Sanders unveils plan to boost broadband access, break internet and cable titans
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Clean water, sewer, electric, internet, and USPS logistics service are table stakes (in the US). It's silly to make this out to be "Live in the suburbs or rural areas? Mad Max for you!".
Counterpoint: How's that cheap, high speed Gb FTTH internet working out for you in downtown NYC or SF? /s
I do think the costs could be more even but this isn't a new trade-off
I haven't though directly seen the cost difference though. I just know growing up one the big things the neighborhood wanted was a connection to city water
You don't accept bad air quality, traffic, crime, consumerism pressure, ads on every street corner, weak and shallow local communities, and proclame "well don't be surprised because you chose civilization". You expect and demand improvements like any other decent human being.
Giving money to big telco's hasnt worked. I think the best way to cover rural areas is wireless, via local WISPs or local government run ISPs. It would be nice to see some of the low-band spectrum being reclaimed from TV stations (sub 1GHz) go towards these efforts, since higher bands wont be able to cover as much area.
It's shitty to hang people out to dry, but at the same time, people MUST move in the above example. Coastal residents can't do whatever they want and expect others to share the costs.
What about the sea life and baby turtles that will die due to raising coastal areas?
For example, the US has a great beer market now. It took several years before US beer - as a broad concept - was removed from the official foreigner list of things to bash the US with (which still includes such fan favorite fallback items as American cheese and Hershey chocolate).
That the US has had faster Internet access than most of Europe - including Germany and France - for the past decade, is a bash list counter that people intentionally pretend doesn't exist. It's very inconvenient reality and your typical American has no idea what the access speeds are across Europe, so they can't counter argue properly.
The access cost issue is also - fairly - of course on the bash list, although people never adjust for the far higher US incomes when pointing it out, naturally.
The US rolled out 4G much faster than Europe and it's going to roll out 5G much faster than Europe. That too is universally, intentionally ignored (despite the stream of articles you can google on the subject reporting how far behind Europe was in rolling out 4G and now again with 5G). That despite the fact that these items are matters of infrastructure and the US is supposed to be the worst on the planet when it comes to infrastructure (the US is spending more of its GDP on infrastructure than the EU).
Something has to be missing here.
16:10:46 Thank you for contacting us. An operator will be with you shortly.
16:10:46 Guest: Is there an installation fee for Gigazone internet?
16:11:08 Guest: Hi, I see that there's an $85 activation fee, but is there also an additional installation fee?
16:11:40 Operator JJ joined the chat
16:11:47 JJ: Hi there!
16:11:51 Guest: Hi!
16:12:13 JJ: There is no installation fee. It is rolled in with the activation fee which is waived if you sign a 6 month contract.
16:12:54 Guest: That's great--I was discussing this with friends and we can't figure out how it's possible! How can you afford to run fiber optic out into the country and charge so little for it?
16:14:36 Guest: Part of why I ask is because almost no other rural areas have this figured out
16:14:56 JJ: Well, there's a couple of ways. For a long time we required our members to have phone lines along with our internet service as there are a number of government grants that we can qualify for as long as we're building rural telephone infrastructure. That's the reason we still are required to require phone service in some of our service area.
16:15:13 Guest: I see, cool
16:15:52 JJ: Secondly, we're a co-op and committed to the community. If we plow a fiber line to your home and you end up moving some time in the future, the line remains for some other lucky co-op member in the future. It's kind of a "long-game" mentality.
16:16:05 Guest: Makes sense, thank you!
I'm in a city of 872k people and can't even get fiber. The fastest I can get at home, without going business, is 75mbps.
Sure... I can see your point that it “is a decision” for folks that choose to move to a rural area, but I don’t believe that’s the case for the other 99% of folks living there.
You can stop subsidizing our internet, and we'll stop supplying you with cheap food. Deal?
if subsidies weren't already being used by those supplying the food, entire businesses and families would fail. 'feeding the nation' isn't all that profitable without subsidies, from most angles.
so, I guess my point is that 'we'll stop supplying you with cheap food' is a hollow threat, given that the cheap food is over-produced and under-valued for the sake of an artificial economy that's largely enforced and legislated by 'citydwellers'. Most of the motivation to supply food is drawn from the incentives provided by the few in legislative power, not from profit nor moral imperative from 'rural-livers'.
If it's profitable to export soy from the US to china it most certrainly is profitable to import food from africa or australia after a storm.
Let the market incorporate the costs of broadband access into the price of food. The extra cost will almost certainly amount to fractions of a cent on the dollar.
Exactly: you receive cheap food in the city because it's subsidized. You are a beneficiary. Why should that be? Living in a city where it's impossible to grow food is a choice. So let's end that, along with internet subsidies (of which I'm a beneficiary) and we'll see if you're better off.
