Voters overwhelmingly back community broadband in Chicago and Denver
vice.com
vice.com
Hi, Chicago voter here. The question wasn't about public utility, it was "Should the City of Chicago act to ensure that all the City's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" which can imply a number of contradictory policies, from Chicago setting up municipal broadband to Chicago giving tax incentives to the existing national broadband providers.
Illinois limits ballots to three referendum questions, and questions chosen by higher-up political entities have precedence over smaller, more local ones. The three questions on the ballot for Chicago are chosen by the Cook County Board of Commissioners. (For these purposes, Cook County is equivalent to the city of Chicago plus a couple neighboring suburbs.)
Background established and into personal opinion: The question is in fact deliberately vague. The Board's goal is not to ask three divisive questions getting at the heart of urgent political matters. It is to fill the ballot with three questions to preclude local, less connected authorities from putting inconvenient, compelling questions on the ballot. Here's a 2018 court case reaffirming that (Calumet City is in Cook County): https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/opini...
These questions are deliberately worthless and it's a waste of time to analyze them for policy guidance.
If you're curious, the other two questions this cycle were: * In creating its City-wide plan for continued growth and sustainability, should the City of Chicago place equal focus on the goals of resiliency, equity, and diversity? * Should the State of Illinois restrict the sale or possession of firearms that have been defined as assault weapons or of magazines that can hold more than a certain number of rounds of ammunition?
Second, though you might think otherwise from Very Online commentary, cutting funding for the police has in fact not much support from Chicago communities. The Online Discourse seems to have a real problem getting its head around the idea that communities of color in Chicago are both very justifiably upset at CPD for abusing them, and very justifiably upset at CPD for ignoring them.
At any rate, Chicago will not be taking money from the Chicago Police Department to fund community broadband.
[1]: https://www.citybureau.org/newswire/2020/10/16/chicagos-budg...
It's worth noting the age difference - that defunding police is popular among younger people of color, and unpopular among older people of color, still by and large subscribing to the tough-on-crime approach.
A lot of the ideas underneath defund have legs! In most places, the police should stop doing traffic enforcement (replace with unarmed compliance patrols, the way we handle parking tickets) and obviously, police shouldn't be doing mental health wellness checks anywhere. No-knock warrants should be outlawed in almost all circumstances.
There are lots of other structural reform ideas Defund hasn't really touched; for instance, police should be licensed by their respective states, so that misconduct can result in a revocation that preempts union contracts. Civilian oversight bodies should be given more authority.
It's just that advocates for these ideas centered the least popular and least important aspect of the policy.
I'd despair except the idea behind a national police reform policy push was, I think, ill-conceived from the jump. In Oak Park, where I live, a switch of just 2-3 trustees in our 2021 elections would give us a majority that could rewrite the police general orders, and whatever ordinances govern our police union contract. That's like 10,000 votes, not 70,000,000.
What's more, if you watch town board meetings --- which is easier to do in the C19 era because they're all online --- you'll notice that one of the most powerful bits of evidence in support of any policy idea is "what do the neighboring townships do". It likely won't take many trustee board flips to get a decent snowball rolling.
Its a dumbfounding gaffe on the part of the activists using it as a rallying cry.
I don't think its a strawman because unfortunately its the majority of arguments I see... but people will bring up the APCs or "military equipment" some departments have as an example of things that can be cut... while perhaps true a one off APC or extra equipment isn't going to be anywhere close to how much it would cost for many city projects.
What if someone is walking in the street, naked, and screaming things? Are they violent? Are they mentally ill? Are they on drugs?
I get the intention here but I don’t think I’ve really seen anyone ask why we police this way. Is there a lesson we are forgetting?
It’s like the tale of the new property owners that come across a fence that appears random. They’d be wise to verify why the fence was put there before removing it.
Also, I think your implicit assumption is incorrect (that the police typically don’t have the individual‘s safety in mind, or that they only have the general public’s safety in mind).
Because we created police forces to round up slaves and then just kept adding more responsibilities to them. In fact, before we had ambulances, police officers would just throw the injured/sick in the back of their paddy wagon and drive them to a doctor. Frustrated with the staggeringly high death rate for people in his community, a black doctor eventually created the idea of an ambulance and specialized paramedics who handle that situation instead of police. It was so effective, white neighborhoods started calling him too and we eventually adopted the idea everywhere.
The idea of defunding the police means to do more of that. Trained specialists for different types of calls who are dispatched based on need. Much like how police will often show up with an ambulance to make sure it’s safe but then leave pretty quickly once they confirm it is, the same could be done with other non-violent calls like the one you described.
This isn’t rocket science, and it’s well steeped in research. We just need to be able to get over our biases.
"Less" policing can mean better services that replace poorly executed police functions.
I don't think you're second question is answerable as phrased, but I think having fewer killers on the street probably matters for quality of life in Chicago, or, at the very least, quantity of life.
What is the alternative to detectives that solves more crimes?
You asked whether police solve crimes and whether that matters to people, and you gestured at the existence of alternatives. I answered your two questions, and you didn't contest those answers. And I asked what those alternatives might be. I guess what I'm saying is I don't know why you're talking about the complaint rate for patrol cops now.
The first year will be a bit rocky, but after that the worst offenders will be removed from the planet.
I haven't seen evidence that this is an effective strategy, though there's not really compelling evidence in either direction. At the very least, I can argue that this should be tested thoroughly before implementation in Chicago.
