Bernie Sanders Unveils $150 Billion Plan To Expand High-Speed Internet Access (theverge.com) 275
On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) announced a new plan aimed at expanding broadband internet access across the country and dismantling what he referred to as "internet and cable monopolies." From a report: In his sweeping "High-Speed Internet for All" proposal, Sanders calls for broadband to be considered a public utility, much like electricity, and calls access "a basic human right." The plan would provide $150 billion in grants and technical assistance to states and communities for the purpose of building out their own "democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks." As part of the new plan, Sanders defines "broadband" as 100 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up, which is significantly higher than the Federal Communications Commission standard of 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. If elected president, Sanders said he would also work to restore net neutrality and ban internet and cable companies from instituting data caps and throttling consumer access to the internet.
We've already given the telcos billions (Score:5, Insightful)
And they have spent it on bonuses.
Unless his plan includes prison time for telecom CEOs who misspend the money, it's a bad plan.
Re:We've already given the telcos billions (Score:5, Insightful)
This money is to go to "states and communities". It will be harder for the telcos to get their hands on it. Not that the scumbags won't try.
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Reminds me of the problem with high speed rail. Like high speed rail would have been a great plan 30 years ago. Which was already 30 years behind Japan's high speed rail.
Nowadays... this broadband-for-all plan is going to be about 7 years behind Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet buildout.
Like the next-gen high speed rail is going to be about 15 years behind Elon Musk's Hyperloop by the time it's delivered.
Some of these ideas are just too much, too late.
The best thing Bernie could fight Congress to tea
Re:We've already given the telcos billions (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, I can see the argument for making internet connectivity akin to a public utility. Although, currently even with those, there are private companies that own and operate utilities (ie Entergy for power in many states), but they are regulated and answerable to local governments.
However my fear here is unintended consequences and possible govt intervention down the road.
My thoughts are, if government both federal and local are in charge of the internet, then later down the road, what is to stop them from passing laws that mandate licenses to get on the internet, token authorization access only and no more anonymity at all??
Sure it is getting more and more restrictive on free speech today with many gatekeepers of main parts of the internet targeting speech they don't agree with and shuttering it, but wait till it has governmental force of LAW behind it.
If the government owns and runs it, they can surely introduce all sorts of new laws and regulations to "save the children", fight terrorists and otherwise keep the populace safe.
The internet snuck in under the politicians' collective eyes and the genie got out of the bottle before they could stopper it, it would be a wet dream for governments to be able to get control back, no longer is everyone a "peer" on the internet, but you are only given permission to play and say what they say is acceptable.
And again, while I can see the argument for making internet access a type of utility...I can NOT see it being called "A Basic Human Right".
Seriously?
Sure being hooked up to the internet is very helpful, but a basic "right"? A basic "need"?
You don't need FB connectivity (or even an account) to live. Food, water and shelter....those are true NEEDS.
He's making it sounds like this is a RIGHT that the government GIVES it's citizens.
In the US, at least, this is bass-ackwards.
In the US, rights do NOT come from the government, you are born with them....it is suppose to be WE the people that give the government entities the limited rights and responsibilities to serve us, not the other way around.
And finally, let's say all my concerns above are addressed.
Where is the world is Bernie going to get all this $$$$ to roll this out, in addition to medicare for all, and free college and free.....and free...and free.....all the other stuff he is proposing the US government gives you.
It has to come from somewhere and even if he were to confiscate 100% all existing wealth of the top 1%....it won't come close to what he's proposing now before this latest addition.
For God's sake Bernie, please tell us all where this magic money tree is.
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A minor quibble - the government has POWERS, which we give them. Only people have RIGHTS.
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I stand corrected....typing and choking food down on lunch break, I miss things some times.
Re:We've already given the telcos billions (Score:5, Informative)
"The best thing Bernie could fight Congress to tear down the legal restrictions that cable and telcos are putting up to stop municipalities from doing this stuff anyway."
But that's what his plan does. Did you not read the link? The plan will:
Provide $150 billion through the Green New Deal in infrastructure grants and technical assistance for municipalities and/or states to build publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks.
Condition grants on strong labor, wage and sourcing standards to ensure that federal funding goes toward creating good-paying union jobs.
Ensure all funded projects cannot subcontract work to evade labor law through the Workplace Democracy Plan.
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Provide $150 billion through the Green New Deal in infrastructure grants and technical assistance for municipalities and/or states to build publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks.
Condition grants on strong labor, wage and sourcing standards to ensure that federal funding goes toward creating good-paying union jobs.
Ensure all funded projects cannot subcontract work to evade labor law through the Workplace Democracy Plan.
The problem with all of this is that the $150 billion will have strings attached so that I'm not eligible not being a protected class but my next door neighbor is by virtue of modern day discrimination. The conditional grants will undoubtedly be filled with these carve outs for the favored classes while leaving me out in the cold. The government made a serious mistake getting into the discrimination business and I'll start supporting these policies only when the discrimination stops.
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Why comment if you haven't read the plan?
Re:We've already given the telcos billions (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA, the plan is to build publically-owned networks, rather than going through the telecoms
>Provide $150 billion through the Green New Deal in infrastructure grants and technical assistance for municipalities and/or states to build publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks.
> Condition grants on strong labor, wage and sourcing standards to ensure that federal funding goes toward creating good-paying union jobs.
> Ensure all funded projects cannot subcontract work to evade labor law through the Workplace Democracy Plan.
> Condition grants on universal service, provisioning minimum speeds, privacy standards and affordability
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How about well-paying ("good-paying" is the way semi-literates spell) NON-union jobs? Is there actually a requirement for union jobs?
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Yes, there is actually a requirement that they be union jobs. Only an idiot would allow non-union jobs, because good paying non union jobs become poorly paying non union jobs in short order.
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Which will make the whole plan an unconstitutional non-starter. You can't force someone to join a union in most right-to-work states, and you can't make it a condition of employment. You can't do that, even if you're the federal government.
Re:We've already given the telcos billions (Score:4, Informative)
Sure you can. It will be a Federal program, and if you want the federal money, you have to abide by the rules set forth. Plenty of government military contracts require union jobs already.
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No one is proposing we run internet packets through Bernie Sanders.
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Bernie pays all his campaign workers at least $15 per hour plus benefits including full medical. Keep spouting lies, I'll keep posting links debunking you.
https://www.newsweek.com/berni... [newsweek.com]
https://www.desmoinesregister.... [desmoinesregister.com]
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Bullshit, he pays all his workers at least $15 per hour plus benefits like full medical. Where the fuck are you even sourcing such lies? Oh, right. The corporate owned media which is scared shitless of Bernie.
https://www.desmoinesregister.... [desmoinesregister.com]
https://www.newsweek.com/berni... [newsweek.com]
Re:We've already given the telcos billions (Score:5, Insightful)
The main part of the plan is simply to take their monopoly away from them and implement municipal broad band. No new money would be going to the telecoms, instead, we'd be eating their lunch.
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However if we use the Electrical Grid as an example. These Telco will still be getting billions, as they would be outsourced to provide services to these communities. What would be different is that they will be required to reach all the households that want it, and must make sure they are working for the general public interest.
Power Companies are private institutions. My Area power is actually ran by a British Based company.
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Nah, he has a "no outsourcing to shitty companies" requirement built in. Read the actual plan before commenting, it's not that long.
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Re:We've already given the telcos billions (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally I don't mind the idea of municipal networks, but it's something that each municipality should decide on and pay for themselves instead of making tax payers across the rest of the country foot the bill for it all. Further, there's not a lot of difference between a cable company that has a monopoly and a municipal network that has a monopoly outside of the CEO of the cooperative having an office that's a lot easier to pound on the door of if you're unhappy.
I suspect that the best solution would be for cities or a local cooperative to own the physical network (and there's nothing stopping them from privately contracting to have it built or maintained before people go off complaining about socialism) and then opening it up to competition to as many different service providers as possible. A market without competition is one that tends to produce worse results for consumers. It might even be wise for cities to build the infrastructure to make it easy to add additional cable without needing to do a lot of digging and even offer the ability for private companies to run their own fiber (for a fee of course) if they don't want to use the municipal network.
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Personally I don't mind the idea of municipal networks, but it's something that each municipality should decide on and pay for themselves (...) I suspect that the best solution would be for cities or a local cooperative to own the physical network (and there's nothing stopping them from privately contracting to have it built or maintained before people go off complaining about socialism)
Actually the latter is why I think a larger entity is preferable, by far most of the work should be outsourced and a few counties is often not enough business to get professional contract management. That doesn't mean they should cross-subsidize each other, but maybe the contract to pull fiber should be the same. Bulk purchases of communication equipment. Properly staffed 24/7 network surveillance. Billing routines. Customer support systems. I guess you'll have some very practical differences in the terrain
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WHOA there Bernie! (Score:2)
You're supposed to hide the club behind your back so the dog isn't alerted that you're going to bash its brains out.
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Way to pick a fight with everybody - billionaires, the medical-industrial complex, big school loan and now cable companies. How's he planning to attack lawyers to get the hat trick? You're supposed to hide the club behind your back so the dog isn't alerted that you're going to bash its brains out.
The club behind his back is the voters.
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Simple you tax them so much money, that the rich don't have enough money to pay for so many lawyers. They will have to advocate their point of view like other citizens do.
You can't hide the club (Score:2)
Funds per mile ? (Score:2)
$150 billion, how much is that per mile of fiber ?
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It costs $7/foot in labor to install the conduits underground in a rural area. add another 50c-$2/foot for permitting and engineering and $1/ft for conduit and fiber and then multiply by road miles in the US and you have your answer on how much is needed.
(Citation: I own a Competitive Access Provider and do this type of work)
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So for $150 billion you could put down about 2.5-3 million miles of fiber, or a couple of hundred feet per residence.
Rural electrification act. (Score:5, Insightful)
Rural electrification acts 'built' the country that won WWII. Without a federal mandate from the top I doubt that corporations would have found it in their hearts (or profitability) to do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Rural Electric Membership Corporation (REMC)s still exist in a lot of areas and have kept prices down, some have even rolled out fiber as part of their cooperative [jacksonremc.com].
My grandparents live just outside of Duke Energy's reach in Florida. Their prices have remained near constant for years while Duke's prices have shot up. They even get a check back at the end of the year since they're also 'owners' of the company.
I wonder how much better California would be right now if there was no profit motive to not maintain lines. Then again, won't someone think of the CEOs making millions.
Amid Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s bankruptcy and wildfire safety woes, the utility’s incoming chief executive officer Bill Johnson will receive an annual base salary of $2.5 million for a three-year contract, the company said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Tuesday.
Johnson — who’s finishing up a six-year stint as president and CEO of the Knoxville, Tenn.-based public utility Tennessee Valley Authority — will also get a one-time transition payment of $3 million on his first day on the job, as well as an annual equity award of about $3.5 million, the filing said. He’ll start May 1, replacing interim CEO John Simon.
Internet is THE thing where competition works best (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in Brazil, when the whole "broadband" thing started, we only had the telephone operator offering DSL, such as telefonica with Speedy.
256-512Kbps down (up i think was 128Kbps), and a pretty awful data cap of 100MB for 50 reais or so, with 10 reais being charged for every extra 100MB (and no way to track it), which led many people to have absurd 400+ BRL bills by the end of the month.
Then a cable TV operator decided to jump in, and offered 512Kbps, no caps for the same price, and not much later telefonica had to drop their data cap to stay competitive.
And things went on and on and on and now i have a 200Mbps fiber connection with no data caps for 70 reais.
So i guess the US just need to remove the literal monopoly laws enforced on the cities etc... to have good internet.
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What "literal monopoly laws" are those? Where I live, we have four ISPs we can pick from.
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It's actually illegal for a city to require a monopoly.
What stops cities from having more than one carrier is the fact that they'd have to build out their own infrastructure. It's simply not profitable in all but the largest cities.
Charge per usage? (Score:2)
I wonder.
Does classifying broadband as a utility like that have any risk of it being more likely to be charged by usage rather than unlimited?
As a high data user myself I don't think I would want a charge per usage type of internet service.
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Why not? Lots of people are "high" data users (thanks, uncacheable streaming video). Do you think your bill would go up, or down? And if it did either one of those two things, are you sure it would be inappropriate or unfair?
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I think mine would go up as I use about 10TB a month.
I'm not saying anything about fairness, but for personal preference I would prefer not to go that route.
Most people vote for or support the things that matter to and affect themselves, not for things that are necessarily the most "fair" to everyone.
utility certified meter at your home is really nee (Score:2)
utility certified meter at your home is really need for that. No more billing for data they tried to send to you
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Something would you need to stop your neighbors from deciding to download the entire Wikipedia* database constantly.
1) As for data caps, no you wouldn't. If you're paying for "up to 1gbs" (a bullshit clause if ever there was one), you should be able to peg 1gbs 24/7/365. If your ISP can't handle it, they shouldn't be offering it.
2) As for your ability to use what you pay for, don't allow anonymous usage of your modem.
Too many people on here will bitch and moan that things should be run a certain way, and they bitch and moan again that they are getting exactly what they asked for when on the cusp of getting it.
