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Marco Rubio and Other Senators Move To Block Municipal Broadband (theintercept.com)
New submitter h33t l4x0r writes: Presidential candidate Marco Rubio recently "fired off a letter (PDF) to the Federal Communications Commission asking the agency to allow states to block municipal broadband services." The municipal services offer cheaper, faster broadband alternatives to the large telecoms. Rubio's campaign has taken large donations from AT&T, and the article notes that other providers, "fearing competition, have used their influence in state government to make an end-run around local municipalities. Through surrogates like the American Legislative Exchange Council, the industry gets states to pass laws that ban municipal broadband networks, despite the obvious benefits to both the municipalities and their residents."
Why is it an issue for the federal government to fix your corrupt state?
For someone who represents the people, how can they possibly justify being against municipal broadband? What is it going to take to get a by the people, for the people government? Torches & pitchforks?
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Block municipal broadband somehow?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
subscription radio is becoming obsolete,, again?
How dare they try to provide a service that people want!
Next they'll have some kind of crazy thing called a "postal service" where people can send letters and packages to other people fairly inexpensively, and the government will operate it! After that they'll force everyone to use something called "public libraries" and "fire departments". Where will it end??
The end game will be complete when they institute the final piece of Satan's plan called "public schools", where every child will be able to be get an education. O The Horror!
Soon the Evil State will force people at gunpoint to use these municipal broadband services, and if you don't, it's off to the FEMA re-education camps with you, citizen! I swear it's true, Glenn Beck told me so!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
We need to be stopping the relentless growth of big government, not find more things for them to get their paws into.
Rand Paul, is that you?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Nothing new here. Typical....
*My town and the one I moved from both have a robust fiber network that spans the entire town, shame that only municipal traffic will ever see it....
I live in a town with a gym that was paid for with tax dollars and a gym that was paid for privately. They compete. There are no problems. If you don't like one, go to the other. Same goes for education.
I don't see the problem, but then again, I don't have a problem competing with the government. Only a protectionist claiming to be a capitalist would.
Place something witty here
"“The FCC is promoting government-owned networks at the possible expense of private sector broadband providers..."
Boy, it's just been a week of "almosts" and "maybes", hasn't it. Started with the drone registration that was justified because of potentially unsafe incidents and now this bullshit.
What's next, mobilizing our military because of a rumor?
Oh and Rubio, this makes you look like a corporate shill whore that will gain you nothing. Enjoy your reputation. You've earned it.
If we allow the government to socialize internet access, we'll wind up with a system that is constantly in need of repair, upgrades, and endless red tape to get even the slightest thing done, along with constant pressure to charge rich people more and give access away for free to poor people in the name of 'fairness...' We need to be stopping the relentless growth of big government, not find more things for them to get their paws into.
Oh, you mean unlike Comcast or any of the other quasi-monopolies we currently enjoy?
And yet, when the people want to band together and do something, you want to remove that freedom?
I'd think that a voter referendum in the upcoming election for each state should allow the voter to select whether local communities could setup public internet services or not. The referendum would then invalidate/over ride any state government law that the bought out elected officials made. The supreme court would then have to uphold the voters vote on the issue and couldn't override the vote since the constitution is based on the public citizen vote.
And then, once you have accomplished your goal, what are you gonna do?
It is pretty much game over and reset.
Go watch the next Star Wars for Christmas.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
...then why don't they pony up and offer the same level of investment? For them, it's about making a dollar or two off the business and residential customers. For municipalities, though, it's about attracting businesses that thrive on big data networks, and residents who work for those businesses. It's an investment in the possible future, just like clean water and sewage can make or break a community. In this situation, smaller communities are routinely underserved by the big telecoms in favor of the more population dense cities (where the telecoms make more money for the same amount of investment), and data-centric businesses are looking at the available infrastructure and deeming it to be inadequate in these communities. Decisions like these can make or break cities in the 30-60K population range, since manufacturing jobs are all going overseas and the only sectors really growing are service and retail.
Socialize? I guess we should get rid of roads, police, military then... because by your definition, anything that the public requests of their government, and then pays for... is "socialist".
We need to be stopping the relentless growth of big corporations and monopolies, not giving them more power & money to control politics.
Well I would say it is up to you to fix your corrupt state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
This. I'm very much a free market supporter, but in the cable internet areana it's anything but a free market in the US right now. Competition is great. We don't have that now, though.
The real joke* in this is that many of these municipalities aren't being served at all by the big monopolies. They asked for service repeatedly only to be denied. But if they start a municipal broadband effort, they are suddenly criticized for "squashing competition." In other words, the big ISPs won't serve them but they don't want anyone else to serve them either so they won't have competition just in case they decide to serve them in the future.
* Unfortunately, the joke is on the public who just wants Internet access and is being told it's illegal for them to get it unless the big ISP monopolies deign to grant them access.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Evacuating the school population of los angeles because of an email
What's next, mobilizing our military because of a rumor?
This happened to me when I was in Viet Nam. Somehow the fact that we were on ready reserve turned into we had to go. The helocopters dropped us in an open field, there was nothing there.
Oh and Rubio, this makes you look like a corporate shill whore that will gain you nothing. Enjoy your reputation. You've earned it.
I woundn't vote for him any way.
During W's administration the EPA (a government regulatory body like the FCC) said that states could not enact their own pollution rules that were more stringent than the EPAs guidelines. California (and slashdot naturally) had a cow - "how dare the federal government tell states what they can or cannot do!"
And here we are again...
Rubio - and the other senate signers of the letter (it's not just Rubios letter) don't want the government regulatory body to override what is ultimately state's rights to decide what's best - like California and environmental laws...
Then came the railroads. The canal companies lobbied heavily to keep railroads out of the canal towns. Even today you can see quaint little towns along the Erie canal that successfully kept the railroads out. They, and their canals, went bust and economic growth by passed them. But municipalities courted the railroads like gangbusters. All levels of the government local, state and federal shoveled money to private companies to build railroads, large land grants. So much of land was given to railroads they actually acted as a catalyst to immigration and populating the Great Plains. They gave away 40 acres of land to immigrants from Europe if they would buy train tickets from New York to Nebraska! Well, history repeated. Railway towns like Altoona, PA actively fought to keep the Interstate high ways away from them!
So in the great American tradition, the municipalities should tax their local population, collect all the money and lay it at the feet of Internet barons in New York and beg them to build a fiber optic network for their poor little towns. These companies would spend a dime per dollar to build the network for the towns and skim off the rest. That is the American tradition.
Municipality building its own network! bah! What would happen next? Municipalities to have their own fleet of trucks to remove snow? Or do their own garbage collection fleets? Or run school districts? We need to put an end to all these un American activities. The only real role for municipalities, or any government, is to tax the population and give the money to private companies, with no bid contracts, and to beg them to provide basic services, after taking their cut of 40 to 60% for profits.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Oh and Rubio, this makes you look like a corporate shill whore that will gain you nothing. Enjoy your reputation. You've earned it.
It makes no difference. No one will complain other than a grumble in online space very few will see. You won't write to anyone, you won't call anyone, at best you'll twat some #dweebrage before going back to your humdrum life looking for other things to get upset about. This is why the laws get through, not just the obvious oligarchy corruption within the government.
If we allow the government to socialize internet access, we'll wind up with a system that is constantly in need of repair, upgrades, and endless red tape to get even the slightest thing done, along with constant pressure to charge rich people more and give access away for free to poor people in the name of 'fairness...' We need to be stopping the relentless growth of big government, not find more things for them to get their paws into.
As a ranking independent libertarian I'd have to say this is some false indignation. The big monopoly providers we have now exist because of big government. And little government. Municipalities all over the country are already deep into this with their power to regulate and license the rights of way across their cities and towns. Often municipalities will create exclusive contracts with just one provider in order "to get the best deal". But the false libertarians are silent on the practice? How about the FCC ban exclusive agreements between municipalities and telecom providers to start?
It seems to me that if a town or city wants to provide assistance to set up a municipal telecom provider as a non-profit corporation, then they should be free to do so. They don't have to become telecoms themselves, just create a new entity like many municipal light and electric companies. State governments shouldn't stand in the way of small business even if, especially if, that business is set up as a non-profit for the public benefit.
It's incredible to me how very plain it is in that communication that he's saying "This municipal broadband the FCC is asking us to deploy looks like it could be funded and be way better than what's currently out there. It's not in our interests to provide something better" I believe the official quote was akin to "The FCC shouldn't be in the business of choosing the winners and losers of competitive broadband"
Essentially, saying A.) It's a "business", so there's money to be made in having a hand in the "winner" of this race. And B.) The proposed municipal rollout looks in even this early stage to be so competitive that the it would be the "winner" in the competitive broadband space.
And Rubino has his signature on the thing. Good luck to him turning that around.
So what does it make Hillary who takes donations from Donald Trump?
And from the banks and other corporations?
https://www.opensecrets.org/po...
http://www.truth-out.org/speak...
Taking money from corps doesn't distinguish good or bad from Rubio.
With the low, low, low rates of participation in government it is no wonder we "get what we deserve".
When my brother first moved to Australia he got a ticket because he forgot to vote.
Makes sense to me. The only way a "government of the people" can work is if the people participate.
Can be, I would PREFER to have a PRIVATE company, in charge of providing internet, than the federal, state, or local government. Name one government agency that ever comes in on time, under budget and with superior service? Not that the private companies are saints, but, when you let the government give it to you "for free" (yeah right), it will come with a TON of restrictions. Sites that are negative to the government will be blocked/throttled. Now, that would be ok for some, but, you must remember, the political winds shift from time to time, and the "other party" might come to power and put the hex on sites you might not want shut down. With freedom of speech, comes a great responsibility. Once encroached, you can never put the stopper back in the bottle.
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,
Isn't that the whole point?
What else would you expect from the Corporate Party?
If we allow the government to socialize internet access, we'll wind up with a system that is constantly in need of repair, upgrades, and endless red tape to get even the slightest thing done, along with constant pressure to charge rich people more and give access away for free to poor people in the name of 'fairness...' We need to be stopping the relentless growth of big government, not find more things for them to get their paws into.
So basically we'd end up with the same system corporations offer us, but (according to TFA) cheaper and faster. Sounds good.
Isn't that the whole point?
No.
If you expect the Federal government to fix your State government when you arent satisfied, who do you expect to fix your Federal government when you arent satisfied?
You think that you have more influence on the Federal government than you do on your State government?
You should get off your ass, stop being an arm-chair power-giver, and fix things at the most local level possible.
"His name was James Damore."
"Free". aka, go let my neighbor pay. What love!
I'd be so slightly more impressed with your opinion if you were actually willing to sign your name to it rather than posting as an Anonymous Coward.
The "coward" has never been so appropriate.
This. I'm very much a free market supporter, but in the cable internet areana it's anything but a free market in the US right now. Competition is great. We don't have that now, though.
I support the free market but recognize the need for some regulation in places where the free market fails, like here when it comes to natural monopolies.
Municipalities acting in their own interests, the part of government that is closest to the people, is now big government? Big government is the fed telling local communities what they can and cannot do.
Yes. Good idea. Private security , just like CEO's higher, and Private roads, pay to use.
CThe last thing I'd want is to get Internet access through the government. If you think service via private companies is bad, just wait until you try getting service via the government!
Power: Check.
Water: Check.
Gas: Check.
I fail to see how broadband would be any different. (And how it could possibly be worse than Comcast.. Three rate hikes this year alone, plus that "data threshold" bullshit which is really another $30/mo rate hike by another name)
By far the shittiest broadband ISPs I've encounteredwere the private ones set up by a HO or apartment complex. Talk about no incentive to improve.
Look, the problem here isn't that the local governments want to set up broadband. It's that ihey are prevented by law from doing so, even when no private organizations are willing.
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
I would not. What evidence do you have that they would put restrictions on "free speech"? Internet access should be part of taxpayer paid services just like roads. If the politicians try to regulate free speech, throw them out.
Basic utilities (power, water, sewage, gas) are all muni here.
They seem to work pretty well.
Better that other areas where they are private.
If there were real ISP competition I might agree with you.
There isn't.
If we allow the government to socialize internet access, we'll wind up with a system that is constantly in need of repair, upgrades, and endless red tape to get even the slightest thing done,
[citation needed]
I come from a part of the country where the electrical utilities are publicly owned and operated, meaning that the entity is beholden to the voters/ratepayers. I now live in a part of the country where the electrical utilities are operated by for-profit companies, which are beholden first and foremost to their shareholders. The difference is like night and day. While I won't argue that there is not inefficiency in "the government", making a blanket statement that it is always so is patently absurd.
Scratch one more candidate off my 2016 list.
This Republican sees nothing wrong with local government getting into the broadband business so long as it does not set up a monopoly. After all there is pressure from voters to "have the city do it" only when there is no, or one ready bad, private alternative. Broadband is a utility, and city involvement in it is developing along the same lines as city involvement in water and power systems.
Local voters are part of the market too.
When we outlaw government, only outlaws will govern.
I think you are over looking the potential for municipal broadband to choke change and growth.
It is also able to drive change and growth. The notion that all government's do is stifle progress is demonstrably nonsense.
