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Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

The public (ie, local or state government). Like the roads. Like the sewers. Like (some) power lines. Like the phone and coax lines (depending on time period, they have passed between private and public owners, but were always state subsidized in their deployment).

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That's what's they've started to do here in Australia. Government owns the new lines (FTTH), wholesale to ISPs who then compete with services.

I'd rather deal with some shitty ISPs and some good ones than be forced to use a single shitty government ISP for the rest of my life.

Not a government ISP, you can have private routing centers. Just public wire in the dirt, so that one company can't own the only access to ones home and make it impossible to compete.

While that might have been true of the past, we do have countries like Sweden, where the state is currently rolling out 1Gb/s connections. Even the country side is having fiber rolled out.

Thanks, but no thanks. Have you seen the roads around here? They've been repaving / widening / narrowing / re-routing the main drag near my apartment for something like a year now and it still isn't done, and the design makes traffic far worse than it was before. No way do I want the same people who run the local highway department having anything (more than already) to do with my broadband access.

It's not a perfect analogy, but as the old saying goes... "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert, in 5 years there would be a shortage of sand".

Considering the state of the infrastructure in the US I think the last people I would trust with this is the government. I can see a model similar to how natural gas and even electricity is using in some states, where their is one carrier responsible for the pipes/lines and everyone and their brother selling service over it.

The government got involved with a lot of those examples because private firms at the time (allegedly) couldn't have gotten it done (too expensive, required easement rights on properties, etc).

The internet already exists. All of today's problems are minor in scope to the original problems of connecting the nation together. Why turn it over the government now?

The "public" doesn't own anything. You can demonstrate that by trying to sell your share of the thing you supposedly own.

Just because you own something doesn't mean its a liquid asset..

I'm not allowed to sell my own body parts, does this mean they're not mine?

Depending on your mindset, that could be the case.

What's your stance ? That's a very valid question regarding relationships between individuals, with the law and authorities in one group.

Depends on where and who you ask. There are definitely people who will take your body parts in sale. (Think iPhone craze + China and remember back to people selling kidneys.)

They said "allowed", organ sale is very illegal everywhere in the world except Iran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_trade#Current_Restriction...

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