Who cares? The Feds here are not in the business of bandwidth provision; they're acting to counterbalance the elephantine mass of Comcast by preventing them from overpowering municipal politics.
I think the idea was that if Disney can get the government to essentially destroy the idea of 20th century work entering the public domain, they could probably get the government to act against an open internet.
They can do this now. Municipal ownership of some of the pipes isn't going to stop what is essentially an orthogonal fight from happening at a higher level.
Yeah - I think the point was that if the pipes are owned by the same government that's already in the pocket of hollywood, then the laws (more likely regulations written by bureaucrats, not laws passed by elected officials, but..) against torrenting/pirating/distributing would be easier to get written and enforced.
A huge portion of broadband in the US is already owned by Hollywood. At least we have a theoretical voice in the federal government's policies. Still, the ideal is for local municipalities to own the last-mile fiber, like they do with power, water, sewers, and streets most places.
Well, then, you switch to Comcast/Verizon/&c. if these issues are important to you. Big ISP will be forced to compete for your business, rather than buying your acquiescence with franchise agreements and big steak dinners at your state capital. I fail to see any way in which this isn't a good thing.
That might not actually be the case. You can't bring a First Amendment complaint against Verizon, but you can certainly bring one against your state-run or municipal ISP.
A thought that occurs to me is that if the government is providing internet access, various pressure groups will leverage that for various kinds of censorship.
Why is my government providing access to porn? To religious sites? To sites that violate copyright? To sites that contain many sorts of 'unsavory' content? Allowing children uncensored access to many things?
I don't know how those complaints would fare, but I'm absolutely certain they'd be made.
It seems to me that the right level for government to be involved in these sorts of questions is the municipality itself, rather than running back to Federal statute. Which is, again, orthogonal to preventing Verizon-owned statehouses from passing laws preventing municipal broadband networks.
This is a very light touch intervention to increase market-based competition. How much more quickly would there be privately owned fiber networks if consumers had the option of going to City Internet for $150/GB/s?
A tax-funded road built with the explicit the purpose of giving access to all three of these? Did the places exist there before the road, and if so, how did people get to them? Are the places located very close to each other or just coincidentally on the same road that stretches a long distance?
So I take it that you are agreeing that there is no fundamental difference between a road and the internet, when it comes to people complaining about the government using tax dollars to facilitate access to undesirable places?
Not sure what the downvotes were for. What I asked were honest questions about the road that was described. I think that are many similarities and differences between a road and the internet with regard to whether they should be tax funded.
It's definitely an issue that will be raised, so I don't know why you're downvoted. Ideally, people would realize that it's roughly the equivalent of using public electricity for unsavory things.
Except that filtering/censorship/monitoring don't have to work at the municipal level.
The UK's (big) ISPs are already required to 'offer' Internet filtering to all customers, collect activity logs, and prevent access to certain torrent sites.
None of them have had a problem implementing this at a national level.
(Setting up a DNS blacklist/redirect isn't hard - you do it in your network/backbone gateways, which aren't anywhere near your subscribers.)
So the premise is then any government infra to provide broadband must come with equally stringent protections on monitoring the content, similar to how government infra to provide deliveries has warrant requirements to inspect those deliveries.
However, we know that government policy is to record all meta-data, forever, without a warrant. HTTP/2 can't come fast enough, but even that doesn't really hide enough meta-data to trust the government with the pipe. E.g. You can tell fairly well what static pages on a domain someone is visiting by simply correlating the size of the response packets.
Of course, they are already doing all of this already, so maybe the ship has sailed... I think the best model is that the government provides the fiber, the L2 and above service is provided by a private entity. It certainly doesn't do much to prevent mass-collection or censorship, but it's marginally better than the Fed actually providing Layer 2.
This is already an issue faced by other government entities that provide access to the internet. See libraries. Their solution is to leave it open because it's not their place to censor. Parents already have (I assume faulty, never checked it out myself) software solutions to block "unsavory" content.
The public library a few hundred feet from my residence heavily and ridiculously censors its internet access. The censorship is provided by a third party and getting a site whitelisted is practically impossible to achieve.
