Biden Administration Backs Strong Rules To Close Digital Divide (bloomberg.com) 82
The Biden administration has urged the FCC to adopt strong rules to redress historic shortfalls that have left some communities lacking adequate broadband service. From a report: The position sets up a possible clash with large broadband providers that have warned the FCC, which is set to produce rules by next month, against unnecessary regulations. Clear rules are needed to close the digital divide that leaves millions without adequate broadband, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said in a statement. The Commerce Department unit advises the president and develops internet policy. "Strong rules are needed to remedy unequal access to internet service, no matter what the cause may be," said Alan Davidson, the assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information, who is also the NTIA's top official. "Rules that combat digital discrimination will bring lasting relief to vulnerable communities that historically have been left behind online."
The FCC is considering regulations to prevent and eliminate digital discrimination of access based on income level, race and other factors, according to Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. Broadband advocates have told the agency they want deep changes that will steer spending into cities. Some urban neighborhoods have suffered from disinvestment dating back to redlining decades ago, when government-aided discriminatory lending patterns starved neighborhoods of housing resources. Many of those areas still aren't prosperous, and haven't seen network upgrades.
The FCC is considering regulations to prevent and eliminate digital discrimination of access based on income level, race and other factors, according to Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. Broadband advocates have told the agency they want deep changes that will steer spending into cities. Some urban neighborhoods have suffered from disinvestment dating back to redlining decades ago, when government-aided discriminatory lending patterns starved neighborhoods of housing resources. Many of those areas still aren't prosperous, and haven't seen network upgrades.
Re:Forget wired (Score:5, Insightful)
Not if we do it without him (Score:1, Troll)
Take away all that gov't money and Musk would be running minor scams off the cash he blundere
Well I didn't single handily set EVs back 20 years (Score:2)
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So who are they? Already a better businessperson than Musk!
I never liked the guy (Score:2)
The Internet means I know his history. I know about the apartheid emerald mines. I know he's a college drop out given a phony degree so he could stay in the United States. I know that without the massive gov't program to funnel kick backs from gas powered car companies Tesla would've went under and he would've gone to prison for false SEC statements, etc, et
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You know that your entire story is factually incorrect, right? He's given interviews at length where he knows the details of the rocket tech. He never got any support from his dad past age 18, let alone the vaunted "emerald mine" that nobody (including Elon) has ever seen that supposedly his dad has some share in, not that it helped Elon any. Few people have ever founded multiple companies with that much success and Tesla literally made electric cars cool instead of an awful boondoggle the industry wante
And you believed him? (Score:2)
He hasn't founded anything except "X", which Paypal bought, realized was worthless, and then fired him while cutting their losses. He's Steve Jobs 3.0. Just another grifter with a reality distortion field.
Space X is just another company he bought. Without the gov't contracts it doesn't exist. It's there because we privatized a bunch of things NASA used to do. It's another example of us idiots letting the 1% skim 10-20% off our tax dollars.
yeah, because I'm not (Score:2)
As for the cost of developing it, I paid for that. All of Space X's fundamentals came from NASA, and the engineers cut their teeth over there. Any of the new stuff is paid for by gov't contracts.
Gov't is more efficient that private industry
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At this point it's very clear that we need to put more effort into considering who will benefit from any such stimulus over the long term, paying particular attention to the effect of corruption. If th
Re:Forget wired (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not. It's not susceptible to interference, doesn't cause interference, and it's more scalable.
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Everything about wired is vastly superior to wireless, except your ability to use it. The idea that we should just abandon wired is so ignorant there is certainly an ulterior motive.
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Wired infrastructure costs more money. Avoiding rent seekers with wired is impossible. Follow the money.
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No, but the possibility of multiple infrastructures exists in wireless, which does not exist (really) in wired, at least at a residential level.
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No, but the possibility of multiple infrastructures exists in wireless, which does not exist (really) in wired.
I have both copper and fibre cables to my house, although only the fibre is in use.
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Hell I have two infrastructures of copper and one of fiber, but they're owned by at most two companies - Verizon and Comcast, and the Comcast infrastructure is anemic. It might as well just be one.
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No, but the possibility of multiple infrastructures exists in wireless, which does not exist (really) in wired, at least at a residential level.
The solution to that is simple - legislate that the 'last mile' infrastructure can only be owned by municipalities and/or states/provinces. Then you have the freedom of choice that 'multiple infrastructures' provide, without the attendant problems. What about the investments which the large providers have made in the infrastructure? Eminent domain, baby! If it can be used to take property from individual homeowners, it can certainly be used to make predatory corporations less socially damaging.
Corporate own
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Right, if you've got a fast protocol that's wireless, it can be even faster when wired. Remember, most wireless goes through actual wires in order to be routed further than the antenna will reach.
