> "USDA has been investing in rural telecommunications infrastructure for decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars are annually available in the RUS programs both by loans and grants all to support modern broadband e-Connectivity in rural communities."
> "In 2018, USDA introduced the ReConnect Program, which has invested over $1 billion to date to expand high-speed broadband infrastructure in unserved rural areas and tribal lands."
We don't let shady private corporations squat on the roads and freeways and charge tolls to anyone who wants to drive on them, why should we allow such behavior on the internet trunk fiber optic cables either - or on the copper/aluminum electricity grid, for that matter?
That 11% wasn't a static state. Electrification was happening, government or not.
The New Deal certainly sped it up but it takes a career politician level of dishonesty to take a government program that increased the rate of electrification and give said program credit all electrification after it's commencement.
The only opponents were the electric power companies who realized they might lose their captive markets if the idea spread to the cities. Hence they started buying lots of politicians.
Something so cynical about such low expectations. "If we weren't in charge, they would all devolve into savagery!"
The issue isn't politics (though it is true that the ISPs have bought both political parties in Congress), it's economics. Building out basic infrastructure is one of the core necessities for widespread economic growth, and that includes roads and bridges, the electricity grid, the water supply, and the fiber-optic network.
It's not a very complicated issue, and I've never seen anyone present a coherent argument that privatized infrastructure improves economic activity overall, it's generally the opposite isn't it?
I suppose if your metric is the concentration of wealth in fewer hands, then yes, private infrastructure facilitates that outcome, but it shrinks the overall economic activity in terms of production of goods and services (i.e. consider the farmer who can't get to market because the bridge is washed out, the washing machine manufacturer who can't sell to the farmer who has no electricity, and so on).
> we're not going to have multiple private roads systems are we?
Toll roads exist but indeed, roads are one of the cases where building and maintaining them is easy so you don't lose much from a state monopoly, and they take up a lot of space so duplication is unfortunate. But there are relatively few cases like that.
These are cases where it only makes sense to build one system, and any such system should be under public control, not under private monopoly control by some rent-extracting shareholder outfit.
Sure and they have done in the past. The existing networks weren't initially built by governments, they were built by private entrepreneurs and then nationalized. That's true at least for power and internet, admittedly I don't know for water piping, that might be old enough to pre-date private companies of any significant size.
Now should they is a different question to will they. In many cases it's OK to allow that. I think the US still has private railway lines. In other places there aren't any left. But I agree that for networks that require enormous amounts of land and where there's ~no scope for innovation, government monopolies can be beneficial. Water, power and roads seem clear cut. Rail is a sort of interesting middle ground where countries go back and forth because there is actually scope for innovation in how the signalling works and governments are typically extremely slow to deploy improvements.
This is simply not true in many cases, and the Rural Electrification program is Exhibit A, isn't it? Exhibit B is the national freeway system. The takeover of the government-built Hetch Hetchey to CA power grid by PG&E is exhibit C, granted a complicated story:
https://www.dailyjournal.com/articles/293699-a-hundred-years...
Certainly the private sector has a role to play, i.e. the production of water pipe itself is a competitive business, so is the production of fiber optic cable, and of tools and equipment - but the systems themselves should never be privately owned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnpike_trust
(well, semi-private at least, corporations didn't exist in the same way that far back)
And the internet was all private and still is, with no change on the horizon.