Say what you will about Comcast and friends but we have things like 100Mbps down 75Mpbs up links at affordable prices.
In some places you do. In others not so much. And you might consider picking an example of a company that is somewhat more beloved than Comcast. They are among the least liked companies in America for well deserved reasons. Monopolies don't do shit to improve service unless there is some form of competition. I guarantee that if AT&T or Verizon isn't there to compete that Comcast wouldn't improve their service very fast.
Consider the article about Flit Michigan's water system the other day. The issue was really not the water source but the infrastructure. How many places have over crowed schools, etc?
Do you have any concept of how hard it is to get taxpayers to fund upgrades to a water system even in a city without financial problems? Taxpayers routinely vote down school levies. This isn't government failing, it is the citizens saying they don't want to pay for any of this.
I am sure public broadband systems could deliver today's technology to consumers more cheaply and better serve under served areas, but the cost would likely be that the level of service rarely improves.
As long as the municipal system doesn't prohibit via laws private enterprise from competing, what is the problem? If the municipal system doesn't improve then private enterprise can fill in the gap. But if the citizens of a town collectively want to run their own broadband that should be their right to do so. If they end up paying more in the long run then that is their problem isn't it? Towns that consider municipal broadband probably aren't being well served now by the private companies so why should they expect that to change in the future?
If you allow municipal broad band it will choke out terrestrial ISPs. The broad band market is broken because there is to little competition, plan to effectively make it so the government is the only game in town isn't a solution to that.
Your argument makes no sense. Trading a public monopoly for a private one doesn't improve anything and it means the citizens have even less say in what they want. There is no reason to prohibit municipal broadband provided private companies are still legally allowed to build their own networks too.
Talk to the citizens of New Jersey that recent got screwed by Verizon who took Billions of tax payer dollars to wire the state and reneged on the deal. So again FUCK YOU RUBIO.
Banning municipal governments from providing broadband services that its citizens vote for is "small government"? In what alternate universe?
What I want to know is where is companies like Walmart, Amazon and others alike when it comes to things like this? If AT&T is funding Rubio's campaign, you would think that sites that provide online sales would provide "anti-funding" to candidates who would then voice their "paid for" opinions on having the bans overturned and stopped? The more people you can get online, the more likely you are to make sales. Just a thought...
That's right. A corrupt state usually means a corrupt majority. Corruption can't win without their votes.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Socialize? I guess we should get rid of roads, police, military then... because by your definition, anything that the public requests of their government, and then pays for... is "socialist".
We need to be stopping the relentless growth of big corporations and monopolies, not giving them more power & money to control politics.
That's the whole point. Publicly funded "roads, police, military" are socialist and, even so, are perceived by many upstanding Americans to be good things.
In other words, using "socialism" and "socialist" as labels to demonize something or someone is mere rhetoric. A socialist approach to a problem should be evaluated on its merits against and in combination with other approaches.
The use of the word "socialism" as a label often stops thoughtful deliberation, and those who use such labels usually have something to lose if their listeners really think about the issues at hand. Better to stop further thinking by riling their emotions.
blog
Canada also.
IMHO, the ideal model of this is the government bonding the municipal network construction (fiber, data center, etc) but giving contracting out management of the L1/2 infrastructure to someone who knows how to run a network like this.
Actual services delivered over this infrastructure would be provided by other third parties who buy access to the network, such as ISPs, video providers, telecom, and then resell their services to subscribers. I'd probably mandate that a service provider on the network would be barred from being eligible for managing the network, too, to avoid any conflict of interest.
This to me seems like biggest win/win for everyone. The actual management is handled by someone who has the skills/people to do it, as an "open network" consumers would have a choice of providers and services (ie, geek ISPs with barebones support for people who know what they're doing, grandma ISPs with extras like webmail and support for those who don't).
The school district could be its own ISP, using the municipal network like a private WAN. Businesses with enough points of presence could also use it the same way if the costs made sense to buy in at the central office. I even knew a company that set themselves up as an ISP option with Qwest DSL -- employees who wanted remote access could get DSL and choose their company as the ISP -- instant VPN.
The government wouldn't be in the IP dialtone business at all. If it *wanted* to, it could be just another ISP choice and it wouldn't surprise me if some places decided they wanted to provide a subsidized ISP offering for public housing or something, but at least it has the narrowest and most transparent cost, since the cost of that service wouldn't be buried with the rest of the system.
This is pretty much how the model for municipal roadways works -- the government pays for them, often hiring contractors to maintain or expand them, but service delivery on the roads is handled by various companies depending on the services delivered -- taxis, Uber, pizza delivery, UPS packages, etc.
Really what you'd end up doing is tasking the government for its biggest benefits -- low cost financing through bonding and access to rights of way. The rest would be essentially private, albeit operated at a profit level sufficient to keep up the network but not rent-seek.
I lived in a town with municipal internet. It was wonderful. My up/down speeds were synchronous, I didn't have to buy my own modem (or lease one for 10 bucks a month), and here comes the kicker: If I had a problem and had to call them, I talked to an actual person. No machine, no waiting on hold, just a person picked up on the other end of the line. A person who was even competent enough to perform basic tasks, like renewing my IP address.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Thanks be to the local governments.
Allowing the townhalls to run Internet-service will not improve things — it will kill off, what little competition there is.
Ah, and your online behavior will be subject to the town's laws — written by the same folks, who set up speed-limits and school lunches.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Nobody would be stopping you from hiring a privately-owned commercial ISP, if you prefer.
www.wavefront-av.com
I dunno I was an admin for a college that was on property of county land that shared with a municipal airport. Only option I had was DSL or to tie into their fiber. Just to get the fiber ran from one side of the street to the other was 10k, and 10mbit was 1-2k a month I cant remember exact cost. This was 2-3 years ago. After about a year of working red tape I was able to get permission for ATT to run their fiber from the service road quarter mile away and signed up for a 2 year agreement for 100mbit for same cost and at&t ate the running of the fiber lines. To me the 10mbit was still worth while but the added savings from using at&t sealed the deal. Owner was too cheap to put in t1's, so we went from 6 dsl lines supporting about ~200 students and 50 employees to 100mbit.
I'm all for whatever gets the best competition, and with all the dark fiber and gov subsidies given out I think that comcast and at&t etc should be overlooked when providing for future infrastructure upgrades and they should make it a priority to increase competition.
The free market didnt fail 'here'. It was monopolized by $$$ so that it stayed that way.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
In August, I drove from Chicago to New Haven, CT. The roads are beautiful. I'd like to see how Bain Capital would build an interstate highway system. Oh, and then there's this little government project: http://www.zastavki.com/pictur...
Call me when a private corporation can get a human into orbit without killing him.
You are an idiot.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If we allow the government to socialize internet access, we'll wind up with a system that is constantly in need of repair, upgrades, and endless red tape to get even the slightest thing done, along with constant pressure to charge rich people more and give access away for free to poor people in the name of 'fairness...' We need to be stopping the relentless growth of big government, not find more things for them to get their paws into.
New generation of Slashdot poster doesn't know what the internet actually is or what it represents. Never thought I'd see it here.
sine puella vita suget
"Whatever government does, is done poorly."
That is your fundamental assumption and worldview, but not actual fact. The government does many things better than the free markets. Pretty much in every area where the objective isnt to abuse and wring money out of people.
There is a reason why Telcos have a 30% net profit... it is because the free market doesnt work when there are extreme startup costs.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Evacuating the school population of los angeles because of an email
Ah, yes. Forgot about that. Sad there's been so many examples within mere days we can't even keep track of them all.
And it's a rhetoric that is less and less effective as time goes on.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/125...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Poe's Law
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
we'll wind up with a system that is constantly in need of repair, upgrades, and endless red tape to get even the slightest thing done
We have that, even without government involvement...
The private sector only works when there's competition, and a lack of competition is precisely why government run systems usually don't work well either.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Dude, you need to get out of Bumfuckville. I suggest you take some time travelling to other countries. You know, other nations, outside the US? Maybe you'd realise just how inbred and stupid you look then.
And most of these large telcos were started with government support... The infrastructure they now make huge profits off was paid for by the tax payers originally.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Considering, it is the local governments, who are impeding Internet-service provision competition to begin with, your stance is not just foolish, it even seems malign.
Wow, it's not the ISPs trying to buy out the local governments and having them put in higher costs, it's just the local governments, eh?
Fat fucking chance anyone actually believes you.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Oh, god, for a second I read that as you saying 'Comcast is great'. Almost did a spit take...
When someone says, "Any fool can see
So you've never been to Chattanooga then.
You would do well to read http://www.governmentisgood.co...
It would correct a significant portion of your ignorance.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
That just sounds horrible. /s
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Is this how you regard everyone you disagree with? They should be voted out of office, not drawn and quartered or shot on sight. What the fuck is wrong with you.
Or just maybe people didn't want 17 different companies constantly digging up their neighborhoods as they installed and maintained their respective cable networks.
A corrupt state usually means a corrupt majority.
You aren't very old, are you?
Or at least have very large blinders on.
Political idealism aside, I actually can't think of any "obvious benefits". I mean, there aren't even any obvious benefits to government healthcare: it takes a good bit of analysis to figure out if state healthcare is more or less expensive, and then you have to figure out if it's *affordable* or if it inflicts crippling poverty on more individuals than it protects; that's not even considering the various *forms* of state healthcare (single-payer; state hospitals; hybrid systems like Canada; laws mandating how employers, insurers, and providers will operate...).
People *need* healthcare. They get sick. They don't *need* Internet access; they may need transportation--there aren't enough McDonalds peppering your neighborhood for everyone in the ghetto to walk to their shitty, underpaid job. Even then, you're dealing with class status: most jobs above the minimum provide this stuff, or provide enough money to just buy it outright; it's mainly the unemployed who need public service.
Even my Citizen's Dividend doesn't have *obvious* benefits. It took a lot of market analysis just to show it would end homelessness and hunger--retail prices compared to profitability, risk considerations, and even some architecture to plan out miniature apartments that are livable even if way smaller than the luxury 1 bedroom I lived in--and all kinds of secondary effects require advanced economic theory to explain. Remember, people think if we raise minimum wage we'll somehow increase employment by giving consumers more money to spend; they haven't worked out that an increase in the cost of labor raises the minimum cost of products, thus counteracting *every* economic pressure that draws prices down. They haven't even worked out that higher labor costs concentrate wealth into fewer hands.
We actually passed a law giving businesses and rich people tax breaks to stimulate growth and create employment.
The problem, of course, is that the products are being sold to consumers. Consumers have a certain amount of money, and they're spending what they're willing to spend. You can't sell more by making more; if you could, you'd hire more consumers. Profitability scales, and unprofitable expansion doesn't happen just because you have money to spend. You need to make products cheaper so you can sell more of them, which means making labor cheaper... for example, by reducing taxes on the working class so as to allow employers to pay them less while leaving them with the same amount of money flowing into their bank account, thus reducing the cost of products, allowing prices to fall, giving consumers additional buying power which then allows us to hire new laborers to make new products to sell to these consumers, creating more jobs.
These aren't obvious things. Handing out healthcare isn't obviously helpful. There are no obvious benefits to public broadband; all you can say about it is everyone pays a tax, and some broadband system exists for everyone. Whether it's cheaper or better-maintained depends on the economic system; and its impact on the economy itself is highly questionable. If you're going to pitch something like that, you have to answer those questions instead of just declaring that they've been answered.
Don't even start with the backwards ideals people have about workforce development--notably calling it "education" instead of "workforce development", and then demanding to be sold into serfdom. Again: impact not obvious.
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We can fire our local government.
Ever tried firing Comcast? Did it make them change their ways? Did they even notice if you fired them?
Why do you always focus on the cost of the people who actually do the labor in the business, instead of the real dead weight like middle and upper management and their hugely inflated salaries?
And the low-profit sections of that infrastructure *STILL WOULDN'T EXIST* if the government hadn't paid for it, and would have long-since been left to rot into complete uselessness if they weren't required to maintain it.
The argument that municipal broadband stifles competition in the private sector would be more convincing if it came with examples where municipal broadband was competing against the sector, instead of examples where the private sector refused to engage the market at all.
If there really were many such things, you would've listed a few. You didn't. Therefore, you lied.
Bullshit. Free market is the only thing, that works. Even in the not-so-free market we currently have in this country. Witness Google-fiber as just one example.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Of course, the incumbent ISPs are involved in the corruption! But that does not change the fact, that the government is the problem, not the solution.
Once the government starts running its own ISP, the competition will vanish completely.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
In my experience local, state and federal governments have a hard time providing essential services that they *should* provide. It's rare when that is done effectively and efficiently. Why do we want to grow our governments to start providing nonessential services?
Here's the other problem: it really, truly is unfair competition when the taxpayers will be on the hook for the capital investment of a municipally operated ISP. Private companies do not have that luxury of having someone else pay for the construction of a new network and then only collecting monthly fees for ongoing operation.
No, I do not work for any ISP nor do I have any financial interest in them.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
And yet, when the people want to band together and do something, you want to remove that freedom?
