Because cities are interconnected in terms of telecommunications, electricity, and roadways. Which means the distance between those cities, and the number of cities served, matters a great deal.

While I sympathize with your problem, as has been discussed elsewhere, the problem is municipalities, who control the right of way for laying new infrastructure. As a result of having to deal with hundreds of thousands of municipalities all over the country, the cost of entry goes up enormously. As well, municipalities typically sign exclusive contracts for periods of 10 to 50 years for right of way for electrical and signal cabling. It is not Comcast's fault, but rather a failure of our Constitution and, by extension, our federal government to centralize right of way permits and promote competition by eliminating exclusive contracts, as has been done in most other western countries.

That said; Turn off your service and ask a friend to pay for a couple months on their credit card and claim they live there. Obviously, pay your friend. They typically have low-cost deals for the first several months of service. When the term expires, have your friend cancel service, and request that the service be re-instated under your name as the previous tenants "didn't work out." Rinse, wash, repeat.

Literacy: 48th.
Math: 32nd.
Science: 14th
Life expectancy: 33rd
Infant mortality ('05-10): 40th.
Median household income: 4th.
Labor force: 3rd
Exports (per capita): 43rd
Exports (gross): 2nd
Incarceration (per capita): 1st
Adults (belief in angels): No reliable statistics available. 41-80%
Defense spending (gross): 1st
Defense spending (% GDP): 2nd (tied with Russia)

False. Only the next 14. Of those, only 9 are allies.

If they're already doing the expensive part, they might as well do the cheap part and run the fiber. That still leaves a lot of legacy area where there is no conduit currently.

Be it the fibers, just the conduit, or even just the right of way, there is a natural monopoly in there.

Meanwhile, it is notable that several broadband providers HAVE chosen to divide up territories rather than competing head to head.

Regulatory hurdles, low population density, and we are one of the largest countries by area on Earth.

Because America subscribes to a warped version of capitalism that places things in the private domain when most other governments wisely decided to manage these things. This includes, but is not limited to, basic utilities like water, electricity, telecommunications, internet, and even roadways. This policy benefits a tiny fraction of Americans -- perhaps 1 in every 250 Americans, while harming the rest, and it is not changed because our government has essentially been co-opted by wealthy private interests and corporations. As our popular media is controlled by the same, the illusion is presented of choice regarding political affiliation and candidates, when in fact no choice exists.

Because we don't take vacation, or sick days, and have no labour party present to defend workers' rights, leading to the majority of states passing variations of Right to Work laws which effectively ban unions and allow employers to fire people for any reason, at any time. As a result, the rights of workers suffer, leading to institutionalized abuse and exploitation of workers. Should labor prices rise, it is easy to simply order Congress to flood the affected market with immigrants and crash the labor price.

All governments do that. Ours just got caught. As far as why they do it, the reasons are too numerous to list here, but effectively it comes down to national security and preventing any widespread political insurrection amongst a highly exploited worker caste.

Because we invest very little in public education, and the price of post-secondary education is inflating at double digit percentages every year, effectively eliminating access to higher education for many, if not the majority, of the population.

This isn't entirely accurate. Japan has the lowest wealth inequity of any country on Earth, and the highest is Bolivia. The United States, while scoring nearly the same as Uguanda, also wasn't that far off from the United Kingdom. Source The problem is not a wealth "gap" per-se but rather that when you plot wealth distribution as a curve, the United States has an uncharacteristically high concentration of wealth amongst the top 1% -- far higher than any other country on Earth.

There are many reasons for this, but essentially it comes down to a lack of inheritance tax and how our economy has been structured; We are much more an investment and service-based economy than most, and both of these, but investment in particular, leads to rapid wealth disparity being created. Deregulation of the stock market, banks, etc., also have contributed significantly to this problem -- we are, as it were, robbing Peter to pay Paul. See also: Too big to fail. While the impact of any one of these legislative initiatives isn't enough to change things, collectively they are excerting a continuous pressure on the economy and over the past thirty years the problem has worsened. However, the retirement of the boomers has acted like a catalyst, rapidly accelerating this trend.

Because we live here. Duh. Nobody's national anthem starts with "We're Number Two!"

