Bogus Experts Fight Your Right To Broadband 378
An anonymous reader writes, "Karl Bode of Broadband Reports takes aim at supposed telecom experts and think tankers who profess to love the 'free market,' but want to ban the country's un-wired towns and cities from offering broadband to their residents. If you didn't know, incumbent providers frequently determine towns and cities unprofitable to serve (fine), but then turn around and lobby for laws that make it illegal to serve themselves (not so fine). They then pay experts to profess their love for a free market and deregulation — unless that regulation helps their bottom line. A simple point: 'Strange how such rabid fans of a free-market wouldn't be interested in allowing market darwinism to play out.'"
Not really anything new (Score:2, Interesting)
What we really see here are Statists who use the words "free market" are just pro-State pundits who, as the anonymous reader wrote, are paid to profess support for their employers while sounding pro-freedom.
This is no different than war supporters who think that soldiers and previous war protect freedo
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Well that smacks of black and white thinking, doesn't it? You mean there's no middle ground between those two?
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It's useless to round all fuzzy values to 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
If false is the law of the jungle and true is totalitarianism, then whether a particular enterprise is regulated by the state is a fuzzy-valued membership function [wikipedia.org], not a boolean-valued indicator function [wikipedia.org]. The prohibitions of murder and bank robbery are state regulations; therefore, all business is state regulated to some degree. Your way of defuzzifying [wikipedia.org] this, by rounding all fuzzy values greater than false to true, makes your logic useless.
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You mean there's no middle ground between those two?
Nope. "Competitively", in an economic sense, means that a business is all alone, by itself, sink or swim, fighting to make a profit or go bankrupt.
This changes if you have government "help." Depending on how extensive said help is, you can make a lot of screw-ups and still get billions in pension forgiveness, forced contract re-negotiations, bankruptcy protection, etc.
"Competitively" is a good thing - because state help shifts the burden of busin
Re:Not really anything new (Score:4, Insightful)
But what if the State does the opposit of helping - i.e enact regulations that shift the burden from the taxpayer to the private corporation, and make corporations responsible for actions like pollution and product safety? That's not "free" and it's not "helping" - so I guess there must be more than two options, huh?
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Yeah. Because businesses like paying license fees, taxes, tariffs, and duties, and having their goods embargoed.
TIME OUT! Hi, Slashdot. I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that YOU, too, Slashdotters, can vote against the American two-party system in the upcoming electi
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"Business" as such, is indeed hurt by these. But don't make the fallacy of composition -- specific businesses can certainly benefit from them through elimination or hindering of rivals. For example, Sarbanes-Oxley -- ostensibly to promote a fair environment -- actually imposes disproportionate costs on smaller businesses. ExxonMobil can easily adjust its finance department to comply. A newer f
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Seriously, though, a simple little "no-confidence" option would go a long way to restore my confidence in t
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Socialism: 1 : any of vario
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Where exactly are you watching this take place? Where are you watching it from? Seriously?
Free (Score:5, Informative)
Frankly, I'm shocked that you would think that states should be forbidden to provide services THAT THE FREE MARKET DOESN'T PROVIDE. Small towns can't get high-speed, because no merchants want to provide it. It's not worth it. But if the people of that state feel that they want that service, and are willing to pay for it, what's wrong with them banding together to set that service up themselves? Should construction firms be able to pass laws preventing you and your neighbour from collaborating to build a tool shed that you can then share? A state is no different from you and neighbour working together -- it simply occurs at a larger scale.
Finally, state-run businesses don't necessarily interfere with the functioning of competitors. Frequently, governments will create an organization to supply some service that the free market doesn't provide, and then once it has been established, they split it up and sell it off to merchants who are willing to run these services now that they've been established and proven.
Socialism vs Capitalism isn't a one-or-the-other choice. There are productive balances that can be achieved between total government management of everything and slavery to an oligarchy of industrialists.
But seriously -- how do YOU think small towns should get services like broadband, water-purification plants, sewer systems, and whatnot?
Lastly -- "neoliberal Senators who think that minimum wage laws protect the freedoms of workers"?! You sir, are officially a retard. Neoliberalism is exactly the opposite of that. Neoliberalism is the philosophy that YOU are endorsing in your post -- that of total deregulation. Sorry man, but you're a neoliberal. I know, I know, anything associated with the word "liberal" is automatically evil because of that association with freedom, but deal with it.
