Legally protected status? The current removal of that legal protection is currently being fought in courts, once that gets cleared expect the minor violations that we have now to be expanded rapidly.
Most of this is standard Democratic boilerplate. It's how they have been trying to appeal to rural voters for at least the last decade. Obama ran on roughly the same plan in 2008. So did Hillary in 2016. Obama even brought it up during his debates with McCain.
Without Congress on board there's only so much you can do. Obama made some regulatory changes and shuffled some money around to get at this problem, but without a big pile of new money from Congress it's not going to do much.
seriously though. over the last few decades, economies around the globe have taken tax load off the bigger shoulders, and now the argument against any progressive agenda is "how would you ever finance this?"
Not that it's a generally bad question to ask, but I find it quite remarkable how deeply ingrained the notion is that you can't simply raise funds as a government, and how much that limits the (perceived, and by extension practical) agency of a government and "the people".
I find it quite remarkable how deeply ingrained the notion is that limiting the agency of government limits "the people".
Government isn't the only way people can get things done, and I think we should be resentful (and suspicious) of the argument that to fund and accomplish large tasks, we need to hold a gun to the heads of the people. Are we really so incapable of cooperation that we need tax men, followed by armed police, to ensure that businesses serve the customers who pay them? Just like Sears & Roebuck and Wells Fargo worked to bring good things from the cities to rural America, this situation could be resolved by private enterprise. I believe we would be farther along without government attempts to regulate the industry that have impeded its progress.
The problem with government is accountability. The government apparatus can make all kinds of promises, meanwhile, the citizens are too busy blaming each other - getting into partisan games - while the incompetent people just keep getting re elected without making progress. Exhibit A: Congress. A lot of folks who prefer this seem to believe that the government will make progress on its promises that it won’t just waste away tax payer money.
The problem with private enterprise is accountability too - they generally are accountable to someone, but that someone typically happens to be shareholders who truthfully don’t give a damn about much other than maximizing their returns. A lot of folks who blindly prefer this route are either the ones who have the most to gain (because they already have capital) or folks who just don’t understand the incentive structure.
Saying one side is always inherently better than the other is short sighted and more of a tribal belief in my opinion.
I don’t want FB to have my data and would prefer the government break up internet monopolies. I’m also not saying I want to live under Hugo Chavez. Unfortunately, at least in America, we love to go towards extremes. The civic discourse is lacking.
A couple counterpoints: first, sustainable profit in general happens when you serve your customers well. If you don't satisfy your customers, you don't make money — at least for long. The perverse incentive structures you mention are largely the result of unwise legislation and regulation.
Second, there's a real moral difference between the voluntary association among people in business and the coercive foundation of government. One is built on people wanting to trade value for value, and the other is built on armed military, police, and jailers. I would rather promote the former, even if it sometimes would be more efficient on the surface to force people to cooperate.
You can serve your customers and make a profit either way because you have effectively a monopoly. In the example of social media, you see FB now open and even advocating the government regulate social media - because it only makes it that much harder for the new guy to jump through the hoops whereas FB is already at more than critical mass.
I think your second point is overly simplifying a lot of complexity. I agree that government has this coercive function... However, it’s also true that unchecked private enterprise ends up influencing that government to meet their own special interests. You want to promote the former, but the former ends up making the large campaign contributions so they can have legislation written in their favor... laws that apply to the common person don’t apply to these big corporations. Hence, we socialize losses but privatize profits. The fat cats go to prisons (if ever) that are potentially comparable to high end hotels, nicer than the homes of many ordinary citizens.
I understand your criticism of my second point, but notice that for your criticism to be valid, there needs to be a government involved in forcefully regulating private industry. I reject that sort of government.
I’m not sure what your comment is getting at. Government exists because we need courts, cops, enforcement of contracts, some level of infrastructure for society to function - and whether you reject it or not, it does exist. But to concede power to private enterprise without any set of rules to protect the common good has no merit. The obvious examples are monopolies... and that’s only one kind of market failure.
As far as some moral conflict is concerned because of the policing powers of the state - that’s why we have something resembling a democracy, even if it’s imperfect.
> Are we really so incapable of cooperation that we need tax men, followed by armed police, to ensure that businesses serve the customers who pay them?
Empirically, the answer seems to "yes", at least in the USA.
Hospitals and insurance companies, higher education, private prisons, private companies operating water systems, drug companies, local internet monopolies, all seem to have a business model of stepping right up to the line of outright defrauding their customers, occasionally crossing that line, and constantly finding ways to avoid competing with each other and extracting more money from their customers for worse quality and service.
We have given the "free market" plenty of opportunities to provide improving quality at lower prices (the mantra of capitalist ideology), but in many of the most important markets, it has completely failed.
I'd like to point out that the industries you enumerate as serving the customers the worst are the most highly regulated. Is it possible that government intervention contributes to their poor quality and high prices?
Can you draw plausible cause and effect lines from regulations to lower quality and higher costs? (If it's higher costs enforcing higher quality, arguably the regulations are working as desired.)
Are there examples of countries with high quality outcomes and low costs where those industries are deregulated?
I would add the Republican party in the US is so incompetent and dysfunctional, they are unable to create concrete policy proposals or pass legislation, even when they had full control of the federal government. What concrete steps did they take to fix fundamentally broken industries like health care and higher education?
So I find myself drawn to Democrats like Bernie and Warren, at least they have plans to address these issues, and the status quo is unacceptable.
First, I'm completely in agreement on the Republican party. Both the main parties are a disaster, and their competition is stunted and ineffective. Part of that is because the two main parties are given all sorts of regulatory advantages by state and federal governments, and their competition is unfairly hobbled by the same. The favored parties' competitive abilities atrophy, and their competition cannot fully develop.
An analogous situation arises in business. When the government regulates quality and cost, it leaves businesses no natural path to profitability, so to allow them to survive, it must also interfere in competition, with subsidies, tariffs, and other measures, up to and including enforced monopoly. That keeps the natural economic processes that reward good quality and low price from operating --- the favored businesses cannot be displaced by their competition, and the effect of consumer dissatisfaction is blunted --- and provides the perverse incentives that create the problems you perceive in industry (and politics).
> seriously though. over the last few decades, economies around the globe have taken tax load off the bigger shoulders, and now the argument against any progressive agenda is "how would you ever finance this?"
US Government spending as a percentage of GDP has been fairly stable for decades. It's higher now than it was in 1970 -- the only time it has ever been substantially higher than it is now was World War II, and a transient spike a decade ago because of the housing bailout.
There are only two ways the government has ever really been able to spend more money on something. Grow the economy so that the same percentage of GDP is more money, or cut some other spending.
The lack of broadband in rural areas is more a legislation problem than a funding problem: presently, legislation is set in a way to strongly encourage localized monopolies in rural areas. There's little funding needed to pass laws to prevent this from happening, and half of what he seems to be proposing is legislation.
However, the specific amount he's proposing ($120,000,000,000 for a national initiative) is nowhere near unheard of, and actually normal for large infrastructure projects (remember, the grants rarely happen all at once).
Judging by his site, he intends to make a lot more initiatives plausible at once via a progressive (in the tax sense, which means only after a certain level of value, and only on value after that level) estate tax, a proposed piece of legislation to prevent tax dodging, taxing market speculators at an increased rate and cutting preexisting tax breaks for people with billions:
So, it's the usual "(try to) soak the rich" plan, with the inevitable extension down to more and more people when it generates less revenue than expected? No thanks. I mean, the stated goals are something that we should want, for the most part, but the funding schemes range from fantasyland to nonexistent.
>Where does he propose to get the funding for projects like this?
The same place we get money for the F-35, corporate welfare, and the hundreds of other bullshit handouts to the ultra-wealthy that benefit them at the expense of the rest of us.
From [0], the actual funding is a $150b fund from the Green New Deal, and $500m/yr in grants which will have to be allocated separately. The latter is puny from a federal POV. Note that the fund has a $7.5b earmark for Indian and Native relations, which is quite likely to find bipartisan support on its own and could be broken out into a smaller battle independent of Green New Deal.
Keep in mind that, even without this Green New Deal fund, much of the work he proposes is conceptually simple and cheap: Many folks believe that removing barriers to municipal and community-owned ISPs would be a profitable action for the USA on its own, and does not need further justification or funding. That is, it's seen as a problem of regulatory capture and corruption, and not of political willpower or constituent goodwill.
This is economic stimulus: The fund is expected to pay for itself by improving the lives of people around the country. If we use the 1/5 rule of thumb [1], then this is a wager that demolishing the ISP monopolies and regulatory capture, and supporting municipal ISP development and community-owned infrastructure, is worth $750b in toto, plus $2.5m/yr, over the next decade. [0] notes that there is an $40b/yr inefficiency in terms of ISP profit, so we could hope that over a decade, we might reap a $400b boon to the collective taxpayer's worth, and after paying back our portion of Green New Deal, and even if we only get 80% yield, that's still a $200b profit in our worth.
To be more clear: $20b/yr across ~100m taxpayers with cable bills is around $200/yr; Bernie's betting that he can not only improve our cable bills, but generally improve the wealth of the typical taxpayer/billpayer.
I will preface this with, my internet costs a ton and i would love it to be cheaper.
My issues with the government running the internet is, first money. They say they are going to end price gouging, but they will spend billions, if they succeed wont the taxes the telecoms pay be gone and wont it cost more. Also then the US government controls the internet from your house. ISP's spying is bad enough.
I am probably wrong on both of these minor complaints, and i would love to see cheap fast internet.
Gesture widely at "billionaires", "wall street", and "military spending" as wells of resources that will also get us free universal health care, free college, a federal jobs guarantee, and free public housing (and more).
Sounds great, right? Does the math check out? Probably not, but it wouldn't matter anyway.
The president is not a king, and even with both houses of congress under democratic control (not even close to a given under a Sanders presidency), legislators in swing constituencies are not about to put their seat in jeopardy because of huge projects they never themselves ran under and committed to.
But Sanders loses nothing by making promises like this. It's all in hopes that his campaign gets traction before he loses Iowa/New Hampshire.
Our subway and water systems are “public utilities” supporting “good paying union jobs.” How many of them would rank in the top 10-15 in the world? (Note that no country in the top 10 treats broadband like a publicly owned utility.) Moreover, the median age of municipal election voters is 57. What trade offs are they going to want to make in balancing rates versus maintenance and upgrades? (There is a reason that our water infrastructure, for example, is facing a one trillion investment shortfall.)
Sanders proposes to spend $150 billion on broadband. Over what time frame? If it’s the typical 10-year time frame candidates have been using for budget proposals, that’s just about 1/5 of what the private sector is investing in broadband annually.
Public broadband is going to be an $80 billion a year commitment just for capital expenditures. If you demand those be tied to “good paying union jobs” be ready to make it $120 billion or more. Add in operational expenditures, be ready to triple that.
Telecom is a huge sector. Even if you subtract the profits, you’re talking several hundred billion of dollars annually. That’s half the size of the military budget.
It’s not misleading. The US broadly adopted cable because the market was mostly deregulated. Europe tends to lag on these measures because it’s more top-down regulated markets tried to evolve the existing phone network with DSL. So the few places that have fiber have great speeds, while everyone else is stuck with DSL. The US has an entire additional infrastructure that offers much faster speeds than DSL. Countries like France and Spain are now rolling out fiber, but the US has enjoyed a huge advantage in speeds for most of the 21st century because of cable.
You realize you cannot make such broad generalizations about Europe? Cable internet has been available and very popular in several countries. And DSL doesn't have to suck, G.fast offers speeds above 500Mbps. Also FTTH rollout has started long ago in most countries.
Even in rural areas the coverage is typically pretty good when horizontal deployment is done by municipalities or local utilities. And you see the exact same thing in the US.
You can make generalizations about Europe. Most of the EU population lives in just five countries: the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. The US has faster internet than all of them, although Spain is pulling ahead in a couple of recent surveys.
> The US has an entire additional infrastructure that offers much faster speeds than DSL.
Maybe download speeds, and even then, probably subject to a temporary boost while the ISPs slows down other people in the neighborhood.
The fact that no upload speeds are ever advertised means to me that the ISP hasn’t made any hardware or capacity improvements or, they’re just reallocating what they already have.
Either way, who cares what other countries have and don’t have. It’s pitiful what the “greatest” country on earth can’t manage to offer due to monopolies having a disincentive to offer it, since they also sell TV and phone service, which they would lose revenue from if people had decent internet connections.
Getting a new phone line and getting fiber run are not really comparable services. There's a massive infrastructure that already exists to get your phone connected; a one-month lag is remarkable in that context. Your fiber delivery was probably a bona fide construction project, in addition to whatever cooperation needed to occur between you, whoever your fiber was run to, and whoever was installing it.
Why would you sum it up instead of looking at percentages?[1] AT&T’s profit margin is under 10%. For wireline, Verizon’s is under 5%. Eliminating the profits isn’t going to change
[1] I know why Sanders does it, because he is catering to people who are outraged at the thought of “billions in profit” even if that only represents a single-digit percent of revenue. Indeed, if you go read Sanders’ proposal, he makes a point of stating how AT&T’s CEO made $33 million, as if that isn’t a drop in the bucket for a company that spends $140 billion a year on opex.
