and publish an independent annual audit in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles that reflect the fully allocated cost of providing the communications service, including all direct and indirect costs. The indirect costs shall include amounts for rightsofway, franchise, consent, or administrative fees, regulatory fees, occupation taxes, pole attachment fees, and ad valorem taxes. The annual accounting shall reflect any direct or indirect subsidies received by the city owned communications service provider, and any buildings, equipment, vehicles, and personnel that are jointly used with other city departments shall be fully allocated to the city owned communications service. The North Carolina Utilities Commission may adopt rules and regulations to ensure compliance with the provisions of this subdivision, and all records demonstrating compliance shall be filed with the North Carolina Utilities Commission and made available for public inspection and copying.

Anyone opposing this is basically saying, "I want cheap Internets by making you pay for it."

Re:The actual bill in question

[Whorhay]

Mainly the issue is that this bill puts more stringent requirements on programs such as Greenlight than on the existing private companies such as TWC. Most notably is the requirements for auditing, which far surpass what the private companies are required to provide. Greenlight already provides more auditing than the private interests simple because it is a government project.

Also in (6) "The annual accounting shall reflect any direct or indirect subsidies received by the city owned communications service provider, and any buildings, equipment, vehicles, and personnel that are jointly used with other city departments shall be fully allocated to the city owned communications service."

Which makes no sense at all. Basically if Greenlight has a single cubicle allotted to it in the Municiple office building they have to claim the entire building as a subsidy. That's some heavy bullshit right there. And it applies to everything they might jointly use with the city.

Not to mention they are trying to prevent municipalities from getting any of the federal governments subsidy money for building broadband infrastructure.

Re:The actual bill in question

[Uberbah]

So I take you refuse to use public roads, municipal water, municipal sewage, hospitals, and rely on the neighborhood watch instead of calling police?

Re:The actual bill in question

[J'raxis]

If the government would stop monopolizing those services through force, I would.

Re:The actual bill in question

[Uberbah]

Do I have a solution for you!

Its a lie...

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is a lie. Every slashdotter knows that government services are always less efficient and more expensive than their privately run counterparts.

Re:AS someone who worked for a small ISP- so what!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see...

A) at the start, the villagers only had crappy, low-speed dial up service.
B) they perceive a benefit to cooperatively build their own ISP. In other words they see it worthwhile to either pay an upfront cost or enter into a service agreement for x-years to bring a shared, high-speed internet to their village.
C) another company starts offering a better service at a lower price than the villagers can. (the villagers paid their upfront costs and now they get even better service at a lower price than what they could get with their own community ISP.)

I don't see the issue! The villagers have better internet at a lower price than they had with dial-up or with their community ISP. It seems this would only suck if you were a salaried employee of the small ISP that couldn't find work elsewhere or if you expected some sort of return on an upfront investment. If you expected some sort of return on an investment and didn't get it, then you're an entrepreneur that didn't do your homework. If you're an employee of the ISP, then it's time to move on; you didn't have a job with the ISP when there was just dial-up and you don't now.

Flawed premise

[Anonymous Coward]

The city is *the people*. *The people* should not have to compete with other businesses to give themselves services. Crazy talk.

Can't compete?

[donatzsky]

More like don't want to.
Here in France I pay EUR 30/month (USD 39) for 18/1mbit internet + 150 tv channels + free telephone (domestic and most international landline calls are free, cellphones cost a bit), and TWC can't compete with $99 and a service that don't offer nearly what I pay EUR 30 for? Please, give me a break. And when fibre gets rolled out it'll be the same price, only faster (100/50).
Oh, and they do make money on that, here in France.
http://www.free.fr/adsl/

awww can't compete

[Anonymous Coward]

hrm so maybe the cities have the right idea for hte internet, instead of allowing self centered greedy AIG style companies ot run it for the CEO's benefit rather then the customer.

WHERE is the capitalism in the ISP business? there isn't. It is an oligarchy styled after soviet style communism.

corporate warfare

[Tom]

The cyberpunk stories were wrong. Corporations don't recruit mercenaries to engage in actual physical warfare against each other, governments or other entities they dislike - they use the courts and lobbying power to pass new laws instead.

And yes, they already enjoy the extraterritorial rights that cyberpunk novels mentioned every now and then, though very rarely in western countries. Give it ten more years.