On a personal level, I really do not want to be made responsible for killing anyone, though I expect your response is that enough people would be willing to kill a person that there would be a kind of herd immunity. I also do not believe in the death penalty, even for murder. Accordingly, I disagree with this plan wholeheartedly, exactly to the degree that it is effective.
The police department however has had numerous scandals.
It is worth noting that, earlier this year, when property crime briefly became popular in certain rich areas, the response of the city government was to deepen segregation by raising the bridges over the Chicago river, which serves as a boundary between the poor south/west and the rich north. Chicago's inequality problem is more serious than its crime problem.
But I'd contest that the bridges that separate the Loop from the rest of city is symbolic as a divide between rich and poor. Plenty of the near west side across the river is affluent, as are the near west suburbs, and the lower north side. It's remarkable how much of the violence (especially homicides) are concentrated to East and West Garfield Park outside the south side where it's less concentrated. Raising the bridges doesn't really inconvenience anyone but commuters going between the Loop, West Loop, and River North. The bridges were raised to prevent looting of the store fronts, not stop violent crime. I wouldn't compare the boarding up of stores in Emeryville at the same time as symptoms of the divide between rich and poor in the east bay.
All that said, the violence is much better today than it was even a few years ago, and orders of magnitude improved over 30 years ago. Though there is debate whether crime was reduced or just spread out to the suburbs after the demolition of housing projects like Cabrini Green.
And while property crime and violent crime are separate to a degree, I think the city's response says a lot. My experience in Chicago is that the police are more interested in keeping crime contained than truly eliminating it.
This is pretty silly. The highways were open between the north and south sides (I crossed the river the next day without issue); they were only isolating the hardest hit commercial districts to dissuade more damage. It wasn’t some ploy by our Black mayor to increase racial segregation.
It’s the easiest way to promise low taxes today and shift expenses onto future generations who have no say. It almost works as long as people keep having 3+ kids and the tax base keeps growing. Not so much once population growth stalls and the tax base suffers income stagnation.
There was hope of a Federal bailout of all pension funds, numerous covid19 bills tried to bury them into the dollars, but fortunately that may be off the table as the Congressional elections did not pan out as needed. Yyes, the expectation was the Feds would not use the Pension Benefit Guarantee System to salvage something but actually fund them with tax dollars. The PBGS should be the default solution but is not a friendly solution as benefits are generally brought back from silly levels.
The issue with many public pension systems is that too many payouts are excessive. No pension system, notably no public, show being paying out six figure retirements in addition to health benefits. California had to use a law to cap theirs around 125k but that has faced numerous challenges and may see more in the future.
They do deserve their retirement pay but it needs to be reasonable and equal across the board to best serve the public and employee interest. The lower paid employees are not well served and the managerial and certain others are over compensated in retirement.
[0]https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/pension-apocalypse-co...
Anyone who thinks that's "fair" really needs a reality check. 600k pensioners in Illinois [1], many of them living out of state, and the ones that live in-state aren't even taxed on their pension income. They also don't have to pay for health insurance. This is simply insane. There's really no other word for it. This needs to be indexed to private benefits or otherwise tethered to reality.
Sidenote. We need a rethink of public service in this country (US). The old bargain of "you get paid less working for the government but the benefits and job security are better" needs to go. Everyone receiving this $2 million entitlement is going to say, well, I work for the government so I deserve my "better benefits". It shouldn't matter if you work private or public sector. There needs to be some equivalence otherwise you get Illinois, where politician after politician promises great treatment to AFSCME and SEIU and to nobody's surprise, no real attempt is ever made to fix this broken system.
As far as the $2 million figure, if you go to any retirement calculator and try to figure out how much you need to save to have a similar lifestyle in retirement as to working, you will indeed find they advise you to save $2-4m. In the private sector, you're expected to do this on your own, but you get a higher salary to compensate. Looking at my own career, a comparable government job seems to pay about $40k less than a private sector job.
If your argument comes down to the public pensions being too generous relative to private ones, shouldn't we instead make private pensions more generous? Why do we want old people who work their whole lives to have a massive step down in lifestyle when they retire? Is that what you want for yourself or your parents?
I'm sure everyone is in agreement for giving everyone an awesome life. The problem is no one wants to pay for it. The proof is that voters won't vote for a politician who would compensate government employees a cash amount in their 401k equivalent to the defined benefit pension, because that would require increased taxes compared to a politician that pushes those costs into the future via defined benefit pensions. And taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare are a proven vehicle for corruption where costs are shifted from today to tomorrow.
And unless the government has the power to print money, they should not be in the business of promising people money decades in the future. That's the only way I see to prevent a repeat of IL/Chicago/Detroit/NJ/CT/RI/KY/CA/San Diego, and the list goes on and on.
It seems the real answer to this would be to have a more generous version of social security at the federal level. And the interim answer is to switch to defined contribution pension plans at the local level, I suppose. Though one thing I don't understand is how governments plan to attract workers when they pay substandard salaries and don't even offer very generous benefits anymore. I was looking at government jobs with the city here (which has a defined contribution pension pretty similar to a 401k), and across the board it was so much worse than any private sector job I've worked.
I don't see how it could have played out any other way. Politician A offering low taxes and high services by skimping on saving for future benefits is 100% going to win versus politician B offering high taxes and a fiscally responsible government. And it still plays out that way, until the system reaches a nadir, and it is forced to change, such as Puerto Rico or some of the other aforementioned cities and states.
