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from the socialize-the-costs-and-privatize-the-profits dept.
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.
[...] "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."
[...] 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.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @09:11AM (3 children)
You don't really get that money-meets-power-meets-your-face-with-a-stick sensation unless you have a reciprocal circle between government and corporate corruption, spending and suppression. You really do need the government to have an invested interest in ISPs using backdoored equipment, the ISPs wanting government to maintain their monopoly and the CEOs getting as much of the pie as possible so they'd be able to dominate campaign funding and choose the politicians that best pay out to them.
All the pieces fitting together... That's when the real magic happens.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @10:48AM (2 children)
Don't worry citizen, president Trump will drain the swamp any minute now!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @11:18AM
Pretty sure Führer Trump is the last piece of the puzzle. Question is, if Bernie is Hermann Müller, does that mean Hillary is Heinrich Brüning?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Revek on Friday August 17 2018, @12:13PM
Not as long as him and his fellow scum is floating on it.
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