Well said; there is a place for government. (Score:2)
I consider myself to be basically a small-government borderline libertarian, and I agree with you. I have seen very little evidence to convince me that a society completely devoid of regulation, either in the criminal or economic sense, would be a nice place to live. Maybe it would be an interesting place to visit -- I mean, who wouldn't want to play at being a ruthless vigilante? -- but I wouldn't want to live there permanently. (And th
Re:Free (Score:5, Interesting)
1: Socialism and capitalism are coexisting RIGHT NOW. Unless you believe that your ridiculous anarchist fantasy could survive the predations of organized nations using just its privatized, non-communist military. Every nation has a completely communist, authoritarian military. The military produces no goods and subsists entirely off of taxation of the labour of real people. The same goes for the police, and indeed the government itself. Are we socialist? Hardly. You don't have to choose, and anyone who suggests otherwise is just some kind of deranged fanatic that's one pamphlet away from assasinating people and blowing up buildings.
What the hell do you call that, if not a government? It may not be a federal or state government, but it's people organizing and consolidating money and power to accomplish goals. That's government (probably municipal in this case). That's why anarchy never works. People invariably want to gather together to accomplish goals that they couldn't achieve on their own. Rather than waste all their time overseeing every aspect of the project, they appoint a few people to manage it while everyone else just contributes resources and gets back to their own work. Now they have a government and taxes.
Centuries of ... human nature have made us accept that organization is natural, unavoidable, and overwhelming. The most organized group will, at best, assimilate the rest; as often as not, it will annihilate them.
I work for a living. I work fucking hard at shitty jobs to pay for school so that I can do better, more valuable jobs at some point. Unlike the cowards I deal with everyday, paying a few taxes doesn't reduce me to fits of crying and impotence. I drive our roads, I use our sewer systems. I benefit from a government that defends the border and fights crime without my needing a personal bodyguard. I benefit from the fact that the government stomps monopolies and prevents them from price-fixing or creating (much) artificial scarcity. We've seen anarchy -- anarchy is the five minutes before a warlord enslaves you and your family and puts you to work picking opium poppies at gunpoint. Anarchy is the window of opportunity for the worst kinds of government to establish themselves. Anarchy is so monstrous that it convinces everyone to put power into the hands of a despotic church or a monarchy, and thanks them for the safety of slavery.
So you know what? I'll take the minor hassle of a few taxes, and having to fill out a few forms now and then. It's that, or paying ten times as much in protection money to the local organized crime ring that has a monopoly on security and murders anyone that tries to compete.
The real crux of it is that democracy trumps economics. If 50%+1 of the people say that we should all pay taxes for a health care system, we do it. If 50%+1 of the people say we turn the rest into dog food, we do it. There are balances to prevent rash, insane changes, but ultimately the people can do anything. The people want a national bank to buffer against economic fluctuations (imagine if entire military had to be sold for scrap everytime there was a downturn), so we do it. The people don't want losing a job or becoming too sick to work to be a death-sentence, so we establish a welfare system. The people don't want to have the spend time and money doing background checks into supposed hospitals and doctors everytime they have a medical emergency, so the government regulates hospitals and medical licensing. Are you tyrant enough to say that we should cast aside democracy because of your weak spine in the face of a deduction from your paycheque -- a paycheque that is already being scaled-up to take that deduction into account?
Only a fanatic suggests that an issue is black-and-white. There are always middle grounds. That's why
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Dada (Score:2)
This is dada.
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Free markets often need regulation to be beneficial to society. Because being beneficial to society is the only point of a free market, some regulation is necessary.
Don't you want assurance that there aren't harmful strains of E. Coli in your food? The federal government has regulations that handle that, even if there is an occasional slip up.
Don't want a strip joint in the middle of your neighborhood? Zoning regulations mean that your neighbor can't suddenly decide to turn his house into a strip joint.
E
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How can the market be free if the government isn't free to participate in it? Are these "free market" people scared of a little competition or something?
