Donald Trump reveals plans to end the United States's Digital Equity Act, which provides funding to programs that assist people to live in an increasingly online world.
I wonder how far away we are from bans on hiring racial minorities, women and queer people. Some of the first acts against minorities the Nazis carried out were bans on working for the government and bans on working in education. Eventually the Trumpists will get to that point. Fascists are neither creative nor original. We know what they want and we know what they’re going to do, it’s all a matter of timing now.
Fascists actually are both creative and original, as Umberto Eco has noticed long ago.
About this “digital equity” … They are removing something that was intended to replace monopolist companies’ expenses with government’s expenses. If another company can’t lay wire to some town, then one should investigate why. Not play dumb and pretend one can’t do anything other than throwing more money.
I’ve seen an interview with Bill Joy about solving the problem where you can’t regulate such a complex industry properly, yadda-yadda, the answer is simple - you don’t regulate it preventively, dictating what specifically they should and shouldn’t do, you just calculate damages and fine the companies after. They’ll then find a way to not cause those damages.
It seems sometimes that many people not only blame “capitalist” mechanisms for everything, but also refuse to use them as a weapon in their own favor.
I’m not going to nitpick you on your politics since that’s not my strong suit. However, as someone who’s worked 4 years in rural networking and infrastructure as everything from tech support and customer service to engineering and field repair:
ISPs will never install 100G+ fiber circuits to cities 100+ miles from their nearest drop on a whim. They absolutely need a market that (1 needs internet and (2 can afford it. otherwise they’re gonna waste money if they can’t recoup the costs. the thing Trump is rolling back is the thing that helps to guarantee* that ISPs won’t kill themselves trying to make infrastructure work.
and yes, of course Spectrum and Comcast could do it and be fine, but because of our dear sweet “free market”, they don’t give a fuck about these small rural places because at their scale (read: monopoly) there’s no reason for them to.
This means it’s the little guys - actual small business ISPs, that are gonna be pulling conduit and standing up switching and line cards and distribution backbones and applying for construction permits and FCC licenses for spectrum with the money that comes from programs like these
The little guys can’t do rural builds otherwise because it’s too cost prohibitive without a way for people to pay for the service - too risky.
The big guys won’t because they don’t give a fuck. And if they do complete a build, the service is fucking garbage because they literally leave the infrastructure to rot while saying they’ll be sure to send a tech to look at it, while paying that tech 5 pence and an “atta boy” to fix a rotting mess of cable that should have been decommissioned 20 years ago.
edit: semantics
100% this. Our local cable company, a subsidiary of Spectrum, refused to lay fiber to anywhere but our core metro centers and even then, only to businesses. It wasn’t until our metros collectively agreed to subsidize another, smaller ISP to come in and lay fiber to every neighborhood across the region (I live somewhere that has like 6 cities all closely clumped together). The monopoly cable company sued for years trying to block it. They allllmost succeeded, too, until a state appeals court finally overturned their injunction. Now we finally have competition and it’s glorious. I pay less than half what I did before and get twice the speed.
Well, I’m not in the US, but I’ve seen one village (not exactly, mostly dachas) organize enough to reach a nearby ISP and have an agreement, so there’s fiber there now, from reading such posts it seems that with better speeds than many towns in the USA. They just need certainty that enough people will use it and pay for it, to lay infrastructure first.
But yeah, it’s not 100+ miles.
Maybe crowdfunding infrastructure can be a thing, lol.
I wonder how far away we are from bans on hiring racial minorities, women and queer people. Some of the first acts against minorities the Nazis carried out were bans on working for the government and bans on working in education. Eventually the Trumpists will get to that point. Fascists are neither creative nor original. We know what they want and we know what they’re going to do, it’s all a matter of timing now.
Fascists actually are both creative and original, as Umberto Eco has noticed long ago.
About this “digital equity” … They are removing something that was intended to replace monopolist companies’ expenses with government’s expenses. If another company can’t lay wire to some town, then one should investigate why. Not play dumb and pretend one can’t do anything other than throwing more money.
I’ve seen an interview with Bill Joy about solving the problem where you can’t regulate such a complex industry properly, yadda-yadda, the answer is simple - you don’t regulate it preventively, dictating what specifically they should and shouldn’t do, you just calculate damages and fine the companies after. They’ll then find a way to not cause those damages.
It seems sometimes that many people not only blame “capitalist” mechanisms for everything, but also refuse to use them as a weapon in their own favor.
I’m not going to nitpick you on your politics since that’s not my strong suit. However, as someone who’s worked 4 years in rural networking and infrastructure as everything from tech support and customer service to engineering and field repair:
ISPs will never install 100G+ fiber circuits to cities 100+ miles from their nearest drop on a whim. They absolutely need a market that (1 needs internet and (2 can afford it. otherwise they’re gonna waste money if they can’t recoup the costs. the thing Trump is rolling back is the thing that helps to guarantee* that ISPs won’t kill themselves trying to make infrastructure work.
and yes, of course Spectrum and Comcast could do it and be fine, but because of our dear sweet “free market”, they don’t give a fuck about these small rural places because at their scale (read: monopoly) there’s no reason for them to. This means it’s the little guys - actual small business ISPs, that are gonna be pulling conduit and standing up switching and line cards and distribution backbones and applying for construction permits and FCC licenses for spectrum with the money that comes from programs like these
The little guys can’t do rural builds otherwise because it’s too cost prohibitive without a way for people to pay for the service - too risky.
The big guys won’t because they don’t give a fuck. And if they do complete a build, the service is fucking garbage because they literally leave the infrastructure to rot while saying they’ll be sure to send a tech to look at it, while paying that tech 5 pence and an “atta boy” to fix a rotting mess of cable that should have been decommissioned 20 years ago. edit: semantics
100% this. Our local cable company, a subsidiary of Spectrum, refused to lay fiber to anywhere but our core metro centers and even then, only to businesses. It wasn’t until our metros collectively agreed to subsidize another, smaller ISP to come in and lay fiber to every neighborhood across the region (I live somewhere that has like 6 cities all closely clumped together). The monopoly cable company sued for years trying to block it. They allllmost succeeded, too, until a state appeals court finally overturned their injunction. Now we finally have competition and it’s glorious. I pay less than half what I did before and get twice the speed.
Well, I’m not in the US, but I’ve seen one village (not exactly, mostly dachas) organize enough to reach a nearby ISP and have an agreement, so there’s fiber there now, from reading such posts it seems that with better speeds than many towns in the USA. They just need certainty that enough people will use it and pay for it, to lay infrastructure first.
But yeah, it’s not 100+ miles.
Maybe crowdfunding infrastructure can be a thing, lol.