Except not everyone wants to band together, and when the government does something, it is forced on everyone. Sadly, you and others who turn to government for their every need have no idea what freedom is. What you want is to force your will on everyone. That's not freedom, that's tyranny!
Contrast this with a business or charity formed to do something. Only those who choose to own or work for the business or donate to the charity are involved with doing something, not the whole population. If someone would choose not to support a certain venture, they simply don't commit resources nor involve themselves. You can't do that with government -- it's all or nothing.
Whether that's true or not, it is not relevant. A child may be born with government support (such as when his mother is poor) — this does not mean, he owes anything to the taxpayers or is a slave of the state.
Citations? Please, give one or two examples of such companies listing the total cost of their infrastructure and the portion of it, that was paid by the taxpayers.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This attitude is why I hate Republicans. Even Democrats are better and that's from pretty much anywhere you stand on the left/right spectrum. You have to be pretty anti-American and politically apathetic to be worse than Democrats, but Republicans manage to do it. Any conservative caught being in that party instead of a real party, should be forced at gunpoint to wear a pink armba-- oh wait, I almost went Republican there for a moment. Ok, I get it: people get stupid when they get angry.
The FCC is not promoting government-owned networks. The FCC wants to allow government networks. The difference between these two things is like night and day and anyone who confuses advocacy with tolerance is a fucking moron. You're why we can't have freedom, why America continues to slide into authoritarianism.
If someone had a political idealogy where state agendas should be able to override both federal and municipal agendas (and this isn't too hard to understand at all; it's arguably the most constitutional, even if not-so-democratic since it tyrannizes municipalities), there's an easy way to argue against municipal broadband. So, so easy.
Just say the laws banning municipal broadband are evil. Say they're evil and you are horrified by them, but also say that you support and defend them on the principle that state authority is more important than good/evil decisions. Say it's preferable to deny people who live in cities the power to govern themselves. Say they need to, must, yield to state governments.
That's all you have to do; your integrity would be unassailable. It would be distasteful and make people question their position: the left would say it should be a federal decision and the right would say it should be a municipal decision, but you would have the ground in between, with the constitution values (if not the ever-murky and ever-reinterpreted law) possibly on your side.
But Rubio isn't doing that. He isn't framing this as states' rights being more important than democracy (municipal control) or unity/consistency (federal control). No, he's just saying he doesn't want cities to have that power, because they'll compete with the highway compan-- I mean the fire depa-- shit, I mean the cops. No wait, were we talking about the networks that control the traffic signals and the subways. The airports? Garbage disposal? Sewage? Oh, it was the water supply!! No. Hmm. Shit, now I remember! We were talking about the cable and phone monopolies.
Right, so anyway: he's saying he doesn't like the city government's doing that. He could say, "oh well, that's democracy, and those people are going to regret it some day and then other city's citizens will learn from their mistake," but instead, he wants to point guns at city-folk's faces. And if a small state (instead of a municipality) were to establish government broadband, he would be against that too. So this isn't really about whose-power-is-this-should-be at all.
Ergo: fuck you, Rubio.
I'd like to see how Bain Capital would build an interstate highway system.
You mean kind of like how the private sector built the Internet? It would happen more often if government would get out of the way.
(Before you drag out the tired, old, discredited idea that the government built the Internet, while the DoD and the private sector did the initial research and development of the early protocols of what would become the Internet, it is the private sector that created the Internet we know today.)
Enjoy your shitty internet access, then. Every time you spout this nonsense argument you guarantee the US's internet access will remain cripplingly bad for the vast majority of people for a little bit longer.
And... The U.S. has probably the worst human rail transit system in the developed world. The best are all backed by the governments.
In August, I drove from Chicago to New Haven, CT. The roads are beautiful.
What parallel universe's I-95 did you drive on? The whole area around the Q Bridge is a disaster. It will be better once they finally finish it. Stamford and Bridgeport are also quite horrible.
Or if you took, I-84, how can I get to the alternate reality where Danbury isn't a nightmare? And which bridges in Pennsylvania suddenly weren't in permanent and desperately needed overhaul?
The solution is competition, not municipal broadband. Sure, municipal happens to be the only competition in some cases (and that's why is seems good). But it wouldn't be necessary if there was competition to begin with.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Why would they each have to dig the streets up? Isn't the telephone infrastructure there already? In the UK, BT owns the copper in the ground and everybody competing in the pool coughs up a fair rental for using that copper, including us customers. On copper alone and with a distance of around 3 miles from the exchange we managed an easy 6+/2+ Mbit. Recently we started seeing fiber to cabinet which lowered costs in general so now I get phone, TV & 50+/14+ Mbit for about £45 a month (including calls but still paying BT about £18 monthly line rental for the "last mile" of copper). I've recently read that my ISP is starting trials of fiber to home in select locations and will likely see speeds of 900Mbit or more (seems to be cheaper too). BT can either like it or lump it as that looks like it cuts out the line rental portion completely. At that point they might as well start pulling out the copper and recycling it.
Then again, although some of our politicians are fairly corruptible it seems that none are overtly in a corporate hip pocket as many in the US appear to be, so we get better competition and less monopolisation. Although services vary quite a bit, in general, things are pretty damn good and nobody is digging up the neighbourhood.
Bullshit. There are a whole raft of studies which show that state-provided healthcare offers similar outcomes at a greatly reduced price. Strangely enough, when you remove money-sucking middlemen from the equation, healthcare becomes a lot cheaper. The single buyer gets a much better deal on medication and supplies, etc. which lowers the price for everyone. Hospitals aren't looking at their bottom lines to gouge patients, etc. If you really think there is any doubt in this, you really need to read more. The US spends a greater proportion of its GDP on its non-public healthcare than other countries with public healthcare. You'd save money, simplify everything, and whenever you went to the hospital, there would be no paperwork or money changing hands. Witchcraft!
So, you'd rather have the real monopoly of the townhall running Internet-services, than the quasi monopolies?
Let me introduce you to Chattanooga Gig.
You might want to check them out before you say something that might embarrass yourself.
Remember, people think if we raise minimum wage we'll somehow increase employment by giving consumers more money to spend; they haven't worked out that an increase in the cost of labor raises the minimum cost of products, thus counteracting *every* economic pressure that draws prices down. They haven't even worked out that higher labor costs concentrate wealth into fewer hands.
Actually, they have worked it out, and the math doesn't support your conclusion. (Interestingly enough, we have multiple historical data points which completely disagree with your conclusion, including the *implementation* of minimum wage.)
Hint: Labor costs are one of the *smaller* costs associated with most goods people buy. Bumping the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 will result in a 4-15% increase in cost of goods where the labor is done solely by people being paid minimum wage (less, or even not at all where the labor is done by higher-paid workers).
Let's do some basic math:
Before taxes: $7.25 or $15
After taxes (40%): $4.35 or $9
Let's assume a 50% gross profit margin (that's high for industries where minimum wage is a factor at all).
That would mean that the high-end 15% cost increase would increase prices by 22.5%.
That reduces that $9 (after tax) wage to effectively the same as $6.975 against the old wage, for a net increase of slightly over 60% for minimum wage workers. That's 60% more money for the people who actually spend *all* of their money on necessities (and often have to choose *which* necessity they will go without for a given week), to pump back into the economy. That's a *huge* increase in demand for goods and services. What happens to a employment rates when demand for goods and services increases?
The cost to you is *at most*, $0.15 on the dollar. In reality, minimum-wage industries are actually projecting cost increases significantly closer to the low-end of the spectrum (McDonalds, for example, is projecting a 4.3% cost increase in Seattle when the minimum wage increase goes into full effect.) In the mean-time, you'll be facing *increasing* tax bases, and *reduced* need for government services such as food stamps, because *you* won't be tasked with ensuring that Walmart's employees don't starve. The *actual* net cost to you is negative.
In the mean time, while you argue so hard that we have to keep working people in poverty by allowing companies to pay them starvation wages (and even *decrease* that!), you're apparently blind to materials-based cost increases that outpace the worst-case labor-based increases by a factor of 2-3.
We actually passed a law giving businesses and rich people tax breaks to stimulate growth and create employment.
Yes, we've passed a number of those laws. They don't actually work. They create cost-savings for corporations, but don't create any demand for the goods and services those corporations exist to provide. Without increased demand, there is no need for an increase in jobs (as you describe below).
The problem, of course, is that the products are being sold to consumers. Consumers have a certain amount of money, and they're spending what they're willing to spend. You can't sell more by making more; if you could, you'd hire more consumers. Profitability scales, and unprofitable expansion doesn't happen just because you have money to spend. You need to make products cheaper so you can sell more of them, which means making labor cheaper... for example, by reducing taxes on the working class so as to allow employers to pay them less while leaving them with the same amount of money flowing into their bank account, thus reducing the cost of products, allowing prices to fall, giving consumers additional buying power which then allows us to hire new laborers to make new products to sell to these consumers, creating more jobs.
Take a look at the history of the minimum wage. The rhetoric against it's creation, and against ever
Damn man, who says these municipal telco's will get a monopoly?
And don't you have laws guaranteeing net neutrality?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
So the one effective means available of providing desperately needed competition (a fact you acknowledge) should be prohibited because it seems good? Wow, what a devastating critique!
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Except that the 'free market' was never allowed to exist in this sector. It could be argued that establishing a muni broadband service would be the 'free market' expressing itself - an actual competitor to the entrenched government-granted telco monopolies of the 1970s.
But those monopolies are more than willing to spend money preventing it from happening through legal measures and campaign contributions, rather than spending to eliminate the need by improving their networks, lowering costs, or both.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
> That's the whole point. Publicly funded "roads, police, military" are socialist
You may want to meditate on the difference between hiring people to provide a service, and owning capital means of production.
What crap are you babbling? Megacorps are destroying this company, yet you blame government? Drink some more koolaid you mindless moron.
The internet used to be a non-essential service. That time has long gone. Now the network is the new interstate, and we are behind the rest of the world because we insist that the free market will do a better job of providing universal internet infrastructure. This is demonstrably not true, the free market will provide excessive capacity where there is profit to be made, but no capacity where there is no profit to be made. This uneven coverage actually hurts the country. Just as uneven electrification, interstate system, or health coverage hurt the country.
We should create a government run high performance back bone that runs to every city in the US and town. Corporations could still compete on top of this system paying a rent for the maintenance and upgrades to the system similar to the rents they pay for air spectrum. Corporations would then not have to double build infrastructure so the overall cost would be lower. The reason that companies don't want this is that one of the ways that they keep their monopoly is that it is expensive to build network capability, so they can exclude competition from smaller companies that cannot afford to build infrastructure.
That should say "What crap are you babbling? Megacorps are destroying this COUNTRY, yet you blame government? Drink some more koolaid you mindless moron."
At&t has about a 10 percent operating income of revenue. Considering how big my AT&T bill is, I was expecting it to be higher. I guess it is genuinely expensive to provide residential internet.
Oh so you do believe municipal ISP's are better.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
In the US, the telephone networks were forced open to be like what you describe under the FCC's "common carrier" rules. A particular company owns the wire, but other companies can lease circuits on them, allowing subscribers to get services from whomever they please.
Cable Television networks are not included in that. They are still very much privately owned by the descendant companies of whoever put that copper in the ground, and fight vigorously to defend that.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Your point is great (US isn't the only way of doing things, perspective from seeing the rest of the world can be quite eye opening) but you totally destroyed that and your credibility with the insults.
The majority are not usually corrupt, in most cases they are either uninformed, apathetic, or sufficiently informed to realise that the only realistic alternative is even worse.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Oh my god, what are you, some kind of corporate astro-turfer?
Megacorps are the problem, government is the last defense of the people against the megacorps turning everything into virtual slaves.
Once the government starts running its own ISP, the competition will vanish completely.
And in MANY places, once the government starts running its own ISP, people will have access to broadband for the first time because the 'free market' didn't give a shit.
And that is exactly what local government is for.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Tax the citizens to subsidize(give money to) the monopoly to provide broadband to citizens.
OR have the local government provide broadband to citizens directly for less than the corporation charges?
No brainer, if you aren't on the take from the monopoly.
uninformed, apathetic, or sufficiently informed to realise that the only realistic alternative is even worse.
All by personal choice...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
As a ranking independent libertarian...
This is entirely new to me. Libertarians have ranks? "Independent" ones at that! What is your rank? How did you acquire it? What are the other ranks? Inquiring minds want to know.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
No shit, sick pro-corporate brainwashed astro-turf drivel. Makes me sad, these are the kind of people selling out this country to the lowest bidder.
Very true, so glad there are other who think the same. Getting disheartened seeing the brainwashed spouting their free market bullshit.
Except weren't ISPs just declared "common carrier" a few months ago? Happy days!
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You, the OP and a whole bunch of USians mix up Social and Socialist, the former is working together for a common interest, the latter is a political view.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Article says
> Presidential candidate Marco Rubio recently "fired off a letter (PDF) to the Federal Communications Commission asking the agency to *allow states* to block municipal broadband services.
This is nothing about Rubio being anti-broadband. He's only supporting state governments having a say in what economy they want. To people not living in the U.S., this is what makes America different.
Yes, he's being funded by a large corporation, but what candidate isn't?