Government should offer people competitive pay, and the idea of it being okay for government jobs to offer less pay in exchange for more stability and retirement benefits should go the way of the dodo, as we can see it just results in long term pain.
I suppose we are getting technical here, but at some point someone working for these governments (an actual person with a calculator) has had to sit down and do the math to figure out how much money needs to be set aside in order to achieve the advertised pension payout.
Who is that "person" in most cases, and why was their math so off? The math must have been very optimistic on the ability of the pension funds to compound wealth.
And so the facetious answer to your remark would be "things would have played out much better for these governments if the person doing the math was more realistic about expected returns." Not sure how realistic that goal is in itself.
These are all guesses based on assumptions, of course, and no one knows the future 5, 10, 20, 30+ years from now. But as an idea of how corrupted taxpayer funded pensions are, the US government requires all non taxpayer funded pensions to calculate the liabilities using yields from highly rated corporate bonds, i.e. a conservative, safe investment class.
However, the US government exempted taxpayer funded pensions from any oversight, and so they can use whatever discount rate they want. For example, private companies have to use ~4% for their discount rate, whereas governments use ~8%+ for their discount rate.
But that's just small pickles. The big problem is there is no enforcement of even the liberal actuarial recommendations that the pension fund pays for. IL/NJ/CT/and other trouble governments simply skip contributions, i.e. don't set any money aside for the future, and that's the main reason they are in this situation. A decade or two ago, the senior union officials on the pension board didn't care about the skipped contribution payments to make a sufficiently big deal out of it, since they were going to get paid in the short term anyway. And they negotiated ridiculous pension benefits which are never seen in the private sector, such as final average pay formulas.
A typical pension formula is years of service * 1% * salary over 30 years (with a cap). That's referred to as a 1% plan, some companies might do 2%, maybe even 3%.
But in the government, you have formulas like years of service3%final average pay for the last year, or 3 years, or 5 years. That is why you see cops and firefighters working 100 hours a week when they're about to retire in their 40s and 50s, so they can secure $100k+ per year defined benefit pensions. You would NEVER see that in the private sector, as that's a laughably unaffordable benefit.
On top of which, police and firefighters in some lavish plans get to retire in 20 years, so if they start at 18 to 22, they're retiring at 38 to 42, and getting paid $100k per year for 40+ years. That's an annuity worth millions of dollars.
I can say the same about cities borrowing money to finance infrastructure projects, but I've yet to see a political comment grousing about how a city's budget woes come solely from billions of dollars of 10-year old debt that has to be serviced.
King county just voted to take on 1.7 billion dollars in debt to renovate a county-owned hospital. Ten years from now, nobody will be talking about defaulting on it, but I fully expect them to be talking about defaulting on pensions.
The cost of deferred compensation can be wildly understated for decades (and continues to be) by using erroneous investment return and mortality rate assumptions. Also, the risk of corruption remains for decades as you have a huge pot of money which many are fighting to get a piece of with little transparency.
No one actually considers the figures put out by IL/NJ/CT/Chicago and other distressed governments as accurate, and if they had to abide by the rules that non taxpayer funded entities have to, their debt would easily be 30%+ higher than stated (based on an assumption of a 1% change in discount rate moving liabilities ~15%).
I agree that politicians can also hide debt by not properly accounting for infrastructure and long term maintenance costs, and that is also a big problem.
The incentives to game the system are just too strong. Whether incorrect discount rates, systematic underfunding, whatever, people always treat the pension assets as a "big pot of money" for today's emergency, and use it for the pet project du jour.
I even see this at my condo association. We have a replacement fund to stay on top of long-term replacement liability. We can't even balance that. What chance does a large government, with many stakeholders, have of getting this right?
As a side note, defined benefit pensions don't have a place in the world anymore. It's the same thing as putting your money in a target date retirement fund from Vanguard/Schwab/Fidelity, except you also have to pay all those actuaries and pension fund managers so the expenses are higher.
Their purpose has been automated out of existence, but only exists due to politics in the government sector.
They are saying, “how do you feel about this extremely broad and unquantifiable goal which sounds good to most?”
In other words the initiative is so vague that it doesn’t even make sense to begin starting to talk about cost.
We would need a specific, actionable proposal to begin assessing cost.
Like many farms have no access to decent broadband, as in you can't readily buy it for any money. I am not sure what's the deal in Chicago.
> Colorado is one of nearly two-dozen states that have passed laws, usually directly written by regional telecom monopolies, that hamstring or prevent the creation of such networks.
> But in Colorado’s case, the state’s 2005 law included language that allows local towns and cities to opt-out of the restriction if voters agree to do so.
W.r.t. Denver, the headline overstates things a bit, but the contents of the article are accurate.
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/10/08/denver-issue-2h-broadb...
"community areas" so that means just libraries council buildings or does it mean FTC or FTP for all homes?
You right that allowing the executive to cherry pick motions is not democratic.
The one "in creating its City-wide plan for continued growth and sustainability, should the City of Chicago place equal focus on the goals of resiliency, equity, and diversity?" is arguably pious and also does not propose any action.
I assume they worded the motion obscurely to avoid people voting against giving the "poors" access to faster BB
It's useful for city planners and the like because "neighborhoods" have fuzzy boundaries that people disagree on, but Chicago's community areas are well-defined.
