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Would You Pay an Internet Broadband Tax?
An anonymous reader writes "Remember the Internet Tax Freedom Act? The whole point was to prevent the government from ever taxing the Internet. But that's the proposal from the FCC — and backed by companies like Google, AT&T and Sprint. Would you pay a buck or two extra for fast access — or vote for someone who thinks you should? 'If members of Congress understood that the FCC is contemplating a broadband tax, they'd sit up and take notice,' said Derek Turner, research director for Free Press, a consumer advocacy group that opposes the tax."
I would gladly pay a small tax for super fast internet access...but the internet has to be free, no filtering, no censorship, no throttling, no blocking torrents ect. Information wants to be free, but there is no free lunch.
If paying a small tax will guarantee completely free, uncapped and non-filtered broadband with a certain reasonable speed guarantee, then yes! Otherwise, what's the point?
As we have seen time and again with the Universal Service Fund, big health care (Pfizer being let off the hook for defrauding Medicare because punishing them would mean delisting all of their products from Medicare) and big finance (if you cannot immediately think of five major scandals, you've not been paying attention) the big guys get government money and aren't held accountable at all. At all. So, no. Not a single red cent to them. I don't give a damn how high and noble their stated goals are. Until we have an independent prosecutor who can hang one of these companies from the nearest lamp post for taking the money and not doing precisely what the money is for, the answer is "no."
And if you let your idealism get in the way and say "yes," you're an idiot who deserves to have your face rubbed into this when you get betrayed.
without broadband access DO NOT want high-speed internet
hahahah!!!! thats rich.
They want it. They just do not want to live in a city... You are confusing living like that, with living 50 years ago.
They just do not like cities. They usually do however like modern things. Its worse than that though. There are *many* who want it. But will never get it because of lack of infrastructure. Also what you and I consider high speed, and what that survey considers high speed are 2 different things.
Another Slow Service user here. I did play a numbers game and pick my plan, I have something pretty low, (too lazy to detail it, maybe 1mbit?).
However I carefully considered my internet habits and discovered I can live with 5 seconds of buffering, and overall the $20 or whatever per month saved is worth more to me than having a "better experience". Generally, you can "spend for experience" until you go broke.
Misc Tips: I have a Verizon Dry Loop. That means it's Data Only. No Phone. But who needs a "landline"? $400+ saved per year. (Guess). Meanwhile, I have an AT&T GoPhone, that charges per minute, not per month. Another $700/year saved there. Here's the fun part. Get a VOIP service (I like Magic Jack Plus) and plug it in, and then you have a landline after all! Whee!
So instead of spending cumulative $150+ per month, I think I spend $40 per month tops.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
tl;dr - Why are folks in rural areas entitled to amenities of cities when they don't have the population density to support them?
Because the city slickers think they're entitled to the amenities of rural areas, like, say, food, and transportation across rural areas via roads.
The other part of the argument is unlike medical and museums, you don't have much of an internet without the monopoly granted easements across rural property for buried fiber...
So we'll make a deal... stop eating our food, rip up the roads between the cities, and rip out the buried optical fiber, and you can keep your internet access to yourselves.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Their experiment in being Wall St. with glaciers didn't work out so hot, though... (to their credit, however, they (relatively speaking) just washed their hands of the issue and told people to fuck off, rather than working on the theory that if we just pandered a little harder to the people who fucked up in the first place, they would deign to fix the problem...)
Foreign deployments are not legitimate. We need the Coast Guard and the army. The nuclear sub fleet and their nuclear deterrent can be transferred to the coast guard, and the army focuses on maintenance of the land based nuclear deterrent, with the air force folded in there as well. Security of shipping lanes can be handled by a renewed merchant marine (ie allow merchant ships to be armed to whatever extent they like).
You don't need a big standing army when you have nukes. With no big armies anywhere, wars of all descriptions become less likely. A small special forces would be enough to deal with non-state threats.
You need a military to absorb the % of the aggressive young male population and kill some of that off, and develop some discipline and maturity in the survivors. (Alligator control is just not big enough to take all of them). Kind a Kipling-esque view and a bit curmudgeonly, but fits the observed facts much better than we need to spend $$$ and $$$$ and $$$$$ for "national defense".
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What gets me is that people who believe in socialism see others by what their Government does, not so in America. American's judge others by what they do, not their Governments.