AT&T is the biggest violator here, IMNSHO. I know of one entire build out where they literally have FTTH where you can't get more than 1Mbps up, at any price.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Wouldn't that make more sense? Basically one company is responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure as well as pitching upgrades to the municipality. Anyone that wants to offer service is welcome to come in and do so. There's an access fee that's a part of your bill (or just in the service) and that's it. Are there any technical problems that prevent it or it is just all political bs?
I think it's time to turn the old right-wing mantra on it's head. From now on it's "Corporations aren't the solution, they are the problem!"
And I think that's far more true.
So start serving those people internet, or shut the fuck up and let them have municipal broadband.
If comcast etc. just served those locations this wouldn't even be a problem.
I can say that a Volkswagon Rabbit isn't very good at hauling a cubic meter of yard mulch, and it makes just as much sense as what you said. As it turns out, purpose matters. The US rail network wasn't built primarily for transporting humans - that was an afterthought. It was built for transporting cargo. And there are lots of nations, including in Europe, who wish they had such an industrial rail network.
Haven't you ever wondered why every train station in every major US city, excepting a few, is in an industrialized shithole?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
And which bridges in Pennsylvania suddenly weren't in permanent and desperately needed overhaul?
The ones on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Oh, wait...
(Yes, I know that the Pennsylvania Turnpike is still a government entity in the form of a public - private partnership, but collecting usage fees seems to be the winner for road construction these days, with the Federal Highway fund being raided constantly to pay for other things, and a non-indexed fuel tax)
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Citations? Please, give one or two examples of such companies listing the total cost of their infrastructure and the portion of it, that was paid by the taxpayers.
You ask for a citation as to how the taxpayers put the ILECs in business? Seriously? How can you get into this discussion without having even the fundamentals correct?
As a start, you do understand that the entire infrastructure is built on rights of ways and every single one of the central offices, the ones that have the prime real estate, are also a gift to the teclos, right? Then let's look at the billions collected from the telephone customers to provide universal service not to mention the billions in tax break that Pennsylvania handed out with the promise they would get broadband and never happened.
As best I can tell, you have no idea what actually brought about our telephone network or what good a regulated monopoly can be when the free market ideologues get out of the way.
We need to be stopping the relentless growth of big corporations and monopolies, not giving them more power & money to control politics.
This is the core problem. Corporations should be barred from buying anything after reaching 10% market share in any market they are active in. This means that you will not have M&A consolidations that result in greater than 10% of a market share, which means after 10%, the companies have to gain market share by competition. It also means that a company that owns more than 10% of a market cannot be sold. Those restrictions would go far in alleviating a bunch of Wall Street fleecing of the public. As for those that state "Oh noes, but foreign companies will dominate", the federal government has the ability and obligation to levy taxes appropriately at the borders and ports of entry. Inspect every single container. "It costs too much" is not an argument but an appeal - the answer is that the cost to import is increased by whatever costs to inspect add to them. I haven't seen a single candidate address this aspect of "securing our borders".
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Disclaimer: I work for a telco/ISP
There are limited options for building out the infrastructure required for broadband access. It boils down to wired access or wireless access.
Wired access requires burying copper or fiber lines, or planting poles and running aerials of the same. This requires either that providers own or lease the land across which those lines traverse, or that they own or lease some easement on all that land. In the United States, such an easement is often owned by the public and regulated by the government. Then it gets shared among all utilities under the regulation of the government.
Wireless access requires use of wireless spectrum, which is a fairly limited resource. In the United States, wireless spectrum is deemed to be public property and is regulated by the government.
Many Americans believe that capitalism and the private sector are the best way to provide goods to the public. The general thinking is that competition leads to the best quality/dollar, and also encourages development of products to meet all of the varying demands.
If you would like to have, say, four different wired providers and four different wireless providers compete in the same neighborhood, each wired provider would have to build out copper/fiber infrastructure to every premise in the neighborhood. If they somehow managed to split the customer base evenly, that would mean that each provider would have to install four times as much infrastucture as they actually use. Any new contender would have to come dig up the neighborhood to install more redundant infrastructure, creating even more inefficiency.
Accommodating 10 or 20 competing providers becomes impractical as the easements are not large enough to contain all that infrastructure. This is true for both wired and wireless infrastructure. In the case of wired access, the government could force private property owners to surrender larger easements. Then I suppose they could layer infrastructure lower and lower in the ground or higher and higher into the air. In the case of wireless access, the amount of available spectrum is much more constrained.
So government regulators must choose which providers are allowed to benefit from public easements. Such constrained competition dramatically alters the benefits of capitalism. In general, the United States has opted to suspend capitalism in many similar scenarios. For instance, public transportation is rerely ever a private enterprise in the United States. What quiet residential neighborhood wants every thoroughfare to have 6 competing toll roads servicing every house? Do you have five different water providers piping water to your house? Four sewer providers?
If the public--that is the people themselves--own the easements and right-of-ways anyway, why not just have them own the pipe as they do for sewer or water or roads? Why not avoid building out five or ten times the necessary capacity?
What's the purpose of this snark? You're being an asshole just for the sake of being an asshole, and it's not even clever.
Not exact figures, but here's $200B (in 2007) that taxpayers paid to the telcos and never got shit from. It should be known that the excise tax from the Telecommunications Act of 1996 continued for quite some time after 2007, if it still doesn't today.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
the corporation" :-)
As corporations acquire more rights of people like unrestricted speech, this makes sense
And of course we need Imperial Washington telling every state how to act. Laws should be made by the President or the appropriate executive branch bureaucracy; approved by congress and governors of the 50 jurisdictions should enact the Laws / Regulations made by the Executive Branch.
/sarc
Maybe, just maybe, there are other issues here. (Such as the FCC "preempting state law")
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Private sector stinks at infrastructure.
Supply and Demand is the economies ID based response. When we have an infrastructure need then we have a massive demand, that may exceed supply thus driving costs to a prohibitive level for population who may need it the most.
I see Internet access as an important infrastructure for modern life. Thus should be expanded for all to use it, however Private Sector will create a high cost as to maximize profit. Municipal access would be at cost thus undercutting the ideal price point.
Economically speaking this will create a shortage for Internet usage, however just as long a governments offer the correct basic/free package this should be incentives for those who have more to upgrade to better more luxury access which would be priced higher.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What else would you expect from the Corporate Party?
While it's very true that the Republican party in its current incarnation is absolutely a corporate party it implies that other parties are not. The last 8 years could be dubbed the Goldman Sachs presidency as described here: http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITI... or http://www.nationalreview.com/...
Not convinced yet? How about Obama pushing TPP as hard as he can? That's as corporate as it gets. Hillary is bought and paid for which is why the media is working its level best to feed us only smiling pics of her. Only Bernie, an independent who seeks the Democratic party nomination, could be described as anti corporate.
The internet used to be a non-essential service. That time has long gone. Now the network is the new interstate, and we are behind the rest of the world because we insist that the free market will do a better job of providing universal internet infrastructure. This is demonstrably not true, the free market will provide excessive capacity where there is profit to be made, but no capacity where there is no profit to be made. This uneven coverage actually hurts the country. Just as uneven electrification, interstate system, or health coverage hurt the country.
I disagree. It's not essential. There are still communities in the US without telephone service. Why didn't the government intervene there? Because telephone service isn't essential either. I think you're not understanding the definition of the word essential. It means absolutely necessary.
We should create a government run high performance back bone that runs to every city in the US and town. Corporations could still compete on top of this system paying a rent for the maintenance and upgrades to the system similar to the rents they pay for air spectrum. Corporations would then not have to double build infrastructure so the overall cost would be lower. The reason that companies don't want this is that one of the ways that they keep their monopoly is that it is expensive to build network capability, so they can exclude competition from smaller companies that cannot afford to build infrastructure.
The government does not need to provide more nonessential services. Like I said in the OP, our governments can't even provide essential services properly. We don't need them overextending their incompetence to nonessential services too.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
You're talking about maybe 6 miles out of a 900 mile trip. Overall, the entire route was an absolute pleasure.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is where you logical breaks the hell down. Competition would only vanish if they weren't better than the local government option. So either government can do stuff well or competition will remain fierce because doing it more efficiently results in better service at a cheaper price since the wire is already in the ground.
This idea that government can't do anything well comes from the neo-conservative movement where putting bad people in charge of FEMA results in Katrina. Brownie was completely unqualified to run FEMA. So when you have Republicans sabotaging the process then pointing at it and saying see! Government can't do anything. It's very disingenuous and has been happening in almost every facet of our government since Clinton actually balanced the budget. Bush took over and did it to a whole new level and it has continued under Obama due to extreme and unprofessional conduct on the opposing party.
It is extremely sad when you look at creation of the interstate highway system, the construction of the hoover dam and many other large projects the government did extremely well with. Then look at the lack of investment, and the resulting decline in what used to be world class infrastructure. My grand father was put to work as part of the CCC which was a government program which lead to him being part of the construction of the Hoover Dam. The skills he learned through the process lead to him having a career in the private sector and doing quite well for having a 6th grade education.
The exact same thing happened with our public education system. Neo-cons fought tooth and nail for Charter schools to get their snowflakes away from the bad kids. This lead to a sprawling school system which could no longer keep up. Adding additional mandates and no more funding to public schools made the problem even worse. It used to be almost everyone piled into the public school, the bad kids were influenced by the good kids and things had a way of evening out. Now public schools are only declining further and we refuse to make teaching a full time profession for people. There are extremely few teachers who only teach until well into their career. After about 10 years of teaching you can probably quit your second job. Not all districts pay that badly of course. Where I grew up in Vermont there was local property tax to help pick up the funding shortfalls and this resulted in teachers being paid better which makes them care about their jobs more. At the time we had some of the best public schools in the country as a result of actually caring about education.
Government should not try to do everything but there are absolutely things that are much better done through government than through the "free" market which can never actually exist since all free markets will lead to monopolies eventually.
Pretty much in every area where the objective isnt to abuse and wring money out of people.
Ever work with a Federal agency with lots of money and full of people engaged in empire building? It's a shame you don't see that bill. Oh wait, you do!
The government does many things better than the free markets.
Such as dropping bombs on women and children, oppressing racial minorities, excluding competition from the market, bailing out losers...
Pretty much in every area where the objective isnt to abuse and wring money out of people.
You must live in a world without taxes and monetary inflation.
is because the free market doesnt work when there are extreme startup costs.
What's your evidence for this? There is a growing number of private local ISP startups bringing broadband to underserved areas. There's Google, choosing to get into the ISP business, bringing gbps broadband to an increasing number of cities. There are companies that have IPOs that bring in billions in capitalization. Startup costs are not anywhere close to being an insurmountable obstacle.
As I have stated here before (like in October 2014) all that is required to fix the entire ISP mess in the U.S. is one single, simple federal which bars municipalities from exclusive franchising.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I have not seen a single municipality project which excluded competition from other providers. Your logic is way off base. There is no forcing everyone in the town to use the same Internet, the is merely an option available. Almost all projects were also self funded meaning no new taxes. This rapid support for ATT or Comcast or the likes makes me wonder if you have Stockholm syndrome?
What socialist oppression, first municipal broadband, next the gulag! /s
build an interstate highway system.
Most highway projects are paid for with government money yet actually built by private corporations, not actually built "by the government". Government versus private isn't about execution it is about where the money comes from.
To the degree that they are monopolies, they are monopolies created by the government.
Municipal broadband isn't about "the people wanting to band together and do something", it is about some people forcing others to pay for something they don't want.
And it is government that currently removes the freedom of people banding together and providing broadband access commercially, by limiting access.
To bad more of your kind doesn't agree with you. Here in Seattle, the rulers of our city are diehard CONservatives that hate the Internet. They won't allow decent infrastructure. Those closet Republicans created something they call the Director's Rules in order to prevent us from getting Internet access or cable TV. Those Republicans want us to be ignorant. They are preventing us from accessing information. They do not allow the local phone monopoly, CenturyLink, or the local cable monopoly, Comcast, to install equipment or dig up streets or yards to install cable. That is why most of my friends are still stuck on dial-up. I use ISDN, even though it is expensive, because work reimburses me for it. That is what happens when you allow Republicans to rule over you.
government is the last defense of the people against the megacorps turning everything into virtual slaves.
Government? The same institution that is gunning-down unarmed black men in the streets? The same institution that bails-out mega banks when they screw up and lose billions of dollars? The same institution that drops bombs on wedding parties, schools, and hospitals? The same institution that waged war against the people of Iraq in the name of blatant lies? The same institution that spies on every single phone call we make, every single internet message we send, every single website we visit, every single financial transaction we make? The same institution that steals people's homes to give to big companies to demolish and build over? The same institution that keeps native americans living in abject poverty? The same institution that forces immigrants to attempt dangerous border crossings, and subject themselves to employment abuses just so they can make some money to send home to their families? That's who you think is going to protect us?
You're from the UK, right? Doesn't look like your country (or Europe) is doing significantly better than the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.techinsider.io/akam...
http://data.worldbank.org/indi...
Note also that the Internet in Europe only took off after privatization and deregulation, and the UK today doesn't seem significantly different in how it provides Internet access from the US.
