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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

We tried this. It was a national broadband initiative in the late 90s. Telecom companies were given BILLIONS of dollars to build fiber across the country. They took it and did exactly zero.

If we are dumb enough to do it this way again (paying the wolves to secure the hen house), we better have good checks and balances on it.

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Separating concerns prevents these problems. There should be one company responsible for the infrastructure and other companies competing to provide service to customers.

Deregulation of the Texas energy market should be the model. In Texas, I get an electricity plan that is 100% wind power at a third of the cost of electricity in California. They even gave me a free digital thermostat and installed it for free. The service is reliable and gets restored quickly if there's a natural disaster.

If only telephone service and internet access worked this well.

But I agree, if you give billions of dollars to customer-facing companies to improve the infrastructure, they'll squander it.

You aren't really getting 100% wind power since the grid doesn't work like that. You are, however, promoting more wind energy into the grid.

Yep, and that was a disgrace for everyone involved, and screwed the consumer. There's two pretty big indicators that we're doing it wrong. First, with few exceptions, USA pays among the most for internet data, at middling speed. Secondly, those providers are consistently ranked among the least liked by customers. Why this doesn't scream monopoly/oligopoly needing intervention is beyond me. I personally believe these companies are so disliked that even the biggest pro capitalists would not even care if it were nationalized.

The ISPs, their lobbyists, the politicians whose campaigns they donate to, and the revolving door of government regulators who were and will be employed by said ISPs definitely care.

The proposal is to build public infrastructure and lease it to private firms, not to pay private firms with public money to build and own infrastructure.

Which also has potential for abuse and failure

When people talk about this "nationalized" 5G network, it's very likely that it would be outsourced to a single prime contractor (probably either AT&T or Verizon). The government has actually done this before with FirstNet.

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