Regulations, licensing, taxations, embargoes, tariffs, duties and other "pro-market" structures are "legal" uses of force by the State for one thing an
freemarkets (Score:2)
There are two ways to conduct business: competitively, or with the help of the State. Regulations, licensing, taxations, embargoes, tariffs, duties and other "pro-market" structures are "legal" uses of force by the State for one thing and one thing only: to take care of the businesses friendly with the State.
Actually there's a third way, have the local infrastructure owned by the local community but have them open it up to all comers. IEEE's "Specturm" has an article on A Broadband Utopia [ieee.org]. Several cite
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First of all, neither Texas, nor any other US state would execute anyone over an accidental death. Second, incorporation does not protect individuals from criminal prosecution nor civil liability for torts they commit. Third, if there were no Big Evil Corporation to sue, only the managers could be sued individually. If history is any guide, with less-deep pockets, they'd have to pay fewer damages (faceless corporations always get hit with the big judgments), but the
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I don't think the grandparent was talking about accidental deaths, but deaths caused by gross negligence. I'm pretty sure you can get big jail time if your child dies due to your negligence. So, why not if an employee dies?
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Yeah, but it was pretty clear he was just making an over the top joke about Texas. Like when I say that Texas is the only state where they execute retarded people AND elect them to be govenor.
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I don't think it's *ever* clear when he's being serious and when his posts are just satire. And that's not a good thing.
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Horseshit. What's to stop a company creating barriers to entry without government help?
In a free market, competition ALWAYS appears, even if the cost to enter the market is high.
Got any evidence of that? Have you got numbers from studying a 100% free market for eternity?
Confusion & the 'Free Market' (Score:2)
Re:Confusion & the 'Free Market' (Score:2, Funny)
Computer science majors are easy to confuse. Just ask them how to ask out a girl.
Re:Confusion & the 'Free Market' (Score:3, Informative)
I say, I say, don't mislead the boy (Score:2)
"Petitionin
Egad (Score:2)
No, it is subject to market forces (Score:2)
This isn't quite true. You see, there were market forces at work when the franchise agreement between Cox Cable and your town or county was being negotiated. Whenever your area was making a move from broadcast programming into the cable world, there were probably a number of cable television players vying for the contract. For
Re:Confusion & the 'Free Market' (Score:2)
As a result the ONLY option at this point has been satellite or dial-up. Try using a VoIP phone on one of those connections!
It is simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Throwing them to the wolves, however is not Socialism, therefore it must be good.
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like this ;-)
You're oversimplifying (Score:5, Insightful)
Paying Haliburton and other US contractors to rebuild Iraq--that's not socialism. The discriminator is this--who makes the money? If money is being spread among a bunch of little people, then that's socialism. If money is poured into a few large corporations whose executives make tens or hundreds of millions, then that's the free market. If it's profitable for the rich, it's the free market, but if you're giving money to a single mother of 2, then that's socialism. If you're helping the working poor pay their medical bills, that's socialism, and probably creeping totalitarianism.
But we can brag on TV about building schools for Iraqis, and that's NOT socialism. But--you guess it--large American corporations have won contracts to rebuild those schools, along with those huge military bases over there. What is an what is not socialism has more to do with who gets to pocket the money than it does with any fidelity to Karl Marx. Care to look into how much federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans, compared to how much is spent on rebuilding Iraq? If you spend money in New Orleans, then small local firms may get some of the contracts, and the money may be spent, and most importantly earned, locally. If you spend in Iraq, all of the money goes into the coffers of large companies with sweetheart deals, such as Haliburton.
Small mom-and-pop contractors don't have contacts in the Department of Defense and White House. But if you get big enough, you get to engage in nation-building as part of someone's "vision," like PNAC, and then that isn't socialism, even if you're building the very things that WOULD be socialism if you were building it for Americans back home.
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Wow. Great post. Too bad I'm out of mod points and also already posted.
In light of your post it's interesting to think not only about what government spending constitutes "socialism," but also about exactly how different big business today is from "socialism," not only in its work for the government abroad, but here at home as well.