The roads are dangerous and the government refuses to be held accountable for the tens of thousands of people who die on its roads every year. The police are brutally violent racists. The military slaughters civilians on a massive scale. Yay socialism!
Do you take every comment you read 100% literally? I'm pretty sure he was using hyperbole. If you have a brain thing that messes with your social comprehension I apologize in advance.
That's exactly HOW the free market fails. Constantly. It's what it does in these high barrier to entry low to no competition environments. The purpose of a corporation is to eliminate competition, not to revel in it.
We already have that system with telcos. If it comes out anything like municipal water/power, it will be such a godsend I'll wet myself from sheer awe.
>give access away for free to poor people
Because the lower classes are known for being the ones controlling the depletion of unsustainable resources. Like electricity and bandwidth.
Either you're a clever troll placing dominoes that lead to keeping proles afloat, or you're a dumbfuck accomplishing the same thing by accident.
The reason there isn't more competition is because starting an ISP is really hard, in large part due to government regulations:
http://arstechnica.com/busines...
And, what "municipalities aren't being served at all"? Most people have access to at least one DSL provider, one cable provider, and one wireless provider.
Well, let's see, I'm not voting for Hillary either.
There is no such thing as a "natural monopoly" on internet access. In some places it's a mandated monopoly because politicians were bought. In other places it's dirty business keeping the market effectively closed. Still other places it's just ridiculously high cost of entry barriers. None of those are "natural".
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Everybody has one. Fortunately sending a letter is different from voting for a law. There is no need to abstain for the conflict of interest reasons, and the voters benefit as they get to see what kind of people the candidates really are.
The US Interstate Highway System is lousy: it has excess capacity in many places and insufficient capacity in many others. And, of course, it was built for the same reason the German highway system was built: for the military. Countries like the UK used to have private highway systems before they became nationalized.
Governments do lots of things that private corporations don't do: put a man on the moon, build weapons of mass destruction, bomb other nations,, force people into labor camps, or imprison a large fraction of the population. The reason private corporations don't do these things is because they are not worth doing. Putting a man on the moon was a propaganda feat by one government trying to impress another government; it's in the same category of government action as dropping an atom bomb on Hiroshima: something rational people do not waste their money on.
You act as if the cable and broadband providers are chomping at the bit to do their own private buildout with no assurances of a captive market. They are not and they never have been.
In fact, even where it is permitted, Comcast and TWC made "gentleman's agreements" not to compete.
profits are insanely higher for the megacorp internet service providers... over 95% pure profit on internet access (it costs them less than 1c per megabit/sec per customer to provide broadband via dsl, coax or fiber). no wonder they want to preserve their monopolies.
So what's your solution? How will you cause that competition to happen? We anxiously await your better solution!
True, because they have to be: human rail transport makes little sense. Germany tried to privatize it, but it didn't work out financially. And it doesn't work out financially because people don't actually want to travel by rail if they see the full cost. So the cost gets hidden in taxes.
Note that the US has the world's largest rail system, and it is nearly 100% utilized and extremely efficient. It is used what rail is actually good for: freight.
When you look at public transit use by country, the US comes in last, but that generally simply reflects wealth: people avoid public transit if they can:
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/bl...
all Republicans—Sens. Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Marco Rubio of Florida, John Cornyn of Texas, Pat Roberts of Kansas, John Barrasso of Tennessee, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, and Tim Scott of South Carolina
Source: http://www.dailydot.com/politics/fcc-municipal-broadband-senators-complaint-letter/?tw=pl
Absolutely right: the government is great at giving people what they don't want but what lobbyists and politicians decide they ought to have and pay for.
The startup costs are extreme because of government. And AT&T's and Comcast's net profit margin is around 10%.
[Citation needed]
Of course, you won't be able to come up with a citation because it's utter bullshit.
The government does many things better than the free markets.
Such as dropping bombs on women and children, oppressing racial minorities, excluding competition from the market, bailing out losers...
Pretty much in every area where the objective isnt to abuse and wring money out of people.
You must live in a world without taxes and monetary inflation.
is because the free market doesnt work when there are extreme startup costs.
What's your evidence for this? There is a growing number of private local ISP startups bringing broadband to underserved areas. There's Google, choosing to get into the ISP business, bringing gbps broadband to an increasing number of cities. There are companies that have IPOs that bring in billions in capitalization. Startup costs are not anywhere close to being an insurmountable obstacle.
You do realize Google is one of the top 80 richest corporations in the world, and top 5 in the USA, right? "extreme startup costs" doesn't generally apply to the richest companies in the world. It applies to the small businesses that will actually provide competition.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
No, we should privatize most of those functions.
So your solution to lobbying and monopolies is... to make lobbyists and monopolists even more powerful: that's what you are advocating.
They happily take 'election' money from Businesses, Businesses that are 100% owned by the Chinese gov, groups that represent illegals, rich ppl, or nations like Turkey, and then discard their 'morals'.
Sadly, I doubt that they discard their morals. They just never had any to begin with.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Google is providing actual competition. Small companies do as well.
> People *need* healthcare. They get sick. They don't *need* Internet access;
Ok so give up your telephone, electricity and plumbing. You don't *need* any of that. People may not need Facebook and Twitter, but some level of remote communication makes life a whole lot easier (not to mention efficient). If I have internet I don't need any other telecommunications, internet is the modern information carrier.
It is infinitely better than the privately-built US Highway System.
And yes, private corporations do indeed imprison people and force them into labor camps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Lol. I don't know anymore man. It feels like we are becoming entitled babies. I drive the roads in PA everyday, yea some are shitty, but they work. I haven't seen or heard of one accident which was caused by the roads. Most accidents are caused by drivers not paying attention. Don't put that on the roads Ricky Bobby.
I know PA != everywhere, but PA has some of the worst roads ever in the US. Yet they still function and are drivable.
I do agree that all of our bridges are fucked. They just redid two bridges by my house that were on their last legs. So they are getting around to fixing them, just taking a little while.
Your comprehension is horrible. How you came to that conclusion from that remark is beyond my thinking.
You are a grade A nutcase.
> There are a whole raft of studies which show that state-provided healthcare offers similar outcomes at a greatly reduced price
There are not. I mean, they aren't studies as much as they aren't based in science (no double blind, no significant sample size). Empirically, this isn't possible. Rhode Island cannot provide equivalent health care to California.
Aah, I see - thanks for the info. If cable companies now own the base copper then they can be as assholy as they want. Much suck. I won't know enough of the history of US telcos & scum like Comcast to get a better picture without digging into Google, so I might have a good gander later. Over here we went straight from the origins of the General Post Office to splitting the telcoms off as BT, which then got sold by the government to make a fast buck. A big mistake only now being slowly turned around but even then it seems we have far better infrastructure than America does. Still not a patch on Japan & Korea or any place that starts afresh, but still.
People don't want to pay because they see the expensive, shit-quality job done by the govt' agencies and generally don't want that.
You mean like being able to send a letter anywhere in the US and have it arrive within a few days for $0.49? [/sarcasm] What a stupid generalization. Governments routinely provide all kinds of services with excellent efficiency and quality. Not everything but they are hardly these palaces of incompetence you claim. While the private sector is definitely better for some things the notion that government cannot do anything well is simply ridiculous nonsense.
You ever see 10 Cal-Trans (or local equivalent) workers all standing around one guy with a shovel? The populace doesn't hade infrastructure upgrades, but they do get frustrated after seeing that and then the projects go massively over budget. "Good enough for govt' work" is a saying for a reason.
I see plenty of private company construction workers standing around one guy with a shovel all the time. Has nothing to do with whether or not they are public employees. That's just the nature of construction work. Apparently you've never done road work. I have. Trust me, most of the time they are working plenty hard. Harder that people who post to slashdot anonymously during work hours.
As for projects that go massively over budget, you think that never happens in the private sector? If you actually think that you are incredibly naive.
The problems that we have today are the direct result of government interference in the 1980s and 1990s. Governments granted monopolies to cable companies and further funded private enterprises in the 1990s paying companies to deploy faster internet (but for which no strings were attached- and nothing in turn ended up being done). These sorts of actions have created a barrier to entry in most places. We should be able to setup non-profit municipal-like organizations to run lines and provide internet services, but they shouldn't be funded by tax dollars. It's not even really necessary. It's just the direction we have been pushed as a result of our screwed up overly governed system. The non-profit municipal-like broadband providers aught to be funded by the members of the communities which opt in and not by tax dollars obtained by violent means. There is even a name for these types of corporations. They are called consumer cooperatives and are enterprises owned by consumers and managed democratically which aim at fulfilling the needs and aspirations of their members. Unfortunately none of this is possible when the barrier to entry has been artificially heightened and these monopolies own the governments.
To the degree that they are monopolies, they are monopolies created by the government.
Right, because nothing says free market efficiency more than having seven sets of coax cables and fiber running to everyone's home.
Municipal broadband isn't about "the people wanting to band together and do something", it is about some people forcing others to pay for something they don't want.
Which set of people are you referring to who don't want broadband, TV and telephone delivered to them reliably and for a decent price? Please be explicit. And who are these people who would be paying for something they don't want or are you so throughly caught up in the stories you've been told that you have no idea how these projects are financed, built, run, or embraced?
And it is government that currently removes the freedom of people banding together and providing broadband access commercially, by limiting access.
Oh wait, you mean like how government should allow seven sets of coax cables and fiber running to everyone's home?
Brilliant!
As a member of Republicans for Third-World Internet, I'm all for this. The Internet brings only filth and new ideas.
Citation please. I was under the impression that phone was available everywhere in case of emergencies. If you don't want it you don't pay for it, but all the lines were ran already.
Internet is fast becoming an essential service.
And it's only unfair competition if the municipal ISP had a monopoly.
How do you know your online behavior will be subject to town laws? Has that happened anywhere?
And even if they were, you know you can vote out the town council and get laws re-written - right? Campaign or run for office yourself to get the laws re-written.
Not only does the US spend a greater proportion on healthcare, the outcomes aren't that much better, if at all - Canada's life expectancy is one year longer than the US for example.
As a ranking independent libertarian...
This is entirely new to me. Libertarians have ranks? "Independent" ones at that! What is your rank? How did you acquire it? What are the other ranks? Inquiring minds want to know.
I believe he is a Grand Poobah of the 3rd order.
No, there are studies showing that state-provided healthcare in current practice--that is, in the nations which successfully implement it--provides a specific set of outcomes. State-provided healthcare in 1490 Feudal Japan likely would have provided little more than an economic drain.
Go back to hunter-gatherer society and you find people spent *most* of their time working. There weren't really "rich people", because it took almost all human labor to feed everyone; nobody had 308 times the income of the poorest-surviving individual. Take this up through ancient agrarian societies, through the bronze age, and so forth and you have a similar problem: the amount of excess income the aristocracy and nobility owned, all pooled together, was insufficient to provide services like healthcare to everyone.
It's notable that we call transportation of goods "shipping" and, in fact, we call moving shit around "transportation" because we *transfer* it between *ports* on *ships*. At one point, no government could produce and maintain rail or road with any viable amount of tax money: the production of steel and the movement of earth cost so much in human labor that implementing rails, good roads, and other such forms of overland transportation would cost an unreasonable and crippling amount of the total income. Think like the rich have 15% of all income and you need 73% of all income, so you have to take more than half of the income of the poorest of poor if you're going to do this.
Surprise: in America, the top 10%--which is around 34 million people--collectively have 48% of the income. We invented power tools, electricity, new methods of forging steel, and all kinds of other shit; we expend the same amount of labor and we produce a *lot* more. There's a lot more stuff per person; the amount of money each person has buys a *lot* more. Even our poor live at a level above the nobility of medieval times, with insulated homes and running water and electric lights.
That means we've got a better chance of buying into a good public healthcare system than medieval Europe did.
Canada and Norway are primary oil exporters. Norway is like the ninth largest exporter of oil in the world; Canada is the tenth, and exports more than a fifth of what Saudi Arabia exports. Norway also has 5 million people, versus 35 million in Canada and 28 million in Saudi Arabia; Norway is fucking rich. Norway, in fact, exports 30% more oil per capita than Saudi, meaning the amount of wealth in Norway's oil economy is 30% larger than Saudi's.
We always talk about Norway's and Canada's healthcare systems, not to mention the *insane* standard of living in Norway.
How well do you think a public option would fair in Uganda?
This is part economics, part finances, part history. Most people don't realize that experts are all hobbled by their narrow scope of domain knowledge: an economist without a strong grasp of economic history is going to have a hard time inventing new ideas; most economists who *do* invent new ideas have either a strong grasp of history or a strong grasp of classical economics coupled directly with a wide base of observation of modern business. They need multiple fields of study to manufacture new information; if you knew anything about learning and creativity, you'd be rolling your eyes at me for stating the bluntly obvious.
The point is everything is like that. You can't look at an action and an outcome and say X leads to Y; you need to look at the conditions within which the action occurred. Even the Star Trek utopian no-work society has an economic condition; socialists and marxists thought they could snap their fingers and make that by force of will, which is why they failed. Never guess; always know.
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So the one effective means available of providing desperately needed competition (a fact you acknowledge) should be prohibited because it seems good?