So what I'm saying is: This has nothing whatsoever to do with being fair, levelling the playing field, competition, market or any other buzzword. This has to do with defending your profits with whatever means available. Sometimes, it is that simple.

Re:City-owned ISP

[Whorhay]

From http://savencbb.wordpress.com/ a blog by Brian Bowman who is the Public Affairs Manager for the City of Wilson, NC.

"City Council voted unanimously to move forward with the 28-million dollar project. Instead of paying for the project through a tax increase, the Council chose to sell high speed Internet, cable TV, and phone service and let the subscriber revenue cover the cost of the network. Financing was unanimously approved by the North Carolina Local Government Commission and our debt was well-received by the financial markets."

The bonds were sold into the financial markets and are serviced, or paid for, by the revenue generated from subscribers. So Tax dollars are not being spent to pay for it.

DUPE

[iamhassi]

dupe from just a week ago: Time Warner Cable Won't Compete, Seeks Legislation

Re:DUPE

[atari2600]

Somehow I just knew kdawson was behind this. Don't slashdot editors read their own articles?

But wait! There's more!

[soniCron88]

I live in Davidson, NC, and my ONLY choice for broadband internet is through an ISP owned by my county. While there is no competition here, the proposed bill still has implications for the service I receive, and threatens to eliminate it completely.

But the real kicker is: not much more than a year ago, the county purchased the infrastructure from none other than TimeWarner Cable. TWC didn't think it was such a bad idea for government to run an ISP when they pulled out of my region not more than 14 months ago...

Econ 101

[Mr. Firewall]

The problem with pure-er capitalism is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Not true, and never has been true.

As was proved during the Reagan era, the rich AND poor BOTH get richer when Government gets out of the way (i.e., fetters to productivity are removed).

Re:Econ 101

[Sensible Clod]

That is, until the bubble bursts. Then almost everyone gets poorer.

Re:Econ 101

[EonBlueTooL]

As was proved during the Reagan era, the rich AND poor BOTH get richer when Government gets out of the way (i.e., fetters to productivity are removed).

8 years is a dreadfully short time to 'prove' an economic method. For all you know what is happening right now is a direct result of Reagan era policies, so I am going to call bullshit on that, but if you can actually provide some reasonable backup for your opinion then maybe you can change my mind!

I am not going to pretend that there isn't bad regulation (goddamn there is tons of it), and it should be gotten rid of, but people who say that all regulation is bad regulation are just crazies. Should we take out anti-trust legislation? Was it smart of us to remove the investment bank regulation? What about safety regulation? What about anti-discrimination legislation?

There are 'fetters to productivity' and there is 'good legislation' but to say that all legislation that fetters productivity cannot be good is wrong.

Re:Econ 101

[Civil_Disobedient]

As was proved during the Reagan era, the rich AND poor BOTH get richer when Government gets out of the way

Wrong. 80% of the population experienced a decrease in income from 1977 to 1988 (Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor, p. 17).

Re:Econ 101

[d3ac0n]

You're quoting a Wikipedia article about the nutcase Kevin Phillips? And we're supposed to take you seriously?

ROFL!

Kevin Phillips is wrong about everything.

Phillips is nothing more than a populist hack who uses twisted statistics and hyperbole in his sensationalist books. While I applaud his naked ambition, I wish he wouldn't do it in a manner which so badly misinforms his target audience.

To put it another way, your numbers are wrong just like Phillips is.

Re:Econ 101

[Solandri]

Wrong. 80% of the population experienced a decrease in income from 1977 to 1988 (Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor, p. 17).

The income figures put out by the U.S. Census would seem to contradict this. While the gains were concentrated in the upper 50%, the median did increase over that period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1967-2003.svg

Re:Econ 101

[Khyber]

Umm, it wasn't because of Reagan's policies. Any policy change takes about two presidential terms before even really showing any effect nationwide. Sometimes it takes longer. Like right now we are just feeling the effects of Bush's policies, even though he's no longer in office. During Bush's term we started feeling the effects of Clinton's screwups.

So odds were likely during Reagan's presidency, it was Lyndon Johnson's policies just taking effect.

Re:Econ 101

[Rufty]

These are not mutually exclusive.

Re:Econ 101

[ChrisMaple]

Kevin Phillips ceased being an honest source about 40 years ago.

