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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

I wish the US government would get its act together on this. The Constitution includes a grant of power to Congress to create a national system of post roads (Article 1, Section 8.7) and my understanding is that the founders included this because they recognized the importance of a public communications infrastructure rather than a privately held one [1]. Considering the criticality of our communications infrastructure in an era of cyber-attacks, I find it disappointing that Congress seems to have abandoned this important role to the private sector.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurn_und_Taxis

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Do you really want the government to be in charge of data transport with its track record of blatantly ignoring the right to privacy? Aren't you the least bit concerned that we'll end up with something like in the UK or China, where government control over internet infrastructure has lead to extensive monitoring and censorship?

I'd rather take (possibly) slower and/or more expensive internet that the government has to put a lot of elbow grease in to censor or monitor than a (possibly!) cheaper and/or faster internet that the government has extensive control over.

If you've worked in telecom, you might know how extensive the government's data monitoring infrastructure already is. I sure as hell don't want to make it any bigger.

I'm concerned about the creation of the infrastructure, rather than the operation of it. And no, I don't lose a lot of sleep over this, any more than I lose sleep over having my mail opened.

>any more than I lose sleep over having my mail opened.

You know, that does bother some people.

Are you bothered with having your incoming and outgoing mail checked for un-approved messages and then having those thrown away?

I'm not bothered by it because it isn't and hasn't been a problem in this country. We have laws against such abuses that work quite well and have, if anything, strengthened over the lifetime of this country.

With the NBN, the government is just a wholesaler. They just provide a physical medium and end users will still get a retail service from a private company. Besides the government has the same responsibility to adhere to privacy laws as any private company, in fact government have their own privacy requirements with additional channels to resolve complaints. Ethnically I don't see why a government that you vote for would have any less reason to respect privacy than a private company (who you pay money to). Finally, the government could just pass legislation to monitor/censor within a private network, so it doesn't really matter whether it is public or private from this perspective. It's more a matter of voting for the right representatives.

> With the NBN, the government is just a wholesaler.

The Minister responsible for the NBN -- Senator Conroy -- is also the guy who wants ISP-level internet filtering based on a secret blacklist.

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