Honestly, it would probably turn into a giant mess. Massive nationalization of once-privately managed resources rarely turns out well. It’s generally better to regulate the existing industries than try to take them over wholesale.
I live a mere 6 miles from a major university in Texas and my choice is CenturyLink DSL or CenturyLink DSL…top speed is 10Mbps for download and 1.8 for upload.
The citizens of Flint, Michigan are practically doubled over from laughter. Oh, wait. Maybe it’s the water.
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I agree and disagree. The telcos have essentially done this already buy buying up all the competition, and look how mismanaged it is. I wouldn’t nationalize to manage though, I would nationalize to unmanage perhaps by open-sourcing / standardizing, removing un-necessary business models, contracts, sanitize the mess, and set it free again with new rules. It would be a clean-up job - bring the regulation up to present day, jailing a certain few for the making of examples.
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here bud, get you (i meant to say 30) of these. https://www.amazon.com/1000ft-Unshielded-Twisted-Ethernet-trueCABLE/dp/B01JAVJNIO/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1533152819&sr=8-5&keywords=bulk+cat5e
That’s a valid concern. At the local level when government doesn’t act to maintain accountability, the infrastructure suffers. Good city managers deserve the big money they make because they put the people and systems in place that run the city’s interests like real businesses in terms of driving both quality and efficiency with the taxpayer’s money.
The problem either way goes back to effective government. Government that refuses to act to provide feedback against monopoly, and other things that damage the free market, will inevitably result in a poor market, where costs are high and outcomes are low. When the government does choose to act, they have to do the right things to provide the feedback necessary to restore consumer choice, or act on on behalf of the consumer when market forces can’t produce the desired outcomes, or the outcomes will be just as bad or worse.
One reason I tend to mistrust socialists when it comes to economics, is the fact that they jump at the chance to employ a government takeover as the solution to every problem they find, even when all that’s needed is a push in the right direction to restore the fundamentals of the market. “market socialists” are a little better about that kind of thing, and there is a lot I can agree with them on.
But your basic “democratic socialists” that you see today scare me. They say the market is evil, and advocate for government takeovers of everything out there, when all that does is put the power in the hands of a tiny elite just like crony capitalism. It just replaces the corporatists with “elected” officials.
Given the general quality of the outcomes we have been getting from the people we elect to run our government, at least in my adult lifetime, I say hard pass. I can always stop buying from the monopolists, or even go into business against them. Just look at what Elon Musk has been doing for cars and solar power and space exploration. If GM was owned by the government, they would never allow Tesla to survive just because “too many jobs depend on the oil industry”.
Sort of a meandering response there, but I enjoyed exploring the perspective you presented here. I’d love to hear your thoughts in exchange.
Capital is amoral; unrestrained capital - the "free market - will always lead to monosopy and disaster.
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Yes indeed. your distaste for Socialism has nothing to do with crappy infrastructure we are seeing today.
Greedy monopolies do. Our local power monopoly is a longtime foe of state consumer advocates, anti-corruption activists and environmentalists. They’ve killed anti-monopoly bills and continue to provide worse service while charging higher rates every year and providing less service and nobody can stop them because they basically write their own regulatory law.
So, when the power goes out people can complain all they want.
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Hyperbole much 
Edit to add:
You really had me going with your first post, except for this one little line…
It was the envy of the free world, and was built out largely at public expense (Socialism, yay!).
And recently, as well documented in so many places, unrestrained free-market forces have resulted in virtually all of the economic prosperity coming to rest in the hands of the top 1% or 0.1%
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It’s like an Anti-Cory.
shudder
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“Those cable poles keep falling over in the wind! Must need a wire on this property to hold them up.”
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There may be some merit in having a national provider that builds the lines and allows any ISP to service customers on those lines. Make no mistake that building and maintaining all of that infrastructure is a project on the scale of the national interstate system. It would take tremendous political will to pull off and would always be in danger of being gutted by the following administration.