Re:Econ 101

[Civil_Disobedient]

You're quoting a Wikipedia article about the nutcase Kevin Phillips?

I used Keven Phillips because he is about as Republican as you can get without the white robes and burning crosses. I could have used a litany other sources, but then I'd be accused of lib'rul bias.

To put it another way, your numbers are wrong just like Phillips is.

Did you want to contribute any actual evidence to counter the original point, or just try re-frame the topic with a smear? You wingnuts are so pathetically predictable. (See? Smear! Let's not talk about the actual problem!)

Re:Econ 101

[Rycross]

Ok, so you're claiming his evidence is wrong. Now the burden is on you: show your evidence. Not anecdote, not "everyone knows," actual evidence please. Statistics and accompanying analysis would be nice. As it his, his poor evidence beats your no-evidence.

Re:Econ 101

[Mr. Firewall]

Wrong. 80% of the population experienced a decrease in income from 1977 to 1988

Wrong. I am talking about the Reagan Era, not the Carter Era. Under Reagan, both rich AND poor got richer.

Re:Econ 101

[Mr. Firewall]

I used Keven Phillips because he is about as Republican as you can get

This discussion has nothing to do with American political party affiliation. It is about economics and what works (and does not work) in the Real World®.

Now please put a white robe on your strawman and burn the whole son of a bitch down.

Re:Econ 101

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the fact that since then, median incomes barely keep up with cost-of-living increases and inflation, while the top 10% of incomes has increased drastically. Sure everyone might be making more dollars, but each dollar means less.

Re:Econ 101

[Anonymous Coward]

Wronger. Reagan didn't take office until 1981. The credit for the malaise between 1977 and 1981 belongs to Jimmy Carter

Flamebait?

[hansraj]

Hahaha, some idiot really thinks that was flamebait? Who is going to be too upset to start warring with me over that? Kdawson? He has enough summaries to twist into propaganda to look over what is being said about it. Or are there any fans of kdawson way of writing summaries here?

Offtopic, sure. Flamebait? Hardly.

Now if anything *this* post is flamebait!

Go ahead, I have enough karma to burn.

Idiots.

Your Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

All those services should be privatized as well. They're not the proper function of government.

Re:Your Right...

[morgan_greywolf]

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with that statement. However, this is what Joe Sixpack sees, and why Joe Sixpack overwhelmingly prefers municipal trash removal to individually-contracted service: at my current residence, I pay ~$150 a year for trash collection, paid out quarterly.

At my last residence, a rented apartment, the cost for trash removal was built-in to my rent. So no bill, $0 from my point-of-view. (Obviouly, though, it was some fraction of my rent)

My parents own their own home in another community with municipal trash removal. It's a line-item on their annual property tax bill which, last time I saw that bill was like $20 or $50 for the entire year. So from their point of view, I pay 3 times as much they do. (Try not to laugh.) Obviously, trash collection in their community is subsidized in some way with funds from other sources.

Point is, people like having their costs hidden from them. Ignorance is truly bliss.

Isn't that kinda what we already have?

[zooblethorpe]

There would be more competition in densely populated areas, and no service whatsoever in sparsely populated areas.
It costs a lot of money to run cables under the streets, and takes a long time to recoup those costs.
You would at best have limited competition, a couple of large suppliers offering you service in a densely populated area.
Small suppliers simply couldn't afford to lay the cable, and you would never have very many suppliers because that would dilute the market and even big players wouldn't be able to recover the cable costs.

Funny, that sounds a lot like the present situation. :) Only the big players haven't had to worry about recovering the cable costs in many cases because they got government help to pay for it.

Cheers,

Too F'n Bad

[Akita24]

The same asshats who have never had a clue what customer service means and who have been handed a virtual monopoly and abused the shit out of it are now getting fucked and they don't like it. Boo hoo. The "free market" just told you to go piss up a rope. Deal. Maybe next time you'll figure out that you actually have to provide something to get our money. Personally I'm fed up with the "new" corporate mentality of entitlement. I don't owe them a profit. They need to actually earn one. I'm even more disgusted by the shills that think they need to be defended. Look, nobody at the cable/telco/whatever company gives a rat's ass about me or what I want/expect from them. Shame on you for expecting me to give a shit what they want or what their problems are. They're the seller and I'm the sellee. Their job is to screw me out of everything they can for as little effort as possible. My job as a consumer is to give them as little as possible for as much as I can get. If we don't work it out and meet somewhere in the middle, one of us is going to get fucked. Sorry, but given the choice between them or me, I chose them to get fucked. Maybe next time they'll be willing to meet somewhere in the middle, but I doubt it.

