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El Reg reports
The US state of Oregon says it will charge Comcast tens of millions of dollars in taxes after revoking a tax break the cable giant had claimed on its broadband service.
The state's Department of Revenue (DOR) has denied a request by Comcast that it be granted an exemption reserved for companies that offer gigabit internet service in the state.
Written to lure Google's Fiber service to Portland after years of courtship, the tax break would give exemptions to reward the installation of high-speed fiber broadband.
Comcast [claimed] its "Gigabit Pro" service tops out at 2Gbit/s and thus made the cable giant eligible to claim the same breaks as Google.
The DOR, however, did not agree, and it ruled earlier this week that Comcast will have to pay the taxes.
[...] Critics of Comcast have previously argued that the Gigabit Pro service is prohibitively expensive (up to $4,600 a year) and only reaches a small number of Oregon residents.
[...] Both Google and Frontier also had their applications denied because neither has an active gigabit service in the state.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday May 29 2016, @06:51PM
Well, it's wrong to "Love Big Google" just because it's "Big Google", but this doesn't mean you can't strongly approve of some of the things they do.
I don't know the economics of the ISP business, but they did steal a lot of federal money under false pretenses. And weren't charged. One may guess that they never intended to fulfill their obligations, but that can't be proven. One may guess that they used bribes to get the bill passed, but that hasn't been proven. One can know, however, that they didn't put forth reasonable efforts to extend the service.
So. Google has been rolling out fast internet in various markets. The problem here is that we don't know what happens if they get tired of providing service, but for not it's a bit advantage.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.