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Wireless is stupid when wired is available.
Re:Forget wired (Score:5, Insightful)
I am going to daresay that wired is a privilege. Wired ethernet "just works" for the most part. One may not get the rated speed, but even with consumer level equipment, the network speeds are good enough for someone to do their daily work. I can have a ton of PCs on an Ethernet switch, and still have bandwidth, especially if a lot of the traffic is internal and not communicating anywhere else than the switch fabric.
Wireless is a different story entirely. There are just so many hosts and connections it can do, no matter how wide the spectrum, and how many technologies like frequency-hopping or spread-spectrum items are used. You get enough people, and the airwaves will wind up saturated. Then, there is the ease of jamming Wi-Fi.
Wired is more secure as well. To tap a physical wire takes far more work than just sniffing what is going over the air.
Overall, if a device can be plugged in, I do that. It is simpler, more reliable, and harder to attack.
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Wireless electronics is like pipeless plumbing (porta potties)
It can be made to work when necessary
But a pipe is always better
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Shut up, stupid. I'm wired... and wired is, 100% of the time, a hell of a lot faster than WiFi, and it offers the benefit that assholes like you can't connect to my network.
Oh, and wires isn't bothered by weather.
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I'm talking about for enabling universal access not network speed. Wireless is the fastest and most efficient way to get the most people access. Wired is more expensive and bureacratic almost anywhere it is.
We already have strong rules to fix this (Score:5, Informative)
Strong rules are needed to remedy unequal access to internet service
Yeah, strong rules like fraud enforcement. Telcos have taken billions of our tax dollars, promising broadband upgrades which never materialized. Prosecute the corporations and the CEOs for federal fraud. They stole our tax money!
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At least, we could go after some of the FCC officials who made this possible. Like Agit Paid.
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The tariffing of services and regulation mostly exists at a state by state level. The states lack leverage in most cases. This is why interventions at the federal level are so anemic in impact.
The ultimate solution is to treat internet access as a utility, seeing as it is a natural monopoly like electric and water/sewer service. Or like we used to treat phone service. We haven't gotten there yet, apparently.
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America loves corporations more than it loves democracy.
I'm fairly sure that's because, either consciously or sub-consciously, much of America equates corporations with democracy. Seriously, I think a lot of people believe that democracy couldn't exist without corporate personhood and limited liability.
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And those are the two choices, right? We can't have people doing the right things for the right reasons, only people choosing sides and being tribal.
Given your user name, I wonder what kind of person you are?
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Dude you don’t even know what the word liberal means and you think that regulation is the source of all social ills and then a post later you’re talking about nuance.
You should get checked for brain parasites.
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Okay, I'll bite. Sans regulation, how do you remedy the problem of telco companies deciding it's just simply more profitable to collude with their competitors by agreeing to not actually compete while charging their customers through the nose for shitty service, because their bean counters have determined the installation of competing infrastructure has a bad ROI?
Musk's libertarian-style solution comes with a $599 equipment fee and runs $110/mo. A lot of people can't afford that. Yeah, in the early days
Re:The central conceit of liberalism (Score:4, Interesting)
Would you support banning local monopoly grants given by government to telcos and cable companies?
How about removing the $200/mo/pole attachment fee that telcos charge to competitors in certain jurisdictions?
PUC rules allow those fees in exchange for a $10/pole/year property tax.
We're not allowing any competition in many places and then arguing about whether the existing regulations support a free market or if we need more.
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is that legislation and regulation can solve any societal problem, and thus more laws and more regs are a moral imperative.
The central conceit of conservatism is that legislation and regulation is the source of any societal problem if you dig far enough to find it, and thus repeal of laws and deregulation is a moral imperative.
I think identifying either of those outlooks as a "central conceit" is stretching the point a bit. That said, I also think you've identified prominent characteristics of the caricatures which modern liberalism and conservatism have devolved into.
Force the providers to service unprofitable areas (Score:3)
The French has the right idea: they have this law called "continuity of the French territory" or something, that basicaly forces utilities to service areas where they lose money, like sparely populated rural areas. That includes water, electricity, broadband internet and mobile telephony: if they want to do business in highly profitable, densely populated urban areas, they also have to provide the same service everywhere else, whether they like it or not.
Left to their own device, for-profits will not do that. I don't think Biden will achieve anything without making it a broad-reaching legal requirement, which probably will never happen in the US because lobbies.
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Define "service". Broadband providers can partner with a wireless provider, hand you a shitty 5G modem and call you "served".
We did that with the Tennessee Valley Authority (Score:4, Interesting)
The real problem here is that we're taking universally needed services like electricity, water and information (yes, that's a universal need) and handing them to private companies. The end result is natural monopolies where you're basically letting rich, well connected people skim 10-20% off your tax dollars.