Anyone else?

[Anachragnome]

Anyone else notice that the first paragraph in the last article linked in the summary ends with "The matter is getting national attention in tech media and on blogs such as Slashdot.com."?

Anyone else realize this last article was posted two days ago?

Somewhat prescient of them unless there is another article here on slashdot about this topic that I somehow missed. A search isn't finding one, but that could just be the lack of coffee on my part.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for communities doing what is right for their residents, but isn't this a bit of the pot calling the kettle black? If there are people "working" slashdot to fight the major ISPs, how is that different then push polling on the part of the ISP lobbyists?

Re:Anyone else?

[Whorhay]

The first I saw or read about it was last thurseday http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/23/1521218

Re:Anyone else?

[Anachragnome]

Thanks!

*tips tinfoil hat*

I live in NC, and Time warner SHOULD be scared

[RaigetheFury]

First off, I live here. Time Warner isn't bad service... it's 99% uptime for me in multiple addresses. Sure it suffers from hiring some really stupid people to work in it's national tech support office but hey... they really do stand behind their work.

However, time warner pricing has gotten WAY out of control. I have StandardDigital Cable and Internet on a DEAL for $85. That's WITH A DEAL... usually it's $119 and that's without the phone service.

These guys did all of this for $99 a month. The fees and taxes BULLSHIT is a stupid arguement. Look on your bill... it's just not that much. We're talking $10. Time Warner would charge $149 for the same thing. Where is the $40 difference?

What happened to the BILLIONS OF DOLLARS given to them by the US Government for their infrastructure?
Why can satellite offer the SAME channels and MORE of them for less? They pay the EXACT same fees to the providers.

The people in Wilson got tired of waiting for "good, cheap service". Time warner said "2-3 years" before they would provide what they wanted. So they took it into their own hands. They didn't want to "wait" for them to get around to it. That's the biggest problem lately.

Time warner things they are entitled to this huge HUGE profit margin when most of their infrastructure was PAID for by US. It's greed... pure and simple. This just proves it.

The Power of the Question Mark

[Chris Burke]

As explained in this Daily Show clip.

Thank you for pointing that out.

[jcr]

Why in the world should we have to choose between funding schools (Johnny's gym jumprope) and fast internet service? The two are totally unrelated

Exactly. Those of us who want the internet service should buy it with our own funds, and the people who want to send their kids to school should do so with their own funds.

-jcr

Re:Thank you for pointing that out.

[garote]

The people, acting collectively via the power of the state, have an obvious vested interest in providing universal access to basic education. Democracy, among many other things, is WORTHLESS without educated minds to drive it. If you think it is an expression of "freedom" to relegate something as life-defining as education to the realm of for-profit cabals, simply on the basis that they would provide better "choice" of what and how to teach, you no longer have a grasp on what "freedom" is. Next you'll be trading a cow for magic beans.

And, your comparison of education to ISP service is execrable.

freedom

[Funkeriffic Toad]

I detest the ludicrous prices of internet service as much as anyone. I'm all for new players entering the market and shaking up the monopolies' crappy (in the sense of evil, albeit profitable) business models. But I am somewhat uncomfortable with a local government being this player.

Now it's true that certain industries are natural monopolies (in the sense of economics: they require large capital investment in infrastructure, which results in high barriers to market entry and enables the sort of tactics other commenters have described, pricing competitors out of the market when they do crop up. Many of these industries seem to work better for society when they are government-regulated utilities, e.g. sewage, electricity, water, police and fire protection. But that doesn't mean that the government should be allowed to run any industry which is a natural monopology. In particular, I think it's best to maintain a healthy distrust of government when it comes to running media of communication which are necessary for political speech and dissent from government policies. Internet, phone, and cable services, I believe, fall into this category.