I would because they are spending barely 40 of that on telco. Most of it is being spent on their content play to capture "premium" customers i.e. not the 163 million Microsoft claims don't have basic broadband speed internet access. Might as well just divide the country and be done with it, if you are quite happy with the direction Big Telco will take us.
Yup looks like I jumped the gun there. I was looking at mobility group opex - 41 billion (150 million subscribers). Assumed rest was content (hbo/warner/turner etc). They have a header called "entertainment group" opex - 36 which I assumed was content. Digging deeper "entertainment group" was actually cable and satellite.
The inequality in access to service around the US is stark. I'm currently living in a suburb of a large city, and have some of the most awesome internet I've ever had (I can finally host my minecraft server from home!). My parents living an hour away in a small town pay more for service that can't reliably stream video... but pay slightly more than I do. It's one of the thousands of small cuts that are killing rural areas.
I hear this argument framed so many ways, but to me it always comes down to the simple fact: if you put distance between yourself and the rest of civilization, don’t be surprised when you don’t reap the same benefits from that civilization.
Someone has to do it. The people in "civilization" (as you put it) need food, minerals, etc. The people in rural areas are the one's supplying it. They're the farmers, ranchers, miners, etc.
To be fair, they already get significant subsidies and various preferential tax arrangements to compensate for this, at least in the US and many other western countries.
This is not how one should look at utilities to be delivered to all citizens. It's cheaper to run internet infra in the suburbs and rural areas due to lower per mile buildout costs (have you ever been in a vault under a major downtown core roadway pulling fiber during the day?), this is just a matter of having the fortitude to put good public policy to work (monetary policy, construction jobs).
Clean water, sewer, electric, internet, and USPS logistics service are table stakes (in the US). It's silly to make this out to be "Live in the suburbs or rural areas? Mad Max for you!".
Counterpoint: How's that cheap, high speed Gb FTTH internet working out for you in downtown NYC or SF? /s
Hum interesting. I wonder if your neglecting the cost of installing wells and septic systems. The running costs are doubtless lower until you have to replace something expensive.
I haven't though directly seen the cost difference though. I just know growing up one the big things the neighborhood wanted was a connection to city water
I suspect it varies a lot by region,here in NW Oregon we don't really need very deepwells and we used composting toilets so our septic system was really underutilized.
Well and Septic are free, unless you include the maintenance and installation costs, which are substantial. 20k+ to drill a well in some places, electricity to run it, maintenance when the pump breaks, things like that. Septic has to be pumped sometimes, clogs sometimes, again probably 20k+ to install, etc.
That's such an useless approach to any discussion. People live under a power structure (democratic government) and expect some things from it. We can all blame each other for the choices we make but choices have a glass ceiling and casting stones will break yours too.
You don't accept bad air quality, traffic, crime, consumerism pressure, ads on every street corner, weak and shallow local communities, and proclame "well don't be surprised because you chose civilization". You expect and demand improvements like any other decent human being.
The question is who should pay for it. There are plenty of areas of rural America where the houses may be quite far apart - it might legitimately costs tens of thousands of dollars per hookup to bring fiber. That money will effectively never be recovered - no one is going to pay $500/month for home internet. Keep in mind there are significant portions of the country that don't even have access to water or sewer utilities (wells and septic only) - its just not practical.
Giving money to big telco's hasnt worked. I think the best way to cover rural areas is wireless, via local WISPs or local government run ISPs. It would be nice to see some of the low-band spectrum being reclaimed from TV stations (sub 1GHz) go towards these efforts, since higher bands wont be able to cover as much area.
If only that argument worked in the Bay Area, where your best option is Comcast Cable and the electric utility can’t keep the lights on, despite being one of the most populated metro areas in the country.
A sizeable amount of the Bay Area has fiber available from ATT - I'm buying it resold via Sonic, since its the same price and you dont ever have to deal with ATT technical support.
That sounds so much different if you phrase it as "if you're born in the wrong place, don't be surprised when you reap less benefits". Most people don't choose where they live.
How about this framing: are non-coastal residents supposed to subsidize the costs of sea level rise and climate change damage for future coastal residents?
It's shitty to hang people out to dry, but at the same time, people MUST move in the above example. Coastal residents can't do whatever they want and expect others to share the costs.
Distances in the US can be so much bigger than in other countries, leading to rural areas being much more rural than in pretty much any other developed country. This makes servicing some rural communities very expensive. Not only for ISPs but for pretty much any infrastructure. Living in a rural area is a decision, that's fine for people to make, but I'm not sure we all need to be subsidizing it. Yes, cities have become very expensive, but it would be much cheaper as a society to solve that problem by getting rid of NIMBY regulation and make it easier and cheaper to build denser than to keep maintaining small, remote settlements with very little economic value
Cities have some of the most expensive internet rates. The US has some of the most expensive internet in the entire world. Your distance argument only makes sense if you take away the billions given to ISPs to lay black fiber. Cities would be super cheap internet. That's not what happened. ISPs charge exorbitant fees for a service they barely keep up to date. Remote settlements are often what allows those cities to exist and who are you to tell people where and how they should live?
People can and should live anywhere they want. We however should not subsidize it. This way the true cost of living there is apparent, and if the services/resources they provide are needed then the cost of those services/resources will need to go up so that they can afford to live there.
Survey after survey shows that the US beats most large European countries for internet speeds. So how does the meme that ISPs barely keep the service up to date survive?
There's always immense lag between when the anti-US propaganda online catches up with reality.
For example, the US has a great beer market now. It took several years before US beer - as a broad concept - was removed from the official foreigner list of things to bash the US with (which still includes such fan favorite fallback items as American cheese and Hershey chocolate).
That the US has had faster Internet access than most of Europe - including Germany and France - for the past decade, is a bash list counter that people intentionally pretend doesn't exist. It's very inconvenient reality and your typical American has no idea what the access speeds are across Europe, so they can't counter argue properly.
The access cost issue is also - fairly - of course on the bash list, although people never adjust for the far higher US incomes when pointing it out, naturally.
The US rolled out 4G much faster than Europe and it's going to roll out 5G much faster than Europe. That too is universally, intentionally ignored (despite the stream of articles you can google on the subject reporting how far behind Europe was in rolling out 4G and now again with 5G). That despite the fact that these items are matters of infrastructure and the US is supposed to be the worst on the planet when it comes to infrastructure (the US is spending more of its GDP on infrastructure than the EU).
Which US city vs which European city? What metric? Median throughput? 99th percentile latency? Worst case packet loss? Is the average good but some places really terrible while in Europe the worst case is closer to the average?
I'm not saying that there aren't systemic problems with ISPs in the US. I don't think the market is properly solving the issue on many areas because there is no significant competition. The impact from Google just announcing fiber coming at some point to an area was significant. Also net neutrality should be a no-brainer. I'm however unwilling to focus on bringing the wonders of civilization to people who decided to move as far away as possible from it.
I also might be disgruntled because it's largely the same people who then turnaround and punish you for it with their vote.
There's truth to that, but affordable rural high speed internet is possible. Paul Bunyan Communications in northern Minnesota, for example, runs affordable fiber optic service deep into the country. My friend lives 25 miles from any town, and they happily ran fiber out to his house. The main difference between Paul Bunyan Communications and other rural providers who claim that such a thing is "impossible" seems to be that Paul Bunyan is a Co-operative: https://paulbunyan.net/cooperative/our-history/
I don't know. The website says that there's an $85 activation fee, and my friend's income is such that a large installation fee would have been impossible for him (just like most folks in the north woods!).
I genuinely don’t understand how this is possible/profitable. $80/mo is just shy of $10,000 in $10yr. Even if all of that is marginal profit (e.g., the costs to them after running the lines once are zero), there’s no way that pays for the crews to lay even 10mi of fiber.
I asked a customer service rep about it on the online chat. Here's what they said (I doubt they'd mind me posting it here):
16:10:46 Thank you for contacting us. An operator will be with you shortly.
16:10:46 Guest: Is there an installation fee for Gigazone internet?
16:11:08 Guest: Hi, I see that there's an $85 activation fee, but is there also an additional installation fee?
16:11:40 Operator JJ joined the chat
16:11:47 JJ: Hi there!
16:11:51 Guest: Hi!
16:12:13 JJ: There is no installation fee. It is rolled in with the activation fee which is waived if you sign a 6 month contract.
16:12:54 Guest: That's great--I was discussing this with friends and we can't figure out how it's possible! How can you afford to run fiber optic out into the country and charge so little for it?
16:14:36 Guest: Part of why I ask is because almost no other rural areas have this figured out
16:14:56 JJ: Well, there's a couple of ways. For a long time we required our members to have phone lines along with our internet service as there are a number of government grants that we can qualify for as long as we're building rural telephone infrastructure. That's the reason we still are required to require phone service in some of our service area.
16:15:13 Guest: I see, cool
16:15:52 JJ: Secondly, we're a co-op and committed to the community. If we plow a fiber line to your home and you end up moving some time in the future, the line remains for some other lucky co-op member in the future. It's kind of a "long-game" mentality.
The missing factor may very well be taxes and corporate accounting. If the ISP is writing off the cost of running the lines as a capital expenditure and are further able to reduce their tax burden from amortization over the life of the lines that $80/mo could conceivably be all profit.
+1 - VTel [0] provides symmetric gigabit fiber to rural communities in Vermont for ~$80/mo. Again, they are a co-op. The other benefit is that their customer support is spectacular.
> Living in a rural area is a decision, that's fine for people to make, but I'm not sure we all need to be subsidizing it.
Sure... I can see your point that it “is a decision” for folks that choose to move to a rural area, but I don’t believe that’s the case for the other 99% of folks living there.
it's totally off-topic to the discussion of this thread, but that 'cheap food' is cheap very much in part to government subsidies, already.
if subsidies weren't already being used by those supplying the food, entire businesses and families would fail. 'feeding the nation' isn't all that profitable without subsidies, from most angles.
so, I guess my point is that 'we'll stop supplying you with cheap food' is a hollow threat, given that the cheap food is over-produced and under-valued for the sake of an artificial economy that's largely enforced and legislated by 'citydwellers'. Most of the motivation to supply food is drawn from the incentives provided by the few in legislative power, not from profit nor moral imperative from 'rural-livers'.
Cheap food is "overproduced" so that a bad storm doesn't cause the price of bread to rise 3x in a week. Without food subsidies, food shortages are a constant threat.
We subsidize the cheap food, but whatever, I'm fine with that.
Let the market incorporate the costs of broadband access into the price of food. The extra cost will almost certainly amount to fractions of a cent on the dollar.
Exactly: you receive cheap food in the city because it's subsidized. You are a beneficiary. Why should that be? Living in a city where it's impossible to grow food is a choice. So let's end that, along with internet subsidies (of which I'm a beneficiary) and we'll see if you're better off.
While it is true that the US is very sprawling, it is absolutely ridiculous that in 2019 internet giants haven't provided basic internet access to rural areas.
I am really not a big fan of the democratic party at large but a plan like this to take power away from the large internet monopoloies is going to be one of the only ways to make sure that internet infrastructure is kept up to date and that fast internet is available to everyone in the US.
Infrastructure like the internet pipes shouldn't be privately owned, simply because they value profit over maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure.
Maybe we can compromise with a system I have heard of ( in the nordic countries I believe) Where the local municipalities own the wires but you buy the service from a number of internet companies who rent the lines and provide service. This would increase competition and allow for private companies to not have to worry about the cost of upgrading the infrastructure.
It’s funny you mention the Nordic countries. People always take one piece of the Nordic solution then ignore the other pieces. It’s true that in Stockholm, a publicly owned entity (Stokab) owns the fiber. But:
1) It receives no public funding.
2) It has few public mandates or price controls. (No, “must offer subsidized service to disenfranchised people” or similar requirements.)
3) It faces no build-out or universal service requirements. It took Stokab almost 20 years to wire the city. They did it based entirely on demand/revenue potential. They deployed first to businesses and areas with the most revenue potential. Stokab didn’t need public funding because it could deploy in a revenue-directed manner. This is illegal in almost every US city. New York flipped out and tried to file a civil rights lawsuit when Verizon couldn’t meet the five year deadline for wiring the city.
4) It charges large up front fees to hook up to the network.
Stokab would be burned to the ground with civil rights lawsuits if it was attempted in New York or San Francisco.
Likewise, Sweden’s approach to wiring rural areas was very market oriented. Unlike the US, it didn’t mandate providers to serve rural areas (cross subsidizing them with revenues from urban areas). It gave rural homeowners a tax credit of about $600 to subsidize laying their own fiber.
$600? Every time I’ve ever seen anyone talk about getting lines run for rural internet, the price starts at tens of thousands even if there is a line nearby already.
