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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Wait a second. Didn’t we already give these companies money to upgrade their infrastructure??
Yup, we just funded their new yacht without getting anything in return.
Sheesh I thought this was uplifting news until I thought about this perspective. I hope there is some sort of language in these grants that will hold ISPs at least a little bit accountable to build out actual networks.
I'm lucky to live in a town that has municipal broadband, so I pay a reasonable rate for gigabit fiber and it's owned by my town so there's less of a profit motive and no need to appease shareholders by cutting corners or using unfair pricing. I wonder if some of the funds from this program coukd be used by more towns to set up their own ISPs like that.
A lot of our criticisms on this plan is that we have tried the 400 billion dollars plan and the promise never materialized. So naturally, we're a bit jaded toward corporations.
I agree that we need accountability and I suggested here that anytime we fund a company with public money, we should demand non-sell-able shares of that company (basically we never sell that shares and company will have to repay dividend to the public.) If we practically gave money to them that we would've own 50% or more of that company, that company should then be a utility since we literally paid tax money for it, it's a service at that point.
It's frustrating, because we are not only in an economic squeeze, we are also bleeding money left and right with money inflation going out of control.
I believe that they followed the letter of the commitment and ran fiber from hub to hub, but did nothing to take it to the last mile and let it all sit there. Google bought up a bunch of it for their Google fiber ISP. Google HQ in Manhattan sits stop one of these fiver hubs.