"A variety of market and technical factors, government efforts, and access to resources at the local level have influenced the deployment of broadband infrastructure. Areas with low population density and rugged terrain, as well as areas removed from cities, are generally more costly to serve than are densely populated areas and areas with flat terrain. As such, deployment tends to be less developed in more rural parts of the country. Technical factors can also affect deployment. GAO also found that a variety of federal and state efforts, and access to resources at the local level, have influenced the deployment of broadband infrastructure."
Source: GAO-06-426, A Report to Congressional Committees. May, 2006. US General Accounting Office.

Attempts have been made; in 2007 the Community Broadband Act was proposed. It died in committee. It would have federalized broadband deployment and removed municipalities' and states' ability to restrict or impede broadband deployment. Did you know that in several states, broadband is banned by law?

No. You probably didn't, because as you put it... it's a "horse shit excuse". I must admit, I'm incredulous too that a government as big as ours could be incompetent, or that the Constitutional separation of federal and state might occasionally create entry barriers for prospective companies looking to lay down infrastructure. Yes. Totally shit. Forget I mentioned that; and be doubly sure to forget that large "megalopolis" like New York continually try to pull stupid legislative shit like banning fountain sodas over a certain size, or those stickers on everything claiming the product only causes cancer if you live in California.

Nope, but you're half-way there. The problem with the United States is that, well... States. In most other countries, if you want to run cable, utilities, etc., you go to the federal government, get your permit, do whatever environmental impact studies need done, and be on your merry. But here, you have to deal with municipalities. Thousands of them. And that opens the door for exclusive contracts; Which are typically for 10, 20, even 50 years. And it goes to one company. One. For an entire town. For 50 years. They didn't write any legislation, they just took advantage of how our government was organized. It's a glitch courtesy of our Constitution.

The other half of the equation though, and one most people forget, is that the United States is big. Like, really big. Like, it could fit all those other countries mentioned inside it and still have space left over for dessert. Low population density is what fucks us, even more than the above-mentioned which, while bad, can be fixed by law. You cannot shrink a landmass down to a more maintainable size.

Roads, water works, electricity, cabling... all of it, we need more. A lot more than say, Japan would. In Japan, people are packed in like sardines. There are parts of this country where you can watch your dog run away for three days it's so flat and barren. But it still needs cabling run across it.

We are, in a very literal sense, a victim of our own size. No fat american jokes though please.

Yes, yes - it's a "natural monopoly", we get it, you studied economics in college.

This whole thing could be fixed by changing the model from "pay to access" to "pay to use".

The US considers the infrastructure a fixed resource - fixed radio bandwidth allocated to certain players, fixed easements given to certain players, and so on. When you have a fixed resource, you have high access fees and discouraged use: multi-year contracts, high monthly bills, data caps, throttled access, poor/no connectivity with no guarantee, and so on.

In a "pay to use" model, the government would mandate a fixed maximum charge per gigabyte of usage. Companies with a fixed resource could increase profits only by encouraging more usage: deploy newer and faster technology, connecting more people, encouraging high data-transfer activities (netflix, et al.), and so on.

Such a change wouldn't even affect the existing players: take the total cost of internet access and divide by total internet usage to come up with a fee per-gigabyte that would give the same income next year as they get with the current system.

The difference being, now they have an incentive for service, instead of an incentive for rent-seeking.

I envision a lot of use for geolocation services.

A site could disallow access from problematic countries. For example, allowing East Asian countries read access but not post (to forums) access might cut down on sock puppet and spam replies.

Of more interest is the NSA angle. Suppose your website disallows visitors from within 50 miles of Washington, DC. Or better yet, shows sanitized links to visitors known to be associated with the government.

Any IT person will know that this is trivial to circumvent, but look at it from their point of view: Nothing they use locally will see the links they need, anyone outside the radius can't send a link into the circle for review, and setting up a tunnel (VPN &c) to a location outside the radius is a pain, and all the effort could be invalidated by the website adding the tunnel exit to the block list.

It wouldn't be hard to keep a global list similar to the SPAM blocklist sites that have lists of IPs used by government. You could download a blacklist that includes the local police station, state police, and FBI building. People could "report" access from government agencies like they currently report spam activity. It would be much easier to hold that demonstration without the police knowing your plans in advance.