Burial fiber is like 20~40ct/m. Whether you can get a bucket wheel trench excavator through it at speed or have to dig by hand depends on what's in the ground and how hard the ground is, and how long the stretches are.
Otherwise, it's like 10~20min to sufficiently properly terminate the fiber at the ends and that. You can likely get around that if you just order pre-terminated fiber at like 1$/plug and just plug it in at the ends instead of splicing. Sure, this will higher losses, but money.
Fiber is literally cheaper than copper for >150m or >=10Gbit/s (though direct-attach cables up to 3~5m are even cheaper) if you can get by without field-terminating fibers.
This is a 'never seen a shovel yuppie' price. You can rent a walk behind trencher at ~$100-200/day or ~$1-2K/month, it will do 50 meters/day of 1 meter deep trench. Need to lay something in a 40 degree hill overgrown with trees? $200/day AirSpade will do 20 meters/day. Want to hire contractor subcontracting 3 layers deep? that will be $10K.
>While it is true that the US is very sprawling, it is absolutely ridiculous that in 2019 internet giants haven't provided basic internet access to rural areas.
The contiguous United States is 3,119,884.69 square miles (the United States makes up a little less than 1/3 of North America). There are individual states larger than several European and Asian countries.
Sure, there's not someone living in every single square mile but they are spread out. The fastest I can get at home, in a city fo nearly 900k people, is 75mbps down without going to a business line. Even delivering that speed to 80% of the population would probably require several billion in just equipment (lines included).
I think you're just making my point for me. The telco companies have made several times that in the past 10 years. There is simply not enough reinvested into the infrastructure.
Yes they've made profits, but as it stands now I can get in my car and drive 5 minutes and not be able to get AT&T Uverse but I"ll be able to get Comcast where at home I can get Uverse AND Comcast but can't get Spectrum.
To go into a market, an ISP has to be able to reasonably recover their roll-out costs from that market. If they spend xxx dollars rolling out to a town, and then if they can hope to sell service to 75% of the homes, but are only going to make 0.5x or even xx of that back each year as profit, is it reasonable for them to spend xxx amount just to deploy when it might be a decade or more before they recover their initial investment? And what about the (likely) x to xx a year to maintain the equipment from squirrels/birds/storms/drunk drivers, and then upgrading the technology etc.
It's great when you have a small country, that you can drive across in a day, but when you're talking about 1/3 of a continent everything is orders of magnitude more expensive and more difficult.
I think people easily fall into the "well that country has it!" but they don't realize that "that" country is tiny. Let's take the country with the fastest internet [1], Taiwan, with an average speed of 85.02Mbps - it is 13,974 square miles, that's 0.44% (zero point four four) of the contiguous United States. 41 states are larger than Taiwan.
This exact same issue prevented rural communities from getting access to electric power for many decades. It wasn't until the 1930s and the New Deal that it was solved, and that required the Federal government stepping in and building out power infrastructure, through programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority) and the Rural Electrification Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act).
Today we take it for granted that you can go anywhere in the United States and flip a light switch to turn on a light. But without that public investment, there would be big swathes of the country still living by the light of candles and oil lamps.
These problems can be solved, but the private sector will never solve them, because the profit motive isn't there for them to do so. It requires public investment.
I would agree except that we wired all rural areas with power and phone lines when it was far more expensive and had far less utility than internet alone has now.
Also, you claim that "remote settlements" have little economic value, and yet their economic value is highly restricted when they don't have access to the internet so how can we claim that to be true?
One could say that about the U.S. highway system too, though. And some do, advocating the privatized highways some states have adopted. But I would argue that things like internet and highway do not make sense to be privatized because they are inherently centralized and monopolistic - you can't have two competing sets of roads in the same location, and can only have so many cables going through the same neighborhood. It's a massive inefficiency to let the free market do its work in these regions and leads to monopolistic behaviors. Since nearly everyone uses internet and to a relatively consistent degree, it's a pretty reasonable candidate for centralized subsidy and/or control.
Unless you're lucky, even major cities have expensive and bad options. In Helsinki I paid $40 for a 500/500 line. In Seattle I pay $70 for 70/5 I believe and no better options available (I could pay a lot more for a bit more downstream). In whats supposed to be one of the top 2 tech cities in the country.
I'm quite lucky. I live in southern Utah. I pay $65 for 1 Gig down, and I think 60 MB up. I was paying $95, but they moved to 1 plan only (dropped the 100MB plan), and re-branded, I'm not complaining! This is a rural area, maybe 50k people in the entire county.. I mean it's a city but a really small city.. (I'm from dayton/cincinnati area... so compared to t here, it's a very small city :D.
Yes, a company like Google should do it instead, so they can also kick you off your internet when your account with them is terminated for some opaque reason. /s
They will already censor or intercept anything they can if they want to, whether it's public or private infrastructure. Why not treat internet like other utilities and install fibre everywhere, with your choice of ISP? This was working well in Australia, until the Coalition ruined it.
I'd still rather it in the hands of government than a monopoly corporation.
If multiple companies are competing, I'd much rather get services from the market rather than the government, because I can vote with my wallet, and companies respond to that.
But if I must use a single monopoly company that provides a service, I'd much rather get services from the government, because at least I have some semblance of a vote in the form of my actual vote. With a single corporate provider of a utility, I have no say at all.
> With a single corporate provider of a utility, I have no say at all.
Which is honestly the case in couple instances in my life. I have moved around the US NE quite a bit and multiple places I have lived only offer Verizon or Comcast but only one or the other. The current place I am in is Verizon which is fantastic because dealing with Comcast has always been a massive time sink and emotional/mental strain but I still have no choice in who provides me service.
When many large British companies were in state hands (up until the 1980s) there was no accountability. Customers were ignored because they had no alternative. The law - sensibly enough - didn't allow politicians to interfere in the running of the companies so they were basically unaccountable. That's how you got waiting lists of more than a decade for a phone line.
One of the Tory ministers responsible for privatizing utilities in the 1980s said they did it because the utilities would be easier to control as private companies with a regulator.
>The law - sensibly enough - didn't allow politicians to interfere in the running of the companies so they were basically unaccountable.
I'm not sure how that's sensible. Are you being sarcastic?
Sure, there are problems with political intervention in state-owned companies (near term bias, etc.), but if it's the only means of holding state-owned companies accountable, and if a competitive market is untenable, then yes, voter-accountable politicians should be able to intervene in state-owned companies.
As it stands, with a company like PG&E, you have a half-solution, where it's a privately-owned monopoly but isn't directly accountable to its customers because they can't vote with their wallet, so it gets metric tons of regulation dumped on it instead as a half-measure that (obviously) doesn't work.
Food in the US is regularly subsidized, especially meat. It's how we compete unfairly with the rest of the world. ISPs already receive massive subsidies to have laid fiber they decided not to lay. They kept the money though. The US pays more for healthcare and receives poorer results on average than anywhere else in the world. Pretty sure you're unfamiliar with the differences between socialism and communism. The US is a heavily socialist state with massive corporate welfare plans. Instead of spending our money on taking care of our people we take care of the wealthy.
Sanders litterally wrote the damn bill for free-at-use medical coverage.
Current policy already has mechanisms (broken though they may be) to provide affordable medicine to people, ranging from government provided medicaid to income based discounts on drugs.
Current policy provides subsidized food to everyone in the country (and outside of the country, which is something of a sticking point on trade negotiations). We additionally provide further subsidies on a need based basis through the SNAP program (aka, food stamps).
Prices are already highly regulated for other utilities like electric and water (although, I am not sure what regulationd exist at the federsl level here)
EDIT: also, China is a rapidly growing economy that has overall had very succesfull policies. We should not blindly copy what they do, but "China did it" is not a convincing arguement.
For rural areas, with all of the low earth orbit internet constellations being proposed, I'd rather wait to see how they end up doing rather than massively investing in laying down a ton of fiber at enormous costs especially when spacex has already demonstrated speeds of 610 megabits per-second to a flying airplane [0] and their expected cost is $10 billion [1] which is 1/15th of the $150 billion dollar plan Bernie is proposing.
The USPS is fantastically more efficient than private mail. The entire insurance industry relies on Medicare to even begin negotiating prices. Even Amtrak, for all its faults, is far better at providing service than private trains.
In other countries, where foolish attempts to involve predatory private industry or outright hamstring government programs, state-owned enterprise is even better. Healthcare, trains, power- all drastically outcompete private industry. Not to mention the fact that in-house military hardware is years ahead of industry stuff.
There is nothing that makes governments less efficient than private industry. At every level, people are getting paid based on the job they do. People are fired if they are a waste. The only argument of perverse incentives that makes any sense is that the things governments do are not necessarily needed, not that they aren't done well.
The idea that the government doesn't operate well is a complete myth.
USPS is only more "efficient" in certain areas of mail because the other players are legally prohibited from using the infrastructure: UPS and FedEx are not allowed to deliver non-urgent letters and may not use U.S. Mail boxes at residential and commercial destinations.
The USPS also has the benefit of being able to lose $7 billion per year and not go out of business, and I'd hardly say that is "efficiency".
How is any player supposed to compete against something like that?
At what latency and upload speeds? Satellite internet has historically been high latency and ultra-low upload speeds; not an ideal condition for internet. Sure, if you have no other option, satellite will work, but fiber will blow it out of the water.
It's important to distinguish between Starlink and the old kind of satellite internet - they are entirely different.
Latency will be on par with using a VPN a few hundred miles away (the satellites are in low earth orbit, not geostationary like previous generations). Upload speeds will also not be like with previous satellite internet, which often used dial-up for upload because the satellite+dish setup was not designed to receive signals from users on the ground.
Existing satellite ISPs have their satellites stationed in geosynchronous orbit, which is like 35,000 km above sea level. This allows them to send up fewer satellites, since they have a line of sight to more of the Earth's surface. However, that distance that results in those high propagation delays.
SpaceX (et al) have a different strategy. They are instead sending satellites to Low Earth Orbit, so they'll be about 500 km above sea level. As a result, the propagation delay will not be nearly as bad. Perhaps under 50 ms, compared to the 600 ms I've seen on geosynchronous satellite internet.
At that low altitude, you need a lot more satellites (because each satellite can only "see" a small-ish area of the earth), so they need to send a swarm of those satellites. This is now possible because satellites are much smaller and cheaper than they used to be.
Will fiber blow it out of the water? Yes. Will The phone company run a fiber line out to my house for less than thousands of dollars? No. Would they do it if there's some competition from above? Maybe so.
Satellite internet like Starlink will actually be lower latency than fiber, since light travels faster in a vacuum and unlike fiber the constellation will be point to point rather then zig zagging between cities on the ground.
Providing 610 megabits to a moving plane is great and all, but can you provide gigabit internet speeds to literally millions of people at the same time? I find it hard to believe that the spacex satellites will be able to handle that kind of load anytime soon.
42,000 satellites × 21 gbps per satellite for first gen satellites × (2,959,064.44 miles squared in continental us ÷ 196,900,000 miles squared on earth) = 13,254 gbps over continental us assuming they are evenly orbiting around the planet (they won't be and instead most will cluster around continents but let's make it easy). 2% of the US population are farmers * 325,000,000 Americans = about 6 million people. At an over subscription ratio of 5:1 (Google search gave many different answers for this so no idea on what wireless networks actually use) gives users 10 mbps which isn't too bad and you can multiple that by 15 if you want to match Bernies planned cost by launching 15 times more satellites.
Use the same guiding spirit as the rural electrification project of the 1930's to get this done. Bringing symmetrical broadband service to every address in the US is just as important as electrifying the countryside was back then.
We tried tax breaks--hell, we even tried simply giving companies like comcast billions to do the job. Instead they just took the money and didn't do anything. If we the people want something done, we have to do it ourselves.
Decades of productivity of improvements make higher labor costs completely bearable. In fact, one might say that is the fundamental basis of advancing civilization.
Has that really affected labor costs related to broadband rollout? We're still sticking wires up on poles or in the ground - from what I can tell by using the same machinery we have for decades now.
Small scale digging & semi-automated specialized trenching equipment makes for smaller crews, smaller capital investment, and less time to dig a given trench. (Did you know that there's a delightfully named machine called a Ditch Witch?)
For another, the equipment you need to support a given level of bandwidth has dropped orders of magnitude in cost. For another, endpoint hookups are faster and easier, we know much better how to splice fiber faster and cheaper. etc etc... it takes a real lack of imagination to claim it's the same as when we put in electricity and telephone networks or even early fiber or copper networks.
Alon Levy mainly cites the flawed design-build model where design and construction contracts are awarded to the same firm as well as the comparatively high cost of TBM use for deep stations / tunnels versus cut-and-cover construction techniques for simpler, shallow stations.
Underground work is multiple times cheaper these days and aerial installations are easier than ever because you can wrap fiber over already existent copper phone lines. And even when doing aerials, you don't even need any kind of certifications or permits because you are never going past phone line height towards power.
Your arguments are the same exact same arguments big companies had when rolling out the initial electrical and phone grids, and yet today we would find it ridiculous if you said you weren't able to get electrical service to your house.
