Slashdot Mirror
FCC's Broadband Plan May Cost You Money
At ten minutes past midnight the FCC released their National Broadband Plan. Judging by the available coverage, few reporters spent the night poring over it. The BBC at least posted something in the morning hours, but it quotes Enderle, so that gives you some idea of its sourcing. Business Week notes the plan's cool (not to say frigid) reception among broadcasters. Dave Burstein of FastNet News did some real digging. His take as of 4:00 am Eastern time is that the plan will cost most Americans money, and won't provide much if any relief to the poor. We'll see many more details and nuances emerge over the day. Update: 03/16 19:53 GMT by KD : The FCC plan (PDF) is here.
If there is one thing that the internet helps, its ensuring that no one ever has to find this out if they don't want to. If someone only watches Fox News, listens to talk radio and reads the WSJ in print, all they're likely to do is add foxnews.com, redstate.com and/or stormfront.org ("white nationalist" forum) to their reading list, group up with more and more people who agree with them, then eventually find Alex Jones and then its over. The same thing can be said of the person who doesn't watch anything but PBS news, listens to NPR and reads nothing but the New York Times... or the people reading Daily Worker or whatever.
The internet, for most people, really just helps to ensure that they never have to step outside of their comfort zone insofar as information is concerned. Once they've "discovered" so many comforting sources, then it'll just legitimize their entire world view, solidify everything in their mind, give them comfort in the virtual crowd and make them even more dangerous. I have first hand experience with this myself, and I had to drop off for a while and go read real books, multiple media sources, etc, to ensure that I gave myself a well-rounded view of things again and got back towards normal.
Don't get me wrong, I love the internet -- it makes my life a lot easier, provides the infrastructure within which I make my living, allows me to keep up with friends from high school and college, and get information from all over the world whenever I want it. But for a very large subset of the population on either side of an issue, all its going to do is help entrench their views and help them think "look at all these people who are saying what i've been saying for years! what's wrong with people who can't see what I see?! It's all right there, on the internet!" But, as a poster said above, Democracy has drawbacks. This is one of them.
So the text has been out for several hours and this guy flipped through it (you can't honestly read 357 pages of children's fiction in that time, let alone government policy) enough to find a few stated ideas for taxes, and all of a sudden it's a net loss for consumers? When are those taxes going to take effect, and what is the inflation-adjusted amount in today's dollars? It's a lot easier to suggest taxes than to try and tell congress how to budget or regulate companies, so this statement of policy cannot honestly take into account any kind of subsidy that might be dreamed up by congress (save your complaints about how taxes pay for that, that's not the kind of cost we're talking about), nor any kind of price regulations that would decrease charges. A substantial part of the plan is supposed to be paid for by auctioning another part of the broadcast spectrum, and there's no way of knowing anything other than a ballpark estimate for that amount. It's not like this is anything other than the first public rough draft; items will change and funding will be battled over every day until the relevant budgets are passed.
It depends on the government and the business. In a free market, business almost always does save the customer money. In a natural monopoly like utilities, roads, bridges, etc, you're going to pay through the nose if privately owned.
An example is two electric companies, CWLP and Amerin here in Illinois. Amerin's rates are far higher than CWLP's, who provide the cheapest power in the state. Amerin's customer service is abysmal, CWLP's is excellent. When two F-2 (almost F-3) tornados tore through CWLP-served Springfield, we had power restored in our devastated neighborhood in a week; houses that had their roofs impaled by their neighbors' roofs had electricity back long before the roof was fixed, and the electrical infrastructure was completely destroyed, requiring replacement of every pole, wire, and transformer. When a weak F1 passed through Amerin-served Cahokia across the river from St Louis, my friend Jeff was without power for over a month. I visited him a week after his tornado, and the only evidence one had gone through was his lack of electricity.
To paraphrase Lilly Tomlin's "Ernestine", "We're the electric company. We don't HAVE to." Amerin is only beholden to its stockholders, since their customers have no other choice for electricity. OTOH if CWLP's service is bad, the Mayor loses his job; the customers/citizens own CWKP.
CWLP not only doesn't use tax money, it actually turns a profit for the city, keeping taxes lower. Since my experience with the tornados, I've advocated that all utilities be taken over by city and county governments. Keep government out of construction and fast food, but do away with private-owned utilities. A monopoly doesn't follow free market rules.
Free Martian Whores!