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Comment by arca_vorago | Hacker News Reader

What lots of people don't know is many ISPs across the country took that money and shoved it in exec pockets and then raised rates and never invested in infrastructure. An exec of one in my area for example was caught embezzling millions of that grant money.

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Like most things, what really happened is complicated. Here's a good hn thread on the matter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556

If you have more interest in understanding the issue, there's plenty of good assessments. Everything from the explosion of wireless, to hdtv, to local municipalities, to mergers, and technological limitations are to blame.

I really wish that we as a society would spend less time sitting around figuring out who to blame for shit and actually invest in the things we claim to care about. I am sick to the back teeth of bullshit free market ideologies that have an extremely poor track record in reality.

That does not mean I am opposed to or deny the value of markets.

The issue in the U.S. is (and has historically been) that neither side wants to invest in telecom infrastructure--both want private companies to foot the bill. When you start from that premise, all your options are limited by the overriding need to ensure adequate incentives to invest.

As a matter of personal ideology, I'd say: let's build a nationwide public system with a federal/state partnership, and import regulators from Scandinavia to run it. But that's not one of the choices.

You know perfectly well that several states have passed laws forbidding municipal entities to construct their own broadband networks. The left has made some tentative moves towards articulating a goal of investing in national broadband infrastructure (citing the example of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a working example of public utility investment) but has understandably been scared off by the right's strident equivalence of any kind of public investment with communism.

I don't want to oversimplify the issue and don't disagree that everyone in politics would prefer if better broadband infrastructure just happened and all they had to do was show up and cut a few ribbons without investing any political capital. But I think you're being a tad disingenuous here. You are too smart and well-informed to buy this argument if I were to make it to you.

I disagree with those laws ideologically, but they're a footnote. The vast majority of people do not live in one of those states. My county (in Maryland) is building a fiber network and wiring up towns in the rural part of the county that's not served by FiOS: http://archive.aacounty.org/News/Archive2013/News%20and%20Up....

At the same time, I inserted the caveat of importing regulators from Scandinavia for a reason. Public infrastructure in the U.S. (outside of NYC/Chicago) mostly sucks and is poorly run. I say this because I've walked the walk: I used to commute on Metro North every day from Westchester to Manhattan, then on SEPTA from Wilmington to Philadelphia, then on Amtrak from Baltimore to DC, then (briefly) on the D.C. Metro. Metro North was fantastic, but the others are worse than Comcast.

The basic problem is that I don't have the choice to vote for Stockholm's fiber system run by Swedes. My only choice is between Verizon (which is actually pretty damn good in Maryland), or the same folks who run the D.C. Metro.

I'm not sure the free market has much to do with it.

For example, in a lot of areas, the issue was simply local regulations and getting approvals from the local governments. It's hard to build a large metro ring when 1 of the 5 towns you need to go through won't approve the easement expansions necessary.

Or, as another example, should you continue to plow ahead with your fiber to the curb strategy when market forecasts are showing internet connected phone usage growing by multiple thousands of percent within the next 10 years?

Do you have a source that shows their misuse of funds?

I don't believe it to be wrong, I have parroted this fact many times myself. But I just realised that I don't have any evidence of it either.

Different topic, but on the legal side of the law you'll find that most exclusive franchise agreements by an ISP contain something to the effect of "we will pay the city/county $A, give them an ongoing amount of $B/yr (and are not allowed to break that out as a line item), and perform C, D, and E at no cost."

All these agreements are public. Go down to your local city hall or courthouse and ask for a copy of the franchise agreement.

Point being, part of the evil is Comcast. The other part is your elected local politicians...

Franchise agreements can't be exclusive anymore. Officials at any level can still play favorites, of course.

I stand corrected. I'd read ours recently, as I was curious. It was essentially an inherited document from the first cable company to build a network for the city.

It specifically noted it was non-exclusive, but I assumed that was the exception rather than the rule.

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