This is exactly right! A "new" New Deal which in part addresses the USA's crumbling and outdated infrastructure would be a far better solution than the patchwork of government-guaranteed corporate monopolies we have now.
I don't know; my ISP has raised my bill by 50% over the last three years. My only other option is EarthLink, and they charge... wait for it... the exact same price. I live just outside Austin.
It only appears useless now because nobody has it, so there are no business models that depend on it.
Symmetrical broadband enables a lot of really interesting p2p use cases that are otherwise infeasible. Think content distribution, routing, etc. You don’t need to be part of the tech crowd to benefit from p2p software.
If everyone had upload speeds as fast as download speeds, “personal clouds” and a “data center in every home” would be real possibilities.
My parents have no access to high speed internet, except over 4G. Which I find unacceptable. Even DSL would be fine...but ISPs have discontinued that and are expanding fiber. So that basically adds maybe 5-10 more years before they'd ever get it?
I generally don't agree with Bernie's whole premise here, but I do think he has the right idea. We should up high speed requirements, but also OTA should not count. The reason wireless (5G, 4G, Satellite) shouldn't count is...well the data caps are so limiting that you can't possibly do anything with the service. Or the equipment and setup is so expensive you'd have to be a company to afford it. I don't agree that high speed is a "human right," I really think such statements add nothing of value and make such proposals easy to mock. The argument should simply be to treat high speed land lines as a public utility and requirement, like electricity.
Instead of saying OTA doesn't count, why don't you just set the requirements as both speed and data cap requirements? So that an OTA solution that has high enough speed and high enough data caps would count.
I don't think encoding a current limitation into law is a good idea. If they can provide a wireless internet that meets the requirements, that is good enough for me.
I’d add a latency maximum too, which would be low enough to disqualify wireless connections. A fiber circuit to each home is the minimum I would accept.
While I agree access to the wealth of information on the internet should be a right, I don't think it's necessary to require every household to have gaming level latency. OTA latency is generally good enough for doing what really matters on the internet.
It really helps with communications, and there’s just no reason not to since a symmetric connection is going to be fiber anyway, might as well beef it up for low marginal cost and make it a little future proof.
Using the internet with connections that have 5ms latency is a far better experience than 100ms, especially with real time communications. Also, everyone should have symmetric connections, none of this 250mbps down and 3mbps up BS.
I wonder what the cost would be to run low latency fiber to every single home in the entire country, regardless of geographic remoteness (it is a human right after all, per Bernie).
What are the benefits of wiring up every home with a connection capable of high quality video calls and data transfers? Remote work, teaching, medical exams, etc.
This country built an interstate system 70 years ago involving tons and tons of labor, asphalt, concrete, and continuous repairs. I find it hard to believe running fiber cables to be a challenge.
The biggest cost is Comcast’s share price going down as they lose the ability to rent seek on customers for being a useless middleman peddling “TV” and substandard internet.
On the other end of the spectrum, why does the federal government spend money on the "interstate" highway in Hawaii? Why does every state (even Wyoming) have two senators?
I think we should have use common sense here. Fiber deployment is expensive but it is probably worth pulling fiber at least to every post office in these United States.
> Do you literally mean internet access in the post office building, or are you using that as a metonym for population centers?
I didn't even know the word metonym but you said it better than I could have. Yes, I mean population centers. I mean we have to be reasonable. If someone moves to the South Pole and demands we run fiber there, we might have to say no. I don't know where we exactly draw the line though. My understanding is that there is a lot of "dark fiber" criss crossing the country that can be "lit up" so the "long haul" isn't so much of a problem as the "last mile". I could be wrong though. I don't know much about these things.
We’re talking about equipping fellow citizens with the ability to work from home and have equal opportunity to create and distribute intellectual property, as well as possibly facilitating things such as video appointments with doctors and teachers and whatnot.
The productivity improvements of high bandwidth low latency connections are numerous. Just like building the interstate highway and a network of roads did, or water, or gas, or sewage.
Latency to where? Latency is not a metric that applies to a single connection, it can only be measure when you have two systems that communicate to each other. 5ms to your router doesn't matter if everything you are connecting to is 500ms away from that.
The best internet in the world, located in a major city, will have around 15ms latency to the closest datacenter. Wireless solutions can easily achieve that.
I have a fiber circuit for one of my businesses that has sub 10ms and sub 5ms latency to most large websites. I understand that certain latencies are not possible for every point to every point, but I’m using it as a proxy for the quality of the connection. Easiest way for me to discern the quality of my internet connection is to check the latency. All of my good fiber circuits are extremely low latency, and all of the terrible residential cable company connections split between 1,000 homes have terrible high latency (and upload bandwidth).
You must be very close to a large datacenter that houses the CDNs used by those large websites if you are seeing sub 5ms latency.
For any of the users we are talking about (underserved populations in areas without fiber internet), they will never see those latencies even with the same fiber you have.
If you live in rural Wyoming, there are going to be practically zero services hosted within 500 miles of you. You are not going to get 5ms latency no matter what you do.
Yes, I’m in a major population center. But whatever the case, a symmetric fiber connection would be a solid improvement over the nonsense coaxial situation we have now.
I guess, but my point is that for many people in rural and underserved locations, they won't notice any performance difference between fiber and a coaxial connection, for example.
Insisting that EVERYONE has to get fiber, even when that won't change their performance experience, only slows down the actual service of their needs.
This is like any sort of performance engineering problem; focusing on an area that is no where close to becoming the bottleneck is not an efficient use of resources.
So you can never talk to someone across the country? We are limited by the speed of light, you are never going to get sub 100ms latency across the globe.
The speed of light through optical fiber is slower than the speed of electromagnetic waves through air, so good wireless could be lower latency than good fiber.
Yes, but for whatever reason, no wireless connection is as good as a wired connection today, and as far as I know, wired will still be superior to wireless for a long time.
With 5G, the 'air latency' will be about 8-12ms. That is about the same as a wired connection (from your house to the ISP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G
I guess it would depend, I do understand that they could build a 4G tower near everyone that serves well and has no datacaps...but what happens when people clog up the tower? Wireless has a lot of problems landlines (generally) don't have. I guess OTA would be fine, if the telecom could prove that it could handle over a certain amount of traffic without throttling (this is generally why throttling exists.)
The same thing that happens when wired ISPs oversubscribe their infrastructure. Users get less than than theoretical maximum speed. Wireless infrastructure doesn’t inherently have this problem and wired infrastructure doesn’t inherently solve it. The bigger problem with wireless internet access is probably geographical constraints where neighboring sites can have drastically different quality depending on what is between them and the closest tower.
Satellite broadband is incredibly expensive and has data caps that are no different than 4G at around 5 - 15GB/month. Some setup costs are up near $500 and require a 1-2 year contract.
> So that basically adds maybe 5-10 more years before they'd ever get it?
They'll have access to Starlink within the next few years. Proper broadband access at prices competitive to fast cable and fiber in the rest of the country.
^This. Over the course of the 20th century, the vast majority of killings occurred at the hands of governments. Furthermore, it was typically governments killing their own people, not the people of other countries.
Say what will about big greedy corporations, they're boy scouts when compared to the carnage brought about by governments in the last century.
You're probably correct. Corporations almost never reach an enormous scale without government to provide the regulatory moats necessary to inhibit competition and disruption. And that doesn't even take the issue of subsidies into account. Smaller government would likely lead to more small enterprises and fewer enormous ones.
Again this is not so clearly cut. With small govt, corporations take over its responsibilities, both social and repressive. There is plenty of historical precedent for that and AFAIK it is not considered a good thing.
And governments can change over time. I agree that there should always be room for nuance. But people should think carefully about what declaring something a human right really entails, and what kind of authority that gives the government regarding it. Most of our legislature talk about technology like they still login to the web with AOL.
Maybe in time we'll decide this one should be, but Sanders seems ready to expand that list a great deal.
Advanced technology infrastructure can't be sustained without extensive network of enforced relationships between humans. It's either government oversight or private monopoly, there's no third option.
> What makes access to high-speed internet a privilege as opposed to a right?
What makes it a privilege is that it's a consumer service, like cable television or satellite radio. Sure it's good to have, but hardly on the same page as "human rights".
There seems to be a trivializing of human rights by the left, who have a tendency to throw everything under the sun in as a human right so they can justify expanding the government to provide said right.
Access to the court system and a fair trial? Human Right
Freedom from slavery? Human Right
Broadband internet to watch streaming videos? Not a Human Right.
Your argument starts with a false premise, which is that because the providers code the delivery of high-speed internet as a "consumer service" that it is thus not a right.
By your same logic, if I began charging people to have access to the court system and a fair trial (which is arguably the case in the US today anyway) and treat the judicial system as a "consumer service," then it would cease to be a right.
You don't need internet to live, you don't need internet to earn a living, the internet does not cure cancer, the internet does not treat any disease. Yes the internet will grant you access to knowledge you wouldn't otherwise have, yes it will allow you to telecommute, yes it will allow you to type to strangers in 17 countries at once.
The internet however also:
- allows for persistent, extended bullying
- can lead to all sorts of negative mental health events by exposing you to all sorts of highly-curated content giving the perception that someone always has it better than you or by exposing you to incredibly graphic imagery and news
- encourages sedentary beahvior such as wathcing 12 hours of tv on a Saturday, sitting on HN/reddit for 3-5 hours a day, playing MMORPGs for 5, 10, 24 hours in a day.
It's no more a human right than diet coke or owning a vehicle is. It's a tool.
One could easily argue the internet, and recreational computation in general, is a detriment to society. A few years ago I did a little research and some maths and was quite surprised with how much time we collectively waste on just video games
>I got to thinking, 'how much time do we waste annually on video games' and I quickly found answers. The average U.S. gamer age 13 or older spent 6.3 hours a week playing video games during 2013. Wow, but what about globally? Could I find an estimate? Well, I did, on TED no less. We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames.
> It's no more a human right than diet coke or owning a vehicle is. It's a tool.
Access to essential tools (judicial system, healthcare, shelter, nourishment, etc.) is a human right, broadly speaking. The internet is quickly becoming an essential tool for carrying out nontrivial activities in our modern society.
> the internet will grant you access to knowledge you wouldn't otherwise have
Then I am forced to conclude that you also believe that education is not a human right on the same grounds.
By definition human rights are intrinsic and universal. Everyone has them and everyone is responsible for not violating others'. Right off the bat we can see that claiming high-speed internet as a human right is asinine, because high-speed internet didn't even exist a couple of decades ago, thus access to it can't be claimed as an intrinsic right of the human soul.
It also fails universality. If even one person lacks broadband internet, then we would all be obligated to provide it or we are failing to uphold their rights. So if a person in Montana doesn't have broadband, everyone in e.g. Uganda and Malaysia is complicit in a human rights violation. It really is this silly, because human rights are not limited to any government or institution. They are a universal responsibility and mutual obligation between individuals as well, so defining them positively implies absurd moral conclusions.
Venturing into meta-level ideological territory, I can't help but perceive the theory of positive rights as a cynical tool for expanding government powers. It mandates utopian promises, it sucks the air away from reality-based alternatives that look anemic or even cruel by comparison, it requires nuance to argue against, and it functionally cements the government as the source and provider of human rights. It could not be better propaganda for the state.
Positive rights are a tool for expanding government services. This hardly grants power to the government except when citizens become dependent on it. Which is the case a priori, since the government acts as protector for the citizenry. So the relationship between government and citizen becomes at least no more exploitative than it was when introducing the service of positive rights.
No, it goes deeper than providing services. If the goal is only to provide services then that can simply be done for the sake of it. We can run welfare programs because it makes society run better or even just because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy.
But when we elevate those services to the status of faux "human rights" then it weakens actual rights. If your right to association is on the same playing field as my "right" to public housing, then disbanding right-leaning political parties is on the table because they threaten my human rights.
This may seem like an absurd example but we already have absurd arguments like the "right" to feel safe outweighs the right to bear arms, or the "right" to not hear hate speech outweighs the right to free expression. Balancing positive "rights" that must be supplied by the government against actual freedom-from-coercion negative rights is a monumental expansion of state power. Enshrining positive rights, as desirable as the ends are in themselves, is a serious and fundamental distortion to the ideological foundations of liberalism.
The part I don't agree with is paying for universal access, again. Those of us fortunate enough to have an ISP have been paying into the Federal Universal Service Fund for decades. Of course, that money went into the pockets and broadband is still not fully deployed in this century.
I think every ISP which got FUSF money should deploy, now, as promised, with the money they've already been given, before we talk about giving them more.
> News was particularly good for the United States, which moved up from the 21st-fastest country in 2017 to the 20th-fastest country in 2018. That might not sound like much of an improvement, but it was achieved by increasing speeds from an average 20 Mbps to nearly 26 Mbps, a bigger increase than the average.
(In 2019, the US jumped from 20th to 15th in the M-lab data, ahead of Germany, France, the UK, and Italy.)
Over the decade or so Akamai published its results on broadband speeds (the last one being in 2017) the US moved from the 20s into the top 10.
