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Wisconsin Public Internet Struggles Against Telecom, Legislature
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Ars Technica:
"The University of Wisconsin's Internet technology division and a crucial provider of 'Net access for Wisconsin's educational system are under attack from that state's legislature and from a local telecommunications association. At issue is the WiscNet educational cooperative. The non-profit provides affordable network access to the state's schools and libraries, although its useful days may be numbered unless the picture changes soon. Under a proposed new law, the University of Wisconsin system could be forced to return millions of dollars in federal broadband grants that it has already won, spend far more money on network services, and perhaps even withdraw from the Internet2 project."
can't they stand ANY competition?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
"and that government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations shall not perish from the earth."
The provision was inserted at the 11th hour by Republicans after lobbying by companies such as AT&T, claiming that these types of services should be provided by private companies. http://wistechnology.com/articles/8648/ http://wistechnology.com/articles/8665/
Used to be called corruption.
Unfortunately, the population of a country always wait until it's too late to act and then you get a revolution.
AT&T won't provide the services or will do so at triple the prices paid now. This is also a very convenient way of shorting the school system what they need, and thus have more ammo to go after them for not providing what our kids need. Thus making schools the root of all evil again. Most voters will go along with it, and the GOP in Wisconsin gets more of what it wants.
THis makes perfect sense when you figure that ATT is set to profit big time from this legislation and they were/are a huge campaign contributor to Scott (I'm a Douche Bag) Walker. For those of you following along, this is the second time he has done this, the first was a 23m Fed giveback that would have replaced the sub par Badgernet service.
Privatize everything.
Except brutality and suffering; those will be available to everyone camped outside of the enclaves.
There has been a concerted war on the public interest in Wisconsin (and a few other states) for the past several months. IIRC, Wisconsin is where three legislators are up for recall elections, three more have the signatures filed but not validated yet, and steaming mad voters are counting the days until they can start a recall effort on the governor too.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Nine legislators are up for recall, Six Republicans and Three Democrats
This is a very nicely written and researched article, which, unfortunately, only shows in detail one horrific case study of what could soon be a widespread occurrence if the big telecom corps get what they want: to go after the government/educational market (now that the consumer market is completely saturated) and offer them half the service at twice the price.
Organizations like WiscNet provide a fantastic public service, and the notion of dismantling them for private industry to make a buck is just reprehensible. I'm from Michigan, not Wisconsin, but I could very easily see this happening here, as we have the same issues in play: Merit Network, a non-profit co-op founded for the same reasons as WiscNet, provides Internet access to almost all the schools in the state. It would be a huge loss for our corrupt legislature to squeeze them out (never underestimate the evil of the Michigan Legislature, look up the Michigan "promise scholarship" if you don't believe me). I'm sure other states are in similar situations.
My dad's a public school teacher, and my Internet access growing up was through Merit's dialup, which they offered free to teachers at the time. Unlike most commercial offerings back in the mid-90s (or even now) there was no monthly time allotment or bandwidth cap. I shudder to think how my experiences building web sites and learning to code would have changed had AT&T run that system. I do biomed research now, and I'm posting this from a Merit network connection that we use to collaborate with other labs across the country. Try doing that on a 250GB monthly cap.
Hey Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association: Go to hell, and take your bandwidth caps with you.
So, does that mean the telecoms are going to return the BILLIONS in subsidies and tax cuts they've received?
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
His union-busting went well enough for his purposes
If WI laws allowed it, he'd be facing a recall vote along with the 6 Republican senators that are already being recalled. And I'd be shocked if he doesn't face a recall when he becomes eligible for one in January. He pissed a lot of people off and if his goal was to weaken support for the unions he failed miserably. A lot of people who started out against the unions watched the unions agree to a pay cut, a benefits cut, and even a temporary moratorium on collective bargaining. There are people angry with the Democratic senators for their walk out, but even that anger isn't directed at the Unions. In the end, it was the unions who looked reasonable; while the Democrats looked petty and weak and the Republicans looked like card carrying villains.