Another example might be newspapers, which are obviously about to go out of business, because website redistribute for free the content produced by the papers' journalists. Some people have proposed endowing newspapers as nonprofit organizations. Another possible model, I suppose, would be having the government pay journalists to do their reporting, which would then be delivered to citizens, e.g. online. But no one (I hope) would seriously consider this a good idea for "saving" journalism --- we would end up like with a state-controlled media of questionable objectivity, not really worth a damn.

The moral? Be wary when the government owns the flow of information. It's a Good Thing that the ISPs are being challenged. But hopefully private enterprises can accomplish the same thing, too.

A matter of priorities

[fugue]

There seem to be two competing objectives here.

The first is "provide an opportunity for private corporations to make a profit."

The second is "provide people with the best possible internet connectivity", where "best" might include things like "fast" and "cheap".

The two are very much at odds. I don't really see how this debate can move forward until people recognise that these are conflicting objectives, and that they have to explicitly take sides.

Can the two objectives be united?

Stop taxing corporations or stop allowing perks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Walmart comes to town and gets several tax reduction perks. And, if they dont, they decide the town 2miles away is much better, when that town gives the perks.
Mom and Pop can barely compete anyway and can not with these perks added on top.

Stop these perks or just stop all corporate taxes.

Corporate taxes are not paid by corporations. Instead they are passed on to you and me as expenses while simultaneously leveraged by politicians in the form of perks for companies. Why should politicians have this highly manipulative power over us?

Can't or won't?

[rgviza]

> Time Warner and Embarq can't compete.

  Time Warner and Embarq won't compete.

There all fixed. My Dad had a way of refusing to accept "can't". It's usually a nice way to say "won't" and is a coward's refusal. If the task is not impossible, can't is the wrong word to use.

-Viz

Moved from NC to the GTA

[quax]

GTA being the Greater Toronto Area. Don't know where you live but the medical service that I get here is not that different from the one that I had in the Research Triangle Area of North Carolina. My wife gave birth to our first kid in the US. Our youngest was born here in Canada. We actually had a much worse experience in the states and despite a top notch health plan from my employer I still had to pay more than a thousand dollars out of pocket for the medical costs of the birth. Here in Canada I never saw a bill.

Part of the reason that I moved up here is because I regard basic medical service as a human right. One that also makes a lot of practical sense because controlling infectious diseases is much easier if everybody has access to medical service.

I toy with the idea to start my own business. I find the idea much less daunting here because I know that neither I nor my family will lose our health insurance when I make the jump.

Re:Moved from NC to the GTA

[roman_mir]

You simply misunderstood me, I am proposing that there should be competition between private and government ran insurers. This has nothing to do with your private experiences.

Spin it out ?

[billcopc]

The laws exist to prevent governments from competing with private businesses. It's a good and bad law, for various reasons, but wouldn't the obvious solution be to spin this out into a separate company ?

I don't know how it is down in the states, but here in Canada we have "Crown Corporations", which are semi-independent gigs owned by the government, but they have their own budgets and are not dependent on taxes - they have their own revenue streams. If I am not mistaken, they are wholly owned by the government but not publicly funded - at least not past the start-up phase.

Most of them are "privatey" types of businesses like industrial associations, artistic ventures (galleries/colleges), things that are too narrow to be treated as a federal service, but not necessarily profitable enough to be left to the free market (or to keep it out of greedy hands).

It sounds like that format would suit this type of ISP. It takes a pretty big investment to get started, but not so much for steady-state operation. Let the gov't give them the initial boost, then kick them out of the next and let them fly.

mod parent up

[godrik]

wish i had mod point. Exactely what I thought.

Who cares?

[Radical Moderate]

Telcos and cable companies have no inherent right to exist. If government can provide the same service and voters don't have a problem with it, there's no reason they shouldn't. That's called democracy, and, no, it isn't synonymous with capitalism.

Upgrade?

[Radical Moderate]

I'm paying Qwest 40 bucks a month to rent two twisted copper wires, that were probably installed before I was born. And a repair tech just told me my run is 3000 feet longer than their DSL specs call for, which explains my less than stellar connection speeds. At least they give me a discount for the sub-par performance----NOT!!

Don't talk to me about government being less willing to upgrade than corporate monopolies. I'd frickin kill for municipal fiber.

Re:Upgrade?

