Bogus Experts Fight Your Right To Broadband

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

[dada21]

If you are really a fan of a free market, you'd understand the reality that regulation means that it isn't free. Restrictions mean it isn't free. Taxation means it isn't free. Licensing means it isn't free.

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 freedoms (they don't). It is no different than neoliberal Senators who think that minimum wage laws protect the freedoms of workers (they don't). It is no different than the Federal Reserve Board of Governors who believe that more liquidity means more freedom for the consumer (sorry, wrong).

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.

I love the free market because I love watching markets change to meet the needs of the consumers (demand) as well as the manufacturers (supply). I love seeing both sides of a barter or exchange profit from that exchange, rather than one side gaining and one side losing. The free market is not zero sum: it is mutual gain. This is capitalism. The State-licensed mercantilistic market is not zero sum -- one party loses, one party gains. This is socialism or Western State mercantilism.

Bad idea

[Spazmania]

Nobody wants to hear it but I'll say it anyway: Municipally owned and operated ISPs are a bad idea. No matter how hot your technology is today, tomorrow's technology will be hotter and the municipality won't be able to react. Governments and government contractors never can. Their taxpayer-funded presence in the market will, however, serve as a very effective means of encouraging for-profit companies to go elsewhere.

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.

Re:Bad idea

[monkeydo]

Seems obvious to me. Free marketeers are opposed to monopolies just like everyone else. When governments enter the private sector they behave very similarly to monopolies, because they aren't playing with their own money. This leads to market failure. The article has no logic whatsoever, and the author makes no attempt to examine the logic of the reports that it criticizes.

Re:Bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

(this is not in the US, and posting anonymously since this is a rather delicate case)

I can't see why your municipality would offer broadband if there were several ISPs in the area, but anyways, here is my story.

Internet is today a critical part of the infrastructure. If the muncipality is to survive they must have good coverage. You can hardly do any kind of business without Internet access. At least it will be a huge disadvantage as most things are online, even your local garage needs access to central databses. The local entrepreneurs need to be hooked directly to the suppliers.
Few families move to a place without broadband access, and very few businesses start up there.

I was just a part of a municipality push like this. By first creating a wireless network connecting all our buildings through licensed radio, we then had the infrastructure to provide bandwidth for an WISP. We didn't have enough manpower to do this ourselves so after appealing to the free market we got a partner and could start selling broadband to the people. We now cover about 90% of the population.

Looks great, eh? But behind the scenes is a drama. Basicly, we have a leader who is gullable, incompetent and likes to take swift action. When everyone was on summer vacation our partner aproached us and tried to convince the municipality that the WISP was doomed and that if the bss acted quickly they would be willing to take the problem of our hands and limit our losess. Noble business!
So without consulting anyone everything was signed over to the 'partner' - for free. Not just the WISP, but also the whole infrastructure we had invested in. And since we had all our schools and other buildings hooked up we are dependant on this network. The result is that we gave away a $500 000,- investment and we now have to RENT access to that infrastructure for $50 000,- a year.

And it is not 'we' that much longer. 1st of December I am out of here and in a new job.

Re:Free

[Mark_MF-WN]

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.

"If there are enough people in your town that want a broadband connection, they'll get together and cough up the dough to get it there."

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