FCC chair rejects call to impose Universal Service fees on broadband
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
If we want to provide "programs such as Lifeline discounts and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund deployment grants for ISPs," then we should just do that right out of the general fund. And as long as that cost sits there on the books we can continue to evaluate if we want to grow, shrink, or let it alone.
Would you have examples of this in the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
california vehicle code section 40801
No peace officer or other person shall use a speed trap in arresting, or participating or assisting in the arrest of, any person for any alleged violation of this code nor shall any speed trap be used in securing evidence as to the speed of any vehicle for the purpose of an arrest or prosecution under this code.
That said, I remember a friend fought this once. A motorcycle officer gave him a ticket, and he investigated and found he had given hundreds of tickets from the same location. didn't help.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point, but that does not constitute a speed trap. It very well could be that on that section of road there are just a lot of speeding drivers, and hence hundreds of tickets.
One example of a speed trap is if the speed limit takes a sharp drop without warning. For example, rural road with a 60 mph limit, and it drops to 25 mph at the town limits with no "25 mph ahead" signs, and there sits a cop with a radar gun ten meters after the "25 mph" sign.
1) is a section of highway where cops monitor cars entering and exiting, then calculate an average speed to identify people who were driving over the speed limit. Basically, they need to demonstrate instantaneous speed, not average speed, to write a ticket.
2) is a highway segment that hasn't set its speed limit based on an engineering/traffic survey done in the last 5 years, 10 if nothing nearby has changed.
Also, what laws could be changed to make it so (assuming that's a good thing). Examples: The government takes it directly from your bank account like they do if you don't pay your taxes. Another would be to use a progressive fine system like I've heard they have in some countries so that rich people don't feel like they can just pay the fines and ignore the law.
I have the highly controversial opinion that they should use civil asset forfeiture for some traffic violations. If a speed cam catches a car going over 100mph, it's a public danger, regardless of who was operating it. Sue the car, and allow the owner to recover the proceeds from the driver in a separate civil action if they can prove that another person was driving it. Only exception would be if they reported it stolen. Eventually the fine would be paid or the vehicle would be impounded for lapsed registration/insurance.
"The combination of traffic enforcement and Mayor's Court has provided 80% of Linndale's one million dollar annual budget, and underwritten its four full-time and ten part-time police officers.[14]"
I think speed laws should be based on engineering/behavior as well.
It's possible to artificially set speed limits too low and make normal people into fine-paying-department-funding criminals.
There's something called "the 85th percentile" that engineers use to assess whether the speed limit set is too high or too low.
(if the speed limit is too different than what normal people drive, the variance in speed will make the road more dangerous)
I believe it might be true in places with icy/snowy weather. Many people try to reach that magic number on the sign no matter what the conditions are. That means that people driving to the conditions are going far slower than the other people, and as you said - the difference isn’t a good thing, in addition the the fast people being a lot more likely to crash on their own.
For Montana (where I lived at the time), there was no posted day time limit; night time it was 55 MPH. While no posted limit, the law stated something to the effect of "must drive reasonable and prudent for conditions". Conditions here is kind of vague, but is pretty all encompassing: road conditions, weather, traffic, your vehicle, your tires, etc. Bright, sunny, summer day in a Porsche with good tires? At 100MPH, you might have gotten pulled over, your tires checked, and then the officer would send you on your way. Blizzard conditions? Driving 45 might get you cited. And the citation had teeth: it was automatic reckless driving, something like a $500 fine and possibly a suspended/revoked license. Previously, the fines were a joke. Something like $5 for up to 20 MPH over the limit, could be paid in cash and didn't go on your record.
Anyways, "reasonable and prudent" was eventually rule unconstitutional because we can't have nice things. So, out it went, and instead it was replaced with a 75 MPH daytime, 65 (I think? maybe it was 55 still) night time limit. It's now 85 day/65 night MPH as of last summer when I last drove through.
But, the tl;dr is: when the posted limit was put in place, highway fatalities increased (quite dramatically from what I recall). No, I don't have any references to cite, it's just my recollection of events from nearly 30 years ago...
