Slashdot Mirror
Free Broadband For NYC Public Housing?
First time accepted submitter nomad63 (686331) writes "Earlier this week, the NY Times reported that a group of city and leaders, with NYC public advocate Letitia James at the helm, are pushing for a commitment from Comcast to provide free broadband to the city's public housing and to extend its low-cost Internet Essentials plan (which was created as a condition of the NBC deal). While New York City might be the center of finance and commerce in the U.S., about 1/3 of households don't have an Internet connection, highlighting the huge "digital divide" between the city's wealthy residents and those who can't afford broadband service.In addition to the free service for public housing, the group wants gratis access at shelters for the city's homeless and its victims of domestic violence."
And still misses the real issue here. If you want to narrow the "Digital Divide" stop granting monopolies to companies like Comcast. Once you have some real competition in the market there's no reason that people who need the internet won't be able to buy it for themselves.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
Is there any reason that internet in NYC should cost 4 times what it does in Zurich or Seoul, except and exploitative monopoly ? The U.S. has places were the population density will make any kind of communication service more expensive but NYC is one of the most densely populated areas on the planet and is not one of them.
Free quality education, free quality medical care and free child care would help more.
t seems to me that if you're going to give a company a de facto monopoly of both television distribution and Internet, it would be a fair trade-off to require that they provide a very basic level of service to poor people for free. We can quibble over the details, but for example, providing the over-the-air channels and a 1mbps symmetrical connection seems fair.
These companies don't like to admit it, but they're providing exclusive access to public infrastructure. I think they should be counting their lucky stars that they're not as regulated as other utilities.
I wish governments would use taxes to pay for benefits for the poor instead of making us pay through hidden costs by forcing companies to give "free" or reduced cost services, which are made up for in higher fees for the service. The same goes for "affordable housing" where developers have to provide reduced cost housing, which is paid for in higher cost of housing for everyone else.
I have no problem with providing benefits, but If governments want to provide these benefits, then provide them through taxes where they are shared among all taxpayers (why should a Comcast customer pay to subsidize "free" interenet for the poor, while an AT&T UVerse customer does not?), everyone can see what they are paying to the full cost of providing these benefits is known, and the local taxes are tax deductible themselves.
Im a bit dicey about a lot of this stuff (and I'm canadian... some of it is a good idea, ie: health care, school, etc, but there are limits), but internet IMO makes sense, because its the best tool to get your ass out of poverty. It makes looking for a job, learning, school, making connections, finding ways of saving money, etc, a bazillion times easier.
When I was young, I was very, very poor. Computers were not common. As I hit 5th~ grade or so, they started being quite common, and some teachers started giving bonus points or other advantages to people using computers. Then they would give certain research assignments that could be done in minutes with Encarta at the time, but would take forever with books (gathering pictures, snippets, quotes...).
So someone who didn't have a computer would have to -put several times as much effort in the same assignment. That was time they couldn't put in another subject. Let's put aside how retarded/unfair those assignments were at the time, and put it in today's context...where some college work would be downright impossible. Sure, you can use the school's infrastructure, but that prevents you from being at home and multitasking (doing chores, cooking, taking care of siblings) at the same time.
I'm definitely not for free lunch. If there's no difference between rich and poor, there's no reason to get up your ass and help yourself. But in 2014, the internet is the ultimate tool to get out of a shitty situation. Knowledge is just too important, and a basic connection is too cheap to not give it to everyone. You'll spend more money with all the bullshit social programs, or worse, jail, if they stay in poverty a single more day because they were connection-less.
You can't even apply for a job at Burger King without an Internet connection these days.
There are free Internet connected computers at the public library, available for anyone to use. The lack of free Internet is not stopping anyone from getting a job.
The devil's in the details, isn't it? If you go through my posts, I'm for ensuring everyone has access to internet, but against doing a lot of these things as long as the US doesn't have its undocumented (fuck PC... ILLEGAL) immigrant problem under control. Makes for a complicated problem, and that's why I'm not a politician, or even an activist. I'd just fuck it up.
That said, I pay more in property tax than a minimum salary worker makes pre-tax, and my wife and I together pay more income tax than the average household income in the US. The only "tax shelters" we have is our 401ks, and only real deductions are the property tax and mortgage interests (I guess I deduct my transit cards too...how greedy of me).
So that probably pays for my share?