I am really not a big fan of the democratic party at large but a plan like this to take power away from the large internet monopoloies is going to be one of the only ways to make sure that internet infrastructure is kept up to date and that fast internet is available to everyone in the US.
Infrastructure like the internet pipes shouldn't be privately owned, simply because they value profit over maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure.
Maybe we can compromise with a system I have heard of ( in the nordic countries I believe) Where the local municipalities own the wires but you buy the service from a number of internet companies who rent the lines and provide service. This would increase competition and allow for private companies to not have to worry about the cost of upgrading the infrastructure.
1) It receives no public funding.
2) It has few public mandates or price controls. (No, “must offer subsidized service to disenfranchised people” or similar requirements.)
3) It faces no build-out or universal service requirements. It took Stokab almost 20 years to wire the city. They did it based entirely on demand/revenue potential. They deployed first to businesses and areas with the most revenue potential. Stokab didn’t need public funding because it could deploy in a revenue-directed manner. This is illegal in almost every US city. New York flipped out and tried to file a civil rights lawsuit when Verizon couldn’t meet the five year deadline for wiring the city.
4) It charges large up front fees to hook up to the network.
Stokab would be burned to the ground with civil rights lawsuits if it was attempted in New York or San Francisco.
Likewise, Sweden’s approach to wiring rural areas was very market oriented. Unlike the US, it didn’t mandate providers to serve rural areas (cross subsidizing them with revenues from urban areas). It gave rural homeowners a tax credit of about $600 to subsidize laying their own fiber.
That was without having to dig up concrete and repair too.
Otherwise, it's like 10~20min to sufficiently properly terminate the fiber at the ends and that. You can likely get around that if you just order pre-terminated fiber at like 1$/plug and just plug it in at the ends instead of splicing. Sure, this will higher losses, but money.
Fiber is literally cheaper than copper for >150m or >=10Gbit/s (though direct-attach cables up to 3~5m are even cheaper) if you can get by without field-terminating fibers.
The contiguous United States is 3,119,884.69 square miles (the United States makes up a little less than 1/3 of North America). There are individual states larger than several European and Asian countries.
Sure, there's not someone living in every single square mile but they are spread out. The fastest I can get at home, in a city fo nearly 900k people, is 75mbps down without going to a business line. Even delivering that speed to 80% of the population would probably require several billion in just equipment (lines included).
To go into a market, an ISP has to be able to reasonably recover their roll-out costs from that market. If they spend xxx dollars rolling out to a town, and then if they can hope to sell service to 75% of the homes, but are only going to make 0.5x or even xx of that back each year as profit, is it reasonable for them to spend xxx amount just to deploy when it might be a decade or more before they recover their initial investment? And what about the (likely) x to xx a year to maintain the equipment from squirrels/birds/storms/drunk drivers, and then upgrading the technology etc.
It's great when you have a small country, that you can drive across in a day, but when you're talking about 1/3 of a continent everything is orders of magnitude more expensive and more difficult.
I think people easily fall into the "well that country has it!" but they don't realize that "that" country is tiny. Let's take the country with the fastest internet [1], Taiwan, with an average speed of 85.02Mbps - it is 13,974 square miles, that's 0.44% (zero point four four) of the contiguous United States. 41 states are larger than Taiwan.
[1] https://www.swedishnomad.com/fastest-internet-in-the-world/
Today we take it for granted that you can go anywhere in the United States and flip a light switch to turn on a light. But without that public investment, there would be big swathes of the country still living by the light of candles and oil lamps.
These problems can be solved, but the private sector will never solve them, because the profit motive isn't there for them to do so. It requires public investment.
Also, you claim that "remote settlements" have little economic value, and yet their economic value is highly restricted when they don't have access to the internet so how can we claim that to be true?
I generally don't agree with Bernie's whole premise here, but I do think he has the right idea. We should up high speed requirements, but also OTA should not count. The reason wireless (5G, 4G, Satellite) shouldn't count is...well the data caps are so limiting that you can't possibly do anything with the service. Or the equipment and setup is so expensive you'd have to be a company to afford it. I don't agree that high speed is a "human right," I really think such statements add nothing of value and make such proposals easy to mock. The argument should simply be to treat high speed land lines as a public utility and requirement, like electricity.
I don't think encoding a current limitation into law is a good idea. If they can provide a wireless internet that meets the requirements, that is good enough for me.
This country built an interstate system 70 years ago involving tons and tons of labor, asphalt, concrete, and continuous repairs. I find it hard to believe running fiber cables to be a challenge.
The biggest cost is Comcast’s share price going down as they lose the ability to rent seek on customers for being a useless middleman peddling “TV” and substandard internet.