Are you advocating for _increased_ vagueness in our laws?
For an anecdote:
I went to Dallas to watch the eclipse. I got on I-45 to go home to Houston. Traffic was going great, typically about 90MPH in a 75 zone. There were several cars doing 110+ and zooming between lanes while several others were doing a mere 55. The worst were the people doing 55 in the left lane, being passed by people doing 65 in the right lane. The weather was "fine", just cloudy but a pleasant 85F.
Then, just around Richland, there was a sudden massive downpour and visibility went down to about 100 feet. I could feel my front-wheel-drive wheels losing grip for seconds at a time, even at 75.
It was unusual for my vehicle to lose grip at that speed, but I'm used to driving on slippery gravel roads. I also had expected (planned for) it because I had looked at the weather and knew it would be raining by the time I was home. Gotta keep everyone staggered and plenty of distance between each other. So I let off the gas and coast down in speed until traction was regained.
Even so, we didn't have to go very far on the freeway before everyone was 100% stopped for about 45 minutes. The weather was moving northeast (to a good measure of perpendicularity), so the weather will have hit that whole stretch of freeway about the same time. Someone at the "front" hydroplaned and wrecked with someone else around Streetman where I-45 turns west-ward. By the time I made it to the front, all of the emergency vehicles and both damaged vehicles were nowhere in sight -- so at least there's few rubberneckers.
Driving for the _current_ weather is a bad idea, and not enough people will consider what the weather could be in 30 seconds. That's only considering the weather. The fact that's people doing 55+ and people doing double that is also a massive safety issue on a 2-lane freeway.
Even inside of Dallas and Houston, people are RIDICULOUSLY crazy. If you drive for a few hours at speed limit on the freeways, then you will pass dozens of people doing 20 below in the left lane, and also have other dozens of people scoot between you and other cars with mere single-digit feet between you and them. There will be countless instances of other vehicles coming into your lane and immediately braking to avoid hitting the vehicle that was in front of you but now is in front of them. If you're ever in slow or stopped traffic, there will be a half dozen vehicles skipping past the traffic in emergency lanes.
So, I think speed limits aren't the only thing that need fixing. There needs to be much better safety education and enforcement. There's more to my opinion but I doubt it'd be popular -- consider how empathy, greed, and modern timeliness also contribute to these problems.
The idea of adding more and more spending to an already broken budget is nothing new, but its also extremely confusing to me. Why bother with a budget when we just borrow/print our way out of any budgetary limits we don't like?
Projects which increase economic activity (like rural broadband) can be revenue positive without fees or anything.
Now if the money all gets swallowed up by a huge ISP that doesn't actually give underserved people broadband, then everyone loses and its just corporate sponsorship.
That doesn't mean we can't ever do useful work by subsidizing the deployment on infrastructure.
We can and should spend public money to improve broadband infrastructure. I have seen quite a few hugely successful subsidized broadband deployments from PUDs and small municipal power distribution companies in even lightly populated counties. For my money, continuing to subsidize these organizations and empowering them to sell broadband access direct to consumers is a huge value for the money.
Do you know if there's any way we could really track this?Deficit spending increases the money supply which itself will increase economic activity. I'm not sure how we could know whether an increase in economic activity is due to broadband access or the new cash, especially when the project would likely take years.
If society decides to take $6/year from every citizen to fund Rural Digital Access, it doesn't matter if they do it by raising broadband prices by 50 cents per month, or by raising income tax rates by 0.01%. They both mean the same thing: You, the average citizen, handing over $6 per year.
The only differences are sleight of hand, where politicians "haven't raised taxes" and yet have more of your money at their disposal; and whether it's applied progressively, so the rich pay a bigger share.
There's also the difference of exactly which people are paying. It's not uniform across everybody, not even across everybody with internet access.
A more extreme example of this same picking of winners and losers is student loan bailouts. The winners are clearly the minority of people who get their loans repaid / forgiven and the losers are all the tax payers getting the tab added to the national debt.