Not exactly. "Community areas", in Chicago, represent a relatively stable division of the city, with the map drawn up by the government, in order to support city planning and suchlike. Many of them are named for the most prominent neighborhood that falls within their borders, but that's not always the case.
Neighborhoods are a popular division, and is socially constructed by people as a whole. The boundaries are amorphous and constantly shifting. At my last apartment, my own neighbors described our block as falling within about 3 different neighborhoods. (This never resulted in any argument, because everyone understands that the definition of neighborhood is fuzzy at best.) Even where you have a community area and a neighborhood that share the same name, they don't necessarily coincide all that well. For example, just about nobody who lives in the area would recognize the boundaries of "Lincoln Square" as being those of the Lincoln Square community area. To them "Lincoln Square" means the the Lincoln Square neighborhood, which, even by the most generous of standards, is still maybe 1/5 the size of the community area by land mass.
Aldermanic wards are yet another thing, and their boundaries really don't have much to do with neighborhoods or community areas. For starters, there are officially 50 aldermanic wards and 77 community areas.
With how vague that question is, its almost entirely useless. Like another poster said, it essentially could be boiled down to "do you want good thing or not?"
I feel like something that vague has no business being "voted" on.
> CHICAGO – Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot today announced the launch of ‘Chicago Connected,’ a groundbreaking program that will provide free high-speed internet service to approximately 100,000 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students in their households. This first-of-its-kind program will be one of the largest and longest-term efforts in the nation to provide free, high-speed internet over the course of four years to dramatically increase internet accessibility for students and help build a permanent public support system for families in Chicago.
[0] https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press...
If that is not on there that is an open ended contract to waste everyone's time and money.
I used to live in middle-of-nowhere central WA, and they had fiber internet all the way back in mid 2000’s. This was a town of <20k people. Other smaller towns around the region also had access to fiber as well. Basically it worked like this: the county public utilities district was responsible for laying the fiber and connecting it to the building. Once the fiber is hooked up, you can call any one of a dozen or so ISPs to provide you with service.
As a side note, because of this relationship between the ISPs and the public utilities district, some ISPs also operated point-to-point wireless networks to reach customers outside of the fiber network. The ISPs would typically place a tower with several radios at an existing customer’s site, in exchange for free service. These tower sites were usually connected directly to fiber for minimal latency. I mention this because I don’t see how these wireless networks would have been viable without a public fiber network backing them.
I've seen this too, and my reaction is always to ask why that's unfair. The "free" market is supposed to be open to competition. Why is it "unfair" for public bodies to compete? Public bodies are, after all, funded by tax payers. Who in this case would be the recipients of the service. So we have individuals desiring of a service, funding said service through a public body. Now, the public body is not set up to pay a dividend to shareholders - instead it implicitly returns all profit to its consumers (presumably through reduced costs/better service/whatever).
Why is that unfair? It's not preventing commercial entities from competing. If their business model is such that they can't do so - e.g. because of the need to pay away dividends - then that's their problem.
Now: I know there's a lot more to it than that, e.g. public bodies accused of being propped up unfairly. And I know Govt in the US is treated very suspiciously by a large cohort of society.
But that notwithstanding, why is it "unfair" if a community-oriented entity decides to compete with a commercial organisation?
> Public bodies are, after all, funded by tax payers. Who in this case would be the recipients of the service.
Not all tax payers are recipients of the service. The government run entity can collect revenue from all taxpayers regardless of which ones are their direct customers.
That's what makes it "unfair." The private entity has to turn a profit or break even on their sales alone. The government run entity can subsidize their operation by taking funds from general tax revenue.
If one entity is allowed to take always take a loss on their operations how could another entity that needs to pay their employees ever be able to compete?
So, you're saying that regional loss-leading, and the typical VC business model should not be allowed to exist?
A city's constituents have democratic control over their budget. If they want to use that budget to buy broadband for everyone from a local supplier, that's their prerogative.
Who is the private sector to dictate how I, as a constituent, choose to spend my tax dollars? If I want them spent on a vanity sports stadium project, they'll be spent on a vanity sports stadium project. [1] If I want them spent on providing better broadband to the city, they'll be spent on providing better broadband to the city.
[1] For some reason, nobody ever complains that cities subsidizing the construction of sports arenas is bad anti-competitive behavior that destroys the business model of private sports-arena owners...
They certainly do. Many people object to this sort of thing, and say "if it's such a good idea, a private business should be willing to do it." Strangely they tend to not make this argument about things like public transport, even though it's exactly the same thing.
The arguement is that these arenas, convention centers, transit systems, etc. enable more economic activity and generate more tax revenue than they cost. I don't know if that's always (or ever) the case but that's the rationale and it's not insane.
The private sector has pretty conclusively proven that in the absence of municipal competition, their offerings are expensive, and provide terrible service.
In fact, it has proven it so conclusively that people are clamoring for a public alternative.
There is zero reason to oppose unsubsidized, zero-margin municipal broadband.
There are some reasons to oppose subsidized, negative-margin municipal broadband, but if >50% of the electorate supports it, that's a pretty strong signal that its better than the private alternatives.
50%+1 of the population voting for something doesn't make it good; the public overwhelmingly supports farm subsidies, and those are terrible.
