Doc NTIA lead nominee criticizes "woke" and "socialist" fiber broadband subsidy | Hacker News Reader

Doc NTIA lead nominee criticizes "woke" and "socialist" fiber broadband subsidy

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42 pointswalrus0171 comments

Kinda sounds like they want to be able to give more money to the muskrat through subsidies for starlink instead of focusing on fibre (fibre would be a better investment), while also being able to charge whatever they want, while also “owning the libs”.

It's possible, but more likely it's the issue of wireless providers who have tried to make dubious claims about speeds and coverage to claim government funds: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-02-16/fcc-invest...

I think you're just throwing a link out without understanding the topic in the title.

It's talking about opening up scoring system for BEAD to let the best technology for the market win based on features and costs.

Right now it is heavily weighted for fiber, and is done in a way that wouldn't require 25% matching funds for something like the middle of Wyoming, Montana, Alaska, etc.

But if you want to fiber up, say, Alaska - you're going to need a lot more money than $45Bn for just /that/ state alone. That's a lot of tax dollars better spent elsewhere when other sufficient technologies exist.

Honestly she could have done better putting it in those terms rather than attacking it the way she did but you nailed it. It's really expensive to cover large and disparate geographic areas with that kind of thing. There's definitely examples of smaller companies emerging and wiring up their entire rural towns with fibre optic, although the one I'm most aware of kind of foundered when the town ended up selling it to the big phone company after they couldn't pay something like 18 million in debt which gives an idea of scale and challenges for getting lasers to homes in just one town [1]. And on the other hand I've lived in much smaller third world countries where you can get FTTH pretty much everywhere even in small towns, mostly doable because the area to cover is just super small.

[1] https://www.thealbertan.com/olds-news/town-of-olds-selling-i...

I’m guessing Terms are designed to appeal to the most common denominator.

So - all communication must be the most incendiary? Or the most competitive ?

Which would explain much about side effects of outrage arms races?

There are requirements for throughput and latency that must be met for ~10yr regardless of the technology used.

And a more "industry friendly" government is going to let the wireless companies provide crappy service, lie about it, and take the funds.

You clearly have a bone to pick with large lte carriers, but there's a lot of licensed and unlicensed wireless providing service to millions of people all over the world.

They have admited in court to lying to both consumers, and the government, about their products. Fines have been issued for the same.

This is just reality I'm afraid.

"Wireless" seems to mean seemingly something like Verizon to you, as opposed to thousands and thousands of regional wireless providers using microwave radios and things like 3.65Ghz CBRS.

Do you mean that the Trump administration is not an "industry friendly" government? I don't know if Trump and his agency heads care about industries so much as specific companies.

Also, in regard to broadband, Trump and FCC chair Brendan Carr are quite industry friendly. Carr wrote a Project 2025 chapter in which he favored decreasing the FCC's regulations even further, and prioritizing subsidies toward satellite internet from Starlink and Kuiper [1]. (Let's not forget Ajit Pai, but Pai had a filter compared to Carr. I don't think Pai would've written a Project 2025 chapter.)

[1] https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/brendan-carr-fcc-proj...

You read it backward. I expect them to be more than just friendly.

WISPA in particular has been strongly anti-fiber and lobbying that things like 50 x 10 Mbps on a contended-access wireless point to multipoint system is good enough.

https://www.wispa.org/

I would be more willing to accept that state of affairs if StarLink had better competition.

If compared to the alternative, Musk makes more money, but then substantially more of the underserved population get access to high speed Internet, would you consider that to be bad?

I would rather have fibre built out as a utility. People can always opt for starlink or whatever wireless they want on their own dime, but I think tax dollars should pay for infrastructure to be built in the places we live.

I have been seeing lots of seppostani ISP people railing against BEAD.

But like, if I had to choose between a keynesianish narrow targeting of government funds to reward local ISP's, and the Australian style big government telco monopoly it would be no contest.

I think BEAD opponents need to think strategically. If they get rid of BEAD, and fail to meet broadband demand, what will the next democrat government do? Assuming there is one.

I guess "equity", meaning running fiber to rural areas, even if they usually lean red, means "woke"?

Or is it that "woke" now just means any internet infrastructure that isn't Starlink?

Any ISP leader too timid to do a salute is too woke

Yes she specifically called out the fact that they were favouring fiber.