The idea that US broadband is slow or stagnant is just totally false, to the point where you have to wonder where it comes from.
Statistics about download bandwidth are garbage. Quality of the connection is what matters. Latency and upload are all severely lacking in US residential connections (and even business for the most part).
And who knows what bullshit the ISPs use to advertise their speeds. I assume they’re taking a 1GB download line to 100 homes and then selling each one 100Mb or more, so in the evenings, it’s really somewhere above 10Mbps down continuous. And the upload is negligible, so negligible that you won’t even find Comcast or their ilk advertise its amount.
Who gives a fuck about faster speeds when you're data capped? I'm capped at 1TB of data a month on a 250mbit/sec connection. I've actually gone over and even considered SLOWING down my connection. I definitely have no reason to upgrade to 1GBPS. My mom, who lives a kilometer away and has broadband choice is on 1TB with no caps and pays almost half of what I do. I have no choice whatsoever despite having 3 providers within 1km because only fucking Comcast has service here. Yeah, that's fucking stagnation: when people are considering LOWERING their broadband speeds because of the monopolies we've put in place just so Comcast can rake in even more money for their shitty, overpriced service. So what if the speeds exist if they're unusable?
You’re imagining a decades-long broadband deployment effort that never happened. The FUSF didn’t give money for broadband until 2012. Even today, CAF funding is small compared to the cost of deployment broadband.
> The internet is now a necessary feature of everyone’s personal and professional life
You clearly don't know a very diverse group of people. Not everyone works in an office sitting behind a MacBook Pro. A lot of people still make things with their hands.
Musk will do this, Sanders can talk about it but will still need years to implement it. Free for him to suggest he will be able to do this but the problem has more chance of being solved at the technical level than the political one.
2020 will be the year for Starlink, if it really works as advertised by the time Sanders could be elected this will be a reality (or a dud).
Every business or municipality which has tried to go against the corrupt titans and their legion of lobbyists and bought-and-paid for congresspeople have failed at this.
Musk may have the technical ability here, but he does not possess the political ability.
Inversely, Bernie wants to get the political ability, but will not have the technical ability.
Just because Musk has starlink doesn't mean Congress won't pass a law that cleverly neuters his project in the United States to ensure that established monopolies and duopolies aren't hurt. It doesn't mean that former employees of broadband companies who fully control the regulators won't intervene on behalf of their former (and future) employer.
It's not as simple as flick a switch and turn it on, these services are heavily regulated and as we see with the current american government, it's very easy for corporations like Comcast to get former high level employees like Ajit Pai put into charge of the entire regulatory scheme, with vast power to protect established corporate interests and destroy all competition be it business or local government.
I would go so far as to say that if Donald Trump is re-elected and the regulatory capture of the FCC continues, Musk is doomed to failure. Comcast, Verizon et al has pwned the FCC, and currently the federal broadband regulators exist as a tool to protect corporate interests.
As long as it works in all weather, I agree Starink is superior to digging trenches. But if Internet goes out during storms, especially multi-day winter storms, then rural/distant areas would be better off with DSL or Fiber, even ignoring the bandwith or latency differences.
Also, Starlink is run by a single, private company. If anything happens to the company, do we really want a vast chunk of the country offline? At least with GPS we know they don’t need to be profitable. What if the shareholders don’t find Starlink worth it?
That being said, I can’t wait for Starlink myself!
FWIW there are other people entering the low-orbit satellite constellation internet business (though, still big companies -- but better than a single big company).
I don't know if you live in a rural place but in New Hampshire, when there are storms, it can take days for electricity to come back, and then even more time for cable (there's no fiber) to come back.
Why wouldn't Starlink be an improvement over that? Just because it doesn't work during the storm?
I hope starlink succeeds too. That said, it is still important to fight back politically. I should help in the longer term and it also makes it clear to other industries with large monopolies that they may be next on the chopping block. They have had it easy for too long.
I'm not sure why you would believe Musk's grandiose proposals at this point given his abysmal success rate (Tesla vs every other promised "breakthrough").
What is abysmal with the best selling electric cars in the world?
> The Tesla Model 3 in 2019 has seen nearly 3 times more sales than the second best selling plug-in vehicle (EV) in the world, China’s top selling BAIC EU-Series.
SpaceX has now proven they can reuse first stages repeatedly, when sending spacecraft to orbit. Like no other organisation has done. They have 10 reusable first stages, some which have flown 3-4 times. Hardly abysmal.
There is nothing in particular wrong with Musks credibility, not all of his projects pan out, but compared to your average starter-upper he's doing pretty good, against all odds in some cases.
The one thing you can rightfully accuse him of is plugging one hole with another but so far he's managed to escape the consequences and being a complete idiot on Twitter. It certainly doesn't help but his track record so far is good and bankable and I wouldn't be surprised at all if Starlink succeeded. If you look at Inmarsat's turnover then you'll see why, and that's with low bandwidth geosynchronous satellites, now imagine that with high bandwidth, low latency LEO. Just that is a game changer for some industries, bringing fast internet to rural areas is going to be a doozy compared to the offshore applications and what that's worth.
I'm not the biggest Musk fan by any stretch of the imagination, in fact there are plenty of things that Musk has done that I really disagree with. That said, between SpaceX and Tesla you've got to admit he knows how to move and as of this writing two batches of Starlink sattelites are in orbit. It's well beyond the proposal stage.
This is going to create a public internet free for everyone to use. But will hate speech be banned from this public-option internet? Sanders is going to spend 150b on this...I don't want Russian hackers and Neo Nazis benefit from the public's money
The constitution does not give the government the power to appropriate funds for infrastructure. But hey, that never stopped power hungry megalonmaniacs from wasting tax payer dollars.
The Constitution literally has a Postal Clause for the expressed purpose of creating interstate communication through "Postal Roads". Despite their small-government bona-fides, a reliable communication network was something so important they thought fit to put it right in there from the very beginning.
The constitution ONLY enumerates the power to the federal government to establish post offices and post roads. Period. Thomas Jefferson didn't even want a postal clause in the constitution to begin with because he thought it would be a massive waste of money. Spoiler: he was right.
If Bernie Sanders wants to make such a vast proposal he should do it the legal way and propose a constitutional amendment. Of course, he knows that will never happen so he'll just unconstitutionally let congress force it through if he wants.
Of course, it's all talk now because he's not the president.
If people want government high speed internet so bad they should be lobbying their STATE government because that is where the power in the constitution lies.
Sanders can't even get good internet or phone connectivity in his own State. He's accomplished little to nothing in Vermont and has pretty much been MIA for the last 6 years. Thinking that he can get anything done at a National scale (let alone International scale) is a joke.
Major bills are dictated by party leaders and administrations, very rarely by normal senators and congresspeople.
He's been in the senate since 2007, 13 years. Before that he was a congressman for 16 years. He was an independent except for 2015-2016. Surprise surprise, that makes it hard to get things passed in a two party system. His votes matter. And he still has authored almost twice as many enacted bills as Obama.
I'll name two that meet every requirement except for passing. You tell us why they haven't passed. [0][1] Hint: Pro-labor legislation has difficulty getting votes.
He pass substantial veterans aid reform as chairman of the VA committee, and passed it with the help and support of John McCain.
Important to also remember his time as an Independent Congressman, where he passed more amendments than anyone else. And if we are to believe the stories (from both sides of the aisle), he worked behind the scenes to get legislation and amendments done.
The last 6 years he's been campaigning for progressive ideas. M4A is talked about constantly, he pushed what healthcare should be in America beyond the ACA. He got younger more diverse people elected to congress and on a state level, and has helped unions, workers, and others receive the wages and benefits they deserve by using his current standing as a public figure.
Before he went to Washington, as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he stopped the development of industrial buildings on the lakeshore. He made housing more affordable, by creating more public housing and allowed residents to own their homes (with an asterisk).
And so much more that I need to get back to work...
For a single mayor, congressman, senator from a small eastern state, he's done a ton.
The last 6 years he's been campaigning for progressive ideas. M4A is talked about constantly, he pushed what healthcare should be in America beyond the ACA. He got younger more diverse people elected to congress and on a state level, and has helped unions, workers, and others receive the wages and benefits they deserve by using his current standing as a public figure.
Wow so interesting comparing the comments in this thread vs Reddit. I guess since the HN audience is generally older, they tend to have a more conservative take on this than myself and my peers.
Being older doesn't make you right, but it does tend to impart some wisdom. Most importantly, an appreciation of nuance.
I can't take part in reddit threads because the overwhelming majority sees every issue as black and white, right or wrong. There's little room for real debate.
>Break up comcast? Clearly bernie is a man for and of the people.
>Finally! It's long overdue. These monopolies need to end so people can have affordable internet access.
>Every day there’s more great news from him.
>And now you know why MSNBC hates Bernie. I really enjoy the network but even I'll admit their Comcast connections get in the way of their ability to actually cover politics in a fair light.
>Fuccckkk comcast
And it continues like that for quite a few more. No substance, just empty rage against 'The Man'. Disagree on any bit of it and prepare to be personally attacked and downvoted into obscurity.
Why do you think removing the monopoly of private companies such as Comcast is not “substance”?
Search an address anywhere in America, go to the ISPs website, and see what the options are. I’d bet money that the vast majority are restricted to one ISP, one will be via coax which is limited to 5mbps upload for the whole neighborhood. The other is the phone company offering DSL (doesn’t count as broadband internet).
The only solution to providing high bandwidth, low latency, symmetric internet is by running fiber wires everywhere. The private company owning the monopoly (Comcast for most) has no reason to do that, and can simply charge whatever they want (as long as it’s not too much to cause sufficient outrage to cause political change). They don’t need to improve their product, which the only way would be to run fiber wires to all the houses, but they can just collect rent from everyone who has no option.
>Why do you think removing the monopoly of private companies such as Comcast is not “substance”?
I don't, and I never said that; I said that reddit comments tend to lack substance, and I think the examples show that. Only one of them even mentions the word "Monopoly" (local oligarchies would be more accurate), and it's a very simple, short statement. The rest are complete throwaways.
Look, your response to me was vastly better than any of those. There's no discussion of pros and cons, potential roadblocks, or the complexities of such a large plan. It's just "Bernie is awesome, down with the corporations!". If you disagree, in any way, your labeled a corporate bootlicker. /r/politics is a cult. I didn't come out of that thread having learned anything. I didn't even see a mention of any specific details of the plan in the ~10 top comments I read.
How you can equate that with what you see in the comments here is beyond me.
I read all those short F Comcast and monopoly comments to convey what I wrote in short form.
It’s been known for a long time that the only way to improve internet connections is to run fiber wire. It’s also been known that Comcast and other monopolies lobby and spend money to fight it. It’s known that they stand to lose money by becoming a dumb pipe. So there no discussion to be had, in my opinion, other than governments running their own fiber for their citizens.
You're arguing against a position I never took. This discussion is about Reddit comments versus hacker news comments. I never even took a side on the whole ISP debate. I'm not sure where you're going with this.
Between the entry of the big mobile carriers into home internet with 4g/5g, and new lower latency satellite internet providers like Starlink, the landscape is about to become dramatically more competitive.
4G coverage in rural areas varies widely, but satellite internet is everywhere, and the existing ISPs will have to improve if they want to keep those customers.
You'll theoretically have a smaller town go from having 1 traditional ISP to having that plus Verizon, ATT, Tmobile/Sprint, Starlink, and any other sat providers. That's a 5x increase of options.
I wish the candidates would stop talking about legislative agendas as much as they do and focus on the things actually in the purview of the office they seek. I know almost all of them are in the legislative branch, but I'm tired of hearing about legislative promises they won't be able to deliver on!
The reality is that K-street and the oligarchs write the laws, congresspeople don't even read the bills, maybe key staffer or two who the K-street firm promised a job later who did the actual legwork on the bill has read some of it, and then the congressperson votes along all kinds of machiavellian and other power lines that have nothing to do with "is the bill good or not".
Until America fixes congress, plans like this will get railroaded via riders and rewrites regardless of the merit of the original proposed bill.
At least it mentions the glut of monopolistic mergers and aquisitions, but I want more than "we will fight it". Tell us how you intend to actually use the DOJ to go after white-collar and anti-trust crimes!
Bernie couldn't and doesn't even stand up to his own party as is evidenced by it's corruption in the 2016 election. What makes anyone think he can stand up against the oligarchs?
I think this is what left/social leaning politicians should focus on. "Rich people bad" rhetoric of which Sanders is guilty as well gets old fast. Instead why not say: it shouldn't be possible to get rich by exploiting a monopoly or a resource that belongs to everyone (like natural resources). Focus on regulating away ways to get wealth by what many people from all sides of political spectrum consider unfair and your will get traction. Focus on "tax the guy 70% because he makes a lot of money" and you will be forever economically illiterate old man raging at the sky.
Isn't broadband effectively defined as above the slowest 10% of internet users? Or rather, it gets redefined every few years so that it is effectively that.
