Major Carriers Shun Broadband Stimulus 190
jmcharry sends word that as the deadline looms for requesting broadband grants from the $4.7 billion available in stimulus funding, Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T are conspicuously absent from the list of applicants. Quoting the Washington Post: "Their reasons are varied. All three say they are flush with cash, enough to upgrade and expand their broadband networks on their own. Some say taking money could draw unwanted scrutiny of business practices and compensation, as seen with automakers and banks that have taken government bailouts. And privately, some companies are griping about conditions attached to the money, including a net-neutrality rule that they say would prevent them from managing traffic on their networks in the way they want. ... Yet those firms might be the best positioned to achieve the goal of spreading Internet access to underserved areas, some experts say." Reader Michael_Curator notes that while the major carriers may be holding back, there were still enough applications to slow government servers to a crawl, resulting in a deadline extension.
Re:The Real Reason.... (Score:3, Informative)
No. Among other things they don't like the idea of Net Neutrality which is one stipulation of taking the money.
If ONLY there had been some reference to that in TFA. Or, dare I say it, the summary. I'm imagining a fictional world in which this story had been posted to /. and it had mentioned the net neutrality hangup somewhere in the 6th line of the summary.
Ah... so beautiful it brings a tear to my eye that it can never be...
Re:they don't want real broadband... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh yes, because I want my internet connection tapped 24/7 and all my comments that criticize the US government to be flagged
Why would you think this isn't happening now anyway? Except now the government isn't the only one who can tap into your connection, private corporations get to do so as well.
And just look at the crappy service you get from other government agencies like medicare, the lackluster performance of veterans hospitals, the annoyances of the post office, the general greed of the IRS, and the pain of it all.
Government run markets can and do suck in many instances, but privately run markets can and do suck as well. You list three government organizations. Of them, VA hospitals are currently among the best in the nation according to patients (although they were bad 20 years ago). The post Office does a pretty good job in my book compared to UPS and FedEx. The IRS is a lousy example since it isn't something private industry can do, collect taxes.
Yah, I really want the US government to provide broadband.
Broadband is a utility these days and should be treated as such. I happen to live in one of the best cities in the country for internet access because it has one of the largest wireless co-ops around. You can get free internet access anywhere in the city and much of the surrounding area, provided by local businesses and individuals who share part of their home connections. It sure beats all the privately run broadband options. I would like to see government step up and subsidize the creation of fast internet backbones with real competition for service across them, as other countries have done. We've already given more money to private corporations, per citizen, than many other countries, we just didn't attach strings to the money so nothing resulted. Right now the big providers aren't touching this money because they're counting on waiting for more later, without strings. The last thing they want is actual competition within a geographical area.
but you can bet that the US government will suck even worse. Or are you forgetting all the times they've screwed up technology (BBS raids, DMCA, etc)
Yeah, and there's also DARPA net, breaking up Bell, and several other things they've done that greatly benefited telecom technology. What's your point?
Re:The "Real Reason" (Score:5, Informative)
How soon we forget. The government has already given loads of money for broadband to get caught up with other countries, and the recipients have just taken the money and not done a thing. Wow, some "strings" there, huh?
They want to monopolize THEIR way (Score:4, Informative)
By taking government money, they will have less control over what they do. There are contentions about net neutrality, about uneven deployments of broadband and all manner of things. However, the various states are the government entities that should be writing more mandates related to uneven deployments while the federal government should be mandating network neutrality.
Seriously, the problem of "cherry picking" the broadband deployments was really bad 10 years ago. It is beyond that now. They don't want to build infrastructure that doesn't yield really good returns. That makes perfect sense for them. But it doesn't make sense for the public, however. It is the public utilities commissions that set the standards for deployments of the infrastructure, however, and they have been bought off pretty well so far and haven't been requiring broadband everywhere as they should have been. I hope no one is confused about the role and responsibility of the public utilities commissions. It is precisely the unwillingness of the PUCs and the utilities themselves that have led to municipalities deploying broadband themselves. Some serious reforms need to get put into place and most of it should be in the form of cleaning up the corruption in the PUCs and to put people in place with some backbone.
Either give us municipal broadband (not my preference) or give us wider deployments from the cherry-picking utilities.
Oh yeah, and lest I forget, we need ISPs to be officially considered to be "common carriers" as other communications providers are. The fact that they aren't is a huge part of the problem with enforcement and regulation.
Re:The Real Reason.... (Score:3, Informative)
A Decades Old Fraud. (Score:1, Informative)
Oh poor little bankers and telcom monopolists, cry me a river because they might be expected to do the public a service and keep their word. We can only imagine what the world would look like if $23 trillion dollars were spent on education, parks, housing, medicine, and reasonable regulation of the predatory industries that have left the US fat, cancer prone, broke and ignorant. Telco companies are in a position to refuse this money and it is in their best interest to leave customers paying per byte of third world service. It is in every one else's best interest to regulate the piss out of these theives.
It is instructive to study what happened to the last broadband stimulus [saschameinrath.com]. Had these vultures carried through with their promisses, the US would already have the best network service in the world. Instead, they pocketed the $200 billion dollars that we all gave them and have done trillions of dollars in damages to the US economy. The tide was so turned in the 90's, that by the time the Clinton administration was over, the US government was overseeing corrupt auctions of spectrum for cell phones to the highest bidder. Yes, we now have cheap, 3rd world grade cell phone service as well as copper lines but we could have had much more. The greedy people responsible for this fraud deserve jailtime, not more money.
The public has a right to regulate these companies because they make use of public assets. You own public servitude and the public should put it's regulatory foot down on the Bells with it. More importantly, we own the spectrum which can and should be liberated [reed.com]. All of our communications goals can be met this way. Let the telcos refuse the money, we don't need them.