Of course the best example is Wal-Mart. I've always found their logo, with plain block letters and a star in the middle, creepily Communist. And, sure enough, they have an ef
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Why do you think that is? Even granting the dubious assertion that Walmart has an effective monopoly, they still have to be efficient and keep prices down because competitors would emerge if they didn't. Monopolies aren't necessarily harmful; barriers to entry are, and many government regulations have the effect of raising those barriers rather than lowering them. Large companies have armies of law
Re:You're oversimplifying (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I'm aware of the textbook definition of socialism, thanks, but I was referring to the seemingly obvious fact that if you want to fund infrastructure (water plants, hospitals, power plants) with public funds, the same people who have no problem rebuilding Iraq will complain about encroaching socialism. If you're so concerned about it being a "handout" to give a poor single parent money to live, then institute work programs, and then you'll have the goods and services you care about. But no one is interested in any programs whose main beneficiaries are poor people.
Of course, $100 given to a poor single mother will be pushed right back into the economy, creating just as many jobs as $100 given to Raytheon or some other weapons manufacturer. But everyone acts as if poor people burn their money in little bonfires, forgetting that a dollar spent by a bum is just as good at creating jobs as a dollar spent by a CEO. We basically just worship success, so we funnel money to big corporations as if we need more weapons. Hell, Congress just reauthorized weapons that the DoD said they didn't even need! So yes, the weapons companies are providing goods and services, but if we're buying goods and services we don't really need, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, then that's morally no different than paying poor people $2000 a month to pick up litter. It's just a wealth redistribution program, only one that gets the nod from the "I love the free market" types, while the other is labeled as "big government." Give me a break.
Re:You're oversimplifying (Score:4, Insightful)
The Iraqi construction companies built the country in the first place, and the american government destroyed it. American companies shouldn't be profiting at the expense of Iraq, Iraq should be compensated for their losses and this compensation should go into the local economy.
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Just business (Score:2)
The customer first fad is over. (Score:2)
Until you have signed up with them, they will do everything the can to make you feel like you are coming first, then as soon as they have you, they give you a number and tell you to wait in line.
Market darwinism... (Score:4, Funny)
It makes me wonder (Score:2)
You gotta fight (Score:2)
to brooaaaadband.
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for your right
to brooaaaadband.
Broadband is not a right, but partying is.
Bad idea (Score:4, Interesting)
I have direct experience with this in the dialup market in Altoona PA in the late '90s. If you weren't happy with the sponsored ISP, tough luck. The small ISPs pulled out when they couldn't compete with Joe Taxpayer. I worked for one of those ISPs.
You want municipal wireless? Fine, but understand that means you'll ONLY get whatever products and quality of service your town's government is capable of. Servers and static IPs? Ho ho, good luck. And you'll be the last town in the nation to get anything better.
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The current trend is for municipalities to take bids from private companies. It's the same way a lot of government services operate ... you don't think there's an office at city hall where a guy interviews ironworkers for jobs building bridges, do you? I have faith that at least some of the companies [com.com] that are interested in building out and servicing
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Now, why should a private company, whose main responsibility is to make profits for their shareholders, voluntarily upgrade their technology, particularly when they enjoy a monopoly in their service area? And you assume that a local government, whose main responsibility and accountability is to their citizens (who can vote them out every few years) would not be responsive to changes in technology?
Are you sure you aren't automatically assuming government = bad, priva
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If they enjoy a monopoly then there is little motivation. That holds true whether the monopoly came about as a result of earlier competition or as a result of a MUNICIPAL CONTRACT. You might even say that the point of my "premise" was that municipal involvement tends to creates such a monopoly where one mig
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Free wifi is nice, but if it boils down to dial-up speeds because of sub-standard equipment and implementation, then there will be a market for premium services. I can even envision the advertising "Tired of not being able to use your VoIP phone and comput
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[sarcasm]And Bells are really speedy about rolling out new technology [/sarcasm]. . . They promised video phone in the 1960s "real soon now".
You say municipal governments won't upgrade their technology. Monopolies, regulated or not, aren't real quick to deploy new technolgy either. Like for instance, broadband internet in areas that are now considering municipal wireless internet.
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I mean, how many people have plastic surgery, eh? Even though you could get a better product (improved looks), it costs you money, it's risky, and it's a pain in the neck. So most people decide their 'free' physical appearance is just good enough.
