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Senator Clinton introduces the Rural Broadband Initiatives Act.
By Oliver Rist | April 5, 2007, 10:01 am
Don’t you just love it when politicians try and get creative? So this is what you think it is: A government-sponsored ‘guarantee’ to make sure that all the folks in the mid-west and other apparently remote and Internet-hungry areas have ‘affordable’ broadband access. And Clinton gets to take credit because she’s the one championing this bill which will force the government to:
“…create[s] a policy and action framework to ensure that the federal government employs an effective and comprehensive strategy to deploy broadband service and access in the rural areas of the United States.” (From the press release on her Web site)
Bet she figures that’ll sound great as campaign speech fodder come November. Only trouble is, the government isn’t going to pay for it. We are. Via higher phone & cable bills that Ms. Clinton’s bill will greenlight those companies to send us. How do we know this? Because the federal government doesn’t ‘deploy broadband service and access’ to anywhere in the United States aside from military installations. Private broadband providers do that.
Which means she’s going to ‘trust’ Verizon, Comcast and a wide array of other denizens from the tenth ring of hell to honestly spend this new revenue on deploying broadband services to areas where the customer base can’t support it instead of on country club memberships, fat exec bonuses, new Mercedes and hookers. And even more unfortunately, we already watched them do this because this is EXACTLY the process that lost us about $200 billion to the phone companies in the mid-90s when they petitioned for the right to decrease their taxes and increase their bills to customers so they could deploy fiber to 80% of US homes by 2006. Anyone knocking on your door with a fiber cable in one hand? Nope, not outside the tiny and built-in-the-last-two-years Verizon FiOS ring. And yet all that money is gone. We know that because Verizon was just in the news whining about not having enough funds to keep doing fiber–guess they figured it’d been 10 years so we’d forget the $200 billion.
I’m not giving the Internet finger to someone who wants it in Podunk, South Dakota. But those folks enjoy much lower real estate prices than I’m paying here. So why do I have to pay for their Internet access there? If you absolutely have to live there and you want a fast pipe, pay for a T-1 line or get into satellite. Failing that, move. But asking all of us to accept yet another jack in our phone bills just to support the 7 guys in Deepwoods, Kansas who need fast broadband access is ludicrous. And if you’re telling me it’s more than 7 guys, that there are thousands and thousands of people out there who want these services, then their phone or TV providers should provide them the same way ours do–the customer base is big enough, after all.
Topics: WTF?, Oliver, Evil Empires, Telecomm |
3 Responses to “Senator Clinton introduces the Rural Broadband Initiatives Act.”
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April 7th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
[…] Nerds of the North Dot are less charitable (but more entertaining) - eventually determining that urban folks should not have to pay for rural access. […]
April 7th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
of course urban folks shouldn’t have to pay for rural access!! i thnk he’s just make a lot of assumptions about how she’s planning on paying for this. just because the govnment hasn’t deployed telecomm directly before doesn’t mean they wont in the future.
April 7th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
ummmm, no offense margoman (okay, fuck it, take it offensively), but either you’re high or you over-estimate the government’s internal resources.
NO WAY the government is going to build the administrative organization, hire thousands and thousands of staffers, purchase materials, get build/dig clearances, zoning permits, work vehicles and tools, THEN manage a deployment process that’ll take most of Hillary’s possible presidential term and then some THEN keep that same staff on ad infinitum to support all that infrastructure in case something happens.
No way, no how. Not possible even if they were crazy enough to try it. This goes to a government contractor. Period. And the ONLY contractors capable of completing the job are the national/regional telcos that already service that market. Hence, soon as they read that, their greedy little minds just heard a big mental cha-ching!