[josh2600]

Everyone that's wondering why this doesn't happen, the answer is simple: private enterprise.

The ideal network is publicly owned and privately operated/maintained, but that will never happen because the state would be impinging on the liberty of corporations to profit. In a reasonable state, the gov't would connect every home and operators would compete on service. Instead, we take the tacit monopoly granted to early operators and extend that into the abysmal dystopia we live in today, one where carriers control all.

You could have ubiquitous 10Gb links to every home, if only some one would let you, and then folks start to say "well why don't we do this for every industry. Why if everyone paid their fair share we could all have cheap healthcare!". And therein lies the problem.

Profit and public interest are diametrically opposed in the case of utilities. Nevermind that most carriers operate over publicly licensed spectrum, or send cables along publicly owned land; a monopoly is the epitome of capitalism and Telecom is printing money.

In short, ubiquitous fast internet access has never been a technical problem or a distribution problem, it is a social problem; just like healthcare and, to a lesser extent, power and water.

::EDIT:: I am not saying that profit or capitalism is wrong, only that in the case of utilities, on which we all rely, it is a bit strange.

[rabble]

There are countries where this is being done. Uruguay is tiny and highly urbanized, but it's got a goal of achieving this very thing. Every phone line in the country, there are only about 900,000, comes with free no cost broadband. You get 1GB of traffic free, an extra GB of traffic if you visit educational sites associated with One Laptop Per Child. Speaking of which, every child in the country gets a laptop, so they can get online.

So they've achieved two goals of universal access already. They gave everybody a computer and everybody a slow but free internet connection.

Now that they achieved that, they are rolling out fiber to the country. So far it's just in some neighborhoods of the capital, but if you can get it's a pretty good deal 120M fiber connection for $83 USD per month. Beyond fixed line internet, there's 3G/4G coverage over every city/town/village with good bandwidth (i got 5m up / down last time i tried it).

How did they do this? The government treats getting good internet access as a human right. There's ANTEL, a state telco monopoly which sees it's mission as getting everybody online. There's a viable threat that if ANTEL didn't do it's job, the market could be opened to competition. Bridging the digital divide is a national priority and so Uruguay has chosen to invest heavily in making sure everybody's included and online. As a result, Uruguay has the highest internet penetration rates in Latin America.

Other parts of the state, like the energy company is well on it's way to eliminating the need of fossil fuels for electricity production, primarily through hydro and wind power.

Utilities are precisely places where the state can, has, and should continue to provide a common level of service everybody can expect. Getting universal internet access, cheap and fast, is something any country can achieve if they decide it's important. If a tiny country in south american you've never heard of with $15k gdp per capita and 3.8 cows per person can do it, the wealthiest country in the world should be able to pull it off.

[microb]

Take a hard look at fish populations in the ocean and I think you may reconsider your stance on private vs. public property for "public goods". The problem isn't the inherent nature of private enterprise, the problem is the marriage of private enterprise and government which has created an anti-competitive ecosystem in the telecom industry. The monopolies you speak of are created with the help of government favoritism.

[muhfuhkuh]

Water is both a matter of public trust and run by the town, at least here in Research Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), North Carolina USA. It never gets shut down (unless you don't pay for 2 whole months, and even then only if you're under 65 years old), they send out water tests every quarter, and about 5 years ago they switched over to smart water metrics using Aquasense modules.

We as taxpayers subsidized fiber in this country, we should (as they have in England with BT) force incumbents to share those subsidized lines to competition. Let the competition worry about the last 200 feet leading to my house. Because Buddha knows the incumbents aren't too worried about running it.

For better or worse, we actually are trying to do something about universal care. It's just that there is a particular generation of voters and lawmakers that are truly afraid of losing their level of care to cover who they view as younger and less deserving generations/cultures/people.

[thatswrong0]

> a monopoly is the epitome of capitalism and Telecom is printing money.

But you said earlier:

> Instead, we take the tacit monopoly granted to early operators and extend that into the abysmal dystopia we live in today, one where carriers control all.