Again these are not difficult to circumvent, but it makes it harder for the criminals to get in, and economy of scale is on your side: one blocklist would have to be circumvented by each agency addressed. One action on your part needs actions from multiple parties to compensate.

If there were a simple implementation of this - say, an Apache plugin that periodically grabs the blacklist - it would be a big headache for the overlords.

I once tried submitting a tip on a possible terrorism lead to the FBI's website. Then it put up a CAPTCHA, and that pretty much ended it. I hope he didn't blow up anything important.

Keep waiting.

And we're off to a brilliant start here with a classic ad hominid abuse fallacy. Or as it's known in IT circles... The Handwave. Not that it matters, but I worked for a fortune 50 company in systems administration; My job role included maintenance of workstations and ATMs at over 3,700 retail locations throughout North America. But again; you're attacking the messenger, not the message. Not cool.

Number two burning up the charts is a Nirvana fallacy. Brilliant. No, nobody can guarantee 100%. But I can be pretty confident of 99.997%, yes. And you do recall that the "script kiddies" and "Anonymous" (an aggregate group of script kiddies) have about .01% of the funding of the NSA, right? Yes, they regularly make headlines breaking into computers, but the odds of them breaking into any specific computer is quite low. Unlike the NSA, which has cultivated the ability to point at something and say "I want it. Make it mine." You're comparing the mongolian hordes to the Knights Templar here, buddy.

Up next, we've got ourselves a false dilemma, with a bonus -- another ad hominim. This harkens back to high school where you'd say "If you don't answer, you're gay!"

That wasn't sarcasm. That's how the professionals protect highly classified, compartmentalized information. Perhaps you misunderstand what "physically secured facility" means. These are places like military bases; They have men with shotguns, lots of cameras, a perimeter, barbed wire, high explosives, and thick concrete walls.

This time, a less obvious one: the single cause fallacy, otherwise known as oversimplification.

Please show me the "easy" plan you have for bypassing all of the layers of security at a typical military base, in order to access the server in the middle of it that contains the secure data, and to either do it so quickly that nobody has time to push the self-destruct button, or so quietly nobody thinks to.

I feel sorry for you too, because you spent a couple kilowords demolishing an argument that wasn't made to begin with. Your entire post is a giant strawman, and a poorly executed one at that. I didn't say to give up on information security; I said that a guy on a shoestring budget is no match for them. Somewhere in your brain, a process caught a signal 11, trapped it incorrectly, and you vomited out a four page error message onto Slashdot.

There is something to that. Pricing for complete hosting solutions is now so low at the low end that just answering the phone if the customer calls will make the account unprofitable FOR THE YEAR. The only way to make that work is to become huge and set up an impenetrable wall between the customer and anyone with any level of skill.

They could charge by the hour for support but then they get endless whining and moaning claiming it was really a failure on their side that made the email password wrong so they shouldn't charge for that one.

That's why virtual servers are more commonly offered now. They don't have to actually support any of the services running in your instance. It either boots or it doesn't. If it doesn't, they blast it back to default and it boots. Their mission is complete. Anything else if strictly your problem.

Do you believe that an individual or a corporation has a right to say "I will not pay a penny more than X for a Y"? Does an individual or corporation have a right to take it's business elsewhere? If so, then medicare is not price fixing.

At the same time, if Medicare is ACTUALLY a net loss for a provider, they do have the right to accept no medicare. But they don't seem to want to opt out.

The problem is that there is no market. Nobody publishes prices at all. There's often nobody you can even ask. The 'customer' is often in no condition or position to argue. Even for a non emergency, they may not be able to decline the service for long and live to tell about it. Most customers aren't even vaguely qualified to make appropriate medical decisions. The only person they might ask is the one selling them medical service.

The barrier to entry is high, but do we really want to lower it? Go back to letting anyone at all say they're a physician and letting anyone make medicine with no oversight? I don't think we really want to go there. We know that didn't work very well.

I'm not so sure there can be a healthy and free market given all of that.

Keep in mind that for many Americans, no system can be worse than we have now because they cannot afford what we have now.

I am open to suggestions as to what might work better, but not to arguments to leave things as they are. We already know that isn't working. It's notable that what I suggest has a proven track record in other 1st world countries, there is nothing radical or speculative in my suggestion.