The act defines an "underserved area" as having less than 100/20 speeds.

Which Starlink doesn't meet: https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1400-28829-70

No, that’s not what it means: https://www.thefp.com/p/inside-biden-broadband-boondoggle-tr...

> In addition, states had to prove that they promoted participation from minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, and “other socially or economically disadvantaged individual-owned businesses.” They also had to create a Five-Year Action Plan that required collaborating with unions and “underrepresented communities,” including prisoners, LGBTQI+ individuals, women, and people of color.

If you support incorporating race and identity group preferences into government infrastructure projects, just own that instead of obfuscating.

Very little proof that woke did this vs. Carr just saying so. it sounds like most holdup was at the state level.

Building infrastructure in this country is already nearly impossible, without adding another whole dimension of things that can be used to bog down and litigate projects to death.

I’ve got 10-gig fiber to my house and drive an SUV, I don’t care. The people who should be most upset about this stuff are the folks who want government to facilitate building fiber, trains, etc.

Yes, if you are funding a program to get broadband to underserved areas, including rural and low income populations, it's reasonable to require a plan for outreach so that those groups know they can connect. Why have a program if people don't know about it?

They didn't come up with program out of nowhere, it's been well studied those groups had less connectivity and broadband availability.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10688393/

I'm not sure what your point is here besides that you dislike inclusion. The point of the program is to level the playing field by offering broadband where it might not normally have been profitable to expand.

Outreach shouldn't slow anyone down. The cost of doing some marketing and data analysis is probably miniscule compared to the actual infrastructure build out.

> it's reasonable to require a plan for outreach so that those groups know they can connect. Why have a program if people don't know about it?

It's not about outreach to those groups so they can connect to low-cost internet, it's about who builds out the network itself.

rayiner's comment mentioning "prisoners, LGBTQI+ individuals, women, and people of color" is not about the build out. It's about community outreach and measuring impact on who is getting connected.

It's all in the Notice of Funding Opportunity for the program.

The only reference to actually diversity in the actual build out are:

* Complying with CFR 200.321, considering MWBE are considered in subcontracting, which is standard in many federal contracts

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-2/subtitle-A/chapter-II/p...

* Non-discrimination in hiring, also standard in federal contracts

* Encouraging, but not requiring awardees to broaden their recruitment to underrepresented groups: > Ensuring that subgrantees prioritize hiring local workers and have robust and specific plans to recruit historically underrepresented populations facing labor market barriers and ensure that they have reasonable access to the job opportunities created by subgrantees

The set of people included in the regulations are a subset of all the underserved population. According to the study you linked, they should be a large portion of the underserved population. By cutting the additional regulations, you reduce friction. Let's say there is some (probably small) marginal deprioritization of the groups targeted if you remove those regulations. Even with that, if the states can more easily implement these programs, those target populations will probably benefit on net because investment is more likely to actually happen, and their location intersects with the same locations that qualify for being underserved.

Sounds like these people are only interested in awaking the spectre haunting thr US.

Critical support to Comrade Musk in his mission to destroy the West

https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...

"King" Krasnov and Honored Court Jester Muskow.

Last time Trump installed Ajit Pai, the ultimate telecomm shill into that job, and you know the telecoms all wrote checks to pay him to remove all this hurt to their bottom line. Junk fees and overcharges for everyone again!

"woke" has no meaning these days. It's just a placeholder for "I don't like it".

"woke" and "socialist" is everything to the left of hunting the homeless for sport, these days.

I think you mean hunting them for biodiesel, ala the Butterfly Revolution?

Is this post an instance of that?

The following requirements were part of the program [1]. Are you really unable to see how this can fairly be described as "woke"?

[1] https://www.thefp.com/p/inside-biden-broadband-boondoggle-tr...

No, it is a tool for demagogues to demonize things they oppose.

It's a dog whistle for followers of those same demagogues.

people say woke with a hard-r nowadays

Nah, people with woke are just the winners right now, and you can’t stand it.

No, woke is well understood to be about identity politics.

The following requirements were part of the program [1]. Are you really unable to see how this can be described as "woke"?

[1] https://www.thefp.com/p/inside-biden-broadband-boondoggle-tr...

You seem so concerned about correcting other people on your personal definition of "woke" that you've copied and pasted the exact same comment into two separate places in this thread.