Not "because it seems good", but despite how good it seems. The reason is the close coupling with the municipal government—even if the service isn't outright tax-subsidized, it is not unusual for the initial funds to be raised through tax-backed municipal bonds, and as a branch of the municipality there would be easier access to things like permits and right-of-way which private ISPs must negotiate for.
If anyone really thinks that their municipal broadband service can compete on equal terms with other private ISPs, there is a simple solution which doesn't require the municipality to get involved: form a co-op. The structure of a co-op is very much like a municipal government, but it doesn't have access to taxes or municipal bonds, or "privileged insider" status regarding other city services. A broadband co-op would be subject to exactly the same rules as any other private ISP, and would not be inhibited by a rule prohibiting municipal governments from offering Internet access.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I lived in a town with municipal broadband and cable...it was awesome. But it was constantly in the news for not being profitable or well run or whatever...then when the town brought in an advisor who told them the scrap the whole thing, guess who I was informed would be taking over my absolutely rock solid municipal broadband? Comcast.
So, why don't they look at it like that? Especially, for those places they haven't found it profitable enough to bother making their services available.
That's because government action precludes building a private system. That's why we shouldn't repeat that mistake with other infrastructure.
The prison-industrial complex is a creation of government. It is government police and government courts that force people into these systems. The fact that a few corporations that are buddies with corrupt politicians benefit from this abuse of government power doesn't make "corporations" responsible for it.
I don't need video games either. I still like them.
The usefulness to society as a whole for certain people having certain things is not a given, even if those things are useful to those people. It's useful to *me* to have access to Dice to get jobs making $135k; when I was 19, I could have gotten a job at McDonalds. While it's perfectly possible for me to end up poor and unemployed for a while--and guaranteed that some people with my or other high-dollar skills are currently living as such--it's less likely that I'd be walled-off from such employment with no car and no phone; even less likely that I wouldn't be able to dig my way out by getting a job at McDonalds for a while and buying a phone; and pretty much guaranteed--thanks to public college--that society as a whole has wasted its wealth making more people capable of doing my job than we can employ, thus ensuring that someone else (who is currently poor and hopeless) will only get their chance at a good job if I (or someone else) fall out of my job and get stuck as a poor kid.
That doesn't mean municipal broadband is definitely useless; it just means that such an argument of its virtues by way of giving people opportunities and thus strengthening our society is *trivially* dismissed. You need to show some other reason it's beneficial, rather than just a cost lumbered onto the backs of everyone for no real benefit at the expense of making us all slightly poorer.
Do note that making us *all* slightly poorer has the immediate primary effect of making it harder for the least-well-off to get jobs, and those of them who have base-level jobs get a lower standard of living. They're the first ones to feel the pressure.
Economics isn't a zero-sum game. Some actions cost us a pile of wealth and return a bigger pile; others return a smaller pile. Those actions don't operate by their own virtue, but rather by their relationship to the system. Change the system--it changes all the time--and you get a different outcome.
I'll give you a good example: I want to replace our welfare system with a Citizen's Dividend, which will directly end all homelessness and hunger in the United States while creating jobs, lowering the cost of goods, reducing taxes, and raising the standard of living. This would be a very bad idea in the 1950s. Here's why.
We can also go into the philosophy of choices: every choice involves giving something up. Do you want a chocolate bar or a peanut butter cup? Whichever one you choose, you lose the other. Even if you can choose both, you get excess calories; do you want to be fat, or do you want to eat candy? Maybe you can exchange your time spent leisurely arguing with idiots on Twitter with time spent gagging and coughing as you run yourself ragged doing high-speed laps around the gym in a desperate attempt to burn off the candy bar so you don't get fat, which would lower your body fat enough to do a couple sit-ups and develop chick-attracting abs--a state you'll get to faster if you eat less chocolate and more chicken.
In economics, the choices are analyzed further: how do you give up one thing in exchange for something bigger? Put your time in doing something upfront that allows you to do *more* of what you sacrificed in the long term, thus not actually making a material choice in long terms, but rather taking both.
In this case, economics tells us we are in one of two conditions: either municipal broadband provides an economic benefit which increases or at least does not decrease standard-of-living, or municipal broadband provides a single benefit to standard-of-living at the expense of the general standard-of-living. In the first situation, we enact that choice because it provides a total benefit; in the second, we can give you an XBox, but we have to take away your bicycle and your gameboy batteries. A single action doesn't define the outcome; the action in the surrounding condi
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In different words, you want a monopoly.
I know exactly how municipal broadband is paid for: through taxes and municipal bonds.
Your error is in assuming that municipal broadband does that. It doesn't.
Yes, that is exactly what it should allow, just like it should allow us to have 23 choices of deodorants and 18 choices of sneakers. More importantly, government simple doesn't have any right to restrict these choices.
Municipal broadband *IS* competition. The reason some people unrelated to cable companies hate this is because they see any and all government as evil because of a perverted ideology. So they ask the bigger state governments to trod on the smaller municipal governments all in the name of restricting government.
If municipal government is too big, and the voters in a municipality are unable to control that big government at the ballot box, then they're effectively claiming that the democratic experiment has failed utterly. But that's not true, democracy is still alive, the voters are able to direct their local governments, and it's just anti government hysteria that promotes this idea. They're so indoctrinated with this perverted logic that they would rather the worst internet in the world than to admit that they could be wrong, and they even violate their own ideals by appealing to big government in their battle against small government.
Oh my god, tax payer funds might be used, the horror, the horror! We must protect the voters from themselves by nullifying their votes!
Please tell me how "government action precludes building a private system".
If a company were to buy the land and build roads on it, there's absolutely nothing to stop them from charging people to drive on those roads. There are private roads, you know.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So, no citations. As expected...
Actually, I have a very good idea. And, had you been more of reader than a writer, the history of AT&T getting a monopoly in exchange for submitting to "regulation", and the subsequent break-up of the company, would've been an eye-opener.
Our very problems today stem from this idiotic myth of "natural monopoly". Allowing the government to offer Internet-service will worsen the problem from the current "too little competition" to "no competition". Only a Socialist ideologue would want that.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I have not seen a single municipality project which excluded competition from other providers.
The problem is no one can actually compete with the government. Government can raise taxes or grant itself other powers unavailable to the private sector. Government is the ultimate monopoly.
There is no forcing everyone in the town to use the same Internet, the is merely an option available.
I never said they'd have to use the same Internet. However, that may be the ultimate effect. What I said was that everyone shouldn't be forced into having their tax dollars and their government used to operate an ISP. That's not freedom, and it's not government's place in a free society.
Almost all projects were also self funded meaning no new taxes.
Almost and no new taxes? Please. If they are using existing taxes to fund it, then either other services aren't being funded or the government had too much of our money to begin with. In any case, new or existing tax dollars will be used to fund it.
Not to mention, government will inevitably raise taxes and "fees" in the future. Unfortunately, with government, taxes almost always go up and never down. With people like you demanding yet more government services, it should be no surprise.
If there are so many like-minded people who want better broadband options willing to self-fund such projects, it shouldn't be difficult to form a new corporation or non-profit to provide those options. No need for government to be involved, except for permitting and such, and no need to force others against their will.
Your logic is way off base.
Actually, it's spot on if you can follow along.
. . . support for ATT or Comcast or the likes makes me wonder if you have Stockholm syndrome
You must be projecting. Except with you it would actually be true because there is no choice with government. We must all fund government and follow its laws. At least with with AT&T and Comcast, you actually have a choice to use their service or not. They can't throw you in jail for cancelling service like the government can throw you in jail for not paying your taxes.
I've always found it fascinating how the loudest voices critical of the private sector somehow think those in the public sector are not susceptible to the same human nature the drives and incentivizes the private sector. Only with government you have the added bonus of no choice by force of law. Your logic isn't off base, it's non-existent.
This is more from the ultra anti-tax libertarian wing, which isn't restricted to Republicans. They are essentially idealogues. They have a warped vision of utopia and they won't let things like democracy stand in the what they think is best for the people. Municipal broadband would use public funds, ie, taxes, and so to them this is the ultimate evil. They want to protect naive voters who don't follow their utopian vision from giving local government the power to use taxes.
The only reason they're aligned with Republicans is because we've got a defacto two party system and they have to align with one of the two if they want to achieve any goals. And also because they're too extremist for the official Libertarian Party.
Corporations are the government now. The only votes that matter are on the corporate boards.
Is this how you regard everyone you disagree with? They should be voted out of office, not drawn and quartered or shot on sight. What the fuck is wrong with you.
WTF?? Is this how you regard everyone you disagree with?
Who said anything about being drawn and quartered or shot on sight? Are you retarded or are you fucking retarded?? Or did making a joke offend your weenie-grade sensibilities?
There are plenty of towns that don't get wired, broadband Internet access from any provider. (Small capped and expensive wireless isn't a good alternative and DSL is on its way out with ISPs actively trying to get rid of their DSL customers.) If a town doesn't have Internet access and the big ISPs in the area refuse to provide access (because they deem the town "unprofitable") then why shouldn't the town be able to set up their own municipal broadband effort? (Provided the town votes on it and approves the measure.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I know exactly how municipal broadband is paid for: through taxes and municipal bonds.
Actually, you're wrong - but who would have guessed. Taxes are not used as it is something that many people, including myself are against. And while municipal bonds are sometimes used, PPP (Public/Private/Partnerships) are typically favored in most of the buildouts I am familiar with.
Your error is in assuming that municipal broadband does that. It doesn't.
Maybe you should ask the people of Chattanooga before you make such moronic declarations.
Yes, that is exactly what it should allow, just like it should allow us to have 23 choices of deodorants and 18 choices of sneakers. More importantly, government simple doesn't have any right to restrict these choices.
Thanks for clarifying exactly how much you know. Usually one has to really reach out to get someone such as yourself show their full range of understanding but in this case you've made it easy.
Omg a criticism of obama on the web that is actually about something bad he has done, instead of him being an alien timetravelling terrorist! :-)
So, no citations. As expected...
If you need citations to tell you that these networks are built on public rights of ways, you really shouldn't be involved in this discussion.
Actually, I have a very good idea.
No, no you don't.
And, had you been more of reader than a writer, the history of AT&T getting a monopoly in exchange for submitting to "regulation", and the subsequent break-up of the company, would've been an eye-opener.
I am having difficulty wondering where the heck you managed to get such bad information.
At one point, there were over six thousand independent telephone companies who went into business and guess what - there was no interconnectivity - which as a bright guy like yourself has probably figured out - caused some serious problems.
It was the evil government that standardized the network, formed interconnection systems and made the telephone network work. And had there been no government involvement, it's doubtful that private industry could have made the telephone system into what you take for granted today.
Our very problems today stem from this idiotic myth of "natural monopoly". Allowing the government to offer Internet-service will worsen the problem from the current "too little competition" to "no competition". Only a Socialist ideologue would want that.
What a pile of bullshit. Do us all a favor, move to someplace that actually buys your crap because the rest of us know better.
Unlike you, I didn't just read about all of this, I built some of these networks.
Laugh if you wish, but I work with municipal governments. If you want to see crumbling infrastructure and yesterday's technology, look at your cities. There's no incentive to maintain anything, and every incentive to squeeze every last dime out of something until it breaks.
No, the answer to better internet service is more competition. There are many cities that have only one provider and others who would compete are kept out . . . . by the city!
can you provide evidence that there's anywhere in the US that a municipally operated connection provider is doing that?
posting AC because mod points
Citation please. I was under the impression that phone was available everywhere in case of emergencies. If you don't want it you don't pay for it, but all the lines were ran already.
Believe it or not, not every structure, road or city has telephone service. Even now in 2015. Which makes this rush to provide Internet access to every square inch look totally retarded.
"Marco Rubio and Other Senators Move To Block Municipal Broadband"
C'mon, I know this is Slashdot, but that's quite a misleading title. "Move to allow states to block municipal broadband", or "Move to prevent FCC from blocking states from blocking municipal broadband" maybe, but they're not trying to outlaw it on a national level.
Internet is fast becoming an essential service.
Please explain how it is absolutely necessary to have Internet access.
And it's only unfair competition if the municipal ISP had a monopoly.
That's not the definition of unfair competition.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Here's an end run for such regulations:
- The municipalities install bundles of conduit, along with pull-boxes, manholed repeater vaults, and the like. Also install, or allow the user to install, per-house or per-apartment-complex conduit to the nearest valult. (Include this in the utility hookup zoning and permitting requirements on any new developments, too.)
- Then lease a conduit right-of-way and vault rack space to all comers on equal terms: AT&T and your local mom-and-POP can both string their cables, fibres, or what-not on equal terms, and NONE of them have to get their investors to pony up, up front, to dig up the whole city - separately. (With N conduits in each vault-to-vault hop the first N comers initially have a conduit to themselves, though they may have to share it eventually.)
- String fibre bundles through the first conduit, use some of the fibres for the municipal net, and (if the federal rules don't block it), lease a limited-number-per-customer to all comers, ditto (reserving a few for backups for failed fibres and for future expansion.)
