NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job

Re:NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job by rayiner on Friday November 16, 2018 @12:07PM (#18470002)

I don't doubt your recollection, but I'm skeptical of these stories in general. There is a lot of historical revisionism about what happened in the 1990s and early 2000s. Broadly speaking, the whole industry was deregulated in 1996 because Congress thought regulation (price caps, profit caps, etc.) was a bad idea and was hurting investment. There were a lot of projections about where that new investment would go, but they weren't a quid-pro-quo for deregulation. Then in the 2000s, mobile exploded, and a lot of the investment that was going to go into fiber to the home went into mobile instead. A lot also went into backbone and business fiber networks. That resulted in a lot of accusations of broken promises. But when you dig into it the "commitments" turn into "projections" and the "money for nothing" or "tax subsidies" turns into "eliminating the special rules we had for telcos."

From a regulatory economics point of view, telecom deregulation was one of the big success stories, along with airlines and trucking. For the most part, Western Europe copied it. But our wireline infrastructure is still better than every big European country, because we have invested massively in it: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t... (see page 12).

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Re:NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job by pasbesoin on Friday November 16, 2018 @06:34PM (#18472850)

One venue of coverage I seem to recall as being arstechnica.com . That would make sense in that they had and still have a strong presence in Chicago.

I'll look later for some old articles, if I don't get too distracted.

I'll consider what you describe and what you linked. From memory and off the cuff, it reminds me of all the fiber investment around that time that seemed to undergo a value implosion and leave substantial "dark fiber" waiting for new projects/investments to pick it up. MCI and Wordcom (?) come to mind. (And the bath that some investors took.)

If I was understanding one of them correctly, a year or two ago, my German friends could get high speed wireless Internet (from T-Mobile) at their newly purchased country home in the middle of the Eifel "Mountains" rural... "farmscape", I'll call it, for I think 40 Euro / month. Fast enough to stream, and no data cap.

Meantime, here I was still reduced to just Comcast, as AT&T had over the course of a decade and a half never upgraded my block's line that was so old and poor quality that it wouldn't even reliably support DSL. And I'm in the middle of suburbia in a fairly dense sub-division. Comcast wanted $95/month for their high-speed Internet (with basic cable TV, the way they price their packages; gotta keep their cable TV demographics up). And that was after arm-twisting one of their reps for a discount. In the meantime, that number's up to about $135/month.

Whatever the state of our technology, it's not translating here to effective competition and prices that compare to what friends are getting in Europe. Not even close. In my limited experience.

P.S. On the other hand, I'd hate to buy an expensive laptop over there.

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Re:NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job by rayiner on Saturday November 17, 2018 @12:28PM (#18476430)

But objectively, U.S. internet access is faster than German internet access (or U.K., France, Spain, or Italy, which comprises like 70% of the EU population). According to Akamai, 50% of U.S. connections are over 15 mbps, versus 33% of German, and 18% in France. In states that are as dense as Germany, like Maryland or New Jersey, it's 60-65%. According to the OECD, fiber deployment in the U.S. is 12.6% in 2017 versus just 2.3% in Germany. The U.S. is also better positioned than those countries going forward. More of our infrastructure is hybrid fiber-coax, which can be incrementally upgraded by pushing fiber deeper into the network, and is on the path to symmetric gigabit in the next few years. Countries like France are much more reliant on DSL, which is really hitting its limits. (But the DSL can be "good enough" and cheap.)

Which is really remarkable when you think about it. There is no other infrastructure that the U.S. does better than Germany or France. Our trains, subways, and roads are shameful compared to theirs. But our internet access is better. That's a real testament to the success of the 1996 deregulation.

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