If you really think laissez faire economics is valid, you also realize negative externalities aren't propertly priced into the market, either. But nobody really wants to address that issue.

How'd that free market work out for whale oil?

I guess you've never heard of the tiny towns in the Louisiana swamps that still don't have landline telephones?

Those towns are so out of the way, there's no profit in providing phone service. The idea of the universal telephone fee was to save up enough money so towns like that get connected to the rest of the world. We did the same thing with electrification in the 30s and 40s. It works. Every now and again, there are news stories about some small podunk town getting phone lines for the first time.

Switching those fees to broadband is supposed to serve the same purpose. Since landline telephone service is no longer as important, it makes sense to shift the priority from giving those people landline phone service to broadband internet access.

Subsidies are not universally a bad thing. This is a service that would not otherwise be provided because of the high cost. It's not like with farm subsidies, where farmers will probably plant some kind of crops no matter what. There are some folks who will never get broadband service of any kind unless we spread the costs of providing it across society. Whether or not that's a good thing or not is a more philosophically complex question than the one you seem to pose ("giving" money to companies to do what they would do anyway.

We pay for Defense Department research and data. Seems reasonable that the public should get to see what we've bought.

Or none. The number of Wikipedia contributors has fallen over the last couple years. This is an attempt by Wikimedia to boost the quantity (and quality) of contributors. But it fails to address the basic flaw in having real experts come in. I can edit articles all day, but as long as some friggin' kid with an obsession can simply revert any edits I make, it's not worth the effort to monitor.

Or you know....maybe it's because the corrections are reverted within the hour by some zealous guardian who can't stand to see the article corrected. It's almost impossible to correct articles because some other wingnut will simply come by and delete your work. It's not worth the time, if the result is all your effort ends up edited out.

Edits locked on bleeding edge research? On Wikipedia? That defeats the purpose of open source knowledge. Maybe you should rethink your premise.

Seriously? You think there's that kind of bandwidth available? YouTube is entirely out of the question. The power simply isn't there for on-demand internet type applications. You'd have to code a specialty transmission protocol so that your transmitting antenna doesn't waste power trying to communicate instantly with a "last mile" located millions of miles away. You'd even want to limit (or eliminate) video transmissions to preserve power. Even for DirecTV, you'd need to reconfigure a few satellites and power them waaaaaay up. It's a long way to Mars, and we don't typically transmit at sufficient power to get TV level bandwidth all the way there.

While our deep space probes can accept higher bandwidth streams, they transmit at modem speeds to limit transmission power. There also has to be a lot of error correction (basically sending more than the minimum number of bits), which also cuts down on bandwidth. Unless you want to spend your electricity on transmission, instead of stuff like life support, you're going to be limited in your bandwidth for web applications. Probably limited to 0, if you want to maximize mission success.

All this stuff also assumes the mission is performed while Earth and Mars are within line of sight. There's a good portion of the year when communications between planets is impossible because you'd have to communicate through the sun (more properly, the sun's magnetosphere, which would effectively scramble any comms).

Basically, unless you want to waste resources on what is essentially entertainment, you have to wait until there's sufficient infrastructure on Mars, set up local data centers, and periodically sync data from Earth. Presumably, you'd just perform periodic syncs, instead of direct access, since the Sun would still be an impediment, and you'd have a minutes-long delay anyway.

If we get some sci-fi like instant communication scheme, of course we might manage something.

Pioneers also had a reasonable expectation of finding breathable air, arable soil, animals to hunt for food/clothing, timber and stone for building homes, and drinkable water. Yet, the death rate among most pioneer groups was also unacceptably high (by our modern standards). You almost always had a majority or all of several pioneer groups die in the attempt (Donner party?). In the more modern case of the Spanish, French, and British colonies in the Americas, the colonists had to be supplied from the home countries for years before becoming close to semi-reliant. In the case of the first few British colonies, the mortality rate was in excess of 50% for decades. Even after the US declared independence, the Americans relied on Europe for manufactured goods for most of a century.

Simple is NOT the same as easy. There's a reason why most initial pioneering groups were often poor, felons, or other sorts of outcasts. It's easy to throw your life away if it already really sucks. And they did die. In droves.

Correction: You get access to our content for "free". We will sue you, your family, and all your friends and neighbors to the 9th level of Hell should you choose to infringe on our intellectual property.

Not to rain on this parade, but Russia figured most of these lessons out a long time ago with the Mir/Soyuz. Even now, the person who spent the longest continuous period in space did it on Mir, not the ISS. And even the US figured out a good number of these lessons with Spacelab. The ISS doesn't provide any really new experience in long term space survival, though it does provide some engineering challenges that Mir did not. And besides, neither the Mir nor ISS are close to operating indefinitely. Both needed regular resupply from Earth (the ISS, in particular). And for all the patriotic rhetoric in the US, the USSR had arguably the better and more successful space program and did it at lower cost per mission (and probably lower regard for human life). Didn't get to the moon, of course, but much more successful at space stations and getting to LEO.