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Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

What this tells me is that industries with limited growth potential and who are focused on incremental rather than transformative technology do not respond to government carrots, and to the extent that they do anything, it is to arrange scenarios where they privatize the carrots and socialize the costs.

There is no return on investment for investments in rural fiber. Infrastructure needs a high density of users to be profitable.

If we really think that the speed and reliability of fiber service is important for rural users, we should directly subsidize it - like we do for Amtrak in the Great Plains states - and stop pretending like we care by paying off the corporations and their shareholders.

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Problem is that we live in an environment where a company like AT&T can lobby for basically anything they want, and have basically no accountability when they don't meet their obligations.

You even have people telling stories where they could get fiber service, but the provider just doesn't want to.

What's most tragic is how cheap lobbying is, or more accurately, how great the ROI is. A company like AT&T, or a defense contractor, or an oil company, spends low millions on lobbying, not billions, and as a result reaps enormous windfalls in the tens of billions. I don't have any idea how to fix "money in politics" because first amendment is so tied up in it once you try to do anything, and they've mastered indirection so well that any restrictions are easily worked around by astroturf PACs.

Subsidize community broadband, and stop subsidizing it when the incumbents rush fiber there. The current subsidy scheme hasn't worked.

Sure, because a community likely has more to gain from this than a big telecom corporation. A community benefits when its members can reliably attend telemedicine visits, even if the community broadband is provided at cost. They care about what you can do with the connection, not the connection itself.

A telecom corporation doesn't have a way of profiting from such community benefits. It only benefits if it can somehow charge a transaction tax on those benefits in the form of Internet connection fees high enough to turn a profit.

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