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Comment by darwinwhy | Hacker News Reader

Like it or not, certain parts of the US are too rural/poor to justify even monopolists expanding internet service there. This will incentivize them to build in those areas.

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We already have incentivized them. They take the money, promise to build, and then just don't. They know that neither the FCC nor any of the state/local governments have any will right now to punish them for not following through on their commitments.

At this point, it would be more efficient to just give the money to municipalities directly and just tell them to build their own infrastructure.

Government incentives for commercial companies aren't always bad, but in this case I think they're really clearly not working, and we're just shoveling more money into that hole.

I don't know why these sort of things don't work on a reimbursement basis. Instead of just handing over a huge chunk of money, why shouldn't telecoms be required to submit invoices for reimbursement on qualifying work? It would ensure taxpayers were only paying for work actually completed, not empty promises.

Why doesn’t the government just build it? They do it with sewer lines, power lines, gas lines, water lines, but a little fiber is too much?

Actually they often don't. In the US, we had the Rural Electrification Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act) that brought electricity into rural areas, but these places often still have wells, septic tanks, and gas tanks.

The government doesn't build water, sewer, or gas in many parts of the country! Where I live, less than an hour from DC and maybe 5 minutes from a Whole Foods, we don't have gas lines at all, we use propane and fuel oil. We got public water and sewer only in 2015, and each house is paying off a $30,000 assessment for that. Most of the areas around us are reliant on wells and septic systems. Ironically, we have had fiber since 2008 or so. As to electric--most of that was built back when labor was relatively very cheap and tons of people were unemployed. We couldn't build the national electric grid today, for the same reason we couldn't build the New York subway today.

Then use roads as an example. The point is, internet is obviously a communal good that can’t be logistically provided by more than one entity, and the government is there for the benefit of the community.

Because the ISP corporations have sued the government (successfully) when it's attempted.

And 'successfully' includes a completed lawsuit and/or dragging out the proceedings so long that it costs the taxpayers too much to continue.

The Government does not build those.

I consider utility companies that have government oversight of pricing to be government.

ISPs will sue saying the government should not compete with business.

With few exceptions, the government doesn’t build or operate power lines in the US.

As long as the government has a hand in the pricing and product delivered, I consider it to be government (for the purposes of comparing it to a rent seeking ISP that has no oversight). If ISPs were operated and regulated like a utility like gas, electric, water, then it’s not important who owns what.

https://www.energy.gov/oe/information-center/educational-res...

Aren't these the customers that SpaceX is targeting with Starlink? Ones that live so far apart that laying fiber is really expensive, but also don't have too many other people living in their satellite footprint?

I don't get why we want to build stuff in rural areas. From a cost perspective, we have to subsidize the infrastructure including medical and utilities. From economic standpoint, the jobs are in the cities. Labor participation rates in cities is much higher than rural areas. Investing in housing cost reductions in urban areas seems like a better investment than wiring rural areas with high speed internet.

"Jobs are in the cities"

Yeah, except for agriculture, energy production, mining, large manufacturing, warehousing and other critical industries that city dwellers like to forget exist. All of these require people, and those people need to live somewhere near their place of work.

There's not a lot of them and as a percentage of total jobs, it is declining every year. Projects should be determined by ROI and be forward looking. Focusing on urban areas where it we get bigger multiplier on our economy and is forwarding looking as that is where the jobs are being created. We have lots of people in rural areas with no jobs and we have urban areas which have labor shortages.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/emp...

Because they're people too, and it winds up being profitable for everyone.

It took New Deal politicians dragging the electric companies kicking and screaming to get rural eras electrified, because the companies didn't think there'd be enough usage to justify the wiring. Turns out, once it's available, people use it, and it was profitable.

You could say the same thing about any government subsidy. Why subsidize the poor when the wealthy generate most of the tax revenue, why should single people subsidize children, etc.

There's poor people in cities as well. This is more like should be invest in fossil fuels vs green energy. Cities is where the job growth is at. Propping up rural would be like propping up the coal industry.

Are jobs in the cities anymore? Jobs downtown in an expensive office building for information workers to basically do the same work they're doing at home right now seems like an artificial and outdated constraint.

Why are we propping up concentrated urban cores with their congestion, pollution, expense/inflation?

If jobs were in vacuums, I'd agree.

More importantly, lives are not in a vacuum and might have physical constraints. Perhaps I want to live in a city (congestion, pollution that comes with it) because the lifestyle and culture I prefer blossoms in a more urban area.

I think you could still develop that culture within town centers and density wouldn't necessarily go away completely, but ideally you could find most of what you need in your neighborhood, ideally by just walking.

A dense urban core that is too expensive to live in, and requires a long commute, is not healthy or within a lot of people's lifestyle goals.

Not all the jobs are in the cities. I'd imagine rural areas have a lot of large-scale farming that would be expensive to do in the city.

Tons of people also grow up in rural areas; access to high speed internet would probably be useful for their development and maybe even innovation in these areas.

Personally I see high speed internet as a way to integrate people who may not be geographically close to each other; this includes those living in rural areas.

But they won't. We've already done that before.

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