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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...t-only-to-get-more-money-from-the-government/
ISPs say they can’t expand broadband unless gov’t gives them more money
Industry asks for handouts, arguing that broadband is essential—like a utility.
Please excuse the brevity of my commentary, I just don't have the fucking words. The fucking balls on these pieces of shit. Subsidize the costs, privatize the benefits.
ISPs say they can’t expand broadband unless gov’t gives them more money
Industry asks for handouts, arguing that broadband is essential—like a utility.
Broadband providers have spent years lobbying against utility-style regulations that protect consumers from high prices and bad service.
But now, broadband lobby groups are arguing that Internet service is similar to utilities such as electricity, gas distribution, roads, and water and sewer networks. In the providers' view, the essential nature of broadband doesn't require more regulation to protect consumers. Instead, they argue that broadband's utility-like status is reason for the government to give ISPs more money.
That's the argument made by trade groups USTelecom and NTCA—The Rural Broadband Association. USTelecom represents telcos including AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink, while NTCA represents nearly 850 small ISPs.
"Like electricity, broadband is essential to every American," USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter and NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield wrote Monday in an op-ed for The Topeka Capital-Journal. "Yet US broadband infrastructure has been financed largely by the private sector without assurance that such costs can be recovered through increased consumer rates."
ISPs want benefits but not responsibilities
While ISPs want the benefits of being treated like utilities—such as pole attachment rights and access to public rights-of-way—they oppose traditional utility-style obligations such as regulated prices and deployment to all Americans.
The industry's main arguments against net neutrality and other common carrier regulations were that broadband shouldn't be treated as a utility and that the broadband market is too competitive to justify strict regulations. "Utility regulation over broadband can only inhibit incentives for network investment," AT&T warned in November 2017.
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Industry groups have also tried to stop cities and towns from building their own networks, saying that the government shouldn't compete against private companies. Telecom-friendly legislatures have passed about 20 state laws restricting the growth of municipal broadband.
Despite the industry's fight against municipal networks, Spalter and Bloomfield wrote that the "private-led investment model" only works well in "reasonably populous areas." In rural parts of America, "the private sector can't go it alone," they wrote.
To close the rural broadband gap, the US needs "solutions that unite the public and private sectors to finish the job of building a truly connected nation," Spalter and Bloomfield wrote. This public/private model is "without question... the only acceptable path forward just as it was in wiring rural America with electricity and building our nation's highways."
"Broadband providers need a committed partner to finish the job of connecting unserved communities. That partner should be all of us as Americans—in the form of our government," they wrote.
The op-ed did not explain why the FCC's repeal of net neutrality rules wasn't enough to spur expanded broadband investment, though broadband industry lobby groups previously claimed that the rules were holding back network expansions and upgrades. ISPs also promised more investment in exchange for a major tax break that was passed by Congress late last year.
Broadband’s similarity to utilities
To make their point, USTelecom and NTCA commissioned a report titled, "Rural Broadband Economics: A Review of Rural Subsidies."
The "costs per user" of building networks in sparsely populated areas led to "unsustainable business models to provide network services," the USTelecom/NTCA report says. The report was written for USTelecom and NTCA by telecom consulting firm CostQuest Associates. It continues:
In this respect, there are similarities between networks in communications, electric power, roads, natural gas distribution, water distribution, and sewer networks. By the very nature of network economics, each industry exhibits economies of density and each reaches a point at which un-subsidized provision of service in low-density areas is not viable.
The report goes on to describe "the importance of subsidies to networks in low-density areas" for essential services including electricity, road networks, natural gas, water distribution, waste disposal, and broadband.
Please excuse the brevity of my commentary, I just don't have the fucking words. The fucking balls on these pieces of shit. Subsidize the costs, privatize the benefits.