Wisconsin Public Internet Struggles Against Telecom, Legislature 259
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by
Soulskill
from the always-two-there-are dept.
from the always-two-there-are dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Ars Technica:
"The University of Wisconsin's Internet technology division and a crucial provider of 'Net access for Wisconsin's educational system are under attack from that state's legislature and from a local telecommunications association. At issue is the WiscNet educational cooperative. The non-profit provides affordable network access to the state's schools and libraries, although its useful days may be numbered unless the picture changes soon. Under a proposed new law, the University of Wisconsin system could be forced to return millions of dollars in federal broadband grants that it has already won, spend far more money on network services, and perhaps even withdraw from the Internet2 project."
Courtesy of Republicans and AT&T lobbyists (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The GOP's bright idea (Score:3, Informative)
Nine legislators are up for recall, Six Republicans and Three Democrats
WiscNet was second target (Score:5, Informative)
WiscNet was, as I understand it a secondary concern, although the telecoms have wanted it to die for a decades. It is the same pattern of schools banding together and riding together on common infrastructure. ATT would like that to go away with WiscNet in favor of Badgernet which they run or even better, from their point of view, to sell everyone T-1 lines retail.
This is the second effort for this. The first successful effort (from ATT's perspective) was to give back $37 million of the same stimulus money (NTIA, BTOP) for a different state run project. The spin there was that the Feds did not want to give the money to a private company. But insiders tell me that it was not the feds but ATT. ( wisconsins-stimulus-rejection-too-many-strings-or-too-much-scrutiny [fibertothewhatever.com])
Re:The GOP's bright idea (Score:4, Informative)
I think you left out a couple of steps:
1. Privatize everything
2. ???
3. PROFIT!
The beauty of this scheme is that step 2 is irrelevant when it comes to privatizing government services. Just about any path you take leads to #3.
Make public schools ineffective by cutting the funding.
Privatize the schools.
Make a profit on government vouchers for private schools that are just as ineffective, if not worse.
Make the prisons overcrowded by throwing uneducated kids in jail on a three strikes count.
Privatize the prisons.
Make a profit by cutting health and nutrition services to the prisoners.
Make the courts ineffective by cutting funding and flooding the docket with charges against uneducated kids and internet downloaders.
No time for lawsuits against privatized service providers???
Profit on cost savings for liability insurance, lawyers and other items.
Republicans in Wisconsin are obviously soft on crime. Education (and therefore education funding) mitigates future needs for prison funding. Despite what the tea party would have you think, there is a role for government services in US society. Public education is one of the essential government services, and internet service is a requirement for public education.
Republicans always like to say that the public sector is too inefficient, and services should be privatized to improve efficiency. What they don't mention is that privatization never leads to improvement in services over the long term. Basically, the extra efficiency (if it exists) in the private sector, is consumed by profit taking. Once the initial inefficiencies are ironed out, the extra money goes as profit to the service provider, not for service improvement. Then thanks to the accounting principle of compounded growth rates, the only way for the privatized service to succeed as a company is to raise prices. Government services are not growth industries unless the population is growing dramatically.
Re:Just like Abraham said (Score:4, Informative)
You need to check your history book. The Internet was paid for by the government and slowly allowed to be handed over to corporations over two decades once it was already long established. Many advances (including computers that you claim are corporate gifts) are actually creations paid for by governments (typically for military purposes) and then handed over to corporations over time for civilian use and implementation.
"...Thus, by 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications. Electronic mail was being used broadly across several communities, often with different systems, but interconnection between different mail systems was demonstrating the utility of broad based electronic communications between people....This process of privately-financed augmentation for commercial uses was thrashed out starting in 1988 in a series of NSF-initiated conferences at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government on "The Commercialization and Privatization of the Internet" - and on the "com-priv" list on the net itself.. "
Source: http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml [isoc.org]
Also, claiming that some form of fair competition exists between companies is either a misunderstanding of how modern MSCs (multiple service carrier) operate or a blatant manipulation of the truth to suit a rant. No company can or will attempt to overbuild another MSC in a zone unless one of them is AT&T (in which case you can actually get government grants to over-build them, and money from AT&T at times as well so they look better). Between franchise agreements and city divisions where cable companies will cut a city in half (effectively choosing to "compete" only in certain regions where there really is no competition) customers don't have any semblance of real options.