No, It's not my "personal definition" of woke. I wrote "woke is well understood to be about identity politics.". Do you deny that "woke" is well understood to be about identity politics?

It is hard to believe you were not aware of how the term is used. I believe you are being deliberately obtuse.

"woke" encompasses far more than that, it's about being aware of the past 500 years of global history, systematic systems of oppression, racism, discrimination, religious wars, a reasonable understanding of the root causes of the major wars of the past 100 years and their aftermath, various genocides, pogroms, assassinations, coup d'etat, economic disparities between wealthy nations and developing nations, global patterns of push and pull factors for immigration, the role that major international organizations like the UN, NATO, EU play in global politics, culturally specific implementations and practices of non-binary and non-heterosexual gender norms in cultures very alien to western european cultural backgrounds, I could go on for quite some time.

now in its current implementation as a derogatory term by a certain political sect in the usa, "woke" has come to mean "anything we dislike which is vaguely left of center that encompasses the well known tenets of progressive/liberal/leftist politics".

So woke is about identify politics then?

I'm not the person who wrote the block of text there but I will say:

If we look at the word "woke" in a more historical context (rather than its use right now) yes I think you can say it is related to identity politics.

But here's the catch "identity politics" as a phrase is kinda wishy washy as a term when it is used too ;)

I think it's become a law of discourse on the internet that any term used by "the left" will inevitably be laundered and poisoned by groypers and trolls until it simply becomes a general anti-progressive pejorative.

And the drifting definition of "the left" within American political discourse itself is an exemplar. At this point simply not being a racist and a homophobe and believing vaccines are real is considered "socialism." Like the Overton window has drifted so far and so many things are "socialist" and "communist" that we need a new word for the people who actually want to seize the means of production and such.

> "woke" [...] is about being aware of the past 500 years of global history, systematic systems of oppression, racism, discrimination, religious wars, a reasonable understanding of the root causes of the major wars of the past 100 years and their aftermath, various genocides, pogroms, assassinations, coup d'etat, economic disparities between wealthy nations and developing nations, global patterns of push and pull factors for immigration, the role that major international organizations like the UN, NATO, EU play in global politics, culturally specific implementations and practices of non-binary and non-heterosexual gender norms in cultures very alien to western european cultural backgrounds, I could go on for quite some time.

Ben Shapiro is aware of all those things you wrote on your wall of text. Is he woke? The same is true for Jordan Peterson, Roger Scruton, Curtis Yarvin. Are all of those people woke?

Aware probably doesn’t cut it. “Aware and compassionate enough to _try_ not to abuse others for your own benefit” is probably a more complete and explicit statement of wokeness (along with all of that which was stated earlier).

Unfortunately I see “woke” as a brand the right uses to disparage compassion, tolerance and intellectualism.

In my experience, I haven't often seen the right disparaging "compassion, tolerance and intellectualism". What I usually see is the right criticizing identity politics. For example, this post is about a Biden program that has the following requirements. Would you say this case is an instance of "compassion, tolerance and intellectualism" or identity politics?

Definitely compassion and tolerance. Ensuring that the program serves the underserved is the right thing to do.

The right may criticise the left of pandering to identity politics but that’s rich. Sounds like projection to me.

Fiber is woke now

Generally it's economic to install broadband in urban areas, but not in many rural areas--so the rural areas need to be subsidized--and rural areas are the least likely to be woke and/or socialist.

Why should rural areas be subsidised?

No one is making you chose to live there, plus you get cost of living savings from being there rather than in expensive urban real estate.

Also, Starlink isn’t all that much more expensive than fibre.

> Why should rural areas be subsidised?

> No one is making you chose to live there, plus you get cost of living savings from being there rather than in expensive urban real estate

This same argument could have been, and was used against funding for rural electrification and power generation dam construction during the depression and new deal era 90 years ago, which is one of the reasons why deepest Appalachia and much of the rural mountain western states now have grid electricity outside major cities.

IIRC Fish Lake Township in the US with 900 residents was wired up before BEAD.

And WISPs can be good too, its just a matter of cowboy lottery.

> … all kinds of left-wing priorities on the program that just divert resources away from the overall goal of closing broadband gaps. This is going to make the program less cost effective, and it's going to undermine its goals.”

So it's complaints about the details rather than the general idea.

Also, that title doesn't match the article title.

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