Go look into how it went when Thatcher privatized the rail roads. It was an unmitigated disaster. You can't have capitalism without competition and some things just don't lend themselves to competition.
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Okay. Please explain why is it moral just and right to expect people living in cities to subsidize those who choose to live away from civilization.
I would have to explain the concept of belonging to the same nation and helping your fellow citizens to you.
I suppose you're also opposed to older people subsidizing schools for other people's children, and well-off people living in gated communities subsidizing police and fire departments for the poorer parts of town too?
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Sigh...
People like you are why are emigrated to Europe 2 decades ago.
Enjoy your ultra-individualistic societal model: I hope you don't become ill and unable to pay for your treatment in old age. And try not to look too hard at the 1-percenters in your country laughing at you behind your back.
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The French has the right idea: they have this law called "continuity of the French territory" or something, that basicaly forces utilities to service areas where they lose money, like sparely populated rural areas. That includes water, electricity, broadband internet and mobile telephony: if they want to do business in highly profitable, densely populated urban areas, they also have to provide the same service everywhere else, whether they like it or not.
Left to their own device, for-profits will not do that. I don't think Biden will achieve anything without making it a broad-reaching legal requirement, which probably will never happen in the US because lobbies.
This is the reason that most countries put significant regulatory burdens on their public telco's when they were privatised, as the British did with BT. They have to serve the Outer Hebrides, not just the home counties and allow other retail operations access to their infrastructure. The US went in the opposite direction and broke up large telco's that threatened to be abusive monopolies by granting them smaller monopolies that they abused after promising not to.
"Backs strong rules" (Score:2)
Backing strong rules has nothing to do with actually implementing and enforcing them. Political speak of the week.
Finally! Choice (Score:2)
I can use my "starlink" dish to have Comcast. you can use your "comcast" cable to use AOL. Sally can use use DSL "phoneline" to have Cox. Bob can have DirecTV over 5G on his phone. Or maybe Disney will have an ISP, that I could choose, using fiber brought to my home with all those subsidies.
Oh nevermind.
Separate infrastructure from access providers. I can see now that "Net-Neutrality" is helpful, not to me, but it needs to apply to mobile providers. We need "last mile" freedom of choice, which we do
Rural living is a double edged sword... (Score:4)
in regards to convenience and connectivity.
If you choose to live too far away from the urban centres you give up conveniences in exchange for solitude and natural surroundings.
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Starlink doesn't work in the forest
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it worked quite well for me, but we got fiber (somehow), but starlink was quite serviceable as an ISP -- especially compared to legacy sat providers and 4g.
Delay tactic (Score:2)
Close to elections, such companies will try to delay enforcement until the next administration arrives, who may be friendlier to their point of view (or PAC bribes).
Here's one answer (Score:2)
Eliminate all rules that allow telecom monopolies to prevent startups from installing fiber
Our local ISP has tried for years to install fiber and has been blocked by the monopolies
The monopolies claim an area is "served" if wireless is available. Wireless is not adequate
Wireless electronics is like pipeless plumbing (porta potties)
It can be made to work when necessary
But a pipe is always better
Did they run out of things to call racist? (Score:4, Funny)
They clearly ran out of things to call racist so now it's just the "Internet", including access to the Internet
Quick, send moar money now! (Score:4, Insightful)
Good gravy, this is what, the 17th time the feds have borrowed buckets o' cash to solve the "digital divide"? It's just payola. 97% of the people in the US own a smartphone. Tell me there's a digital "divide" again.
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My father lives out in the mountains of North Carolina. When I visit him, my phone has no service inside his home. If you stand in just the right place outside, you might be able to make a call, but forget about going online. It works great with excellent 5G speeds if you drive 20 minutes into town, though.
In case you're wondering, yes, he has Starlink now. So yeah, in some places you need both a smartphone and broadband at home if you actually expect to be able to use your smartphone while at home.
Woo-hoo! (Score:2)
Woo-hoo! More free money! What race do I need to be to sign up?
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Ignorant and white, living in "small town" America, stupid racist.
Historic Shortfalls, indeed (Score:3)
I remember when poor former slaves in the South 1870 after Reconstruction were forbidden from having anything better than 56k modems while everyone else had at least gigabit broadband.
private property, it's not fair (Score:2)
The government can't claim it's private property one minute, then it's "not fair", the next.
The US government has spent 10 years buying 'fairness' and nothing has changed. The government knows more money isn't the answer, this is point-scoring by elected politicians. Wi-fi and internet will be discriminatory until 'last mile' is economically and legally separate to internet 'backbone'. Given the cost of last-mile service, a PUC may be the only viable answer.