FCC Gets Go-Ahead For Plan To Expand Rural Internet Access

The FCC's plan to use fees collected from big telecom companies to expand Internet infrastructure in rural parts of the U.S. was given a green light yesterday in Denver, by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Those telecoms maintained that the FCC's mandate did not extend to using the money to pay for Internet service, but a three-judge panel dismissed their challenge. From The Verge: "The FCC originally pitched the program as part of the Universal Service Fund in 2011, noting in a report a year earlier that approximately 14 million people did not have access to broadband. The Connect America Fund aimed to use a portion of customer bills in other areas of the country to build out broadband infrastructure, including cellular data networks in those areas. That would begin with $300 million at the start, and up to $500 million as part of an annual budget."

Comments

Re:Yes!

[Strangely Familiar]

You can't dig a hole in the ground to provide an internet connection, the same way you can with water and septic. For electricity, you could always buy a generator, although that is a much inferior solution than a grid connection. But you can't buy an Internet. The nature of a "net" is that it is cooperative and shared. It makes sense that millions of people would collaborate to connect themselves to the Internet, rather than taking an every man for himself approach.

The telecoms lack even one electron volt of shame. Don't you think the main issue is that these telecoms filed a lawsuit to prevent millions from getting broadband connections? That their image is already so blackened, they don't worry how this might appear? How did rural folks become the bad guys for you in this story?

Who builds it ...

[PPH]

... and what do they build (and run)?

Back when the Universal Sevice Fund was created for rural POTS, that was a heavly regulated and well defined service. So when the government mandated redistribution of funds for the telecoms (actually only the one back then) to build rural systems, they knew what they'd be getting.

Broadband Internet service is poorly defined. Lacking any sort of network neutrality (and other common carrier regulations), there is no telling what exactly will get built and once built, what people in rural communities will be able to do with it.

They should name this the Take The Money and Run Plan.

How to Lie with Statistics

[oneiros27]

... the important part is to pick the metric that you like:

First, we have our possible definitions of 'family farm' :

1. Farms operated by indvidual families
2. Farms owned by individual families
3. Farms owned or operated by individual families that produce agricultural products for sale
4. Farms owned or operated by individual families that aren't incorporated. (might be a death tax dodge, might be a huge corporatation that's tightly held)
5. Farms owned an operated by individual families that qualify as a 'small business'.
6. Farms under a given acerage.

And we can further modify what we're analyzing:

a. ...only those farms that produce agricultural products for sale.
b. ...only those farms that produce food.
c. ...only those farms that produce food intended for human consumption. (no sod or flower farms, feedstock for biodiesel)
d. ...only those farms that produce food that contributes to the human food chain. (so allow hay, alfalfa and animal feed if grown for cows, but if the cows are to be dog food).
e. ...only those farms that 'contribute meaningfully to the market'.

Then, we have our metric, selecting the definiton of 'family farm' that's most advantageous of what we're trying to show, comparing "family farms" to either "corporate farms" or to "all farms":

1. Percentage of the count "family farms"
2. Percentage of the acerage of "family farms" 3. Percentage of the acerage used for farming in a given year.
4. Percentage of the products produced by "family farms" (in tons)
5. Percentage of the products produced by "family farms" (in dollars)
6&7. Percentage of the food produced by "family farms" (tons / dollars)
8&9. Percentage of the food sold by "family farms" (tons/dollars)

Some of these, I'm not even sure which way the selection bias will be. (family farms might sell at farmer's markets and get a better price per pound ... or they might focus on herbs and things typically sold at higher margins that don't tend to be grown on a massive scale).

But like anything, you run all of the different combinations, and pick the one that gives you the answer to support whatever argument you're trying to make.