Regulation can be necessary for some industries and contexts but, generally speaking, broadband is one market that will benefit consumers more with less government restriction.
The issues we currently have with so many areas having only one or two providers are a legacy hangover from earlier federal regulation of phone companies and broadcasters along with municipal intervention where cities granted an exclusive franchise to only one cable co. With disruptive new delivery systems from balloons and drones to LEO satellite constellations about to come online, now is not the time to be mandating pricing or offerings.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadI feel like this could be a meme. Maybe Warren should release a plan for rewriting all C/C++ code in Rust.
Washington State did:
https://www.fastcompany.com/40537222/washington-just-passed-...
Without Congress on board there's only so much you can do. Obama made some regulatory changes and shuffled some money around to get at this problem, but without a big pile of new money from Congress it's not going to do much.
Where does he propose to get the funding for projects like this?
seriously though. over the last few decades, economies around the globe have taken tax load off the bigger shoulders, and now the argument against any progressive agenda is "how would you ever finance this?"
Not that it's a generally bad question to ask, but I find it quite remarkable how deeply ingrained the notion is that you can't simply raise funds as a government, and how much that limits the (perceived, and by extension practical) agency of a government and "the people".
Government isn't the only way people can get things done, and I think we should be resentful (and suspicious) of the argument that to fund and accomplish large tasks, we need to hold a gun to the heads of the people. Are we really so incapable of cooperation that we need tax men, followed by armed police, to ensure that businesses serve the customers who pay them? Just like Sears & Roebuck and Wells Fargo worked to bring good things from the cities to rural America, this situation could be resolved by private enterprise. I believe we would be farther along without government attempts to regulate the industry that have impeded its progress.
The problem with private enterprise is accountability too - they generally are accountable to someone, but that someone typically happens to be shareholders who truthfully don’t give a damn about much other than maximizing their returns. A lot of folks who blindly prefer this route are either the ones who have the most to gain (because they already have capital) or folks who just don’t understand the incentive structure.
Saying one side is always inherently better than the other is short sighted and more of a tribal belief in my opinion.
I don’t want FB to have my data and would prefer the government break up internet monopolies. I’m also not saying I want to live under Hugo Chavez. Unfortunately, at least in America, we love to go towards extremes. The civic discourse is lacking.
Second, there's a real moral difference between the voluntary association among people in business and the coercive foundation of government. One is built on people wanting to trade value for value, and the other is built on armed military, police, and jailers. I would rather promote the former, even if it sometimes would be more efficient on the surface to force people to cooperate.
Unless you have a monopoly or a cartel or capture government regulation of your industry.
I think your second point is overly simplifying a lot of complexity. I agree that government has this coercive function... However, it’s also true that unchecked private enterprise ends up influencing that government to meet their own special interests. You want to promote the former, but the former ends up making the large campaign contributions so they can have legislation written in their favor... laws that apply to the common person don’t apply to these big corporations. Hence, we socialize losses but privatize profits. The fat cats go to prisons (if ever) that are potentially comparable to high end hotels, nicer than the homes of many ordinary citizens.
As far as some moral conflict is concerned because of the policing powers of the state - that’s why we have something resembling a democracy, even if it’s imperfect.
Empirically, the answer seems to "yes", at least in the USA.
Hospitals and insurance companies, higher education, private prisons, private companies operating water systems, drug companies, local internet monopolies, all seem to have a business model of stepping right up to the line of outright defrauding their customers, occasionally crossing that line, and constantly finding ways to avoid competing with each other and extracting more money from their customers for worse quality and service.
We have given the "free market" plenty of opportunities to provide improving quality at lower prices (the mantra of capitalist ideology), but in many of the most important markets, it has completely failed.
Are there examples of countries with high quality outcomes and low costs where those industries are deregulated?
I would add the Republican party in the US is so incompetent and dysfunctional, they are unable to create concrete policy proposals or pass legislation, even when they had full control of the federal government. What concrete steps did they take to fix fundamentally broken industries like health care and higher education?
So I find myself drawn to Democrats like Bernie and Warren, at least they have plans to address these issues, and the status quo is unacceptable.
An analogous situation arises in business. When the government regulates quality and cost, it leaves businesses no natural path to profitability, so to allow them to survive, it must also interfere in competition, with subsidies, tariffs, and other measures, up to and including enforced monopoly. That keeps the natural economic processes that reward good quality and low price from operating --- the favored businesses cannot be displaced by their competition, and the effect of consumer dissatisfaction is blunted --- and provides the perverse incentives that create the problems you perceive in industry (and politics).
US Government spending as a percentage of GDP has been fairly stable for decades. It's higher now than it was in 1970 -- the only time it has ever been substantially higher than it is now was World War II, and a transient spike a decade ago because of the housing bailout.
There are only two ways the government has ever really been able to spend more money on something. Grow the economy so that the same percentage of GDP is more money, or cut some other spending.
However, the specific amount he's proposing ($120,000,000,000 for a national initiative) is nowhere near unheard of, and actually normal for large infrastructure projects (remember, the grants rarely happen all at once).
Judging by his site, he intends to make a lot more initiatives plausible at once via a progressive (in the tax sense, which means only after a certain level of value, and only on value after that level) estate tax, a proposed piece of legislation to prevent tax dodging, taxing market speculators at an increased rate and cutting preexisting tax breaks for people with billions:
https://berniesanders.com/issues/tax-increases-for-the-rich/
The same place we get money for the F-35, corporate welfare, and the hundreds of other bullshit handouts to the ultra-wealthy that benefit them at the expense of the rest of us.
Keep in mind that, even without this Green New Deal fund, much of the work he proposes is conceptually simple and cheap: Many folks believe that removing barriers to municipal and community-owned ISPs would be a profitable action for the USA on its own, and does not need further justification or funding. That is, it's seen as a problem of regulatory capture and corruption, and not of political willpower or constituent goodwill.
This is economic stimulus: The fund is expected to pay for itself by improving the lives of people around the country. If we use the 1/5 rule of thumb [1], then this is a wager that demolishing the ISP monopolies and regulatory capture, and supporting municipal ISP development and community-owned infrastructure, is worth $750b in toto, plus $2.5m/yr, over the next decade. [0] notes that there is an $40b/yr inefficiency in terms of ISP profit, so we could hope that over a decade, we might reap a $400b boon to the collective taxpayer's worth, and after paying back our portion of Green New Deal, and even if we only get 80% yield, that's still a $200b profit in our worth.
To be more clear: $20b/yr across ~100m taxpayers with cable bills is around $200/yr; Bernie's betting that he can not only improve our cable bills, but generally improve the wealth of the typical taxpayer/billpayer.
[0] https://berniesanders.com/issues/high-speed-internet-all/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law
My issues with the government running the internet is, first money. They say they are going to end price gouging, but they will spend billions, if they succeed wont the taxes the telecoms pay be gone and wont it cost more. Also then the US government controls the internet from your house. ISP's spying is bad enough.
I am probably wrong on both of these minor complaints, and i would love to see cheap fast internet.
In reality, he's just a power hungry cranky socialist old man.
Sounds great, right? Does the math check out? Probably not, but it wouldn't matter anyway.
The president is not a king, and even with both houses of congress under democratic control (not even close to a given under a Sanders presidency), legislators in swing constituencies are not about to put their seat in jeopardy because of huge projects they never themselves ran under and committed to.
But Sanders loses nothing by making promises like this. It's all in hopes that his campaign gets traction before he loses Iowa/New Hampshire.
Our subway and water systems are “public utilities” supporting “good paying union jobs.” How many of them would rank in the top 10-15 in the world? (Note that no country in the top 10 treats broadband like a publicly owned utility.) Moreover, the median age of municipal election voters is 57. What trade offs are they going to want to make in balancing rates versus maintenance and upgrades? (There is a reason that our water infrastructure, for example, is facing a one trillion investment shortfall.)
Sanders proposes to spend $150 billion on broadband. Over what time frame? If it’s the typical 10-year time frame candidates have been using for budget proposals, that’s just about 1/5 of what the private sector is investing in broadband annually.
Public broadband is going to be an $80 billion a year commitment just for capital expenditures. If you demand those be tied to “good paying union jobs” be ready to make it $120 billion or more. Add in operational expenditures, be ready to triple that.
Telecom is a huge sector. Even if you subtract the profits, you’re talking several hundred billion of dollars annually. That’s half the size of the military budget.
> How many of them would rank in the top 10-15 in the world?
Anything would be better than Comcast, seriously.
Even in rural areas the coverage is typically pretty good when horizontal deployment is done by municipalities or local utilities. And you see the exact same thing in the US.
Maybe download speeds, and even then, probably subject to a temporary boost while the ISPs slows down other people in the neighborhood.
The fact that no upload speeds are ever advertised means to me that the ISP hasn’t made any hardware or capacity improvements or, they’re just reallocating what they already have.
Either way, who cares what other countries have and don’t have. It’s pitiful what the “greatest” country on earth can’t manage to offer due to monopolies having a disincentive to offer it, since they also sell TV and phone service, which they would lose revenue from if people had decent internet connections.
Yes unions can be good, but, my god, do they encourage massive inefficiencies.
I don’t think that unions are the cause of massive inefficiencies.
[1] I know why Sanders does it, because he is catering to people who are outraged at the thought of “billions in profit” even if that only represents a single-digit percent of revenue. Indeed, if you go read Sanders’ proposal, he makes a point of stating how AT&T’s CEO made $33 million, as if that isn’t a drop in the bucket for a company that spends $140 billion a year on opex.
Profit margins (or numbers used to get Gov funding) are just a big, fat lie.
We do need healthier Internet, but do you really expect bad math or morbidly obese institutions to be the answer?
Clean water, sewer, electric, internet, and USPS logistics service are table stakes (in the US). It's silly to make this out to be "Live in the suburbs or rural areas? Mad Max for you!".
Counterpoint: How's that cheap, high speed Gb FTTH internet working out for you in downtown NYC or SF? /s
I do think the costs could be more even but this isn't a new trade-off
I haven't though directly seen the cost difference though. I just know growing up one the big things the neighborhood wanted was a connection to city water
You don't accept bad air quality, traffic, crime, consumerism pressure, ads on every street corner, weak and shallow local communities, and proclame "well don't be surprised because you chose civilization". You expect and demand improvements like any other decent human being.
Giving money to big telco's hasnt worked. I think the best way to cover rural areas is wireless, via local WISPs or local government run ISPs. It would be nice to see some of the low-band spectrum being reclaimed from TV stations (sub 1GHz) go towards these efforts, since higher bands wont be able to cover as much area.
It's shitty to hang people out to dry, but at the same time, people MUST move in the above example. Coastal residents can't do whatever they want and expect others to share the costs.
What about the sea life and baby turtles that will die due to raising coastal areas?
For example, the US has a great beer market now. It took several years before US beer - as a broad concept - was removed from the official foreigner list of things to bash the US with (which still includes such fan favorite fallback items as American cheese and Hershey chocolate).
That the US has had faster Internet access than most of Europe - including Germany and France - for the past decade, is a bash list counter that people intentionally pretend doesn't exist. It's very inconvenient reality and your typical American has no idea what the access speeds are across Europe, so they can't counter argue properly.
The access cost issue is also - fairly - of course on the bash list, although people never adjust for the far higher US incomes when pointing it out, naturally.
The US rolled out 4G much faster than Europe and it's going to roll out 5G much faster than Europe. That too is universally, intentionally ignored (despite the stream of articles you can google on the subject reporting how far behind Europe was in rolling out 4G and now again with 5G). That despite the fact that these items are matters of infrastructure and the US is supposed to be the worst on the planet when it comes to infrastructure (the US is spending more of its GDP on infrastructure than the EU).
Something has to be missing here.
16:10:46 Thank you for contacting us. An operator will be with you shortly.
16:10:46 Guest: Is there an installation fee for Gigazone internet?
16:11:08 Guest: Hi, I see that there's an $85 activation fee, but is there also an additional installation fee?
16:11:40 Operator JJ joined the chat
16:11:47 JJ: Hi there!
16:11:51 Guest: Hi!
16:12:13 JJ: There is no installation fee. It is rolled in with the activation fee which is waived if you sign a 6 month contract.
16:12:54 Guest: That's great--I was discussing this with friends and we can't figure out how it's possible! How can you afford to run fiber optic out into the country and charge so little for it?
16:14:36 Guest: Part of why I ask is because almost no other rural areas have this figured out
16:14:56 JJ: Well, there's a couple of ways. For a long time we required our members to have phone lines along with our internet service as there are a number of government grants that we can qualify for as long as we're building rural telephone infrastructure. That's the reason we still are required to require phone service in some of our service area.
16:15:13 Guest: I see, cool
16:15:52 JJ: Secondly, we're a co-op and committed to the community. If we plow a fiber line to your home and you end up moving some time in the future, the line remains for some other lucky co-op member in the future. It's kind of a "long-game" mentality.
16:16:05 Guest: Makes sense, thank you!
[0] https://www.vermontel.com/
I'm in a city of 872k people and can't even get fiber. The fastest I can get at home, without going business, is 75mbps.