The same can be said about private providers. Even if they temporarily lower rates and improve service in your area, to prevent entry from competitors, they will ratchet the rates up, and start cutting corners on customer service as soon as they no longer feel threatened. This is not a theoretical concern - this has happened over and over and over again, across the country.
> Farm subsidies
That's not a great comparison.
1. Farm subsidies are terrible for economic efficiency, but fantastic for economic and political resiliency. [1] Lack of bread very quickly leads to regime change. It's why every single country in the world subsidizes their agriculture and encourages overproduction.
2. The reason farm subsidies exist is not because 50%+1 of the public supports them. The reason farm subsidies exist is because the federal government was designed to give excessive amounts of political power to rural states. This means that something supported by ~20% of the public can easily turn into national policy.
3. Municipal referendums are nothing like it - they are direct democracy.
4. Municipal governments are not direct democracy, but they do not have multiple layers, or were designed to give disproportionate amounts of political power to regional minority groups. What a municipal government wants is a lot closer to the pulse of their constituents.
[1] Efficiency (which is what marketeers want) is often at odds with resiliency (which is what anyone looking past the next quarter's financials wants). Remember the start of the COVID pandemic when all of our incredibly efficient just-in-time global supply chains went to hell? Efficient systems have no built-in slack to absorb temporary shocks. When it comes to food supplies, a temporary shock can leave us with millions of emaciated corpses.
I am not a democratic fundamentalist. This is to say that I don't value democracy as an ends; it is a valuable means, but saying that something is democratic doesn't change my view on the policy. I don't care how direct it is.
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/30/poll-indicates-som...
But it is also correct to say that when a when a decision was reached democratically, it is generally speaking, not the business of anyone outside that group to second-guess it.
There's a very high bar that you have to clear in order to tell some other group of people what they can't spend their communal funds on.
There are two halves to a business - how much value it creates for its customers (which can be roughly estimated from its revenue) and how much drain it places on society (represented by the cost of running the business). There are arguments that revenue doesn't measure the full benefit and costs don't measure the full drain. Disregard them for the moment, because this part of the thread isn't arguing about that and revenue/costs catch a lot of the value/drain.
The government can compete unfairly because they aren't constrained by costs - a government body can provide marginally better service by placing vastly more drain on the community. They have a lazy option which is (1) damaging to the community and (2) unfair because their competition can't legally force taxpayers to cover their inefficiencies. Thus it is unfair, and also bad.
As an example, the Australian government in 2008 decided to roll out fiber-to-the-premise to around 90% of Australia, an expensive undertaking that no private company would attempt in one big push. All the telecom companies cancelled their infrastructure upgrades and rollouts effective immediately and I got to spend 2 years without internet because I was moving to a newly constructed area. The telecom companies couldn't compete fairly (they couldn't justify a gold-plated rollout based on actual projected demand) so they just left the market. Access was prioritised to rebuilding existing infrastructure in swing electorates.
It is possible, but very unclear, that the Australian government offered the best option. I personally as a customer would much rather have spent less on the network and lived with a cheaper, more quickly available product. So I would rather have gone with other providers, but they had left the market because they couldn't fairly compete.
All I want is good service, on the cheap.
If the government can provide good service, and have zero-profit margin, that's fantastic. That's actually the best possible outcome. If the government service sucks, then their zero-profit margin should not be a significant enough competitive advantage to drive out competitors.
In addition to all that, all the criticisms of the zero-profit margin model fall apart in a world where VCs and conglomerates frequently operate local services at a loss, in an effort to capture market share (So that they can later raise prices).
Except it's not just a zero-profit margin; it's the money that you pay in taxes for that municipal ISP, which you cannot decide to allocate instead to another ISP. If you want to use an alternative ISP, you have to pay both.
If the public ISP doesn't actually receive tax money, then why would the government need to start it? Anyone can start a non-profit ISP.
(Note: I'm not saying I'm against the idea, just arguing a specific point)
If you had a choice of 10+ ISPs you could choose between a low-low-prices ISP that sells your browsing data to marketers, has a contention ratio of 50:1, and tries to shake down Netflix for peering money; a premium ISP with a great contention ratio and good speeds for netflix and youtube; an uncensored, privacy-loving ISP; a family-friendly ISP with powerful porn-blocking options; and so on.
Has James Clapper been punished for lying under oath to congress? Is he paraded around as an example of what happens when those in senior leadership have violated the rights of millions or is still acceptable to interview on TV or have politicians reference?
There's basically no way a city could create the NSA on their own. If you think a city is violating your constitutional rights, you sue the city (which is way easier than suing the State or National Government).
With luck, you can get national forces on your side. If anything, if the city is violating civil rights, you might be able to get FBI on your side (Department of Justice after all) to leverage the heavy-lifting.
They can get away with it because it's for children. I would not be surprised if you see something similar to what was tried in the UK - block pornography by default and require an embarrasing support phone call to lift the block.
The real threat is tracking that will exist but "wink wink" protected under the rule of requiring a court order to reveal; or if your in the political arena just someone who doesn't like you and leaks it.
At least with a private provider there is a remote possibility of suing them or using the government against them. Against the government there are just too many barriers and would require very robust legislation to protect us.
Additionally, there is no constitutional right to municipal utility services.
Just to note: the government has whims and conflicts of interest also, as demonstrated over the last decade or two with recent wild swings in high-level elected office and shifts in the courts.