I think we should have use common sense here. Fiber deployment is expensive but it is probably worth pulling fiber at least to every post office in these United States.
I didn't even know the word metonym but you said it better than I could have. Yes, I mean population centers. I mean we have to be reasonable. If someone moves to the South Pole and demands we run fiber there, we might have to say no. I don't know where we exactly draw the line though. My understanding is that there is a lot of "dark fiber" criss crossing the country that can be "lit up" so the "long haul" isn't so much of a problem as the "last mile". I could be wrong though. I don't know much about these things.
The productivity improvements of high bandwidth low latency connections are numerous. Just like building the interstate highway and a network of roads did, or water, or gas, or sewage.
Not sure what that has to do with mansions.
The best internet in the world, located in a major city, will have around 15ms latency to the closest datacenter. Wireless solutions can easily achieve that.
For any of the users we are talking about (underserved populations in areas without fiber internet), they will never see those latencies even with the same fiber you have.
If you live in rural Wyoming, there are going to be practically zero services hosted within 500 miles of you. You are not going to get 5ms latency no matter what you do.
Insisting that EVERYONE has to get fiber, even when that won't change their performance experience, only slows down the actual service of their needs.
This is like any sort of performance engineering problem; focusing on an area that is no where close to becoming the bottleneck is not an efficient use of resources.
You mean across the globe, not country. 100ms ping in domestic call sounds bad.
>you are never going to get sub 100ms latency across the globe.
Latency adds up, bandwidth is calculated by the width of narrowest path, but latency is accumulated.
If you have 100ms ping to local gateway, you still need to add another 100ms for the packet to reach the other side of the globe.
They'll have access to Starlink within the next few years. Proper broadband access at prices competitive to fast cable and fiber in the rest of the country.
What makes access to high-speed internet a privilege as opposed to a right? Why shouldn't everyone be guaranteed access to high-speed internet?
A big Finnish government is different than, say, a big Russian government.
To me it seems like saying: I fundamentally disagree with dining out because it requires restaurant, and restaurant is always bad.
Say what will about big greedy corporations, they're boy scouts when compared to the carnage brought about by governments in the last century.
Maybe in time we'll decide this one should be, but Sanders seems ready to expand that list a great deal.
People forcing governments to take care of them is really the only rational thing for governed people to do.
What makes it a privilege is that it's a consumer service, like cable television or satellite radio. Sure it's good to have, but hardly on the same page as "human rights".
There seems to be a trivializing of human rights by the left, who have a tendency to throw everything under the sun in as a human right so they can justify expanding the government to provide said right.
Access to the court system and a fair trial? Human Right Freedom from slavery? Human Right Broadband internet to watch streaming videos? Not a Human Right.
By your same logic, if I began charging people to have access to the court system and a fair trial (which is arguably the case in the US today anyway) and treat the judicial system as a "consumer service," then it would cease to be a right.
That is hardly an argument, I'm sorry to say.
The internet however also:
- allows for persistent, extended bullying
- can lead to all sorts of negative mental health events by exposing you to all sorts of highly-curated content giving the perception that someone always has it better than you or by exposing you to incredibly graphic imagery and news
- encourages sedentary beahvior such as wathcing 12 hours of tv on a Saturday, sitting on HN/reddit for 3-5 hours a day, playing MMORPGs for 5, 10, 24 hours in a day.
It's no more a human right than diet coke or owning a vehicle is. It's a tool.
One could easily argue the internet, and recreational computation in general, is a detriment to society. A few years ago I did a little research and some maths and was quite surprised with how much time we collectively waste on just video games
>I got to thinking, 'how much time do we waste annually on video games' and I quickly found answers. The average U.S. gamer age 13 or older spent 6.3 hours a week playing video games during 2013. Wow, but what about globally? Could I find an estimate? Well, I did, on TED no less. We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames.
[1] Additional sources referenced on the page https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2016/8/2/humanitys-...
Access to essential tools (judicial system, healthcare, shelter, nourishment, etc.) is a human right, broadly speaking. The internet is quickly becoming an essential tool for carrying out nontrivial activities in our modern society.
> the internet will grant you access to knowledge you wouldn't otherwise have
Then I am forced to conclude that you also believe that education is not a human right on the same grounds.
It also fails universality. If even one person lacks broadband internet, then we would all be obligated to provide it or we are failing to uphold their rights. So if a person in Montana doesn't have broadband, everyone in e.g. Uganda and Malaysia is complicit in a human rights violation. It really is this silly, because human rights are not limited to any government or institution. They are a universal responsibility and mutual obligation between individuals as well, so defining them positively implies absurd moral conclusions.