I think he'd be hard pressed to explain his behavior on a national stage to anyone other than anti-union Republicans. Not to mention that there are about 100k people in WI that have shown themselves ready and willing to take time off from work to stand in the literally freezing rain just to show their displeasure for him. Sometimes the "Would never vote for" column is just as important as the "Would vote for" column in polling, because it shows how active and engaged people would be to someone who is opposing him.
Not quite.
Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.
That's the 2008 Financial Crisis in a nutshell. Then hold the mess up as an example of how bankrupt, stupid, and evil government and socialist organizations such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are. Blame it all on the policies of the Clinton and Carter administrations. Mock GM for now being "Government Motors". Crow about how great private enterprise is. Brazenly ignore the boatload of implicit contradictions, omissions, and lies in such statements.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
What sort of public transit do you propose for people who are legally unable to drive, due to age (old or young), disease, or blindness?
The real target here was the federal stimulus money (NTIA, BTOP) that was being used to create coops in Wisconsin. The Building Community Capacity through Broadband project which would have connected together anchor institutions (city and county governments, libraries, schools, hospitals) and allow them to buy bandwidth wholesale rather than retail. That did not sit too well with some telecom folks and in the press they are saying that the University should not compete with the private sector. Well the University has to get bandwith in most of the state anyway to feed the various Univ of Wisc campuses. So including some school systems in the process makes sense if you believe in efficiency and cost savings. Gov Walker is "open for business" so he does not believe in government efficiency.
WiscNet was, as I understand it a secondary concern, although the telecoms have wanted it to die for a decades. It is the same pattern of schools banding together and riding together on common infrastructure. ATT would like that to go away with WiscNet in favor of Badgernet which they run or even better, from their point of view, to sell everyone T-1 lines retail.
This is the second effort for this. The first successful effort (from ATT's perspective) was to give back $37 million of the same stimulus money (NTIA, BTOP) for a different state run project. The spin there was that the Feds did not want to give the money to a private company. But insiders tell me that it was not the feds but ATT. ( wisconsins-stimulus-rejection-too-many-strings-or-too-much-scrutiny)
A lot of people who started out against the unions watched the unions agree to a pay cut, a benefits cut, and even a temporary moratorium on collective bargaining
Sadly that doesn't matter to many people. The unions have become the new multipurpose boogeyman for any number of groups and causes. Go take a look at the recent story hear about an Apple Store employee who wanted to form a union, and look at how many slashdot people jumped up to bash unions in response.
I think he'd be hard pressed to explain his behavior on a national stage to anyone other than anti-union Republicans.
There are a lot of people in this country with strong anti-union feelings. And there are plenty of people who could be convinced to feel the same way as well. Explaining this to enough people to win the GOP nomination is trivial.
Besides, with our current conservative POTUS in office, the republicans have to go even further to the right in order to make any distinction between what they want and what Obama has already done. Anyone who isn't rabidly anti-union will be labelled as "soft left' as the kindest.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I think you left out a couple of steps:
1. Privatize everything
2. ???
3. PROFIT!
The beauty of this scheme is that step 2 is irrelevant when it comes to privatizing government services. Just about any path you take leads to #3.
Make public schools ineffective by cutting the funding.
Privatize the schools.
Make a profit on government vouchers for private schools that are just as ineffective, if not worse.
Make the prisons overcrowded by throwing uneducated kids in jail on a three strikes count.
Privatize the prisons.
Make a profit by cutting health and nutrition services to the prisoners.
Make the courts ineffective by cutting funding and flooding the docket with charges against uneducated kids and internet downloaders.
No time for lawsuits against privatized service providers???
Profit on cost savings for liability insurance, lawyers and other items.
Republicans in Wisconsin are obviously soft on crime. Education (and therefore education funding) mitigates future needs for prison funding. Despite what the tea party would have you think, there is a role for government services in US society. Public education is one of the essential government services, and internet service is a requirement for public education.
