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

Yes!

[jest3r]

The FCC is soooo awesome for doing this!

Finally they stood up to the telecoms and now I trust them completely to ensure that the Internet will be free, open and available to everyone.

I've never understood the hate as of late.

Re:Yes!

[satsuke]

With that mentality, the US would never have completed rural electrification nor rural telephone service .. with a net effect of some parts of the US having never gotten out of third world nation conditions.

Re:Yes!

[MBGMorden]

Because property taxes on rural land doesn't subsidize services for people that live in the city, amirite?

I work for a local government and am heavily involved in the property tax process. I'm sure like all things it varies by state, but here (South Carolina) I'd say that the urban subsidizes the rural even on property taxes.

For one, there's the plain and simple situation that large tracts of rural land are worth much less per acre than land in the cities. A 0.25 acre lot in town might be $30k whilst land out in the woods is less than $10k per acre.

Secondly, large tracts of agricultural land used for crops or timber are given an EXTREME tax break. Most of them pay taxes on less than 5% of the actual value of the land.

And last, serious tax breaks are given to "owner occupied" residential properties. Owner occupied properties are far more common in rural areas. Its not uncommon in the urban/suburban areas, but there are far more rental properties and such that end up paying nearly twice as much in property taxes.

I know in our specific locale its been an area of concern lately that a small urban area that is less than 10% of the size of the county generates more than 25% of the property tax revenue.

Re:Yes!

[Charliemopps]

The FCC is soooo awesome for doing this!

Indeed. I am so grateful that the FCC required me to pay more in order to subsidize the lifestyle choices of other people.

I've never understood the hate as of late.

Me neither. This is such a wonderful country. It would be so unfair if people were expected to deal with the consequences of their own decisions without coerced assistance from people that made more sensible choices.

Those "other people" are generally poor, and didn't chose to live where they do. We're not talking about the dude that lives in the estate outside of town... he'd just get a cellular modem. Most of the people without internet service today are in the rural south, appalachia, the rocky mountains, Indian reservations (the ones that didn't sell out to the casino gods), the dakotas, etc...

I understand that slahdotters are generally "me me me" but give me a fucking break. The small increase you'll see on your phone bill will pale in comparison to the increase later in your income taxes as all "those other people" go on welfare because they can't even access their local jobs website and there's no such thing as newspapers anymore. Crawl out of your miopic hole and view the world from somewhere more than 50ft from your doorstep.

Re:Yes!

[sjames]

Probably because people actually can dig a well and a septic tank on their own and it works fine while internet is all or nothing unless you expect each individual to run a separate fiber to the nearest city.

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?

Re:Yes!

[the eric conspiracy]

Oh horseshit. Do your research. 97 percent of farms in the US are family owned and operated. 2.2 million of them. Average farm family income is about 70K

http://www.fb.org/index.php?fu...

Re:Yes!

[whistlingtony]

I take offense at that "sensible choices" crack. It's a really !@#$ing annoying myth that poor people are poor due to their own choices. I know a lot of poor people that work WAY harder than you ever will. I grew up dirt poor. I got help from the government with food, education, etc. I got lucky, and made it, and I've payed back what I took in help, and then some...

You're basically just putting other people down, and doing so against people you don't like. It's a sterotype, and a myth, and your attitude says more about your lack of empathy than it does about those non existant people that "didn't make sensible choices and don't want to deal with the consequences".

I'm old enough to see that a VAST majority of people make pretty shitty decisions all the time, and that pretty much everyone has no idea how to live their lives. Everyone's making it up as they go along. Naturally, all of YOUR decisions are excellent ones, I'm sure. You've never had help from anyone in your whole life when things didn't work out.

It's always "those people" over there that are ruining everything.

Ahh the real reason Net Neutrality is built

[Billly Gates]

Fed: Here is some tax payer money. Now promise you will use it for rural Iowa where people pay $300 a month for a 640kb connection.

ISP: Oh yeah we promise. Thanks Uncle Sam!

Fed: Uh 3 years has happened where is the new infrastructure that the hard working tax payers paid for?

ISP: NO! We do not want to spend it. Screw you! We gave it to the CEO and shareholders so we could keep our bonuses.

Fed: What?! We had a deal. Why aren't you ...

ISP: Oh look at that ... big Ku CLUNG and a huge bag of money lands ... I was wondering what happened with that money that the tax payers gave us. It appears to be on your desk sir

FED: Oh then I see. Hmm perhaps we need a real expert to hear your case then. Someone with close ties and is on your payroll to tell us you need to steal more tax payer money?

ISP: Ahh good idea. Hire me. I work as a lobbyest and as you know I am quite clumsy and keep dropping these bags of free speech everywhere I go too. Oh boy got to watch that.

Fed: LOL. Ok we can't keep giving you money though. So what can we do

ISP: I know lets rip off other people then. You see we charge too much as it is and we also charge people who want to host and stream. What if we tripple charge all over the place. Then more bags of free speech might just keep falling out if I am not careful.

Fed: Praise Obama and worship Henry Reid so I can keep my job after 2014 and you have a deal!

ISP: Got it ... shakes hands

Re:Just nationalize it already

[Shakrai]

we got very good service as a whole, with reasonable rates

How old are you? Are you old enough to remember the concept of "long distance"? Of paying $0.10/min - $0.25/min for the privilege of calling your friends and family across the country? Rounded up of course. Don't tell me Ma Bell had "reasonable rates". Their rates were highway robbery even with the technological limitations of those days.

Innovation and regulated monopolies don't go hand in hand either. The theoretical underpinnings of what we now call DSL were well known in the 50s and workable technology was field tested by the 80s. It went nowhere because AT&T saw it as a threat, we can't sell dedicated data lines if we bring data and voice in on the same pair. That technology was left to collect dust on the shelf until DOCSIS was on the horizon and they realized they had a competitor.

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.