Venturing into meta-level ideological territory, I can't help but perceive the theory of positive rights as a cynical tool for expanding government powers. It mandates utopian promises, it sucks the air away from reality-based alternatives that look anemic or even cruel by comparison, it requires nuance to argue against, and it functionally cements the government as the source and provider of human rights. It could not be better propaganda for the state.
But when we elevate those services to the status of faux "human rights" then it weakens actual rights. If your right to association is on the same playing field as my "right" to public housing, then disbanding right-leaning political parties is on the table because they threaten my human rights.
This may seem like an absurd example but we already have absurd arguments like the "right" to feel safe outweighs the right to bear arms, or the "right" to not hear hate speech outweighs the right to free expression. Balancing positive "rights" that must be supplied by the government against actual freedom-from-coercion negative rights is a monumental expansion of state power. Enshrining positive rights, as desirable as the ends are in themselves, is a serious and fundamental distortion to the ideological foundations of liberalism.
I think every ISP which got FUSF money should deploy, now, as promised, with the money they've already been given, before we talk about giving them more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund#Controv...
In return for the deregulation of the industry in the 90's, we were told that we were going to get upgraded to broadband access in everybody's home.
It seems like we have already paid for universal broadband more than once.
Yes, and the industry stagnated for decades.
> U.S. internet speeds rose nearly 40 percent this year
https://nypost.com/2018/07/11/the-average-internet-speed-has...
> News was particularly good for the United States, which moved up from the 21st-fastest country in 2017 to the 20th-fastest country in 2018. That might not sound like much of an improvement, but it was achieved by increasing speeds from an average 20 Mbps to nearly 26 Mbps, a bigger increase than the average.
(In 2019, the US jumped from 20th to 15th in the M-lab data, ahead of Germany, France, the UK, and Italy.)
Over the decade or so Akamai published its results on broadband speeds (the last one being in 2017) the US moved from the 20s into the top 10.
The idea that US broadband is slow or stagnant is just totally false, to the point where you have to wonder where it comes from.
And who knows what bullshit the ISPs use to advertise their speeds. I assume they’re taking a 1GB download line to 100 homes and then selling each one 100Mb or more, so in the evenings, it’s really somewhere above 10Mbps down continuous. And the upload is negligible, so negligible that you won’t even find Comcast or their ilk advertise its amount.
It should be a human right and if governments were smart they would blanket their countries with free high speed for the masses.
Instead we contend with the likes of Verizon and ATT whose profit motives are at odds with the core principles of a free and open internet.
You clearly don't know a very diverse group of people. Not everyone works in an office sitting behind a MacBook Pro. A lot of people still make things with their hands.
Our subway and water systems are “public utilities” supporting “good paying union jobs.” How many of them would rank in the top 10-15 in the world? (Note that no country in the top 10 treats broadband like a publicly owned utility.) Moreover, the median age of municipal election voters is 57. What trade offs are they going to want to make in balancing rates versus maintenance and upgrades? (There is a reason that our water infrastructure, for example, is facing a one trillion investment shortfall.)
Sanders proposes to spend $150 billion on broadband. Over what time frame? If it’s the typical 10-year time frame candidates have been using for budget proposals, that’s just about 1/5 of what the private sector is investing in broadband annually.
Public broadband is going to be an $80 billion a year commitment just for capital expenditures. If you demand those be tied to “good paying union jobs” be ready to make it $120 billion or more. Add in operational expenditures, be ready to triple that.
Telecom is a huge sector. Even if you subtract the profits, you’re talking several hundred billion of dollars annually. That’s half the size of the military budget.
> How many of them would rank in the top 10-15 in the world?
Anything would be better than Comcast, seriously.
Even in rural areas the coverage is typically pretty good when horizontal deployment is done by municipalities or local utilities. And you see the exact same thing in the US.
Maybe download speeds, and even then, probably subject to a temporary boost while the ISPs slows down other people in the neighborhood.
The fact that no upload speeds are ever advertised means to me that the ISP hasn’t made any hardware or capacity improvements or, they’re just reallocating what they already have.
Either way, who cares what other countries have and don’t have. It’s pitiful what the “greatest” country on earth can’t manage to offer due to monopolies having a disincentive to offer it, since they also sell TV and phone service, which they would lose revenue from if people had decent internet connections.
Yes unions can be good, but, my god, do they encourage massive inefficiencies.
I don’t think that unions are the cause of massive inefficiencies.
[1] I know why Sanders does it, because he is catering to people who are outraged at the thought of “billions in profit” even if that only represents a single-digit percent of revenue. Indeed, if you go read Sanders’ proposal, he makes a point of stating how AT&T’s CEO made $33 million, as if that isn’t a drop in the bucket for a company that spends $140 billion a year on opex.
