[whamlastxmas]

>Most of the issues, like crumbling infrastructure, would be better spent not by advocating for effective spending, but rather privatization

I think the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we've spent on privatizing the expansion of internet hardware/fiber is a iron-clad evidence to this being flat out wrong. It's been a complete and total failure with no accountability.

> letting people vote online on which firm to contract out to various public works

This is getting into an entirely different argument about direct democracy. How about just having an election and voting system that is better for voters and the public will, and actually being able to elect officials who are willing to implement a fair and balanced bidding system for government contracts?

Your next door neighbor Jim who listens to Rush Limbaugh 2 hours a day and watches mainstream news outlets another 2 hours every evening and makes his voting decisions based off television commercials is not the person I want selecting a government contractor. It will become a marketing contest and needlessly increase the cost to tax payers as a result.

[tzs]

> I think the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we've spent on privatizing the expansion of internet hardware/fiber is a iron-clad evidence to this being flat out wrong.

Well, it would be evidence it it had actually happened, but the claim of hundreds of billions of tax dollars on this is very questionable [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556

[whamlastxmas]

Ok, not literal tax dollars, but dollars from the American population at large, essentially tax dollars that aren't going through the government first and instead straight into the pockets of telecom providers.

Here is my understanding, which largely disagrees with the guy in your link arguing against the $200 billion statement:

It's 1991 and the US government says "our telecom infrastructure sucks". They knew there'd be tremendous economic impact based on the quality (or lack thereof) of this infrastructure. The monopolistic nature of a system involving hardware infrastructure installed literally everywhere on essentially public land (easements) meant that existing companies owning this infrastructure have no incentive to expand it.

The options we were faced were either:

1. Using tax payer money and having the government directly build out this infrastructure to the tremendous and direct benefit of everyone

2. Changing the regulations around the existing infrastructure so that the barrier of entries were lower and more people could theoretically participate in expanding the infrastructure

These two options are the subtext for the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The guy in the thread you posted is trying to argue that the act wasn't about quid pro quo, but about deregulation. He's correct but also misleading. The act itself is marketed as being about deregulation, but the entire reason the act existed was quid pro quo. This is blatant and obvious - the most visible part of the entire act are the goals that the telecoms were required to reach in terms of expansion. It's also funny how this is marketed as deregulation when there's a huge list of requirements regulating what has to be done by certain dates.

Of course, as it often happens, immediately after this passes we have the exact opposite of expectations. There is tremendously less competition and constant mergers to create only a few massive telecoms. Today it's literally only three companies providing long distance according to Wikipedia - AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. Instead of having a government lead initiative to expand what is inarguably a utility service, we naively trusted private companies to fulfill their end of the bargain and meet the legally required goals.

Obviously this didn't pan out. Our infrastructure is shit and the progress was/is laughably short of the specified requirements.

The short summary is: we allowed private companies to continue operating in a space they really should not have, or at least in a manner they should not have. We did this because they said they would, as legally required, expand the infrastructure. That didn't happen and there's never been any accountability for it. As a result, Americans have paid hundreds of billions of dollars to these companies in excess of what they would have otherwise paid, and that excess was legally required to spent on infrastructure and never was to any significant extent.

So yes, Americans were scammed out of hundreds of billions of dollars, even if it wasn't money that went to the government first as tax income. This is also entirely ignoring the economic impact from our lack of infrastructure, which could be estimated anywhere from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars.