How lobbyists are keeping the public in the dark about broadband | Hacker News Reader

How lobbyists are keeping the public in the dark about broadband

advicegoddess.com

26 pointsmiked6 comments

Methinks the goddess doesn't understand very well how money flows, and how external forces like government regulation are what distort the market.

state grantees getting paid to collect the information are expected to get some of their data from the Federal Communications Commission, begging the question - why not require the FCC to create the map and save $350 million?

She also seems to assume that when the government does something, it's free. How can she not realize that if the FCC does something, it needs to pay its employees, etc. If the FCC doesn't need to do it, then it needs fewer employees, and we can all save on taxes?

The problem is that not having the FCC do something clearly within it's "charter" as a public government agency only creates more middle men costing even more state grant money. We still pay the price but the price went up because we added more middle men into the mix.

Given how little government involvement there is relative to other nations that are building faster networks than us, I highly doubt Government regulation is what's holding us back. The US has significantly less red tape involved in building out nationwide infrastructure than countries like Sweden, Japan, and South Korea.

Is there some supernatural market force that amplifies US bureaucracy over these other countries? I guess that depends on whether or not you consider lobbyists the super-heroes of Democracy.

> The US has significantly less red tape involved in building out nationwide infrastructure than countries like Sweden, Japan, and South Korea.

I'd like to read about that. Do you have any links?

Oh man, the lobbyists are definitely the superheroes of democracy. 1 lobbyist has the power of something like 1000000 voters.

I highly doubt Government regulation is what's holding us back.

I said that regulations distort the market, which is precisely true. The result of the distortion might be to retard the market, or to cause over-investment that accelerates the market; I suspect that's the case in the countries you cite.

Just because they're getting more broadband faster does not mean that they're better off overall. It may be that there are other, more important investments that are being made in the USA, but those other countries won't benefit because they squandered their money on universal ultrafast broadband.

Of course, it's difficult to impossible to prove this either way. The market is a mind-bogglingly complex emergent system, and like a neural net, you can't fully reverse-engineer any particular piece of it. The fact that money acts as a communication mechanism, carrying information about the relative importance and substitutability of goods, allows the market to dynamically adapt to what the participants actually want (as demonstrated by their wallets), rather than what is forced on them from above.

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