Well for starters they signed on the line that is dotted. Their peers who went to trade school or got a job at McDonald's didn't co-sign their loans.
Plus, the interest rates on debt with no collateral that could be discharged in bankruptcy would be significantly higher. There's nothing special about tuition payments not being dischargeable in bankruptcy, it's student loans specifically. If you pay your tuition or buy books on a credit card then you could declare bankruptcy and it'd be treated like all your other obligations.
> If you're anti-loan-forgiveness then you need to allow people to discharge these things in bankruptcy.
No you don't. Bailing out people for bad decisions like attending overly expensive schools or acquiring useless degrees is a bad idea. It just incentivizes more bad behavior.
King for a day, I'd remove the government out of the student loan business entirely. That'd have a massive drop in college pricing. Let all loans be private and let them be dischargeable in bankruptcy. But changing the rules in an existing system on already made agreements is a bad idea.
Why do you think it would do that?
I once tried to take a look at college pricing over the last century but wasn't able to find much data. For the few schools where I did find data I found a general trend of college prices going up at something like 2ish times the inflation rate.
That trend didn't show any obvious change when the government got into the student loan business. Prices continued to go up at about the same rate I'd expect based on how they had gone up before. That suggests government loans aren't a major factor in price increases, and so it seems doubtful that taking them away would make much pricing difference.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they increased leave and would always support that move. It highlights the problem of picking winners with financial programs. You can't help everyone and any change will have ripple effects.
In the case of student loans, wiping those loans out puts more spending money in those peoples' pockets. Student debt is a problem and tuition costs are crazy IMO, but there's also no avoiding the fact that increasing spending money in lower income brackets will increase prices and competition. Its hard to predict how much the loan forgiveness will help in the long run versus pushing up prices for everyone.
'michaelt said (and you quoted):
> The only differences are [one thing] ... and whether it's applied progressively, so the rich pay a bigger share.
Your reply seems to be repeating and slightly expanding on that, but because you started it with this:
> There's also the difference of...
It sets up an expectation that you intended to refute something about the parent comment submitted by 'michaelt. But I can't find anything in the content of your message which disagrees with the parent comment.
I think this is the wrong question to ask of the government. At least notionally, when I borrow as a private individual it's to provide some quantifiable benefit in the future. For example if I'm starting a business, I might draft a business plan, conclude that there is money to be made and an opportunity that will dissolve if I try to save, and borrow money to buy equipment to start the business. What we should be asking is "what tangible benefit for our society is this thing going to have, and do we want to be on the hook to pay for it for 30 years?" I think to the degree that broadband access gives people in rural areas direct access to a market and to knowledge and ideas that they can't access locally, there is a lot of value in the rest of the country paying for this so that they can have the same options that the rest of us have.
That's really key to the question though. The federal government doesn't have to risk any collateral and they aren't held to any repayment schedule. Arguably, once the the debt is created they are actually incentivized to not pay back the debt. The new debt creates new money in the system, removing it later would decrease the money supply and at any meaningful scale would risk deflation.
When governments can create their own money on demand and have no tangible downsides to doing so unless they somehow trigger massive inflation, when does a budget really create much of a barrier to them? When would a government turn down or cancel a program, assuming the money spent isn't going to trigger inflation?
The recently departed government still claims that their borrowing wasn't the cause of the problem.
I honestly don't get how economics is considered a science or predictive. At the highest level its still largely driven by trying to play psychological games to "nudge" consumers and investors in a certain direction. There's no prediction there, and a science that couldn't, for example, predict that printing $4T would cause inflation isn't really very scientifically accurate with its predictions.
Once the fiber is in the ground (raceway, conduit, direct burial, whatever), it is citizen fiber forever.
Government is us, hence the inherit nature of this all being a system held together in tension. There is always hope, with my apologies to Banksy.
Just like water pipes, sewer pipes, and power lines.
Electrical utilities aren't allowed to venture into the data-center business, for example. Or the aluminum-smelting business.