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) As for data caps, no you wouldn't. If you're paying for "up to 1gbs" (a bullshit clause if ever there was one), you should be able to peg 1gbs 24/7/365. If your ISP can't handle it, they shouldn't be offering it.
I don't understand this statement. The previous ISP I had included a 400 GB data cap per month. When I did exceed that data cap, I was informed that I would be charged for overages if I kept abusing it. How is your experience different?
As for "1gbs 24/7/365", that sounds like the speed, not the amount. Maybe that's what you're referring to?
I was only able to hit that data cap twice in the past 10 years that I had it.
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Something would you need to stop your neighbors from deciding to download the entire Wikipedia* database constantly.
It's rather pointless to do so ?
I have 100 Mbps down, no caps, and I end up using about 3-5 Mbps average (1-1.5TB/month) with family of 4 heavy internet users and some servers. At that average bandwidth, you could run the combined traffic for a decent city over a single fiber.
Is it just me, or does Sanders seem.... (Score:2)
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Don't worry. It is just you.
Basic Human Right? (Score:2, Insightful)
Anything that can be granted by another person can't be a right, because rights by definition are things that cannot (legally) be revoked by man.
And a service (like internet access) cannot be a right, because it compels other people to supply that "right" to others, against their will. We call that slavery. Thought that one through at all, Bernie?
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Anything I want can be a right, friend.
It's a social contract, not some property of the universe.
Will probably cause lead poisoning (Score:2)
This is good, but Mbps is not enough (Score:2)
Look, I'm literally in a building with two 100 Gbps pipes and four 40 Gbps pipes.
100 Mbps won't cut it.
No, Bernie, it's NOT A RIGHT (Score:3, Insightful)
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Contrary to the clumsy wording in the synopsis above, Sanders isn't calling Internet access a basic human right. His website [berniesanders.com] says:
He knows that broadband isn't a basic human right, and that's what he wants to change.
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"Getting stuff" isn't a right. It's, at best, an entitlement. You don't have a right to make somebody run cable down your country road to your house any more than you have a right to force somebody else to pay a podiatrist to look at your stubbed toe. Can we write laws that say we will tax people and provide those services? Sure. But they're not a right
Except that the services of a judge, jury, lawyer, and every other service needed for a trial are a Right. And the founders of the nation used the phrase "Right".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
How to Fix the Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
The U.S. has ludicrously high fiber bandwidth at insanely low prices. So why are home internet prices high and speeds low? Because the last mile, that segment of cable between the rest of the internet and your house, is an overpriced small pipe. And why is that? Because states and municipalities are permitted to grant ISP franchises. That is, they create monopolies or duopolies. Even in cases where a region is served by multiple providers, services providers overlap on only a percentage of total area because local governments enable collusion between service providers.
Let's review: The only part of the internet in the U.S which is overpriced and underserved is the part which government regulates. Regulates by granting monopolies.
Two simple steps to fixing internet access:
- Enact a national prohibition on municipal ISP franchising. Mandate that whatever terms a municipality grants to one ISP must be offered to all others.
- If you think the poor or rural residents need a helping hand, give them vouchers for purchasing internet service. This conditions payment to corporations on providing the most satisfactory service. Do not give the money directly to corporations, because that conditions payments to corporations on paying off congress.
By the way, Sanders does not give a damn about helping people, he is only indulging his compulsion for power and control. The same way some fat guy walks into McDonalds and can't stop stuffing his face full of Big Macs, Bernie steps into Congress and endlessly votes more powers to himself. Like taking over the internet.
Why do leftists endlessly expand the jurisdiction of government when that is unnecessary to improve governance? If Sanders were capable of improving management and service using government, he then he would repair any of the numerous existing massive government failures without expanding the jurisdiction of government into new domains.
- U.S. Post office: $1.3 billion loss [qz.com] first quarter of last year, projected continuous decline.
- VA: Massive fail [city-journal.org], 307,000 veterans died while waiting for the agency to process their enrollment requests.
- Federal Debt: $230.00 trillion [forbes.com]. The $20 trillion figure is a lie. The real one is too big to repay. National economic collapse is inevitable.
Let's have the same federal government which created those disasters take over internet service. What could possibly go wrong?
Re:we cannot afford Bernie (Score:4, Insightful)
We can't afford corporate greed. Bernie is proposing municipal broadband. Doing things for ourselves is cheaper.
All of Bernie's plans save the middle class money. We can't afford not to elect him.
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I'd love to see private telcos and ISPs lose control and for the People to get their hands on the Internet.