People vote for who is in elected office and for some judges. Elected officials also have to re-earn their job every 2-6 years, or thereabouts.
People have no say in who runs a private media company or how.
Especially not for monopolies. Plus, as folks in tech from the days of IBM/Microsoft dominance can attest to, simply having multiple options doesn’t necessarily create the same kind of level playing field that we (imperfectly) inspire to in the electoral process.
Plus of course there are the non-customers of said private firm, who, in the case of massive companies like Amazon, Google, telecoms, etc.
While with voting the only barrier is (ideally) being a citizen of voting age.
Not sure if that has happened previously on the individual level, vs the organizational/corporate level though.
Technically, though, if they offer commercial service, the organizational/business orgs taking it up would be protected completely in any of their speech (other than things like child porn.)
For example, the Fourteenth Amendment protects against discrimination by States, not private actors: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-14/...
And note 1338 calls out that the federal laws prohibiting businesses from discriminating against individuals are instead rooted in Congress's broad latitude to regulate interstate commerce.
And here's another similar reference:
> As a general rule, the Constitution does not give power to the federal government to pass laws to protect people against private actions. For example, the Equal Protection Clause guarantees equal protection for all – it protects against discrimination. Under this protection, the federal government may pass laws to enforce this guarantee. However, while Congress may pass a law to regulate states or other public actors, it may not pass a law to regulate private citizens. Your police department cannot discriminate against you on account of your race. However, your neighbor in the house down the block can be as bigoted as he so desires.
https://constitutionallawreporter.com/amendment-14-01/the-qu...
Here is a nice timeline: https://billofrightsinstitute.org/educate/educator-resources...
Meanwhile, our other public services kinda suck. I used to ride the Metro to work before pandemic hit. It was designed in the 1970s to be a fully automated system, but the equipment was allowed to deteriorate so much that the automation was turned off permanently in 2009. What used to be a smooth, fast ride when I grew up in DC in the 1990s is now a slow, jerky one. Trip times are also 20-25% longer than they used to be. What used to be 6 minute headways is now 8, because it was too hard to keep up 6 with the manual system. And DC is a very well funded system.
Government Internet would be built by basically the same people. Why would I expect it to be any better?
I don’t know how convincing this argument is. Certainly local law enforcement will, on average, have an easier time accessing these data.
A better argument is this is a temporary measure. Broadband is expensive to build out. Once built, it is cheaper to operate. I imagine these municipal operations will be built well and privatised when the next municipal finance downturn rears its head.
Whoever it is I would like their behavior to be meaningfully regulated under the law.
The government can throw you in jail, seize your assets, raise your taxes; AT&T can't.
With that extra power comes additional scrutiny.
The irony being that, if there wasn't a government (of the people) enforcing law, then, AT&T would have zero issues/problems with doing any of those things.
I'm not saying our government works great. I'm just saying it's, flawed as it is, run by the people. While a company is not.
The evidence so far suggests that government agencies are better stewards of personal data.
I am too old to hold politicians in high regard.
Many places have government broadband or phone, has there been abuse on the scale of US carrirers selling location data?
Whenever I bring this up, I'm accused of being "for hate", when I really just am a big fan of Snowden and don't people to give up safety for security. Most people would see a measure to combat hate on the internet and vote for it, not realizing its giving the govt the right to monitor all data or crack down on something that isn't even hateful (e.g. Free Palestine, Hong Kong etc).
Give the local "community government" the right to run the internet and now the federal govt will be spidered throughout all local govt ISPs.
> The bar for restricting what you can access, and for what reasons your service can be cancelled, becomes much higher when it's governed by the constitution
I wouldn't put it past Biden or Harris to issue and executive order for the sake of "hate speech". I couldn't imagine Sanders or even Trump doing that.
Welcome to a community that powers a lot of open source software, which powers a lot of the world.
> if the government is providing your Internet service, then your service is protected by the constitution
Nope. Did you know the constitution is a document, and not "stuff the government currently pays for"?
Is that actually accurate? My impression is intersectuon between tech entrepreneurs and folks that maintain linux kernel is not that high.
Most rights guaranteed or actions forbidden by the Constitution only restrict the government. The First Amendment is one of those.
That's probably the worst example, since most of the restrictions that apply when that occurs are via special law (e.g., the UCMJ) applicable only to that situation, not contract law to which private parties have recourse.
https://bearingarms.com/cam-e/2020/10/20/two-more-guilty-ple...
Which would be fine but isn’t the same thing.
And SCOTUS declining a case doesn't mean they don't care either, their decision not to accept the case is a choice in and of itself and a reading of the law.
More so than "not caring", IMHO, what you are describing is disagreement.
Now, you may disagree with what I just said, but that doesn't mean that either of us don't care ; ).
That's blatantly false. The Constitution only protects against government action. Until the civil war amendments, it did so almost exclusively for the federal government; it now also does so for state governments, but it doesn't extend beyond that.
For a Boulder resident I’m lucky actually, I have access to to 100mbit VDSL and Comcast. So at least I have two shitty choices.
It's been 10 years, we've spent $30M, and there's been absolutely zero progress on it.
These no competition here since providers are forced to pay a franchise fee to the local government. With lower population towns, it's just uneconomical for a second provider to come in. Seems like the law is anticompetitive.
Do you mean the other way round? Because this way is fairly unusual.
BTW my BB plus phone is $30 a month in the UK VDSL via local loop unbundling.