Republicans always like to say that the public sector is too inefficient, and services should be privatized to improve efficiency. What they don't mention is that privatization never leads to improvement in services over the long term. Basically, the extra efficiency (if it exists) in the private sector, is consumed by profit taking. Once the initial inefficiencies are ironed out, the extra money goes as profit to the service provider, not for service improvement. Then thanks to the accounting principle of compounded growth rates, the only way for the privatized service to succeed as a company is to raise prices. Government services are not growth industries unless the population is growing dramatically.
We are the 198 proof..
Nice spin. You're implying that the telecommunications grant isn't available to the other 49 states and somehow the rest of the country is being shortchanged. You also overlooked the purpose of these grants. Without them private entities would not expand their broadband offering to rural areas. If there was truly a free market telecommunication market then people in rural areas would still be paying too much for POTS (plain old telephone system) and would only have dial up access to their ISP.
I can't help but notice that the republican party advocates cutting subsidies to non-profits because of "free market" concerns, yet is amazingly quiet about government subsidies going to profitable industries (eg. oil).
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Repeat after me: "There is nothing illegal or immoral about public infrastructure."
Support SETI@home
That trend has been forming for quite a while now. Until not long ago, politicians were far more sneaky when trying to dismantle public institutions to shift more power to their "friends" in various businesses. But when they noticed the general "meh" attitude that spreads in the population, I guess they felt a bit let down that we didn't even honor their attempts to veil the sellout to corporations. And now they're pretty much blunt and blatant about it. Simply because there is no public outcry. We've learned to expect that from them, we pretty much expect our politicians to screw us over. And, bluntly, why should they veil it? It's not like we have a choice. Republicans or Democrats, hanging or shooting, Kang or Kodos, it's not like there's really a difference.
And please don't start something like "then run yourself" or "vote for another candidate". Please. At least be sensible. First, people are too stupid for democracy to really work, they're too caught up in petty bickering about how much party A is the hell spawn and if they don't vote for B the apocalypse is going to happen the day after the election. And second, the amount of money required to do something like this is crippling, it's like telling someone to open a competing telco if they're not happy with the AT&T service.
So why should they be sneaky about selling us out? It's not like we can do anything about it anyway.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You can't run a public transit system that caters to 1-2% of the population and only serves that number. It doesn't work without massive funding from the government, which people have consistently voted against.
When I was in Chicago in the 1960s the buses and electric trains there had plenty of riders and ran 24x7. Unfortunately, the result of a lot of government programs created the "inner city" mess that everyone should be familar with. It was no longer safe to ride public transit, so if you didn't absolutely have to, you did not. Ridership dropped. Fares increased because of this, so ridership dropped some more. They ended the 24x7 service because there were too few people to make it practical. The removed station attendents and got rid of every single person in the system they could do without. The trains became less and less safe to ride.
The end result of all of this is the train routes have been reconfigured, stations closed and buses cut way back. It is now something that is usable during rush hour and absolutely nobody goes anywhere near unless they have to. There have been attempts at bond issues for funding the CTA and every single one has failed. It is viewed that if it can't survive as an independent company, it shouldn't survive at all.
In other places rails that were used for trains have been torn up and the land used for something else. The rail lines aren't coming back - the land is tied up now. That decision was made in the 1950s and has just finally gotten around to being noticed.
End result is public transit is pretty much dead in the US. What was needed was massive government investment in the 1940s and 1950s to offset the investment in roads. It wasn't done, so public transit became less and less relevant to the people in the US. Sure there might be some people that it would be nice if public transit worked for, but they are far too few to support the system. It would now take the government spending billions of dollars each year in every major city to have a functional public transit system and for the most part it would be empty - except for the 1-2% that absolutely require it. It would still be a haven for crime and unsafe, but that is how we seemingly want to have inner cities.
You might be OK with that level of government spending, but apparently very few voters are. I suppose an alternative might be to tear up the highways that have been built over the last 60 years or so and force people to use the unsafe, crime-infested public transit system. It might get enough ridership to reduce the crime level then. But it would take that kind of thing to make it work. And that would cost hundreds of billions.
By the way, the US is broke and unless China wants to sponsor public transit in the US (maybe some nice Chinese buses?) we're not spending anything on public transit.