Profit margins (or numbers used to get Gov funding) are just a big, fat lie.
We do need healthier Internet, but do you really expect bad math or morbidly obese institutions to be the answer?
2020 will be the year for Starlink, if it really works as advertised by the time Sanders could be elected this will be a reality (or a dud).
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-internet-ser...
Musk may have the technical ability here, but he does not possess the political ability.
Inversely, Bernie wants to get the political ability, but will not have the technical ability.
Just because Musk has starlink doesn't mean Congress won't pass a law that cleverly neuters his project in the United States to ensure that established monopolies and duopolies aren't hurt. It doesn't mean that former employees of broadband companies who fully control the regulators won't intervene on behalf of their former (and future) employer.
It's not as simple as flick a switch and turn it on, these services are heavily regulated and as we see with the current american government, it's very easy for corporations like Comcast to get former high level employees like Ajit Pai put into charge of the entire regulatory scheme, with vast power to protect established corporate interests and destroy all competition be it business or local government.
I would go so far as to say that if Donald Trump is re-elected and the regulatory capture of the FCC continues, Musk is doomed to failure. Comcast, Verizon et al has pwned the FCC, and currently the federal broadband regulators exist as a tool to protect corporate interests.
Also, Starlink is run by a single, private company. If anything happens to the company, do we really want a vast chunk of the country offline? At least with GPS we know they don’t need to be profitable. What if the shareholders don’t find Starlink worth it?
That being said, I can’t wait for Starlink myself!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)#Kuiper_System...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb_satellite_constellation
Why wouldn't Starlink be an improvement over that? Just because it doesn't work during the storm?
> The Tesla Model 3 in 2019 has seen nearly 3 times more sales than the second best selling plug-in vehicle (EV) in the world, China’s top selling BAIC EU-Series.
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/12/05/tesla-model-3-13-percen...
SpaceX has now proven they can reuse first stages repeatedly, when sending spacecraft to orbit. Like no other organisation has done. They have 10 reusable first stages, some which have flown 3-4 times. Hardly abysmal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceX/wiki/cores#wiki_.2810.29_fli...
The one thing you can rightfully accuse him of is plugging one hole with another but so far he's managed to escape the consequences and being a complete idiot on Twitter. It certainly doesn't help but his track record so far is good and bankable and I wouldn't be surprised at all if Starlink succeeded. If you look at Inmarsat's turnover then you'll see why, and that's with low bandwidth geosynchronous satellites, now imagine that with high bandwidth, low latency LEO. Just that is a game changer for some industries, bringing fast internet to rural areas is going to be a doozy compared to the offshore applications and what that's worth.
I’d like to see something like fiber to 80% of the country, and then alternatives (like low-attitude satellite internet) for the last 20%.
Give companies huge tax breaks if they’re doing this work.
No need to reinvent a process that worked well the first time around.
For another, the equipment you need to support a given level of bandwidth has dropped orders of magnitude in cost. For another, endpoint hookups are faster and easier, we know much better how to splice fiber faster and cheaper. etc etc... it takes a real lack of imagination to claim it's the same as when we put in electricity and telephone networks or even early fiber or copper networks.
Take for example this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21716312
Alon Levy mainly cites the flawed design-build model where design and construction contracts are awarded to the same firm as well as the comparatively high cost of TBM use for deep stations / tunnels versus cut-and-cover construction techniques for simpler, shallow stations.
Your arguments are the same exact same arguments big companies had when rolling out the initial electrical and phone grids, and yet today we would find it ridiculous if you said you weren't able to get electrical service to your house.
I could use some competition in this space.
Symmetrical broadband enables a lot of really interesting p2p use cases that are otherwise infeasible. Think content distribution, routing, etc. You don’t need to be part of the tech crowd to benefit from p2p software.
If everyone had upload speeds as fast as download speeds, “personal clouds” and a “data center in every home” would be real possibilities.
He took a busload of breast cancer patients from Vermont to Canada so they could buy cheaper prescription drug and voted against trillion dollar wars.
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/legislative-landmarks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdFw1btbkLM&feature=youtu.be
Currently, these are the top five comments:
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/e710oj/sanders_ca...
>Break up comcast? Clearly bernie is a man for and of the people.
>Finally! It's long overdue. These monopolies need to end so people can have affordable internet access.
>Every day there’s more great news from him.
>And now you know why MSNBC hates Bernie. I really enjoy the network but even I'll admit their Comcast connections get in the way of their ability to actually cover politics in a fair light.
>Fuccckkk comcast
And it continues like that for quite a few more. No substance, just empty rage against 'The Man'. Disagree on any bit of it and prepare to be personally attacked and downvoted into obscurity.
