[ssp]

And, I think you're going to be very lonely at your meetings if you start a group pushing for the state to take over currently privately owned infrastructure.

I'd show up.

Nationalizing the communications hardware (the towers and cables), then having a state-owned company lease the bandwidth wholesale to private-owned cell carriers, doesn't strike me as inherently a bad idea. It is not much different in principle from roads being state owned.

By eliminating the huge capital requirement to starting a cell carrier such a model would increase competition, not decrease it. The current price gouging on text messaging would disappear overnight for example, if anyone could just resell bandwidth. There would also be secondary effects where the handset manufacturers would not be as pwned by the carriers as they are now, so we could see more innovation there too.

Now, the US Government is very incompetent in many ways, in part because the US political system is so broken, so it may in practice be a bad idea there.

[philwelch]

Nationalizing the communications hardware (the towers and cables), then having a state-owned company lease the bandwidth wholesale to private-owned cell carriers, doesn't strike me as inherently a bad idea.

Other than creating a chokepoint for government censorship of the internet, of course.