Re:we cannot afford Bernie (Score:5, Insightful)
"Where will the money come from!"
Well PG&E, the company that has been starting California wild fires AND going through bankruptcy managed to scrape up almost $10M for its new CEO.
$2.5 million for a three-year contract, one-time transition payment of $3 million on his first day on the job, as well as an annual equity award of about $3.5 million,
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Charter Communication's profit margin was 3.38% for the last quarter. Where is the "corporate greed"?
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Funny thing about "profit" is that CEO salaries are a loss. You could reduce profit to zero just by paying the C levels more. Oh hey look, https://deadline.com/2019/03/t... [deadline.com]
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Re:we cannot afford Bernie (Score:4, Insightful)
You think the other C levels and the board aren't also raking in the cash? Or that Charter is not cooking the books to pay less taxes?
In any case, a quick look at their financials shows that their profits are much, much higher than that. Looks like the 3.38% figure is the INCREASE in profits over last year, not the total. Take a look: https://www.prnewswire.com/new... [prnewswire.com]
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>municipal broadband
If a municipality wants it they can do it themselves [ammonfiber.com]. Not sure why my municipality is part of the discussion.
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Unless the telcos lobbied to make it illegal/near impossible in your state.
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If I don't live in your State, why should I care about your problems you can't solve?
You can't solve your local problem because of "lobbyists" but expect to solve it at a Federal level in spite of lobbyists? I have a bridge to sell you.
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You can't solve your local problem because of "lobbyists" but expect to solve it at a Federal level in spite of lobbyists? I have a bridge to sell you.
1 battle to win vs 50 battles(at best, more if you break it down to local communities). Yes, Federal is the way to go to ensure all communities can do municipal broadband if so desired. Because the internet inevitably connects to out of state websites the government could easily invoke interstate commerce as justification.
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> 1 battle to win vs 50 battles(
Umm. No. You have 1 battle. Once you achieve what you want it doesn't matter what the other 49 do.
> Federal is the way to go to ensure all communities can do municipal broadband if so desired.
Buttfuck Ammon Idaho can do it but you need the Federal government? Why?
Moreso, According to the FCC End of 2016 92.3% of all Americans had access to broadband speeds of 25mbps.
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-re... [fcc.gov]
Re:we cannot afford Bernie (Score:5, Insightful)
> 1 battle to win vs 50 battles(
Umm. No. You have 1 battle. Once you achieve what you want it doesn't matter what the other 49 do.
> Federal is the way to go to ensure all communities can do municipal broadband if so desired.
Buttfuck Ammon Idaho can do it but you need the Federal government? Why?
All the Federal government has to so is say that that state and local government cannot enact laws that prohibit the creation of municipal broadband services. There, battle won. It doesn't force local communities to create their own, but it allows anyone who wants to to do so. It's easier to fight 1 battle than it is to get every single community individually to have to fight local/state governments.
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> Some states have outlawed what you suggest
Then it's the responsibility of the State citizens to change the law. Not sure why you need to increase my federal taxes because you can't control your State government.
>therefore something the feds are allowed to regulate;
They set standards and it is becoming quite regular. 92.3% of all Americans have access to broadband speeds of 25 mbps. What else is needed?
> is that municipalities have been legally crippled,
Except municipalities like Ammon Idaho? Why
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Some states have outlawed what you suggest,
So, why are you trying to overrule the choices made by the citizens of that state? What makes you so smart that you think you know better than the people that live there? Personally, I think outlawing municipal broadband is an idiotic move; but, I'm not so arrogant that I'd want to impose my will on people who chose differently than I.
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A monopoly is bad whether it is a private company monopoly or a government monopoly.
A local community can vote out a local government monopoly. They can't vote out a corporate monopoly unless they can buy enough voting shares to control the board.
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> A local community can vote out a local government monopoly.
But can't vote in to have municipal broadband without the federal government?
Do you see the contradiction here?
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And the way we mitigate that "bad" is through oversight. What's easier, oversite on a privately owned company, or on a democratically elected local co-operative?
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> on a democratically elected local co-operative?
Brought forth by the Federal government for Sanders plan.
So, is it easier to control local politics to get municipal broadband or not?
Re:we cannot afford Bernie (Score:4, Informative)
I'd tend to agree with you on monopolies, but having municipal competition seems to really cause the incumbent providers to up their game.
I have 3 choices for fiber-to-the-home and a further option for gigabit cable. Prior to my municipality starting to offer $50/mo gigabit, the fastest service i could get was only 250Mbit. I refuse to believe that's just coincidental.
