[rayiner]

> meanwhile, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States#G.... has a great list of numerous government programs and funds that have dispensed billions of dollars into network infrastructure in the US

The only projects on that list that have distributed significant money are funded by the Universal Service Fund. That money doesn't come from general taxation, it comes from a specific tax on the telecom industry. Imagine if the government levied a 15% tax on smartphone sales and spent that money to subsidize telephones for the poor. Could you then turn around and say "Apple and Samsung are getting massive government subsidies?" That's basically what you're doing when you point to USF and say public money went into the telecom networks.

Moreover, this debate is mostly about cable, which has historically been a different sphere from "telecom" (i.e. the phone system). The networks we're talking about, Comcast's, TWC's, etc, are cable networks built with private money after deregulation in the 1990's.

> So you see the World Wide Web as an equivalent to the Android Play Store?

The World Wide Web is just a set of protocols that runs mostly on private networks. It's a platform owned by the companies that own those private networks.

[dctoedt]

> Imagine if the government levied a 15% tax on smartphone sales and spent that money to subsidize telephones for the poor. Could you then turn around and say "Apple and Samsung are getting massive government subsidies?"

Not only can you say that, you should say that. The tax money is ending up in Apple's and Samsung's pockets, routed through poor people (who presumably benefit from the subsidy, of course, and thus putatively benefiting society as a whole as well).