If you wanted 30 Gbps for 30 houses, then you'd have to pay triple. For something that you wouldn't even notice because you were probably getting 1 Gbps when you actually needed it.
From a European perspective, this just seems crazy. Regulations should be designed to promote competition, not restrict it. Incumbent networks already enjoy a huge advantage. Why would you want to entrench them even further by writing laws that make it difficult for startups and newcomers to compete?
Municipalities can build a network using government money and then price it below what any competitor could deliver.
Municipalities also get to regulate and tax their competitors.
That's not necessarily a great argument against Municipal fiber. But I don't think municipal fiber can honestly be called promoting competition.
Vital infrastructure should be handled by government, and internet is obviously vital at this point. Municipalities build out the last mile, state governments connect municipalities, the federal government connects states (as with our highway system).
Now if we could only do the same for high-speed rail!
(1) Referendums seem able to produce highly decisive vote counts on otherwise controversial political issues. Interesting, in itself.
(2) Issues that parties are at odds about aren't necessarily 50-50 issues.
(3) Referendums can (sometimes) produce democratic legitimacy in ways that representative politics cannot.
All interesting, in terms of enabling decision making. Referendums seem to be gaining a little momentum. I think one hidden advantage is the fact that referendums structurally enforce a separation of idea and execution.
There are 725,000 people in Denver. If we naively assume that one sixth of them pay for an internet subscription at $100/mo each, that's $145,000,000 annually that the people could use to fund their own ISP.
The people are held captive by a combination of forces that appear to have nothing to do with economics. If they could all communicate together they could easily fund their own alternative. Appallingly, the place that they are being held captive is a communications network!!
I looked in a poorer neighborhood in Denver (700sq.ft. house), which is clearly close to fiber, and from Centurylink for $65/mo they can get 940Mbps, for $49/mo they can get 100Mbps.
Looks like for $20/month, xfinity will do 25Mbps at the same address.
Also that Comcast number at the end is for sure an intro price. Actual cost after the first year will be much, much higher.
I live in Denver (and a poorer neighborhood at that), I had this plan before coronavirus sent us all home. This is the price for the first year, after that, they charge $60/month. Switched to century link for 1Gbps up/down for $65.
Is this a relatively accurate and complete characterization?
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkvn4x/the-21-laws-states-us...
Why do they feel a different monopoly will be better?
There's no reason to believe that the local government owned monopoly will be more efficient or more effectively managed.
It could be, but not necessarily.
These 'grass is greener on the other side' type referendums are difficult if they don't really capture the issue.
The 'root cause' is the single point of access and we could all feasibly use more intelligent laws there.
They tried that 20 years ago with the concept of 'CLEC' and there were all sorts of laws put in place, it didn't work out very well. There may be other opportunities.
For example, it may be possible to make the 'last mile' the responsibility of the city or county, to the point wherein they get the wiring to a proper exchange where there's compeitition.
Then if people want fiber to the home, they can pay for it themselves kind of thing.
But a couple weeks ago, a bunch of Verizon trucks were stringing new cables on the poles in my neighborhood. I asked if they were finally bringing FiOS to my neighborhood. They said no, FiOS is being sunset (!) and this new fiber is for 5G residential, which will replace it. They’ll eventually mount antennas on some of the poles and then provide an in-home 5G hardware appliance, analogous to the cable modem. They said speeds should be about the same as FiOS.
All I want is broadband competition. If I can choose between Verizon and Comcast, that competition should help drive down costs, which is the main reason I want community broadband.
My understanding is that the reason the network/over-the-air TV in the US (e.g. ABC, NBC, Fox) has relatively strict regulations about curse-words and sex-stuff and violence being shown is because there's a risk that a child could be watching, and the airwaves belong to everybody, meaning any kid could go purchase a TV and watch it.
Cable channels like HBO and ShowTime and whatnot get around this because they require a paid membership to get into, and thus the responsibility for the kids watching it falls into the hands of the parents who signed up for the services, not the networks.
Now, if my logic is correct, what's to stop something like this to leading to increased regulations? As of right now, in virtually any network I connect to, it's relatively easy for me to go to pornhub.com, and even if you ban outright porn sites, websites like YouTube and Netflix allow for much more cursing and violence than what the FCC currently allows on network television.
I'm sure I'm misunderstanding something, and I'm not a lawyer, so maybe someone with more training on this kind of compliance can explain my problems.
EDIT: Just to avoid downvotes that are unnecessary, I should make it clear, I don't support the FCC making these regulations, and think these tasks should fall onto the parents. I'm just saying what the current rationale is, or at least my understanding of it.
AT&T, Xfinity, RCN, etc are all here, competing with each other. If you live in a dense part of the city, you've got half a dozen other providers to choose from as well. Google-owned WebPass can put a microwave dish on your roof and offer 100+ mb/sec for $50 or less per apartment. Mine is a local company that runs a huge fiber line direct from the nearest exchange center and puts a managed switch in the basement, with each unit having a cat5 line direct to the switch. It's $25 per month for 250 mb/sec symmetrical with direct peering to Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and a few others, and all the common areas like the pool deck and gym have free wifi running at those speeds. I can upgrade to gigabit for an extra $25 per month, which I did for the first few year. But it works so well that I don't bother anymore.
The current subsidized low income internet package is something like $10-15 per month for Xfinity and it's 10-20 mb/sec.