I read somewhere it costs $15-$20/mo (Score:3)
There are just some things that aren't a good fit for privatization [youtube.com].
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Re:we cannot afford Bernie (Score:5, Insightful)
Since most municipalities lack those skills you realize that they'll just end up privately contracting with the same companies that were already offering these services and money ends up right back in the pockets of those companies. You can't just mandate this kind of policy. Just remove the ability for municipalities to grant monopoly rights to cable companies and make it easier from a legal perspective to form municipal networks if they want to and it would go along way to solving a lot of the existing problems and to make it possible for this kind of transition to occur organically.
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How'd that podunk town from yesterday's story do it so well and so cheap then?
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It wasn't that cheap... $45k per mile of fiber. That's on the high side.
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Why are you using that metric? Still cost them less per month for high speed Internet than it costs me.
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It cost them less/month, because they got somebody else to pay for it. That's a good strategy for a small town, but doesn't scale up to the entire country because you run out of other people.
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Who paid for it?
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Don't worry (Score:2)
The democrats are not his friend and they will sabotage him just like last time. I disagree with a lot of his politics but I respect him not taking corporate money.
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free stuff from the government
Not that I necessarily agree with it, but the summary states that he considers broadband a public utility, like electricity. I'm pretty sure most everyone that has electricity provided by the utilities gets a power bill.
ban internet and cable companies from instituting data caps
I'm not sure how I feel about this one.....I think a line in the sand would have to be drawn somewhere.
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NO! NOOOOOOOOO!!! [smashes a cable modem in anger] I will not sacrifice the data caps. We've made too many compromises already, too many compromises. They increase our bills, and we say nothing. They lower our data caps, and we say nothing. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done!
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free stuff from the government
Not that I necessarily agree with it, but the summary states that he considers broadband a public utility, like electricity. I'm pretty sure most everyone that has electricity provided by the utilities gets a power bill.
ban internet and cable companies from instituting data caps
I'm not sure how I feel about this one.....I think a line in the sand would have to be drawn somewhere.
Bernie's got the sword.
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> he considers broadband a public utility
Yes, it's the net neutrality argument all over again but wrapped in the Sanders "free pudding" platform. I would rather address the key issue that is limiting broadband, competition. It doesn't have the same constraints as other public utilities (1 power line vs Broadband delivery options: Cable, phone, radio, satellite, cellular network).
>I think a line in the sand would have to be drawn somewhere.
Why?
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>I think a line in the sand would have to be drawn somewhere.
Why?
If you're on a cable connection, you're gonna feel it if you have a neighbor that is running a 24/7 torrent server.
Of course you won't have this problem on fiber (I think?)
NOT FREE - universal access (Score:2)
Utilities are not free! duh!
Poor people getting free access subsidized by the rest of us is a thing... and it indirectly helps us; water, power, and sewer are subsidized already. Not just for the poor but rural areas wouldn't have jack if gov didn't push us to subsidize their free access to utilities... so they can pay about what we do despite it actually costing way more to initially provide it. Unless you love those 3rd world shitholes where the poor must live in their own filth... because they can't po
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> 3rd world shitholes where the poor must live in their own filth...
What about California?
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lol, fair enough.
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Not Free, we pay for it with taxes. This is stated by the most liberal people as well. The term "Free" seems to only be used by the conservatives to make you think the Liberals are over promising free stuff.
They are things for us to operate in today's society that we need to have, some things we didn't need 100 years ago are now vital for today.
100 years ago. Basic Literacy Optional. You can get a decent job without being able to read, write or do basic math. A High School Education 100 years ago, was a
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> we pay for it with taxes
Yea... Obviously.
> Today a High School Degree with decent literacy skills is required for most entry level work
And since the inception of the Department of Education the standing of US education has gone down. Yes. Yes. Correlation != causation.
Certain educational skills were identified as necessary but that doesn't mean you create a federal department and tax to regulate it necessarily. Same thing for college. I have not heard what skills are necessary for the workplace of t
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The US Interstate System was built in 1956. Adjusted for inflation that $128B is over $1.2 Trillion.
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So why is OK to take other peoples money (Score:2)
My rent goes up $300/mo next year because two large venture capitalists bought up all the apartment complexes where I live and after 2008 and a kid hitting college I didn't have the savings to buy a house. I moved years ago for work because outsourcing from those rent seekers meant my hometown was dead.
The more pertinent example is the ever increasing cost of broadband internet. They literally didn't build it. The internet was invented by the government. The cable was laid with taxp
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