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Comment by Yumz- | Hacker News Reader

Why is this a bad thing? I don't understand why you think every rural backwater needs to be subsidized to the tune of billions by the productive regions of the world. We should be looking to returning 95%+ of land to nature as we urbanize more and more.

I wish more companies and governments would do what the ISPs are doing. Why am I paying for post offices in rural America? Why am I paying to subsidize electricity transportation to rural America?

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Had we taken that approach a century ago most farms would never have never been electrified. It wouldn't have been worth the effort for the utilities to run the lines absent government mandates. (fyi, this has returned as a huge problem today. Utilities charge massive amounts to electrify new developments in rural areas. If it requires more than a pole or two, the cheaper option is to build your own offgrid setup. Poles cost about 15k each in my area.)

There are so many discussions here about information tech changing farms, generally making them better and more efficient. That needs bandwidth. Want retirees to visit their doc via webcam, which saves money/time for all involved? That too needs bandwidth. Bandwidth is the new electricity.

Assuming you are correct that utilities would not have done it freely, then those farms should not have been electrified. It would have sped of the consolidation and industrialization of farming by 100 years by forcing small farmers to either die or sell their land and move to the cities.

So the people living there aren't left behind too much. It is in your best interest to retain some social cohesion.

What if some people like that? Why is the link with social cohesion? Why would it be a best interest? Uniformity for uniformity sake?? And at which cost as the OP said??

Different people have different tastes. I enjoy being offline when I am in the countryside. I am fine with a slow connection, as it lets me concentrate on actual work instead of wasting time online.

I pushed the logic further, and since last year, I have no fixed line internet connection at home.

I would love to find a house not too far from the city, yet without broadband. It would be a relaxing place to live. If there is no government mandate forcing ISP to provide connectivity in the middle of nowhere, the savings could be passed back to me in the form of lower taxes.

So basically I would get a) something I want and that is hard to get today b) less taxes.

Sign me up!

They are free to move to cities any time.

You're footing the bill? How generous.

We are footing the bill for them to live there already. Rural areas are subsidized an incredible amount to our severe detriment. There is almost no decent forested area I can get to in the Midwest and it is only getting worse. Pollution is getting worse as people move further out. People are trapped and either have to get an expensive car or deal with riding poorly set up transit for hours a day. It is ridiculous.

So it's not that they're free to move, it's just that you resent their very existence.

I live out in the boonies. There is a strong percentage of people on sites like this (reddit in particular) that think I'm some kind of geoboomer for not selling my home and renting a sixth story apartment in an urban setting.

The fact that I selected to live here also makes me an uneducated bigot that hates brown folks and will almost certainly re-up in ~38 months.

Okay, but why do we have to foster that social cohesion in the most expensive way possible? Why demand that connectivity in these rural areas be by wireline instead of much cheaper wireless? Okay, people need access. Let’s get it done as cheaply and with as little market distortion as possible. The thing that does that is wireless.

No one will be starting an internet company in a location where there is only mobile internet.

>lets get it done as cheaply and with as little market distortion as possible.

Why do people act like they're paying for personally? This was already agreed upon by communication companies when they were allowed to monopolize much higher ROI urban markets. The whole point was that the high ROI markets would fund the development of the rest of the infrastructure.

Sandbagging the bandwidth of the rural markets is creating an information void that ends up sandbagging support for research and development in other areas.

We don’t need people to start internet companies in areas that are no longer viable. And yes, you are paying for those rural subsidies personally. Literally, through a tax on your telecommunications bill each month. Also, the original idea was to give telecom companies monopolies to allow them to use above-market returns to subsidize rural areas. This was a terrible idea and gave us the entrenched incumbents we have today. In the 1990s, Congress realized this was terrible and got rid of that arrangement, shifting to explicit cross subsidization. But service and build out requirements continue to stifle development of competition. You can’t, as a new entrant, do stuff like pursue a profitable niche (startup 101 advice). And a special tax is levied on your product, as if it were something harmful like cigarettes.

There is no free lunch! If you force urban areas to cross-subsidize rural ones, either directly or indirectly, you’ll get lower quality service at higher prices in urban area.

Look at the regulatory regimes in places like Sweden. They don’t have build out requirements or cross subsidies. To the extent the government wants connectivity in rural places, it doesn’t distort the market by having high-ROI places cross-subsidize it. It pays for it directly.

I totally agree. That's why those people should be given two choices: A) move into urban areas or B) die.

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