Los Angeles Passes Rule Banning Broadband Deployment Discrimination
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If you look at everything through the lens of race you can say things like Versace is discriminating against certain groups by not placing their stores in their neighborhoods. It's just silly.
Corporations can be stupid and discriminatory or smart and greedy. So I guess you have to choose which you believe it is.
> We’ve also noted that when those big ISPs do finally deploy service, they tend to prioritize white, affluent neighborhoods — which generally see faster, cheaper, service than more diverse, poorer neighborhoods.
Any argument that talks of following incentives needs to account for the fact that people with more money pay less.
PG&E's asshattery has led to fires, deaths, and entire towns being burned from the map. For profit utilities have proven that they indeed require assistance in acquiring alignment on their responsibilities to the communities they serve.
Define "high speed". I understand that you need internet access to bank, interact with government, and receive education, but all these use cases don't require exceptionally fast internet. You can get 12Mb/s down with ADSL2 tech from the 2000s[1], which should be more than enough for essential use cases. True, it's probably not fast enough for multiple concurrent netflix/youtube streams, and updating steam games is going to be a slog, but those are arguably luxuries.
These were often back hauled by bonded SHDSL or similar Ethernet over Copper technologies, so you end up with a bunch of people on 12Mbps connections sharing a small pool of bandwidth, resulting in congestion, jitter & packet loss for everyone.
Deploying fiber would have not been as inexpensive to implement though, and for many years getting any connectivity was more important than delivering future proof connectivity.
what about the new huge pre-trained AI model my highschool kid wants to play with. She only has a few hours a day, but you're right, having it downloaded within a week would be a luxury. she's lives in a poor neighborhood so she should have to wait while everyone else gets to explore, experiment, and contribute commits back to the repo it came from.
But instead of attempting to enumerate a large set of things made more difficult. would you say that also applies to electricity? Having a washers and dryer is a luxury right? shouldn't $ELECTRIC company be able to charge more before they install the lines for you? Oh sorry your neighborhood isn't zoned for ovens. This is unavailable, check back in a few years.
Sure I agree with your premis. We could totally allow people to get away with being shit, and unfair to people without money. But we shouldn't.
I see this repeated often, but I've seen very little in the way of details. What was the government program that gave ISPs money? Were there any strings attached?
Imo it was ridiculous that spacex got dinged in the program. Plenty of pigs at the trough have been promising and not delivering. Starlink has been delivering yet wasn't good enough...go figure.
I did a search for "fcc rural broadband funding" and all that showed up was a bunch of programs from the post-pandemic era, and those have specific targets attached. Moreover, the programs in question are only a few years old so it seems a bit premature to conclude that the ISPs are not building out broadband. Finally this meme predates the pandemic by years, so I'm still at a loss as to whether the claim of "FCC gave a bunch of money to ISPs and they didn't do anything with it" is actually true or not.
Older than 2020 has been:
1. Connect America Fund (https://www.fcc.gov/general/connect-america-fund-caf) which has been around 2011
2. Obama's stimulus package of 2009 which allocated $8B (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest...)
I'm pulling these acts from this book: http://irregulators.org/bookofbrokenpromises/
and cross referencing them with wikipedia or other sites. People have been really sore about since the breakup of Ma Bell in 1984. The fact that so much money was spent and America isn't covered in Fiber is a real tragedy.
The FCC website seems to suggest the funds were given in exchange for ISPs providing internet in an given internet. Did the ISPs not follow through? If so, is there more on this?
>2. Obama's stimulus package of 2009 which allocated $8B (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest...)
The linked wikipedia page just lists a dollar amount with no accompanying detail, and google doesn't turn up much either, so it's unclear under what conditions the money was given out.
>I'm pulling these acts from this book: http://irregulators.org/bookofbrokenpromises/
I didn't feel like reading all 581 pages of the book, so I looked at the summary instead. Based on my quick skim, there's little in the way of details in terms of actual examples of government money being handed out with the expectation of it being used for broadband, and the ISPs not following through. There were however, many examples of ISPs failing to meet their broadband expansion plans, which is a slightly different claim.
This is one fairly recent example. They didn't just get provided "money to use for broadband." They were expected to provide service within an area, and they didn't actually provide service to people they said they were capable of serving.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-14/a-guide-...
LA has standing to act and file a suit to do that if they have evidence of corruption.
That voucher is still being paid out of our tax. Either way, somebody's got to pay.
The government saying "You can provide service at any rate, but you have to give the same rate to this whole area" sounds like a much more market-friendly solution to me. Providers can still compete and try to bring the cost down, they just can't do it in a way that leaves poorer part of the city unconnected.
If you're against regulations because you don't trust government, consider what happens when the government gets to decide who receives vouchers, how much they are worth, and what services they are good for.
If the market is competitive and the cost is excessive then yes. If it's an oligopoly/local monopoly and the providers can charge as much as they want that just means there will be slightly less surplus left for the shareholders and management.
Nobody knows anything about what the smaller municipalities do, or what LA County does only within the unincorporated areas
It is impossible to coordinate.. well there is no real interest in doing so because it creates so many opportunities
A tiny hamlet of 200 people pays their public sector 300,000/yr and simply exists to keep LAPD and LASD out by not being part of LA City or unincorporated respectively
and I don't find it controversial, I find it amusing and aspirational, while part of a jurisdictional patchwork system that undermines populist efforts like LA City is aiming to do
Tiny obscure public sectors pay better than large public sectors