The issue is not rich vs. poor. My internet is cheap because our building has contractually guaranteed a single monthly payment on behalf of the many units in the building for some number of years. You can make an investment based on that.
The City of Chicago is contractually guaranteeing payment on behalf of an even larger number of people. Any private company can make an investment in better infrastructure based on that. But the City is content with letting Xfinity provide garbage service in exchange for that money. If they City said "we will guarantee payment of up to $15 per month to any entity that can provide gigabit service to low-income families" there would be multiple bids from local companies, and they'd all be able to do it profitably.
Also because the economics of making your building a live, on-net premises are much more favorable for the ISP. Their capex to make your building live is based on a calculation for the expected number of units that will sign up in years 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and the revenue projections. In the telecom industry this is an "MDU" - multiple dwelling unit.
The cost per unit served in a 65 or 95 unit apartment/condo building is much more favorable as compared to building a new GPON FTTH network (even when 100% aerial on poles) to every house in a neighborhood of individual wood frame houses.
You mentioned Webpass above. Where Webpass got started, in the SF bay area, they did precisely what I described above because they could make the economics work by focusing exclusively on MDUs.
You almost always can get both RCN and Xfinity--and they compete pretty hard. AT&T is always available, but its shitty DSL. Supposedly some parts of the city have fiber, but I'm 0/3 at my locations.
I'm paying like $50 + tax for 500 mbit down / 20ish up. I'd trade that for 100 mbit symmetrical, but that's not happened on cable anytime soon.
I bet like 20% of houses at most are networked well enough to even use 200 mbit.
Signed- lucky person who pays $57 for symmetric gigabit in west town.
Many years ago, people got really tired of companies digging up roads, putting in utilities and then repaving the road, only to have some other company come in and dig up the road again a few weeks later. So the city now has an ordinance - if you are going to dig up the road, there has to be an advance public notice, and anyone can lay utilities once you are done but before you've repaved. And once you've repaved, there is some time limit before anyone is allowed to dig up the road again. This makes it pretty cheap to lay dark fiber that will someday get lit up, and now Chicago is reaping the benefits.
These small local ISPs are super efficient - they concentrate on infrastructure and support, with 1 or 2 people for sales and billing: one sale equals hundreds of customers, and hundreds of customers equals a single payment.
ISP perspective: There are physical limitations to how many discrete, independent facilities-based last mile carriers can be built in a city to individual residential premises. In many cities this ends up with being the local telco, and the local cable company running two parallel overlapping networks. For instance, in Seattle, Centurylink (former USWest/Qwest) running a GPON FTTH network, and Comcast or Wave running a hybrid fiber-coaxial DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 cable last mile plant.
This ends up with a defacto duopoly for many consumers. If you are in a less optimal situation you might have something like the terrible choice between 10Mbps ADSL2+ over degraded, long loop length copper POTS wiring, or 100-800Mbps service from Comcast, Charter, RCN or similar. In which case it's not really a choice at all, you effectively have a cable operator monopoly.
Much like how it is impractical and impossible to have more than one last-mile electrical grid operator in a city, it's highly impractical, costly and expensive for more than 2 to 3 maximum facilities-based ISPs to run parallel competing overlapping networks serving end user premises.
If a city is going to have a 3rd carrier run by the municipality, it needs to be an open access network that sells layer 2 transport to a myriad of independent ISPs. In this arrangement, the city and municipality builds a FTTH network, but only sells wholesale capacity to ISPs.
The city is responsible for the OSI layer 1 outside plant cable, running the drop cable to each house and the termination box, and a basic GPON CPE. Individual ISPs can sell layer 3 (IP) services on top of that and provide the billing, customer support and value-added features like triple-play TV/phone etc. In this arrangement the city ISP runs what is effectively a layer 2 network only, and hands customer traffic in aggregate to an ISP at an NNI.
I have to admit that I am much more skeptical of the concept of cities suddenly developing the deep, long term knowledge base and experience to run last mile access IP networks at a scale of hundreds of thousands of customers. I just can't see many cities successfully getting their own ASN, setting up infrastructure at major IX points, acquiring significant chunks of ARIN ipv4 and ipv6 space, and so forth. Not unless they really throw a lot of money at poaching network engineering talent away from ISPs. If you take a look at peeringdb and pick a random residential last mile broadband specialist ISP with 50-100Gbps+ of traffic, I've literally never seen in my life a city government with the on-staff skill set to successfully implement something like that.
If you want to see how this has been done successfully on the municipality-as-wholesaler end, take a look at Grant and Douglas counties in WA state, which operate 1Gbps FTTH last mile networks much as I described in the above paragraphs. In those two cases, the local county government is also the electrical grid last mile operator. So they already have on staff crews of bucket trucks, pole placing equipment, all of the lineman-related stuff required. Not to mention the support infrastructure like HR/admin/accounting is shared between the county last mile fiber network, and the last mile electrical grid service. There's economies of scale in doing something like that as a combined effort.
The preferred solution is to provide dark fiber and layer 2 transport, ISP's choice.
Certainly the big boys like the NSA (and maybe the FBI?) have.
I think it’s more about what laws are in place to pro Ryder folks, whether it’s for a privately-run service or a government one.
You think private companies are bound by the same constraints the federal govt is??
I don't think "community broadband" is the same as "federal broadband", if that's what you're asking.