It's strange how cities force companies to wire this way. It's as if they forced a luxury brand, Hermès, say, to open a store in the most shit-hole, criminal part of town in order to gain the right to open a store in the yuppie part of town.
Providing health care to the destitute isn't profitable either; doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it.
Clothes are seen as essentials in Western society. Luxury brands, not so much. Yet access to internet and access to cutting-edge broadband are treated similarly by regulators in the U.S. That's the asymmetry.
At the pace technology advances, there's not so much difference between the two. Since companies are still constantly pushing the limits of technology, the majority of the benefits of connectivity come at the higher end of the bandwidth spectrum.
Games are not socially valuable, they're a diversion. Backup software--it's much cheaper to give everyone a USB drive than build fiber out to them. Finally, the failure of rich media in the educational setting has been profound. Text (and static diagrams) is the most efficient and precise way to convey information.[1] In the 1990's, it was about getting "multimedia" into classrooms, and it was a colossal waste of time and money. The value of online courseware is the lecture notes and exams, which have limited bandwidth demands.
[1] I'll note that HN is about as plain text as you can get, and is a place for serious discussion.
---> Since when is "feeling like an equal" a basic right?
Since always, because large groups of people not feeling like equals inevitably leads to instability and uprising.
---> Everyone in my high-school had a car and designer clothing. Should the public subsidize that stuff for poor kids?
Yes, in the form of basic income sufficient to feed, clothe, and transport oneself and one's family.
---> Note that clothes are a much bigger part of "feeling like an equal" to a typical kid than anything to do with computers.
We're not just talking about kids, but even kids deserve the basic dignity of not being terrified to walk the halls of their school because they don't have reasonable clothing. The distraction of being strongly disliked by other students can have a profound effect on a kid's outlook for the future and motivation to improve.
---> Games are not socially valuable, they're a diversion.
Games are every bit as socially valuable as any other form of art or entertainment. As just one example of an artistic game, see Braid.
---> Backup software--it's much cheaper to give everyone a USB drive than build fiber out to them.
Give someone a USB drive you back up their files for a day, but give them fiber and you back up their files for a lifetime. Once built, the fiber is good for a very long time and many other uses.
---> Finally, the failure of rich media in the educational setting has been profound.
That's because people who call things "rich media" didn't know what they were doing or how to measure it. They were just jumping onto a buzzword. As a counterexample, Encarta on CD-ROM was quite useful as a tool for education and inspiration.
---> Text (and static diagrams) is the most efficient and precise way to convey information.
It depends on the information. What sound does a penguin make, in text? What does it look like to fly over an island rain forest?
If this is true, why do we still have classrooms at all? Why was video or telephone invented?
---> In the 1990's, it was about getting "multimedia" into classrooms, and it was a colossal waste of time and money.
I'll repeat my earlier mention of buzzwords, and add the benefit of a generation of students having early experience with computers, allowing them to perform better in a modern workplace.
---> The value of online courseware is the lecture notes and exams, which have limited bandwidth demands.
Strongly disagree. I took the very first edX course, MITx 6.002x. 95% of the value was in the excellent lecture videos by Prof. Agarwal, which I could speed up or slow down as needed to maximize understanding. The remaining value came from interactive circuit simulations. It's not just the medium, it's the quality of execution. Excellent videos and interactive software are invaluable and can't be replaced by lecture notes and exams.
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Cities already have to provide water, electricity, gas, and sewer services, so the roads will be dug up and the labor expended whether fiber is added to the mix or not.
So the question is whether Comcast has to meet the same standard of building out their network in poor neighborhoods as Verizon does.
In every city I've studied, incumbents are bound by the same requirement to build-out their network as potential competitors. I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but the only one that comes to mind is Google Fiber: they get a pass on build-out requirements. These requirements curtail the most obvious route to competition: deploying in dense, rich neighborhoods where the incumbents generate most of their profits.
I guess it could be an argument about what corruption means, but I think that people underestimate how dysfunctional the legislative and regulatory processes can be even without any legal violations.
To put it another way: look at the regulations Google demands exemption from in return for building fiber: build-out requirements, slow permitting, etc. Did the incumbents lobby for these things? No. They arose out of municipal politics that have little to do with lobbying.
Even Wikipedia says:
Regulatory capture is a form of political corruption that occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special concerns of interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.
I don't think I could say it better. Regulatory capture is different to lobbying because the regulatory agencies act in the interest of the company instead of the public. Lobbying is when the company puts forward its own interest.
Verizon wants to wire up the yuppie neighborhoods here in Baltimore with FiOS. That'd be major competition for Comcast, because those yuppies subscribing to triple play are where all the money comes form. The city won't let them do it, because they demand Verizon wire up all the poor neighborhoods too (which cost just as much to service but won't turn a profit).
Is the theory that Comcast has regulatory-captured the Baltimore city government, forcing them to impose this requirement? Because I've seen absolutely zero evidence for that proposition.
When Google goes into cities, they demand exemption from regulation. The regulations they get exemption from are not ones that give benefits to incumbents. They are liberal public policy choices: you have to wire up poor neighborhoods if you want to wire up rich ones, you have to kick in money to support public access TV, you have to get permits and your fiber cabinets can't be too big, etc.