As with "dark fibre", almost all the cost is digging up the countryside to install the conduits and fibre runs. Putting in more conduit, or using fibre cables with more fibres, vastly multiplies the capacity with a small percentage increment on the cost of the installation. This "future-proofs" it. With dense wavelength division a single pair of fibres can carry a major telecom's entire local traffic. Run a dozen four-inch pipes between each vault and you can expect it to serve all the city's communication requirements for far longer than the expected life of the other aspects of the city's infrastructure.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
We should create a government run high performance back bone that runs to every city in the US and town.
Yeah, government is the answer. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/12/16/1618232/facebook-google-and-twitter-agree-to-delete-hate-speech-in-germany
The claim made by Bert64 above was, taxpayers paid for the infrastructure. Allowing the use of land for wires is not the same as paying. Bert64's remains unsubstantiated.
False. AT&T did that. But you are welcome to offer proof of your words, however circumstantial...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The claim made by Bert64 above was, taxpayers paid for the infrastructure. Allowing the use of land for wires is not the same as paying. Bert64's remains unsubstantiated.
Oh really? When then, how does Bert64 explain all those rural telephone lines which never would have been built by for-profit companies? Well, if Bert64 can't tell you, I can. Does Bert64 know what the Universal Service Fund is and what it is used for?
False. AT&T did that.
No, they did not - and if you had read the link I provided for you previously, you would already know that.
But you are welcome to offer proof of your words, however circumstantial...
How about this, why don't you man up an admit you are completely wrong. Maybe then people here would gain a little respect for you.
Voters move to block Marco Rubio and Other Senators from being elected to public office.
^ That's what the title should read.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Bert64 would not substantiate that claim. Can you?
Your link describes, how the US government forced Bell Labs to allow other companies to connect to their network. It says nothing to substantiate your earlier claim:
Which is not surprising, because the standards were Bell Labs', not the government's — contrary to your earlier statements.
Ouch, that was so sexist, bigoted, hurtful and hateful, I must retreat to my safe zone. Fuck you, hater!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You know, it's not worth either of our time to continue this shit. You obviously think you know everything and who am I to tell you anything.
It's a damn shame you haven't figured out how incredibly ridiculous you are making yourself out to be, especially when you haven't quite figured out the timing of all of this. But, I have hope that someday you'll actually sit down and read the information you've been provided. Who knows? Maybe you'll even learn a little humility when you finally figure out that you can't just reinvent history and expect the rest of us to take you seriously.
Good luck with that, you'll certainly need it.
I disagree. It's not essential. There are still communities in the US without telephone service. Why didn't the government intervene there? Because telephone service isn't essential either. I think you're not understanding the definition of the word essential. It means absolutely necessary.
Under the definition you're using, power, water, and sewer aren't "essential" either. Plenty of people in the U.S. live without them, after all. You can always dig a well or put in a septic system, right?
Like I said in the OP, our governments can't even provide essential services properly.
My experience doesn't bear that statement out. When I lived in Orlando, I got power/water from the Orlando Utilities Commission, a wholly-owned municipal utility. I had a frigging hurricane come directly over me and didn't lose power at all. The total number of power problems I experienced over 8 years could have been counted on one hand. Where I live now, my electric utility is Florida Power & Light, a subsidiary of a public corporation that trades on the NYSE. I had multiple power blips and voltage sags every week for three years, and a few months back when FP&L finally decided to come out and replace the corroded 35-year old underground cabling between the transformer and my house, they tacked it together, sealed my meter with clear plastic and tape, and left bare cabling (i.e. no conduit) running 60 feet across my back yard for *three weeks* until they could get a contractor to come out and dig the trench. They flagged the cable run, but if the lawn guy had run over it accidentally it would have been a bad scene.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Even the sticker price for their Internet (apparently, $58 for 100 Mbps) is more expensive than what I'm getting here, and that isn't counting the massive subsidies:
http://www.americanlegislator....
and
More info:
http://watchdog.org/1019/tn-ch...
http://www.washingtontimes.com...
That is, regular tax payers are forced to pay for massive bandwidth that almost nobody wants or needs; but those high numbers give nerds like you a hard-on although even you can't actually use them. And neither the financials nor the speeds are in dispute; it's simply that the people responsible for this kind of government waste are trying to put a positive spin on it.
You're welcome. Thanks for pointing to Chattanooga, presumably the best example you could come up with: it is an excellent illustration of how utterly broken municipal broadband is. Do not want.
In most places, you simply wouldn't get a permit. A lot of the land is government owned, and the government won't sell it to you for building private roads. Finally, since tax payers are forced at gunpoint to pay for public roads already, the price of private roads is necessarily always uncompetitive no matter how cheap they are.
If wired Internet in the town is unprofitable, it's either because the costs are too high or the demand is too low (or both). Municipal broadband doesn't fix the lack of profitability, it simply forces tax payers to make up the difference. What possible justification is there to make me pay for something I don't want?
If the city wants to do something to help remedy this situation, it should lower the cost and risk of planning and permitting, because that's usually what keeps ISPs out.
I've actually lived in such a town. It turns out, you really don't need wired Internet access anyway. People who want Internet access can easily get it via wireless point-to-point connections, expanded mobile Internet access, and other technologies, from small, local operators. A lot of more rural towns have those. I actually found it to be a step backwards when national wired operators finally moved in a few years later.
The free market failed completely, which is how exclusive franchises came to be. Without exclusive franchises cable companies didn't even want to lay the cable as the potential returns didn't justify the capital expenditure.
Ah, and your online behavior will be subject to the town's laws
You know what's neat about that? The Constitution applies to them, unlike business.
Even the sticker price for their Internet (apparently, $58 for 100 Mbps) is more expensive than what I'm getting here, and that isn't counting the massive subsidies
Really? Where do you live? Where I am, we get a supposed 60Mbps for $70.00/month and I bought my own equipment. A quick look at Comcast's site shows their "up to 75Mbps" package costs $76.95/month. Time Warner advertises "Speeds up to 50/5Mbps" for "$64.99 per month for 12 months" and then it goes up from there.
In other words, you are the exception, not the rule.
Chattanooga’s fiber network added to Tennessee’s already staggering municipal network costs.
Let's see the credible citation backing up that idiotic claim.
And, as with all publicly-operated networks, the burden on taxpayers forced to pay for this network went undetected.
Again with the unsubstantiated claims? This is a habit for you, isn't it?
The EPB launched Chattanooga’s project in 2010 and built the network almost entirely with taxpayer funds; EPB’s electric customers financed a hefty $160 million loan, while federal taxpayers paid for the other $111 million as part of the 2009 stimulus bill.
On no! The government did something good for the people! We can't have that. The government is undermining your erroneous dialog. The bastards!
EPB’s Internet and cable television customers will pay for the remaining $29 million.
Oh, you mean the customers will have to pay their bills of which a portion of that money will pay off that investment? Thank God none of us have to do that with for profit corporations!
High-speed Internet service is great, but there is no real demand for the speeds EPB offers, which reach nearly 200 times faster than the average broadband speed in America. EPB offers a one gigabit-per-second service to all homes and businesses in the region, yet only a handful of residents and 20 odd businesses subscribe to the exorbitant $350 per month gigabit option.
You actually had the audacity to post on Slashdot that no one wants gigabit speeds? And somehow you thought that claim would be agreed to here? That's priceless.
Ironically, most taxpayers who paid to build the network cannot themselves afford the service fee.
Which taxpayers would that be? The ones who are enjoying internet speeds for less than I pay and are paying their bills which then pay back the municipal bond or some other fictitious ones you wish existed.
More info:
Watchdog.org
You linked one of the most biased sited I have ever run across as a credible source? And then you linked the Washington Times as another source? You do understand that the Washington Times is owned by a religious cult (The Moonies) and bears no resemblance to reality, right?
No, it's readily apparent that you don't.
And therein lies the problem. You ingest garbage and believe it without questioning it. What makes that even better is that you demand citations from everyone else but the crap you post to back up your baseless assertions have zero real information provided but sell people like you a lot of opinions.
That is, regular tax payers are forced to pay for massive bandwidth that almost nobody wants or needs; but those high numbers give nerds like you a hard-on although even you can't actually use them.
Which is why Google Fiber is failing everywhere it goes? Is that what you are trying to get people to believe here?
And neither the financials nor the speeds are in dispute; it's simply that the people responsible for this kind of government waste are trying to put a positive spin on it.
And yet, not a single number is included - just mor
So, you'd rather have the real monopoly of the townhall running Internet-services, than the quasi monopolies?
Call me crazy, but I'd rather have the monopoly that is required to honor all of my Constitutional rights in charge of my Internet service than one that has no such requirements.
Such people form a private company.
How does a city full of residents form a private company where each resident has an equal vote for all of the corporate officers?
Whatever government does, is done poorly.
Truly, but usually still better than a large business.
Other western countries with similar or lower levels of wealth can do it. There is no reason the US can't. Just look around the world at other developed countries and see what you can learn.
These senators are free-market hypocrites!
in people's minds when they go to vote. These corporate shills only want to get themselves into a position of authority so they can extort more money out of corporations to buy their support and influence. I've said this before.. if we don't find a way to detach elected officials from the bribe money they get (excuse me, I mean 'donations') there won't be any gov't left. I would love to hear the explanation this guy could spin should he be brought to task on this... I'm sure he would defend it as 'American' to try to get ahead in life or some such shit. We need a new Mission/Vision statement in gov't.. 'of the PEOPLE and for the PEOPLE, not the corporate interests!" What kills me is the number of led-by-the-nose run of the mill people that will side WITH this clown even against their own interests.
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
Mainly, stop with the laws that favor a single provider. Stop granting monopolies. Use laws to encourage others to enter each market instead of the reverse.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Democracy doesn't equal the will of the people. I can vote someone into office because of their general stance on some things, but later I might be appalled by what they are doing with regard to broadband regulation. Or I might vote for them despite that because the other guy isnt any better, or is worse.
Unless I have a direct say in the matter, it isn't truly democracy anyway.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
No one implied that it was the only corporate party besides yourself. Political cheerleaders like yourself just can not talk negatively about your party can you? I would imagine that both parties would run a lot better if the members decided to make the party better rather than pointing fingers like children. I mean your party is in such bad shape that Donald Trump is your front runner.
"The government" didn't do anything good. Tax payers all across the country paid $111 million dollars so that the good people of Chattanooga could have a new fiber network. And electricity rate payers have to pay for the other $160 million dollars whether they want Internet or not, effectively a highly regressive tax, mostly paid by lower income households, in order to subsidize nerds who want fiber.
If we roll this out nationally, it amounts forcing everybody in the US to pay an average of $2000 in order to get Internet service that is faster than what they need, and more expensive than what they have. Realistically, most people need about 10-20 Mbps, and they can get that for less than $40 in most places.
If Google Fiber were actually commercially successful, it would mean that the city of Chattanooga wasted $300 million in subsidies in order to deliver a more expensive Internet service than Google manages to deliver without subsidies. I.e., it would undermine your whole argument. But, in fact, Google Fiber appears to be losing money for Google as well, and Google has already stated that they aren't doing this in response to market demand, but as a test bed to see what people do with higher Internet speeds and to get into the market.
No, that is your problem. You have the numbers in front of you, and instead of thinking through what they mean, you attack the credibility of the sources. The sources don't matter: the numbers are not in question. It should be obvious what $111 million in federal subsidies and $160 million in transfers from electricity rate payers mean for a city of 173000 people, you just refuse to see it.
It's people like you who cause stagnation of middle class incomes in order to get subsidized shit they want from the government, while the same time patting themselves on the back about how magnanimous they are.
I'm talking about economics in general. Whether the US can or can't implement public healthcare isn't obvious; it requires an analysis of the economic situation of the United States, an analysis of the economic situation of other countries who implemented public healthcare, their successes, their failures, the costs, the benefits, and then a rough explanation of how each factor influenced each outcome. Then you have to project the range of possible outcomes for various public healthcare approaches to determine which, if any, are suitable; which are the *most* suitable; and to what degree those suitable provide a benefit.
You can't just say, "Well we're a developed nation, so obviously..." because it doesn't work that way. Your guess might be correct, but not because your grasp of the facts was enough to accurately assess the system--same as how you can guess a dice roll.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
The EPB launched Chattanoogaâ(TM)s project in 2010 and built the network almost entirely with taxpayer funds
Oh, you mean like when the American taxpayers funded rural electrification, Rural Telecommunications, and built an interstate highway systems to parts of rural America?
Next up, please tell us how those projects were complete failures probably due to people like you not giving a crap about them rural people.
EPBâ(TM)s electric customers financed a hefty $160 million loan, while federal taxpayers paid for the other $111 million as part of the 2009 stimulus bill.
So, can you prove that any rate increases have been caused by this network that has directly impacted the electric customers? Because, if not, your argument is full of bullshit.
And what I find so absolutely incredible is your unbelievable contempt for your fellow Americans. I can't remember a time when conservatives hated everybody but themselves as much as you typify.