So you agree that what we have in the telecom industry isn't capitalism (since it is the government that grants these telecoms their monopolies), yet you also think that capitalism inevitably leads to monopolies, even though this is demonstrably not the case?

[just2n]

I think trust was intended, from the context. It's not a monopoly, it's an oligopoly.

But it's also a bit wrong to argue that capitalism is at fault here. It appears it's rather the rampant and ubiquitous corruption, greed, and incompetence of government at every level, coupled with the fact that $$ == speech in the USA.

This isn't going to change into a publicly-run publicly-funded enterprise anytime soon, so our best bet is a company that has yet to be wholly consumed by evil (Google, in this case, though they're on the fast track to it by trading our privacy for money from advertisers). I'd be OK with a country-wide investment to help Google deploy Fiber as quickly as possible, but I'd want some kind of guarantee that at some point the entire infrastructure would revert to public control, just to prevent Comcast 2.0 from forming. It would be rather funny to see a kickstarter hit $11B, too.

[thatswrong0]

> but I'd want some kind of guarantee that at some point the entire infrastructure would revert to public control, just to prevent Comcast 2.0 from forming.

You want to stop a monopoly from forming... by creating a government-run monopoly. And you trust the government to be in complete control of the internet. Yet you agree that the government is corrupt, greedy, and incompetent. I don't understand in the least.

[just2n]

I'm not proposing a government-run monopoly. I'm proposing Google be publicly funded up front to take advantage of the current legal system to create a monopoly by sustaining funding that gives it a supreme advantage over everyone else (we give them money) but at the cost that the infrastructure built has to become publicly owned (by the people, not by a government) after some period of time.

No government is involved here. We'd be handing Google the funds to demolish any and all competition with an agreement that they do NOT create a monopoly.

Both local and federal government have colluded to create the trust of service providers that exists today. Public funds paid to build much of the existing infrastructure, then exclusive control over that infrastructure has been granted by local governments. That's fine within a state, but Comcast for example, is operating nationally, so the federal government (in particular the FCC) has permitted them to acquire some absurd 70%+ of all small service providers and obtain these local monopolies all over the country. We can't trust the government to do the right thing in this space, since even though every wireless provider is colluding to keep prices fixed, and every consumer-facing ISP is colluding to keep prices fixed, there has yet to be any investigation into trusts. It's extremely obvious that the $50/mo being required by every single competing company when the same service is $8/mo anywhere else in the world is a fixed price. All of them should be fined some $50B each and/or dismantled.

But we have an opportunity here: Google could completely destroy their business. All of them. Entirely. We (and Google) understand that their services are overpriced in excess of 500%+ of the actual cost and that they don't actually invest more than ~5-10% of their profits in improving the infrastructure. This leaves a LOT of room for a company with nearly unlimited funding to step in and completely dominate. None of these companies will offer you 1gbps, not even for $500/mo. So if Google, cooperating with the citizens of the US at large, were to agree to build this infrastructure, demolish the entire ISP space, and then turn over everything at some point, I'd be willing to pay 100% of my disposable income, and I'm sure I'm not alone. The $11B it would cost (probably closer to $100B, realistically) would be entirely worth killing the likes of Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner, Rogers, Sprint, etc.

We can't really win against lobbyists and every congressperson being guaranteed a job paying in excess of $800k/yr when they retire for doing what big interests want. We can win, however, by abusing the very system they put in place, by massively funding a single corporation. The problem with their logic is that they assume they will continue to have the most money to throw around. No company in existence, in the world, can compete with even 3% of our GDP. None. So if we really want to destroy the massive corruption that exists, we just have to commit the resources necessary. No government required, as the corruption has already provided the framework.

[josh2600]

The monopolies quip is Peter Thiel's philiosophy taken from his class that what's his name from Amicus transcribed and put online. In short, the peak of capitalism is a monopoly; all companies that aren't monopolies pretend to be, all companies that are monopolies pretend not to be.

Telecom pretends quite a bit.