Sure... I can see your point that it “is a decision” for folks that choose to move to a rural area, but I don’t believe that’s the case for the other 99% of folks living there.
You can stop subsidizing our internet, and we'll stop supplying you with cheap food. Deal?
if subsidies weren't already being used by those supplying the food, entire businesses and families would fail. 'feeding the nation' isn't all that profitable without subsidies, from most angles.
so, I guess my point is that 'we'll stop supplying you with cheap food' is a hollow threat, given that the cheap food is over-produced and under-valued for the sake of an artificial economy that's largely enforced and legislated by 'citydwellers'. Most of the motivation to supply food is drawn from the incentives provided by the few in legislative power, not from profit nor moral imperative from 'rural-livers'.
If it's profitable to export soy from the US to china it most certrainly is profitable to import food from africa or australia after a storm.
Let the market incorporate the costs of broadband access into the price of food. The extra cost will almost certainly amount to fractions of a cent on the dollar.
Exactly: you receive cheap food in the city because it's subsidized. You are a beneficiary. Why should that be? Living in a city where it's impossible to grow food is a choice. So let's end that, along with internet subsidies (of which I'm a beneficiary) and we'll see if you're better off.
I am really not a big fan of the democratic party at large but a plan like this to take power away from the large internet monopoloies is going to be one of the only ways to make sure that internet infrastructure is kept up to date and that fast internet is available to everyone in the US.
Infrastructure like the internet pipes shouldn't be privately owned, simply because they value profit over maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure.
Maybe we can compromise with a system I have heard of ( in the nordic countries I believe) Where the local municipalities own the wires but you buy the service from a number of internet companies who rent the lines and provide service. This would increase competition and allow for private companies to not have to worry about the cost of upgrading the infrastructure.
1) It receives no public funding.
2) It has few public mandates or price controls. (No, “must offer subsidized service to disenfranchised people” or similar requirements.)
3) It faces no build-out or universal service requirements. It took Stokab almost 20 years to wire the city. They did it based entirely on demand/revenue potential. They deployed first to businesses and areas with the most revenue potential. Stokab didn’t need public funding because it could deploy in a revenue-directed manner. This is illegal in almost every US city. New York flipped out and tried to file a civil rights lawsuit when Verizon couldn’t meet the five year deadline for wiring the city.
4) It charges large up front fees to hook up to the network.
Stokab would be burned to the ground with civil rights lawsuits if it was attempted in New York or San Francisco.
Likewise, Sweden’s approach to wiring rural areas was very market oriented. Unlike the US, it didn’t mandate providers to serve rural areas (cross subsidizing them with revenues from urban areas). It gave rural homeowners a tax credit of about $600 to subsidize laying their own fiber.
That was without having to dig up concrete and repair too.
Otherwise, it's like 10~20min to sufficiently properly terminate the fiber at the ends and that. You can likely get around that if you just order pre-terminated fiber at like 1$/plug and just plug it in at the ends instead of splicing. Sure, this will higher losses, but money.
Fiber is literally cheaper than copper for >150m or >=10Gbit/s (though direct-attach cables up to 3~5m are even cheaper) if you can get by without field-terminating fibers.
The contiguous United States is 3,119,884.69 square miles (the United States makes up a little less than 1/3 of North America). There are individual states larger than several European and Asian countries.
Sure, there's not someone living in every single square mile but they are spread out. The fastest I can get at home, in a city fo nearly 900k people, is 75mbps down without going to a business line. Even delivering that speed to 80% of the population would probably require several billion in just equipment (lines included).
To go into a market, an ISP has to be able to reasonably recover their roll-out costs from that market. If they spend xxx dollars rolling out to a town, and then if they can hope to sell service to 75% of the homes, but are only going to make 0.5x or even xx of that back each year as profit, is it reasonable for them to spend xxx amount just to deploy when it might be a decade or more before they recover their initial investment? And what about the (likely) x to xx a year to maintain the equipment from squirrels/birds/storms/drunk drivers, and then upgrading the technology etc.
It's great when you have a small country, that you can drive across in a day, but when you're talking about 1/3 of a continent everything is orders of magnitude more expensive and more difficult.
I think people easily fall into the "well that country has it!" but they don't realize that "that" country is tiny. Let's take the country with the fastest internet [1], Taiwan, with an average speed of 85.02Mbps - it is 13,974 square miles, that's 0.44% (zero point four four) of the contiguous United States. 41 states are larger than Taiwan.
[1] https://www.swedishnomad.com/fastest-internet-in-the-world/
Today we take it for granted that you can go anywhere in the United States and flip a light switch to turn on a light. But without that public investment, there would be big swathes of the country still living by the light of candles and oil lamps.
These problems can be solved, but the private sector will never solve them, because the profit motive isn't there for them to do so. It requires public investment.
Also, you claim that "remote settlements" have little economic value, and yet their economic value is highly restricted when they don't have access to the internet so how can we claim that to be true?
I'd still rather it in the hands of government than a monopoly corporation.
But if I must use a single monopoly company that provides a service, I'd much rather get services from the government, because at least I have some semblance of a vote in the form of my actual vote. With a single corporate provider of a utility, I have no say at all.
Which is honestly the case in couple instances in my life. I have moved around the US NE quite a bit and multiple places I have lived only offer Verizon or Comcast but only one or the other. The current place I am in is Verizon which is fantastic because dealing with Comcast has always been a massive time sink and emotional/mental strain but I still have no choice in who provides me service.
One of the Tory ministers responsible for privatizing utilities in the 1980s said they did it because the utilities would be easier to control as private companies with a regulator.
There is no silver bullet.
I'm not sure how that's sensible. Are you being sarcastic?
Sure, there are problems with political intervention in state-owned companies (near term bias, etc.), but if it's the only means of holding state-owned companies accountable, and if a competitive market is untenable, then yes, voter-accountable politicians should be able to intervene in state-owned companies.
As it stands, with a company like PG&E, you have a half-solution, where it's a privately-owned monopoly but isn't directly accountable to its customers because they can't vote with their wallet, so it gets metric tons of regulation dumped on it instead as a half-measure that (obviously) doesn't work.
This really connects to socialism. China used to have "Price Bureau" (物价局). It sounds like Sanders is calling for one in the U.S.
Also, if "affordable price" policy is needed for internet, why not needed for more basic stuff like food and medicine?
Maybe food is too expensive for the poor because there is no Price Examination Department (物价检查所) to check price in grocery stores?
It is and Medicare for All is a popular policy proposal.
Current policy already has mechanisms (broken though they may be) to provide affordable medicine to people, ranging from government provided medicaid to income based discounts on drugs.
Current policy provides subsidized food to everyone in the country (and outside of the country, which is something of a sticking point on trade negotiations). We additionally provide further subsidies on a need based basis through the SNAP program (aka, food stamps).
Prices are already highly regulated for other utilities like electric and water (although, I am not sure what regulationd exist at the federsl level here)
EDIT: also, China is a rapidly growing economy that has overall had very succesfull policies. We should not blindly copy what they do, but "China did it" is not a convincing arguement.
Also subsidiaries are different from price control.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacex-starlink-airforce/...
[1]: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/05/block-5-spacex-incre...
In other countries, where foolish attempts to involve predatory private industry or outright hamstring government programs, state-owned enterprise is even better. Healthcare, trains, power- all drastically outcompete private industry. Not to mention the fact that in-house military hardware is years ahead of industry stuff.
There is nothing that makes governments less efficient than private industry. At every level, people are getting paid based on the job they do. People are fired if they are a waste. The only argument of perverse incentives that makes any sense is that the things governments do are not necessarily needed, not that they aren't done well.
The idea that the government doesn't operate well is a complete myth.
The USPS also has the benefit of being able to lose $7 billion per year and not go out of business, and I'd hardly say that is "efficiency".
How is any player supposed to compete against something like that?
please read any article on starlink, putting the satellites into low earth orbit makes a huge difference, no it isn't marketing bullshit.
Latency will be on par with using a VPN a few hundred miles away (the satellites are in low earth orbit, not geostationary like previous generations). Upload speeds will also not be like with previous satellite internet, which often used dial-up for upload because the satellite+dish setup was not designed to receive signals from users on the ground.
SpaceX (et al) have a different strategy. They are instead sending satellites to Low Earth Orbit, so they'll be about 500 km above sea level. As a result, the propagation delay will not be nearly as bad. Perhaps under 50 ms, compared to the 600 ms I've seen on geosynchronous satellite internet.
At that low altitude, you need a lot more satellites (because each satellite can only "see" a small-ish area of the earth), so they need to send a swarm of those satellites. This is now possible because satellites are much smaller and cheaper than they used to be.
Will fiber blow it out of the water? Yes. Will The phone company run a fiber line out to my house for less than thousands of dollars? No. Would they do it if there's some competition from above? Maybe so.
For one thing, the rural population of the US is, depending on your definition, somewhere between 15 and 20%. [1]
For another, a lot of farmers and rural areas get perfectly good cable internet and even fiber.
[1] https://www.hrsa.gov/rural-health/about-us/definition/index....
I’d like to see something like fiber to 80% of the country, and then alternatives (like low-attitude satellite internet) for the last 20%.
Give companies huge tax breaks if they’re doing this work.
No need to reinvent a process that worked well the first time around.
For another, the equipment you need to support a given level of bandwidth has dropped orders of magnitude in cost. For another, endpoint hookups are faster and easier, we know much better how to splice fiber faster and cheaper. etc etc... it takes a real lack of imagination to claim it's the same as when we put in electricity and telephone networks or even early fiber or copper networks.
Take for example this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21716312
Alon Levy mainly cites the flawed design-build model where design and construction contracts are awarded to the same firm as well as the comparatively high cost of TBM use for deep stations / tunnels versus cut-and-cover construction techniques for simpler, shallow stations.
Your arguments are the same exact same arguments big companies had when rolling out the initial electrical and phone grids, and yet today we would find it ridiculous if you said you weren't able to get electrical service to your house.
I could use some competition in this space.
Symmetrical broadband enables a lot of really interesting p2p use cases that are otherwise infeasible. Think content distribution, routing, etc. You don’t need to be part of the tech crowd to benefit from p2p software.
If everyone had upload speeds as fast as download speeds, “personal clouds” and a “data center in every home” would be real possibilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
Public goods can be good.
I generally don't agree with Bernie's whole premise here, but I do think he has the right idea. We should up high speed requirements, but also OTA should not count. The reason wireless (5G, 4G, Satellite) shouldn't count is...well the data caps are so limiting that you can't possibly do anything with the service. Or the equipment and setup is so expensive you'd have to be a company to afford it. I don't agree that high speed is a "human right," I really think such statements add nothing of value and make such proposals easy to mock. The argument should simply be to treat high speed land lines as a public utility and requirement, like electricity.
I don't think encoding a current limitation into law is a good idea. If they can provide a wireless internet that meets the requirements, that is good enough for me.
This country built an interstate system 70 years ago involving tons and tons of labor, asphalt, concrete, and continuous repairs. I find it hard to believe running fiber cables to be a challenge.
The biggest cost is Comcast’s share price going down as they lose the ability to rent seek on customers for being a useless middleman peddling “TV” and substandard internet.
I think we should have use common sense here. Fiber deployment is expensive but it is probably worth pulling fiber at least to every post office in these United States.
I didn't even know the word metonym but you said it better than I could have. Yes, I mean population centers. I mean we have to be reasonable. If someone moves to the South Pole and demands we run fiber there, we might have to say no. I don't know where we exactly draw the line though. My understanding is that there is a lot of "dark fiber" criss crossing the country that can be "lit up" so the "long haul" isn't so much of a problem as the "last mile". I could be wrong though. I don't know much about these things.
The productivity improvements of high bandwidth low latency connections are numerous. Just like building the interstate highway and a network of roads did, or water, or gas, or sewage.
Not sure what that has to do with mansions.
The best internet in the world, located in a major city, will have around 15ms latency to the closest datacenter. Wireless solutions can easily achieve that.
For any of the users we are talking about (underserved populations in areas without fiber internet), they will never see those latencies even with the same fiber you have.
If you live in rural Wyoming, there are going to be practically zero services hosted within 500 miles of you. You are not going to get 5ms latency no matter what you do.
Insisting that EVERYONE has to get fiber, even when that won't change their performance experience, only slows down the actual service of their needs.
This is like any sort of performance engineering problem; focusing on an area that is no where close to becoming the bottleneck is not an efficient use of resources.
You mean across the globe, not country. 100ms ping in domestic call sounds bad.
>you are never going to get sub 100ms latency across the globe.
Latency adds up, bandwidth is calculated by the width of narrowest path, but latency is accumulated.
If you have 100ms ping to local gateway, you still need to add another 100ms for the packet to reach the other side of the globe.
They'll have access to Starlink within the next few years. Proper broadband access at prices competitive to fast cable and fiber in the rest of the country.
What makes access to high-speed internet a privilege as opposed to a right? Why shouldn't everyone be guaranteed access to high-speed internet?