"The government" didn't do anything good. Tax payers all across the country paid $111 million dollars so that the good people of Chattanooga could have a new fiber network"
Yes, we did. We also paid a few billion dollars so that the people of New Orleans could put their city back in shape, helped out the people of New Jersey when they needed it after Sandy decimated them, and we probably paid money to connect you to the electrical grid back when it didn't make financial sense for private business to invest the money - but most of us aren't whining about helping out our fellow Americans - we tend to love our country. You should try it some time.
And electricity rate payers have to pay for the other $160 million dollars whether they want Internet or not, effectively a highly regressive tax, mostly paid by lower income households, in order to subsidize nerds who want fiber.
Let's see the citation or is it difficult for you to find a credible citation for you talking out your ass? And while you're at it, make sure this citation delivers more than opinions. I want to see exactly how much the electric ratepayers of Chattanooga have paid for this service - in hard numbers.
If we roll this out nationally, it amounts forcing everybody in the US to pay an average of $2000 in order to get Internet service that is faster than what they need, and more expensive than what they have.
Only $2,000 - so that amounts to a little more than two years of my current rate. And investment would give me gigabit speeds? And since that covers the entire capital investment, we can fully expect our monthly cost to drop substantially as the only real costs associated with this network would be transit (near zero cost) as well as maintenance (which on a brand new network should be also close to zero for the first couple of years.) And that sounds like a bad deal to you? No wonder why no one's listening to you! You have no clue about how to manage money and you come here to rant about this? Are you insane in addition to inept?
Realistically, most people need about 10-20 Mbps, and they can get that for less than $40 in most places.
Yes, and I have it on good authority that we only need 640K of RAM memory too.
As to that crap about 10-20 Mbps for less than $40 in most places, feel free to link to these magical places. And remember, you said MOST places - now prove it.
If Google Fiber were actually commercially successful, it would mean that the city of Chattanooga wasted $300 million in subsidies in order to deliver a more expensive Internet service than Google manages to deliver without subsidies.
I s
Ah, what a telling comment: you are so well off that $26/month just means nothing to you. Well, it means a lot to other people.
Well, that's effectively what you do when you pay for stuff through government subsidies and cross-finance it with electric service.
But it isn't just their customers that are paying for it, it is all customers that are paying for it. If only customers were paying for it, then that $58/month service would now go up to at least $75 according to your own calculation (more likely to around $100/month), for the cheapest form of Internet through the municipal provider. That's completely uncompetitive and inefficient. Of course, your calculation is wrong because it neglects interest and other, indirect subsidies from the city. 20 years is also too long to amortize over, because a lot of the spending has gone towards things that don't last nearly as long, and because it assumes there won't be further subsidies in the future when they need more money, as they invariably will.
You suffer from delusions of grandeur and you haven't done shit.
Contempt for your fellow Americans and selfish greed is exactly what you are guilty of. You represent the wealthy class of Americans with a "let them eat cake" attitude.
You must have missed the part where municipal broadband is usually proposed when there are no providers interested at all. Not only is there no competition in those towns, there's not even a monopoly provider.
In many of the places where there is a monopoly provider it's because without that grant, there would be no provider at all. Sad but true.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that monopoly grants are unacceptable. But to make that happen, municipal broadband will become more important, not less.It could take many forms. It could even end up that the town owns the last mile and leases it to providers on a cost recovery basis, perhaps while itself being a provider of last resort or being the standard setter.
Even where Comcast and TWC (for example) could legally compete, they formed a "gentleman's agreement" to not compete.
But as for revoking/never granting monopoly status, that will just result in no broadband at all in most cases.
Well...actually, the anonymous coward that the anonymous coward was responding to specifically /said/ they SHOULD be shot on sight.
Private companies are always better. Hell, look at Comcast!! Who could possibly complain about their stellar service?
"Ever work with a Federal agency with lots of money and full of people engaged in empire building?" Ever work in a large telcom or computer company with lots of money and full of people engaged in empire building? Cause I have and it's just as bad if not worse.
Heh. You think the megacorps wouldn't gun down unarmed black men in the street if the government wasn't there to do it for them?
Ah, what a telling comment: you are so well off that $26/month just means nothing to you. Well, it means a lot to other people.
And yet more proof you have no idea what you're talking about.
That $26.00/month is repayment on the capital investment. What that means is the money paid to service the debt for the municipal network is probably about the same amount you would pay to a for profit company - unless you think that just eat that investment and don't expect a return on it.
But here's the difference. When it's a municipal network, there is no responsibility to earn a return on investment to the stockholders nor is there a need to earn a profit.
But a smart conservative like you would already understand that. Even better, a smart conservative like you could easily explain what value these subscribers receive for that additional money known as profit provides the subscriber. Feel free to explain that in detail, if you would.
Well, that's effectively what you do when you pay for stuff through government subsidies and cross-finance it with electric service.
But it isn't just their customers that are paying for it, it is all customers that are paying for it.
Yes, we're still looking for you to back that up. Do you have a shred of proof or is this just something else you made up?
If only customers were paying for it, then that $58/month service would now go up to at least $75 according to your own calculation (more likely to around $100/month),
What $58 per month service. Where did that number come from? Nowhere in my numbers did $58.00 show up so now I am curious where you got that amount.
And even if we were to accept that $75/month number most of us are paying in that neighborhood now and getting one hell of a lot less than gigabit speeds.
That reminds me, where are the majority of locals where Americans can get this magical sub-$40 dollar 20 Mbps Internet connectivity?
for the cheapest form of Internet through the municipal provider
There you go again, just making shit up. Provide a citation or I am going to tell you that you are full of shit.
That's completely uncompetitive and inefficient.
It might be if anything you were referring to had anything to do with what I mentioned.
Of course, your calculation is wrong because it neglects interest and other, indirect subsidies from the city.
So, now you want the government to earn money on the money it lends Americans to build out infrastructure at zero cost to the government? You're a swell guy. You should run for office on that platform.
And now we have indirect subsidies, ones that you have no credible source to back up? Sure, and maybe we are all terrorist too.
20 years is also too long to amortize over, because a lot of the spending has gone towards things that don't last nearly as long, and because it assumes there won't be further subsidies in the future when they need more money, as they invariably will.
Bullshit, telecommunications networks are routinely amortized over twenty years, as are cable and every other broadband delivery service buildouts with the exception of wireless.
Will Rogers once said, "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."
I didn't know Will knew you.
You suffer from delusions of grandeur and you haven't done shit.
Funny you should mention that. Unlike you, I actually built these networks and projects that I touched exist today on every continent except Antarctica.
Trump has referred to Rubio as Zuckerberg's personal senator. But he's not just Zuckerberg's.
There's only one candidate in the race who is self-funded and you know he is in it not to make someone else rich or push ideology but for pure self-aggrandizement.
Yes and no. The cable companies play fun little games such as Time Warner does, where "Roadrunner" is technically the ISP, even though they are wholly owned by Time Warner Cable. So sure, you can probably get your email account from anywhere, but Time Warner still owns the coax, and still charges whatever the fuck they want.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If you don't have the will of the people at the smallest local government then you will not have the will of the people anywhere. Are you suggesting that the democratic experiment be abandoned and we go back to having a distant remote dictator decide how things should be? The best time for the will of the people to be exerted is at the local level; you can walk to town hall and speak your mind, you can personally tell all the voters how corrupt the politicians are and ask them to vote for someone else, you know everyone and they know you. You have a direct say in the matter, even if you don't get your way in the end.
So why should some ultra libertarian idealogue say "you're doing it wrong, I refuse to let you vote yourself new taxes, so I will ask the state to remove your power of self determination."? Sure, that's ok if they're breaking fundamental rights or the constitution at the local level, like the feds disallowing slavery or institutionalized racism, but to disallow taxation with representation against the will of the people is absurd.
Yes.
It may or may not be "stellar", but it is better, than anything, that townhall will offer you.
The problem is monopoly. Comcast may be almost a monopoly, but the government will be an utter and absolute monopoly. Things will go from mildly unsatisfying to awful — has the public schools fiasco not taught you anything?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If by may not be stellar, you mean something dragged from the deepest bowels of hell, then sure. And who says government will be a monopoly? And if it is, it seems as though the places that want to do it are places you sacred private companies don't want to touch with a very long pole. And, by the way, back on your private companies are always better, my 20+ years in the high tech industry chortles. I watched Prime, Digital, Data General and Wang all willfully destroy themselves. I watched Nortel go from a 120,000 employee company an afterthought in the blink of an eye. There's nothing magic about private companies.
Colourful, but devoid of information.
It is obvious. Local governments already make life hell for would be ISPs. When those same towns start running their own little Internet-projects — paid for not by voluntary customers, but by captive taxpayers — they will shut off the competition completely.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
$58 is their cheapest Internet plan (https://epbfi.com/). That's completely uncompetitive for a basic Internet access plan, but even that is the subsidized price. Without the federal subsidies and the subsidies from electrical rate payers, that amount would be much higher. According to your own naive calculation, it would be around $17 higher, but that calculation is wrong, since it neglects the cost of capital. The actual cost of paying down a $300 million infrastructure investment over 20 years is somewhere between $1.8 and $2.3 million a month, or about $27-$35/month/subscriber. So the actual monthly cost for entry level service from municipal broadband is about $90/month assuming the subscriber base actually stayed constant (it would, of course, shrink rapidly, making the entire venture fail). That is astronomically high. But even that isn't counting the pension liabilities and indirect subsidies and risk assumptions that come with public ownership.
Your premise is wrong; the for-profit Internet service actually costs less than the publicly owned Internet service. The only reason the sticker price of the public service is lower is because it's subsidized.
No, I'm pointing out that spending $300 million on infrastructure isn't the actual cost of creating the network; you have to add to that the amount that that money would have earned had it not been taken away and used for this purpose.
Yes, because it's already rich Americans that received taxpayer money for the kind of infrastructure rich Americans like, and you pull it out of the pockets of poor Americans. You are a selfish prick, plain and simple.
Ah, the plot thickens: not only are you magnanimous with other people's money, you actually benefit financially from these projects. Thanks for clearing that up.
Yes, honey, you should take his advice, because you really are proving yourself to be a greedy privileged nerd and a beltway bandit (or local equivalent) all rolled in one.
No surprise. Large institutions with insufficient competition often breed a culture of waste and inefficiency. There's one exception: regardless of the inconvenience it would cause, I can always drop my telco.
Nobody would be stopping you from hiring a privately-owned commercial ISP, if you prefer.
That's an unreasonable statement. Most Americans, me included, have no choice but Comsuck and their 50 year old copper.
Not everyone can replace their internet provider because the only infrastructure is the old crap that Comsuck will not upgrade EVER.
As one who remembers working in pre-internet days and who asked the question as to whether we could improve the overseas delivery of information better than over somewhat quirky fax machines. That thinking primed the pump of the video to computer and OCR iterations that were pumping out smaller than forklift size keyboards posed and primed the thought pumps that evolved into the GUI of things that birthed the Internet delivery system. Then the weight of data I/O slowed delivery to a crawl as we moved leaps and bounds in modem speed, when we reached the 14.4 baud rate I posed the thought of an on-line video store streaming rented video and trumping hassle free movie rentals without need of returning videos to stores and facing those dreaded late fees! It was not until Big Telco evolved and began extending broadband to our homes with DSL over phone line [copper wire] to our offices and homes that things took off. What happened next took us back to the dark ages with phone and cable providers throttling the speed of the Internet instead of what had moved the true growth forward, speed and accurate delivery of data and imagery. But we as well as the municipalities who owned the poles that deliver the Internet to our homes and offices were snubbed as greed evolved in selling market baskets of baud rate for big bucks that in fact continued the recession longer than necessary as we were squeezed by Telco's and cable companies who were doing just fine as the rest of us tried to tighten our belts and survive. I agree that competition and the free use of the infrastructure by all. large, small and municipal are what's needed to keep us strong and vital instead of hostage to those who took advantage of municipal property and paid their way to what shapes up to be another quasi monopoly. If the municipalities took over, we could easily look at an end to municipal and state taxes from revenue alone along with lower prices for full throttle access that other competing nations enjoy to their competitive advantage. Lets step back in front as we did in the early nineties and put a rope around the abusers and throttle their obscene profits. My two cents worth, as adjusted for inflation;-)
Are you suggesting that the democratic experiment be abandoned and we go back to having a distant remote dictator decide how things should be?
No, did you even read what I said? It's as if I said, "I wish it weren't quite so cold today" and you came back with "So you would prefer to be in Antarctica"? Of course not, that's the exact opposite of what I want.
When my only say in government is "I hope this guy represents me", then I have a few problems: 1) "this guy" may not become elected despite your vote for him; 2) "this guy" may represent your will for some things but not others; and 3) "this guy" may have completely lied to you and not represent your will at all. Typically you have to live with those issues until the next election cycle, often years away. But the trade-off, what makes it better than direct democracy, is that I don't have to be at every meeting and vote on every little issue.
What could work then? I'm not certain but one idea is direct democracy with an appointed representative in my absence. It solves all of those problems:
1) your representative is appointed rather than elected, meaning you aren't part of the (sometimes large) minority whose representative was defeated
2) and 3) you vote directly on issues you care most about, and leave the other less-important issues to your representative
It's not without problems of its own (mostly logistical), but technology is advancing to the point that perhaps this barrier is eroding.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.