Or say, you can chose to pay $300 for a retail copy of Win XP, or you could keep a pre-installed free OS (equivalent or better), which one would you chose? It becomes especially tough to sell you something when you get all the fre
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Paid for stuff gets priority by consumers over free stuff all the time.
I could walk the 12 miles to work for free but, I, and nearly everyone else I know, buys a car and drives.
My country has a heavily subsidised public train system which is much cheaper to use instead of cars and yet most people still prefer to drive to work.
Your XP example is a classic. A great many people will happily pay for XP even if their new machine came preloaded with a free OS.
I'm a bit of a Liberta
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You wouldn't do it if it was a toll road and you paid directly for its use instead of the cost being rolled up in your taxes.
Or maybe you would. Some people do drive to work on toll roads... but not enough to make toll roads viable except in very densely packed areas.
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I'd say most people reading this would agree with me that they are comparable. I only need one counter example to make your assertion false.
I will point out that a great many Mac owners have purchased windows emualtion software and a copy of windows to run with it.
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I dunno. Google has never charged me a single penny, and yet they seem to be a multi-billion dollar company.
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Governments can't tolerate scandal. Private companies (especially small private companies) don't care.
The cure for scandal is policy. If you're drowning in policy so that you can't pick your nose without first checking the manual and getting three approvals then its a safe bet that no one can do anything "wrong" without violating a policy, thereby exempting the agency from responsibility. So, government
Government competing with industry ? free market (Score:3, Insightful)
Government "competing" with industry is not a free market and there is no "market darwinism" to play out. Of the two competitors here, one can confiscate any amount of money they choose from everyone to pay for their service. It doesn't matter if anyone wants it, they need no voluntary "customers." They take whatever money they want and provide whatever service they want.
Pretending that a company can compete with government, where government forces everyone to pay for their service, is a terrible twist of the word "competition." It's like saying that Wendy's can "compete" with McDonalds if the government passes a new law that everyone has to pay to eat all their meals at McDonalds, and then can show up and get the food they already had to pay for for no additonal charge. In order to go to Wendy's, you have to also buy a McDonalds meal and throw it away. That's not "free market competition."
Note that I'm not saying anything in this post about whether or not municipalities should be allowed to offer internet access, or (and this is an entirely separate issue) whether or not they should do so. I'm just saying that calling government "competition" with free enterprise companies some sort of free market is absurd. It's not competition when one of the competitors gets to force everyone to "buy" their product, can charge whatever they want, can loose any amount of money without fear of going out of business, can provide any service and quality level with no effect on revenue, and can tax and regulate their competitors. Yes, there are some areas where a company manages to service the same sector government services in a different way, and I'm not saying it's impossible that some people would pay for another internet service even after paying for the government one, especially if the government one is run as badly as many government things are. But even if a lot of people end up paying for both the mandatory government service and a second, private service, it's still not free market competition.
Re:Government competing with industry ? free marke (Score:2)
That's maybe true in a totalitarian state, but less so in real-world US of A.
Take the Post Office, for example. It's technically a g
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Only the USPS gets to carry normal mail. If you want express from someone else, it either costs (by statute) significantly more than the Post Office does, and/or you have to pay the post office what they would have gotten anyway by buying and canceling stamps in addition to the private postage.
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Post Office Publication 542 [usps.com] (pdf) makes repeated mention to Title 39 [gpo.gov], mostly in Chapter 3 (which is all sections starting with 3xx). You will notice that the US Code site does not list Chapter 3. Since I can not find reference to them, I'm forced to assume one of three things:
1. they've been repealed
2. they've been updated
Re:Government competing with industry ? free marke (Score:2)
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I can't legally start delivering mail in the US tomorrow for 37 cents an envelope.