[WindBourne]

I did not say that Gov is less willing to upgrade. I said that the run from the GreenBox to the home is difficult. That is the one that needs to be upgraded, that is difficult and expensive. On that piece if fiber is put in place (1G would be ideal), then other companies can connect to the greenbox.

I will assume that you live in Colorado. I KNOW how bad qwest is. They SUX big time. USwest was bad, but qwest makes them look great. About the only thing on par with qwest is comcast. But assume that your city or region had a small monopoly that ran fiber to the block or subdivision level. Both Comcast and Qwest would then simple hook to it and compete against each other. It is certain that both would have fibber going to the greenbox by now and both would have dirt cheap internet. We pay 60 from comcast for 6 MB. That is total BS. Qwest wants 100/month for 20. Totally Insane. The state almost opened this up about 4-5 years , but qwest and esp comcast put pressure on all the pubs and got them to block it. Insane again. We need competition.

Not cheap

[Brandybuck]

It's not cheap internet, it's taxpayer funded internet. City governments should not be running businesses.

The poll itself?

[rpillala]

I looked around a little bit for examples of the questions that made this a push poll instead of an actual poll and found nothing. Has anyone been on the receiving end of one of these solicitations?

The Constitution

[ChrisMaple]

socialism isn't outlawed by the U.S. Constitution.

I just read the Bill of Rights. Socialism violates 8 of the 10 amendments in theory, and all 10 in practice.

Nah

[Anenome]

Here's what's dumb:

- Corporation = a group of people.

- Government = a group of people.

To claim that the government can do what a corporation can't do is to claim that people can do what people can't do. That's clearly false.

So, where exactly is the government getting these massive cost savings, eh? It's a sham, a ruse, etc. There's always a trade-off, and generally when the gov runs something it runs it into the ground? Why? Because the gov loves to run things 'in the name of the people' and do it not on a profit basis. No, they do it in exchange for political power instead. So, when you don't have a profit incentive for providing the service, you also don't have a profit incentive to make sure the customer is happy, or to keep the service running, or to upgrade in a timely manner, or even to do regular maintenance. Businesses excel at these latter aspects because if the system goes down for any reason they're screwed. But the gov, and the employees in the gov, get no benefit for running a service well and experience no loss when a service is run poorly.

Don't buy the bullshit, you're being sold a bill of goods to further someone's agenda. If these two companies are genuinely overcharging then the gov should simply make-sure that the barriers to entry are removed and allow the inevitable: a company willing to charge less to come in and compete.

Re:Nah

[Anenome]

I should mention that anyone interested in a fuller elaboration of this phenomena and the associated ideas should pick-up the seminal book "Knowledge and Decisions" by famed economist Thomas Sowell. Highly recommended. I didn't understand why the gov could never run things as efficiently as a corporation until I read that eye-opening book which proves it once and for all.

How is running any service provider any different?

[Anonymous Coward]

The divine right of bungs.

These guys have been playing the system for decades now, and have it down to a tee. There's a sense of entitlement that has its own gravitas as has grown common in any industry leader that has enjoyed even a limited monopoly. A large part of this in dispensed in kick-backs, a form of patronage common among the immortal corporate personalities.

They say that the Catholic Church thinks in terms of centuries and it would seem probable that corporations will soon develop similar tendencies. I'm looking at you, Big Blue (not that I accuse IBM of bribery).

As has been said, we must pressure our representatives. We know how and why to do so, we read /., but others don't.

Go start that conversation. Share the facts, and argue your corner politely. Be Politic.

Oh, and it helps to write GCC, emacs, .... (I love you RMS, though I don't often agree with you, you set a standard)

Slainte! Guinness is good for you.

***

The "bung" was a term used to describe bribe payments in English club football to influence the transfer of contracts of players.

See http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/5363340.stm for a start.

Amazingly, soccer perpetuated a bondage system in Europe until the Bosman ruling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosman_ruling

**** This comment was editorialised for /. ****

What they do around my part of America?

[smchris]

Lie. Tell the customer the ISP isn't available in their area. I recommended an ISP to a woman. She hung up on the first QWest "customer service" rep but signed on to MSN when the second "customer service" rep "confirmed" the ISP wasn't on the available list.

Only a couple miles from my place, still _way_ inside our beltway, and the ISP is very much available. I called the ISP and had them call her to verify the behavior. They said they were collecting case stories but I haven't seen anything come out in the news about it.