How Can the Stimulus Plan Help the Internet? 154
Wired is running an article raising the question of how a US economic stimulus plan could best help broadband adoption and the internet in general. We discussed President-elect Obama's statements about his plan, which would include investments in such areas, but Wired asks how we can avoid the equivalent of the New Deal's "ditches to nowhere" without more data about where the money would actually make a difference. Quoting:
"... the problem is that no one knows the best way to make the internet more resilient, accessible and secure, since there's no just no public data. The ISP and backbone internet providers don't tell anyone anything. For instance, the government doesn't know how many people actually have broadband or what they pay for it. ... In September, the FCC found that its data collection on internet broadband was incomplete and thus ruled that AT&T, Qwest and Verizon could stop filing some reports — because the requirements did not extend to cable companies, too."
The best way to help... (Score:5, Informative)
Demand Side Economics (Score:5, Informative)
How Can the Stimulus Plan Help the Internet? It can't! Already more money has been dumped into this stimulus plan that has been spent on all the major wars this country has fought.
Demand side economics is not the right solution at this time.
Re:Look CEOs (Score:2, Informative)
There's two "o"s in "too". :-)
Re:Slashdot's short memory (Score:3, Informative)
For instance, the government doesn't know how many people actually have broadband or what they pay for it
Wait, I thought telcos giving the government open access to their records was a bad thing.
Come'on folks. You know anything the government touches will be abused. Stop giving these appointees more power for next to no real gain.
You don't see a difference between "Here's a log of all calls to/from 555-1234, registered to Joe Nacho" and "here's a list of how many subscribers we have at each speed in each zip code"? I tend to see personal information as rather different from statistics.
Re:Look CEOs (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, you pulled all that out of the AC's post? You can definitely read more between the lines than I can.
Anyhow, the facts disagree with your belief that a monopoly is required to be profitable. I'm not surprised by this as you are among the majority who have either lost faith in free market and competition or never believed in it in the first place.
In reviewing the latest 10Q SEC filing for Comcast [edgar-online.com] and AT&T [edgar-online.com], two opponents of net neutrality who arguably are engaged in a competitive market for broadband internet, they are making a tidy profit on their internet operations.
Comcast had an operating income of $1.7 billion after expenses, depreciation and amortization on revenue of $8 billion for their cable segment for the last 3 months.
AT&T had an operating income of $2.7 billion after expenses, depreciation and amortization on revenue of $17 billion for their wireline segment for the last 3 months.
Welcome to the free market where ROI includes risk. It is sustainable and works for many other industries. Take a close look at electronics manufacturers, probably the most cut throat competitive industry around. Electronics manufacturers compete, some win some fail, the market continues and consumers get awesome products at great prices. When competitors lower their prices below sustainable levels in an attempt to gain market share and drive competitors out of business they are breaking the law, very much like breaking the law when competitors scheme to fix prices or use other illegal tactics to build or maintain monopoly positions so they can gouge consumers.
See the SEC reports, consumers are paying, providers are profiting. Reality trumps theory.
That would be awesome! :) Unfortunately you picked the minimum data point for broadband access with nothing to explain exactly what you get for $14.95, the truth is that average broadband access rates are $53.06/month [oecd.org] in the United States.
Please, read some of the financial statements for the corporations who are fighting net neutrality and who want to tax other companies who profit by providing valuable services over the network the ISP is already profiting from.
Re:Look CEOs (Score:2, Informative)
I think the thing people get most upset about is that once the company du jour manages to come in and take over, the quality of access degrades quickly. Monopolies don't care because they don't have to.
Take Southern California. It is a prime example of the business practices you described. Comcast was here for a long time. So was Adelphia. There was competition, and while I had Comcast, I never had television or internet outages. I rarely even had slowness issues.
Then, enter Time Warner, the crappiest cable company on earth. They take over the services of Comcast and Adelphia with their financial might. Not six months later, and my television starts going to pure snow every evening hour a couple hours. I ask Time Warner to come out 3 times over 2 months to fix it. They try everything they can - replacing DVR, replacing cabling everything. Still no good. Totally incompetent.
I ask for those 2 months in credit for my TV service, and they refuse. I canceled my TV service on the spot, of course. Nice customer service.
Then my internet starts bogging down to practically 56k speeds during the evening. It takes me nearly 8 months of calling, pestering, and complaining before someone FINALLY notices that the hub node in my area is way over-booked. They split the node and things are okay for about 5 months. Then Time Warner, as of about a month ago, starts having HTTP issues. It's not total routing (Steam continues to work just fine!) but I cannot access anything over the web. It still happens. They're clueless, and they don't care.
I understand the economics involved in the ISPs - the problem is that once they get their monopoly, their service goes in the shitter. I would switch away from Time Warner in an instant if there were ANY other reasonable broadband option in West Los Angeles. One of the biggest economies in the world, and we can't even get fiber here. Amazing.
Re:The best way to help... (Score:1, Informative)
Just ask the white South Africans how well ignoring their fellow poorer (black) men worked out. (Hint: They now all live in compounds guarded by professional mercenaries who make Blackwater look like amateurs.)
economic theories and corruption (Score:3, Informative)
I know what you mean, but in this case many of the theorists are promoting theories that allow their brand of corruption.
you are not living in a vaccuum (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Premise guarantees failure (Score:3, Informative)
Any effort by the State to manipulate or direct economic planning will lead to increasing economic irrationality and inefficiency.
This sentence entirely ignores a reality of economics: economy is a product of government.
Economy is a balance; on one hand you have private efforts which maximize personal profits at cost of the public good (see the tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org] and on the other hand you have social "public entities" like governments which seek to preserve the commons.
In truth, there is no such thing as a "free" economy - a "free" economy requires a government which provides infrastructure for operations. Infrastructure can include things like a universal currency, a set of laws which establish the rules of a market, physical commodities which can be used for commerce (such as roads, highways, information conduits) and a well-educated population.
The reality is that economy is a product of a well-managed government. Take a look at the most obvious: the Internet.
AOL tried to create an online universe. So did Compuserve, and countless others. They all failed because they were all tried to establish public infrastructure through private enterprise, which never works. That's the role of government, which establishes the public infrastructure that private enterprise takes advantage of.
The government establishes public infrastructure (such as roads and highways) that private companies then exploit (such as Arco, ATT, Ford, NetZero) to make profits, which are then taxed by the government as a return on investment.
This isn't "bad", it's a form of socialism that you exploit every day as you drive to work. And yes, I know that "socialism" is a bad word (tm) in the United States, but it's a reality that we all enjoy.
Without this infrastructure, without a solid monetary system, without highways, clean water, roads, phones that work, etc. the modern economy would collapse overnight. Yet the modern economy didn't establish any of these - they all came from our government.
The United States has one of the purest, most "open source" governments ever in Human History - it's just idiotic that so many Americans treat it with suspicion and contempt!