Search an address anywhere in America, go to the ISPs website, and see what the options are. I’d bet money that the vast majority are restricted to one ISP, one will be via coax which is limited to 5mbps upload for the whole neighborhood. The other is the phone company offering DSL (doesn’t count as broadband internet).
The only solution to providing high bandwidth, low latency, symmetric internet is by running fiber wires everywhere. The private company owning the monopoly (Comcast for most) has no reason to do that, and can simply charge whatever they want (as long as it’s not too much to cause sufficient outrage to cause political change). They don’t need to improve their product, which the only way would be to run fiber wires to all the houses, but they can just collect rent from everyone who has no option.
I don't, and I never said that; I said that reddit comments tend to lack substance, and I think the examples show that. Only one of them even mentions the word "Monopoly" (local oligarchies would be more accurate), and it's a very simple, short statement. The rest are complete throwaways.
Look, your response to me was vastly better than any of those. There's no discussion of pros and cons, potential roadblocks, or the complexities of such a large plan. It's just "Bernie is awesome, down with the corporations!". If you disagree, in any way, your labeled a corporate bootlicker. /r/politics is a cult. I didn't come out of that thread having learned anything. I didn't even see a mention of any specific details of the plan in the ~10 top comments I read.
How you can equate that with what you see in the comments here is beyond me.
It’s been known for a long time that the only way to improve internet connections is to run fiber wire. It’s also been known that Comcast and other monopolies lobby and spend money to fight it. It’s known that they stand to lose money by becoming a dumb pipe. So there no discussion to be had, in my opinion, other than governments running their own fiber for their citizens.
I'd still rather it in the hands of government than a monopoly corporation.
But if I must use a single monopoly company that provides a service, I'd much rather get services from the government, because at least I have some semblance of a vote in the form of my actual vote. With a single corporate provider of a utility, I have no say at all.
Which is honestly the case in couple instances in my life. I have moved around the US NE quite a bit and multiple places I have lived only offer Verizon or Comcast but only one or the other. The current place I am in is Verizon which is fantastic because dealing with Comcast has always been a massive time sink and emotional/mental strain but I still have no choice in who provides me service.
One of the Tory ministers responsible for privatizing utilities in the 1980s said they did it because the utilities would be easier to control as private companies with a regulator.
There is no silver bullet.
I'm not sure how that's sensible. Are you being sarcastic?
Sure, there are problems with political intervention in state-owned companies (near term bias, etc.), but if it's the only means of holding state-owned companies accountable, and if a competitive market is untenable, then yes, voter-accountable politicians should be able to intervene in state-owned companies.
As it stands, with a company like PG&E, you have a half-solution, where it's a privately-owned monopoly but isn't directly accountable to its customers because they can't vote with their wallet, so it gets metric tons of regulation dumped on it instead as a half-measure that (obviously) doesn't work.
The reality is that K-street and the oligarchs write the laws, congresspeople don't even read the bills, maybe key staffer or two who the K-street firm promised a job later who did the actual legwork on the bill has read some of it, and then the congressperson votes along all kinds of machiavellian and other power lines that have nothing to do with "is the bill good or not".
Until America fixes congress, plans like this will get railroaded via riders and rewrites regardless of the merit of the original proposed bill.
At least it mentions the glut of monopolistic mergers and aquisitions, but I want more than "we will fight it". Tell us how you intend to actually use the DOJ to go after white-collar and anti-trust crimes!
Bernie couldn't and doesn't even stand up to his own party as is evidenced by it's corruption in the 2016 election. What makes anyone think he can stand up against the oligarchs?
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacex-starlink-airforce/...
[1]: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/05/block-5-spacex-incre...
please read any article on starlink, putting the satellites into low earth orbit makes a huge difference, no it isn't marketing bullshit.
Latency will be on par with using a VPN a few hundred miles away (the satellites are in low earth orbit, not geostationary like previous generations). Upload speeds will also not be like with previous satellite internet, which often used dial-up for upload because the satellite+dish setup was not designed to receive signals from users on the ground.
SpaceX (et al) have a different strategy. They are instead sending satellites to Low Earth Orbit, so they'll be about 500 km above sea level. As a result, the propagation delay will not be nearly as bad. Perhaps under 50 ms, compared to the 600 ms I've seen on geosynchronous satellite internet.
At that low altitude, you need a lot more satellites (because each satellite can only "see" a small-ish area of the earth), so they need to send a swarm of those satellites. This is now possible because satellites are much smaller and cheaper than they used to be.
Will fiber blow it out of the water? Yes. Will The phone company run a fiber line out to my house for less than thousands of dollars? No. Would they do it if there's some competition from above? Maybe so.
For one thing, the rural population of the US is, depending on your definition, somewhere between 15 and 20%. [1]
For another, a lot of farmers and rural areas get perfectly good cable internet and even fiber.