Why is this so difficult?
They can't or don't want to. Too much of the US is too rural for cost-effective near-universal wire/fiber broadband access.
Having finally achieved fiber broadband in a rural area, the main obstacle to build out is the provider being able to cover the initial cost.
Our new provider is a municipal broadband company. If the people in an area all had a voucher to cover the connect, they would have built into our area years prior. Instead, they had apply and wait for grants.
Vouchers would incentivize companies to build, as the more they build, the more vouchers they could collect on. It would encourage competition for the service.
Service fees result in this top down grant system that encourages no build out unless a grant is received, delaying build out.
The large telco in many rural areas is Frontier. They are terribly run and I think they have been in chapter 11 for years. In our area, you can see their lines are unmaintained with trees leaning on the lines for years now. The only time they do anything is when they get some competition in an area, in which case they'll do the minimum to make it unprofitable for the other company in that area.
I've wondered about this.
As opposed to electrical service, I think an ISP can put up wires in a hugely redundant fashion with multiple routes to each house.
If maintaining can be done at their leisure this way, say trimming back the trees every few years, can't costs be lower?
I'm thinking in an engineering sense. You probably know your ISP and they are probably maximizing profit, not cutting your costs.
Imho, net neutrality >> USF
FCC to vote on restoring net neutrality
Imposing similar assessments on broadband could increase the Universal Service Fund's size and/or reduce the charges on phone service, spreading the burden more evenly across different types of telecommunications services.
Best background on it is probably the Wikipedia article[0], which is surprisingly thorough on this.
Currently broadband is already exempt from USF fees because it's never been a "telecommunications service" in a way that's truly equivalent to how telephone lines are classified as a "telecommunications service". Everything around broadband regulation feels very piecemeal and disjointed because US politics/legislation in general has been largely piecemeal ever since broadband came out (except for the Patriot Act and ACA). When telephone was gaining popularity in the 1930's, Congress was in the habit of undertaking and enacting much bolder/unified/populist packages - Glass-Steagal/FDIC, Rural Electrification Act, the New Deal, etc and they wrote a big framework for telephony regulation with the Communications Act of 1934. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 built on the 1934 act to establish the "Universal Service Fund"; but broadband was never formally that type of "telecommunications service".
This statement from the FCC announcing their intention to exempt broadband from USF is politically expedient for designating broadband to be regulated as a common carrier under Title II. That reason alone would likely be sufficient to drive this decision. I doubt that it's the entire rationale, but it is enough. Net neutrality is the biggest issue that the current FCC leadership is looking at and the only issue where large amounts of money and power is potentially at stake. Net neutrality has a complex technical narrative that's difficult to communicate effectively to constituents. If corporate lobbying campaigns can push the message that the FCC's drive for net neutrality is the direct cause of a new fee, it could result in the public viewing net neutrality very negatively.
In more detail, it's not clear that regulating broadband under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 would actually require it to be subject to the Universal Service Fund (Telecommunications Act of 1996). That started as and remains just a talking point of lobbyists who are paid to argue against net neutrality. The FCC says they won't be forced to and there's not much in the way of super-detailed legal argument around the issue that I can find - if the FCC was wrong about that I'd expect someone would have published something which clearly walks through the issue and shows why they're wrong.
The current leadership of the FCC is generally focused on benefitting the consumer. Their current focuses could be called "populist" but it seems like the current FCC leadership really does want everyone to win and genuinely doesn't appear to be overtly/reactively/dogmatically hostile to corporate interests on the whole. The main two things I've seen this FCC taking on are moving broadband to Title II common-carrier status, and taking a look at Xfinity charging customers $50 if they go over a 1.2TB/month data cap[1]. However, one commissioner shared more about what he's focused on here on HN[2].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund
1: Consumers can violate Xfinity's data cap by using the offered 1Gbps download speed for just 3 hours per month (or 6 minutes per day) and the "meter" is not something that can be inspected or calibrated by states' Weights & Measures divisions.