A big Finnish government is different than, say, a big Russian government.
To me it seems like saying: I fundamentally disagree with dining out because it requires restaurant, and restaurant is always bad.
Say what will about big greedy corporations, they're boy scouts when compared to the carnage brought about by governments in the last century.
Maybe in time we'll decide this one should be, but Sanders seems ready to expand that list a great deal.
People forcing governments to take care of them is really the only rational thing for governed people to do.
What makes it a privilege is that it's a consumer service, like cable television or satellite radio. Sure it's good to have, but hardly on the same page as "human rights".
There seems to be a trivializing of human rights by the left, who have a tendency to throw everything under the sun in as a human right so they can justify expanding the government to provide said right.
Access to the court system and a fair trial? Human Right Freedom from slavery? Human Right Broadband internet to watch streaming videos? Not a Human Right.
By your same logic, if I began charging people to have access to the court system and a fair trial (which is arguably the case in the US today anyway) and treat the judicial system as a "consumer service," then it would cease to be a right.
That is hardly an argument, I'm sorry to say.
The internet however also:
- allows for persistent, extended bullying
- can lead to all sorts of negative mental health events by exposing you to all sorts of highly-curated content giving the perception that someone always has it better than you or by exposing you to incredibly graphic imagery and news
- encourages sedentary beahvior such as wathcing 12 hours of tv on a Saturday, sitting on HN/reddit for 3-5 hours a day, playing MMORPGs for 5, 10, 24 hours in a day.
It's no more a human right than diet coke or owning a vehicle is. It's a tool.
One could easily argue the internet, and recreational computation in general, is a detriment to society. A few years ago I did a little research and some maths and was quite surprised with how much time we collectively waste on just video games
>I got to thinking, 'how much time do we waste annually on video games' and I quickly found answers. The average U.S. gamer age 13 or older spent 6.3 hours a week playing video games during 2013. Wow, but what about globally? Could I find an estimate? Well, I did, on TED no less. We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames.
[1] Additional sources referenced on the page https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2016/8/2/humanitys-...
Access to essential tools (judicial system, healthcare, shelter, nourishment, etc.) is a human right, broadly speaking. The internet is quickly becoming an essential tool for carrying out nontrivial activities in our modern society.
> the internet will grant you access to knowledge you wouldn't otherwise have
Then I am forced to conclude that you also believe that education is not a human right on the same grounds.
It also fails universality. If even one person lacks broadband internet, then we would all be obligated to provide it or we are failing to uphold their rights. So if a person in Montana doesn't have broadband, everyone in e.g. Uganda and Malaysia is complicit in a human rights violation. It really is this silly, because human rights are not limited to any government or institution. They are a universal responsibility and mutual obligation between individuals as well, so defining them positively implies absurd moral conclusions.
Venturing into meta-level ideological territory, I can't help but perceive the theory of positive rights as a cynical tool for expanding government powers. It mandates utopian promises, it sucks the air away from reality-based alternatives that look anemic or even cruel by comparison, it requires nuance to argue against, and it functionally cements the government as the source and provider of human rights. It could not be better propaganda for the state.
But when we elevate those services to the status of faux "human rights" then it weakens actual rights. If your right to association is on the same playing field as my "right" to public housing, then disbanding right-leaning political parties is on the table because they threaten my human rights.
This may seem like an absurd example but we already have absurd arguments like the "right" to feel safe outweighs the right to bear arms, or the "right" to not hear hate speech outweighs the right to free expression. Balancing positive "rights" that must be supplied by the government against actual freedom-from-coercion negative rights is a monumental expansion of state power. Enshrining positive rights, as desirable as the ends are in themselves, is a serious and fundamental distortion to the ideological foundations of liberalism.
I think every ISP which got FUSF money should deploy, now, as promised, with the money they've already been given, before we talk about giving them more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund#Controv...
In return for the deregulation of the industry in the 90's, we were told that we were going to get upgraded to broadband access in everybody's home.
It seems like we have already paid for universal broadband more than once.
Yes, and the industry stagnated for decades.
> U.S. internet speeds rose nearly 40 percent this year
https://nypost.com/2018/07/11/the-average-internet-speed-has...
> News was particularly good for the United States, which moved up from the 21st-fastest country in 2017 to the 20th-fastest country in 2018. That might not sound like much of an improvement, but it was achieved by increasing speeds from an average 20 Mbps to nearly 26 Mbps, a bigger increase than the average.
(In 2019, the US jumped from 20th to 15th in the M-lab data, ahead of Germany, France, the UK, and Italy.)
Over the decade or so Akamai published its results on broadband speeds (the last one being in 2017) the US moved from the 20s into the top 10.
The idea that US broadband is slow or stagnant is just totally false, to the point where you have to wonder where it comes from.
And who knows what bullshit the ISPs use to advertise their speeds. I assume they’re taking a 1GB download line to 100 homes and then selling each one 100Mb or more, so in the evenings, it’s really somewhere above 10Mbps down continuous. And the upload is negligible, so negligible that you won’t even find Comcast or their ilk advertise its amount.
It should be a human right and if governments were smart they would blanket their countries with free high speed for the masses.
Instead we contend with the likes of Verizon and ATT whose profit motives are at odds with the core principles of a free and open internet.
You clearly don't know a very diverse group of people. Not everyone works in an office sitting behind a MacBook Pro. A lot of people still make things with their hands.
2020 will be the year for Starlink, if it really works as advertised by the time Sanders could be elected this will be a reality (or a dud).
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-internet-ser...
Musk may have the technical ability here, but he does not possess the political ability.
Inversely, Bernie wants to get the political ability, but will not have the technical ability.
Just because Musk has starlink doesn't mean Congress won't pass a law that cleverly neuters his project in the United States to ensure that established monopolies and duopolies aren't hurt. It doesn't mean that former employees of broadband companies who fully control the regulators won't intervene on behalf of their former (and future) employer.
It's not as simple as flick a switch and turn it on, these services are heavily regulated and as we see with the current american government, it's very easy for corporations like Comcast to get former high level employees like Ajit Pai put into charge of the entire regulatory scheme, with vast power to protect established corporate interests and destroy all competition be it business or local government.
I would go so far as to say that if Donald Trump is re-elected and the regulatory capture of the FCC continues, Musk is doomed to failure. Comcast, Verizon et al has pwned the FCC, and currently the federal broadband regulators exist as a tool to protect corporate interests.
Also, Starlink is run by a single, private company. If anything happens to the company, do we really want a vast chunk of the country offline? At least with GPS we know they don’t need to be profitable. What if the shareholders don’t find Starlink worth it?
That being said, I can’t wait for Starlink myself!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)#Kuiper_System...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb_satellite_constellation
Why wouldn't Starlink be an improvement over that? Just because it doesn't work during the storm?
> The Tesla Model 3 in 2019 has seen nearly 3 times more sales than the second best selling plug-in vehicle (EV) in the world, China’s top selling BAIC EU-Series.
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/12/05/tesla-model-3-13-percen...
SpaceX has now proven they can reuse first stages repeatedly, when sending spacecraft to orbit. Like no other organisation has done. They have 10 reusable first stages, some which have flown 3-4 times. Hardly abysmal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceX/wiki/cores#wiki_.2810.29_fli...
The one thing you can rightfully accuse him of is plugging one hole with another but so far he's managed to escape the consequences and being a complete idiot on Twitter. It certainly doesn't help but his track record so far is good and bankable and I wouldn't be surprised at all if Starlink succeeded. If you look at Inmarsat's turnover then you'll see why, and that's with low bandwidth geosynchronous satellites, now imagine that with high bandwidth, low latency LEO. Just that is a game changer for some industries, bringing fast internet to rural areas is going to be a doozy compared to the offshore applications and what that's worth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmarsat
If Bernie Sanders wants to make such a vast proposal he should do it the legal way and propose a constitutional amendment. Of course, he knows that will never happen so he'll just unconstitutionally let congress force it through if he wants.
Of course, it's all talk now because he's not the president.
If people want government high speed internet so bad they should be lobbying their STATE government because that is where the power in the constitution lies.
I'll wait.
He's been in the senate since 2007, 13 years. Before that he was a congressman for 16 years. He was an independent except for 2015-2016. Surprise surprise, that makes it hard to get things passed in a two party system. His votes matter. And he still has authored almost twice as many enacted bills as Obama.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_Democracy_Act
[1] https://www.sanders.senate.gov/download/pay-workers-a-living...
Important to also remember his time as an Independent Congressman, where he passed more amendments than anyone else. And if we are to believe the stories (from both sides of the aisle), he worked behind the scenes to get legislation and amendments done.
The last 6 years he's been campaigning for progressive ideas. M4A is talked about constantly, he pushed what healthcare should be in America beyond the ACA. He got younger more diverse people elected to congress and on a state level, and has helped unions, workers, and others receive the wages and benefits they deserve by using his current standing as a public figure.
Before he went to Washington, as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he stopped the development of industrial buildings on the lakeshore. He made housing more affordable, by creating more public housing and allowed residents to own their homes (with an asterisk).
And so much more that I need to get back to work...
For a single mayor, congressman, senator from a small eastern state, he's done a ton.
He took a busload of breast cancer patients from Vermont to Canada so they could buy cheaper prescription drug and voted against trillion dollar wars.
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/legislative-landmarks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdFw1btbkLM&feature=youtu.be
Currently, these are the top five comments:
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/e710oj/sanders_ca...
>Break up comcast? Clearly bernie is a man for and of the people.
>Finally! It's long overdue. These monopolies need to end so people can have affordable internet access.
>Every day there’s more great news from him.
>And now you know why MSNBC hates Bernie. I really enjoy the network but even I'll admit their Comcast connections get in the way of their ability to actually cover politics in a fair light.
>Fuccckkk comcast
And it continues like that for quite a few more. No substance, just empty rage against 'The Man'. Disagree on any bit of it and prepare to be personally attacked and downvoted into obscurity.
Search an address anywhere in America, go to the ISPs website, and see what the options are. I’d bet money that the vast majority are restricted to one ISP, one will be via coax which is limited to 5mbps upload for the whole neighborhood. The other is the phone company offering DSL (doesn’t count as broadband internet).
The only solution to providing high bandwidth, low latency, symmetric internet is by running fiber wires everywhere. The private company owning the monopoly (Comcast for most) has no reason to do that, and can simply charge whatever they want (as long as it’s not too much to cause sufficient outrage to cause political change). They don’t need to improve their product, which the only way would be to run fiber wires to all the houses, but they can just collect rent from everyone who has no option.
I don't, and I never said that; I said that reddit comments tend to lack substance, and I think the examples show that. Only one of them even mentions the word "Monopoly" (local oligarchies would be more accurate), and it's a very simple, short statement. The rest are complete throwaways.
Look, your response to me was vastly better than any of those. There's no discussion of pros and cons, potential roadblocks, or the complexities of such a large plan. It's just "Bernie is awesome, down with the corporations!". If you disagree, in any way, your labeled a corporate bootlicker. /r/politics is a cult. I didn't come out of that thread having learned anything. I didn't even see a mention of any specific details of the plan in the ~10 top comments I read.
How you can equate that with what you see in the comments here is beyond me.
It’s been known for a long time that the only way to improve internet connections is to run fiber wire. It’s also been known that Comcast and other monopolies lobby and spend money to fight it. It’s known that they stand to lose money by becoming a dumb pipe. So there no discussion to be had, in my opinion, other than governments running their own fiber for their citizens.
4G coverage in rural areas varies widely, but satellite internet is everywhere, and the existing ISPs will have to improve if they want to keep those customers.
You'll theoretically have a smaller town go from having 1 traditional ISP to having that plus Verizon, ATT, Tmobile/Sprint, Starlink, and any other sat providers. That's a 5x increase of options.
The reality is that K-street and the oligarchs write the laws, congresspeople don't even read the bills, maybe key staffer or two who the K-street firm promised a job later who did the actual legwork on the bill has read some of it, and then the congressperson votes along all kinds of machiavellian and other power lines that have nothing to do with "is the bill good or not".
Until America fixes congress, plans like this will get railroaded via riders and rewrites regardless of the merit of the original proposed bill.
At least it mentions the glut of monopolistic mergers and aquisitions, but I want more than "we will fight it". Tell us how you intend to actually use the DOJ to go after white-collar and anti-trust crimes!
Bernie couldn't and doesn't even stand up to his own party as is evidenced by it's corruption in the 2016 election. What makes anyone think he can stand up against the oligarchs?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But if I lived in a metro area, I wouldn't like the idea of paying taxes so somebody out in the sticks gets high-speed internet.
I'll feel a little guilty if something like this comes to pass. But I bet it'll pass quickly. :)
The issues we currently have with so many areas having only one or two providers are a legacy hangover from earlier federal regulation of phone companies and broadcasters along with municipal intervention where cities granted an exclusive franchise to only one cable co. With disruptive new delivery systems from balloons and drones to LEO satellite constellations about to come online, now is not the time to be mandating pricing or offerings.