[1] https://www.hrsa.gov/rural-health/about-us/definition/index....
Where does he propose to get the funding for projects like this?
seriously though. over the last few decades, economies around the globe have taken tax load off the bigger shoulders, and now the argument against any progressive agenda is "how would you ever finance this?"
Not that it's a generally bad question to ask, but I find it quite remarkable how deeply ingrained the notion is that you can't simply raise funds as a government, and how much that limits the (perceived, and by extension practical) agency of a government and "the people".
Government isn't the only way people can get things done, and I think we should be resentful (and suspicious) of the argument that to fund and accomplish large tasks, we need to hold a gun to the heads of the people. Are we really so incapable of cooperation that we need tax men, followed by armed police, to ensure that businesses serve the customers who pay them? Just like Sears & Roebuck and Wells Fargo worked to bring good things from the cities to rural America, this situation could be resolved by private enterprise. I believe we would be farther along without government attempts to regulate the industry that have impeded its progress.
The problem with private enterprise is accountability too - they generally are accountable to someone, but that someone typically happens to be shareholders who truthfully don’t give a damn about much other than maximizing their returns. A lot of folks who blindly prefer this route are either the ones who have the most to gain (because they already have capital) or folks who just don’t understand the incentive structure.
Saying one side is always inherently better than the other is short sighted and more of a tribal belief in my opinion.
I don’t want FB to have my data and would prefer the government break up internet monopolies. I’m also not saying I want to live under Hugo Chavez. Unfortunately, at least in America, we love to go towards extremes. The civic discourse is lacking.
Second, there's a real moral difference between the voluntary association among people in business and the coercive foundation of government. One is built on people wanting to trade value for value, and the other is built on armed military, police, and jailers. I would rather promote the former, even if it sometimes would be more efficient on the surface to force people to cooperate.
Unless you have a monopoly or a cartel or capture government regulation of your industry.
I think your second point is overly simplifying a lot of complexity. I agree that government has this coercive function... However, it’s also true that unchecked private enterprise ends up influencing that government to meet their own special interests. You want to promote the former, but the former ends up making the large campaign contributions so they can have legislation written in their favor... laws that apply to the common person don’t apply to these big corporations. Hence, we socialize losses but privatize profits. The fat cats go to prisons (if ever) that are potentially comparable to high end hotels, nicer than the homes of many ordinary citizens.
As far as some moral conflict is concerned because of the policing powers of the state - that’s why we have something resembling a democracy, even if it’s imperfect.
Empirically, the answer seems to "yes", at least in the USA.
Hospitals and insurance companies, higher education, private prisons, private companies operating water systems, drug companies, local internet monopolies, all seem to have a business model of stepping right up to the line of outright defrauding their customers, occasionally crossing that line, and constantly finding ways to avoid competing with each other and extracting more money from their customers for worse quality and service.
We have given the "free market" plenty of opportunities to provide improving quality at lower prices (the mantra of capitalist ideology), but in many of the most important markets, it has completely failed.
Are there examples of countries with high quality outcomes and low costs where those industries are deregulated?
I would add the Republican party in the US is so incompetent and dysfunctional, they are unable to create concrete policy proposals or pass legislation, even when they had full control of the federal government. What concrete steps did they take to fix fundamentally broken industries like health care and higher education?
So I find myself drawn to Democrats like Bernie and Warren, at least they have plans to address these issues, and the status quo is unacceptable.
An analogous situation arises in business. When the government regulates quality and cost, it leaves businesses no natural path to profitability, so to allow them to survive, it must also interfere in competition, with subsidies, tariffs, and other measures, up to and including enforced monopoly. That keeps the natural economic processes that reward good quality and low price from operating --- the favored businesses cannot be displaced by their competition, and the effect of consumer dissatisfaction is blunted --- and provides the perverse incentives that create the problems you perceive in industry (and politics).
US Government spending as a percentage of GDP has been fairly stable for decades. It's higher now than it was in 1970 -- the only time it has ever been substantially higher than it is now was World War II, and a transient spike a decade ago because of the housing bailout.
There are only two ways the government has ever really been able to spend more money on something. Grow the economy so that the same percentage of GDP is more money, or cut some other spending.
However, the specific amount he's proposing ($120,000,000,000 for a national initiative) is nowhere near unheard of, and actually normal for large infrastructure projects (remember, the grants rarely happen all at once).
Judging by his site, he intends to make a lot more initiatives plausible at once via a progressive (in the tax sense, which means only after a certain level of value, and only on value after that level) estate tax, a proposed piece of legislation to prevent tax dodging, taxing market speculators at an increased rate and cutting preexisting tax breaks for people with billions:
https://berniesanders.com/issues/tax-increases-for-the-rich/
The same place we get money for the F-35, corporate welfare, and the hundreds of other bullshit handouts to the ultra-wealthy that benefit them at the expense of the rest of us.