Re:Government competing with industry ? free marke (Score:2)
Substitute 'free market' for 'shareholder equity' (Score:2)
The low-hanging fruit of public assets-- the big cities-- are easy pickings. High-density infrastructure pays first. Rural areas and marginal density suburban areas pay less and cost more. Gone is the
DUH! (Score:2)
Net neutrality (Score:2)
Universal truth... (Score:2, Informative)
My history teacher told us that there are three keys to understanding American history:
1. Great Britain.
2. People are stupid.
3. Follow the money.
Great Britain doesn't apply here, of course, but the other two are universal...this article is news, but it isn't new. We should expect people to do things entirely for profit. And we should expect people to be blatantly two-faced. Plato or Aristotle or someone like that said that "Those who are too sm
Re:Universal truth... (Score:4, Informative)
"Right to Broadband" - ????? (Score:2)
Nothing but a big steaming pile... (Score:2)
The Reason Foundation is yet another free-market think tank that believes that eliminating government oversight in the broadband sector will result in broadband utopia.
In my neck of the woods, there is a small community called Lake George, MN. Lake George is a nice small lakeside tourist town, population ~150 and growing. It's got a few nice cafes, some tourist shops. They just got their first apartment complex, and there's a lot of tourist dollars that go there every summer. There's a lo
Old News (Score:2)
They claim they want to protect Canadians from an "unfair" tax, when in reality they want to abolish the small media tax we pay to impose a bigger cost and restriction on those who use MP3s.
This Argument is BS (Score:2)
I mean imagine if I argued, people who don't want the government to provide health care don't really believe in a free market since they don't want the government to compete in health care. This would be absurd. If the government offered everyone free health care the fact that other people could sell health insurance wouldn't really be relevent.
Similarly towns have powers of compulsion that corporati
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Large ISPs deploy broadband first (only?) in big cities, where there are lots of potential customers in a small area, producing lots of revenue for their investment. They haven't had a lot of interest - yet - in deploying in small towns and out in the spaces between towns.
Some towns have gotten tired of waiting for some company to decide to wire them for broadband, and have tried to set up their own, local, town-owned-and-op
Won't anyone think of the poor corporations? (Score:2)
A county public power utility did this in Grant county, Washington. It wasn't economical for the cable or phone company to supply broadband. Much of the place is populated like northern Nevada. See here. [google.com] The power company funded a plan to use internet-enabled power meters and ran fiberoptic cable to every property they could, defraying the cost by offering broadband Internet. I think it's a full gigabit pipe. The cost is much less than most people pay for DSL or cable broadband.
The meters fell throug
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Maybe there ought to only be laws against lying about having a license or something. That's a tough issue for me. I haven't decided.
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I used to think it was easy too. Then I went to medical school.
Certification marks (Score:2)
Heck, existing certification mark [wikipedia.org] laws would work. A lot of people and computer repair shops would hire somebody with a CompTIA A+® certification over somebody without a recognized certification. Likewise, if the law prohibiting practicing medicine without a license were repealed, the AMA would warn the public to "look for the logo".
However, allowing everybody to practice medicine has som
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A person should be allowed to do whatever he/she wishes, but must be held accountable for any resulting damage.
I'm nominally a Libertarian, and this extremity of thought still bothers me. Sometimes, after-the-fact consequences just don't cut it. Occasionally, regulations in a tiny collection of areas can save many lives, without the attendant loss of critical freedoms. I agree generally with the idea that we have drawn the standard of what ought to be regulated far too loosely, but there are still a fe
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Without (government) regulation, reputable doctors and health care providers would likely form their own associations which would certify that people were actually competent to practice medicine. And what's more, they might actually be run by medical experts rather than politicians and bureaucrats.
I can't believe after the last 200 years of history that anyone has the gall to make this argument with a straight face.
We had unregulated medicine. Throughout the 19th century. And what did we get? A bunch o
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It must be nice to live in a country where politicians don't control medical licensing. In the US, the bureaucrats in charge of medical licensing are usually political appointees.
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Fair enough. I oversimplified.
I should have said "Politicians almost never try to exercise any control over the licensing process." I've never heard of any board that was subject to any sort of manipulation by the executive. If you know of counterexamples I'd be curious to hear them.
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And if you think unregulated medicine was bad, you should have seen what the unregulated computer industry was like back then!
Seriously, you're comparing two time periods separated by hundreds of years of biological and medical research, and you think government regulation is the most important distinguishing factor? It sounds like you've bee
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Voters in city council elections. If voters elect representatives knowing that said representatives want to fund the last-mile buildout of an entry-level ISP, then they have declared Internet access a "right".
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Democratic principals (Score:2)