Keep in mind that, even without this Green New Deal fund, much of the work he proposes is conceptually simple and cheap: Many folks believe that removing barriers to municipal and community-owned ISPs would be a profitable action for the USA on its own, and does not need further justification or funding. That is, it's seen as a problem of regulatory capture and corruption, and not of political willpower or constituent goodwill.
This is economic stimulus: The fund is expected to pay for itself by improving the lives of people around the country. If we use the 1/5 rule of thumb [1], then this is a wager that demolishing the ISP monopolies and regulatory capture, and supporting municipal ISP development and community-owned infrastructure, is worth $750b in toto, plus $2.5m/yr, over the next decade. [0] notes that there is an $40b/yr inefficiency in terms of ISP profit, so we could hope that over a decade, we might reap a $400b boon to the collective taxpayer's worth, and after paying back our portion of Green New Deal, and even if we only get 80% yield, that's still a $200b profit in our worth.
To be more clear: $20b/yr across ~100m taxpayers with cable bills is around $200/yr; Bernie's betting that he can not only improve our cable bills, but generally improve the wealth of the typical taxpayer/billpayer.
[0] https://berniesanders.com/issues/high-speed-internet-all/
My issues with the government running the internet is, first money. They say they are going to end price gouging, but they will spend billions, if they succeed wont the taxes the telecoms pay be gone and wont it cost more. Also then the US government controls the internet from your house. ISP's spying is bad enough.
I am probably wrong on both of these minor complaints, and i would love to see cheap fast internet.
In reality, he's just a power hungry cranky socialist old man.
Sounds great, right? Does the math check out? Probably not, but it wouldn't matter anyway.
The president is not a king, and even with both houses of congress under democratic control (not even close to a given under a Sanders presidency), legislators in swing constituencies are not about to put their seat in jeopardy because of huge projects they never themselves ran under and committed to.
But Sanders loses nothing by making promises like this. It's all in hopes that his campaign gets traction before he loses Iowa/New Hampshire.
I feel like this could be a meme. Maybe Warren should release a plan for rewriting all C/C++ code in Rust.
Washington State did:
https://www.fastcompany.com/40537222/washington-just-passed-...
Without Congress on board there's only so much you can do. Obama made some regulatory changes and shuffled some money around to get at this problem, but without a big pile of new money from Congress it's not going to do much.
The issues we currently have with so many areas having only one or two providers are a legacy hangover from earlier federal regulation of phone companies and broadcasters along with municipal intervention where cities granted an exclusive franchise to only one cable co. With disruptive new delivery systems from balloons and drones to LEO satellite constellations about to come online, now is not the time to be mandating pricing or offerings.
4G coverage in rural areas varies widely, but satellite internet is everywhere, and the existing ISPs will have to improve if they want to keep those customers.
You'll theoretically have a smaller town go from having 1 traditional ISP to having that plus Verizon, ATT, Tmobile/Sprint, Starlink, and any other sat providers. That's a 5x increase of options.
But if I lived in a metro area, I wouldn't like the idea of paying taxes so somebody out in the sticks gets high-speed internet.
I'll feel a little guilty if something like this comes to pass. But I bet it'll pass quickly. :)
This really connects to socialism. China used to have "Price Bureau" (物价局). It sounds like Sanders is calling for one in the U.S.
Also, if "affordable price" policy is needed for internet, why not needed for more basic stuff like food and medicine?
Maybe food is too expensive for the poor because there is no Price Examination Department (物价检查所) to check price in grocery stores?
It is and Medicare for All is a popular policy proposal.
Current policy already has mechanisms (broken though they may be) to provide affordable medicine to people, ranging from government provided medicaid to income based discounts on drugs.
Current policy provides subsidized food to everyone in the country (and outside of the country, which is something of a sticking point on trade negotiations). We additionally provide further subsidies on a need based basis through the SNAP program (aka, food stamps).
Prices are already highly regulated for other utilities like electric and water (although, I am not sure what regulationd exist at the federsl level here)
EDIT: also, China is a rapidly growing economy that has overall had very succesfull policies. We should not blindly copy what they do, but "China did it" is not a convincing arguement.
Also subsidiaries are different from price control.
If Bernie Sanders wants to make such a vast proposal he should do it the legal way and propose a constitutional amendment. Of course, he knows that will never happen so he'll just unconstitutionally let congress force it through if he wants.
Of course, it's all talk now because he's not the president.
If people want government high speed internet so bad they should be lobbying their STATE government because that is where the power in the constitution lies.