Like an increasing number of people that are abandoning high home prices and moving into cheaper rural areas, we live in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains in western VA. Out here, the choices are next to zilch. Our house is on the side of a mountain which blocks the area of the sky that would allow for satellite internet. No cable, no DSL. We are on the hairy edge of Sprint’s 3G network and with the assistance of an outside Yagi antenna, we manage to get 1.5 down and 0.5 up. We can also get 4G, but that is a lot flakier. A year or two ago, we volunteered to participate in AT&T’s Wireless Local Loop Rural service test. A Comcast truck and crew showed up and installed a nice small flat antenna pointed at the nearest tower that supplied the WLL signal and we were at the edge of its range. Even so, we got 5 to 25 down and 3-5 up, which was like heaven. Then the test ended (a complete success from our standpoint), and AT&T said they had no plans to continue or build out the service. Rumor was that the trial period was simply a checkbox with the FCC that also let them do some merger. So bottom line is we are back to mostly reliable 3G and flakey 4G from the cell providers. I drive into work from our home in the hills listening to countless ads for gigabit fiber optic internet on the radio and want to kill something. Cut the electric companies in on a slice of the pie to string cable and/or fiber and get us rural folks online - and move more of us blue-voting folks into the red-voting areas 
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AT&T only just started offering actual broadband where I am. In one of California’s largest cities, in Silicon Valley. I’m literally at the end of the line (after they extended out the line), and I live in the middle of the city. So I know how absurd these things get, and it’s pretty easy to imagine how crappy rural internet is.
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I’m in a wealthy suburb of Albany (New York’s state capital). I have the choice of Charter Spectrum or Charter Spectrum. I can’t even downgrade to DSL because I don’t have functioning copper to the home. It failed a few years ago, and Verizon wouldn’t fix it - they have abandoned the copper plant. They get away with that because they’ve told the state regulators that they serve my township with FIOS - which means, in this case, that there are a few customers on the border of the next township over that have it. Aside from that, there’s no FIOS nor any plan to roll it out - although because they maintain the fiction that the town has coverage, they keep sending me the mail urging me to switch. Since the failure, my ‘landline’ phone is operated from a cellular terminal.
Even before the copper line failed, I couldn’t get DSL. There were too few pairs provisioned to my block, so my neighbours and I were on ‘subscriber carrier’ - which is essentially up to 96 subscribers sharing a T1 for voice only. In the dial-up age, I might have got 14.4k on a good day, 9.6k was commoner. The reason that Verizon wouldn’t fix the copper when it finally failed was partly that the service tech could no longer find a working pair.
The county and Verizon are at an impasse. The county claims that Verizon is violating the franchise agreement, and Verizon is claiming … well, they’re claiming nothing, really, just saying, essentially, “we’re more powerful than the elected local government.” And they’re most likely right - they are more powerful, because they can burn down their half of communications grid.
Verizon is still collecting the universal service fee from their remaining subscribers. Because of the power imbalance, it no longer comes with a universal service obligation.
And now New York State has given Charter Spectrum sixty days to exit the market. I’m virtually certain that in the coming fight, Charter will engage in brinksmanship and go dark, leaving me with no choice but 4G (where my signal is marginal) and satellite (where I have a partly obstructed view to the south). “You can’t break us up, we’re a monopoly and have your citizens by the short hairs. Try to regulate us and we twist.”
I might just sign onto a petition to the Federal government to overturn state regulations and let Spectrum do whatever it pleases, because I’m not sure I can afford to be entirely without a communications pipe to the home. I’m being blackmailed. Monopoly-Charter beats having no carrier at all that will serve me.
I also notice that electrical power outages are becoming more frequent. And that the roads in the city aren’t getting repaired. (In England, they drive on the left. Here, we drive on what’s left.) At least the water and sewer are still working so far, here. (Fortunately, this isn’t Flint.)
I do see things headed for worse-than-Third-World infrastructure, because China will in the meantime be fronting the money to build out the infrastructure in the Third World. That will be in return for colonial rent-seeking and resource exploitation, but the US no longer has the credit even to borrow on those terms.
The US has the workforce to rebuild. The US has the natural resources to rebuild. But anyone who tries goes broke. Apparently, having the combination of available goods and services and consumer demand is no longer enough to support market transactions, because our betters would rather burn civil society if they get to rule as kings over the ashes.
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DSL doesn’t reach out past a few miles on normal phones lines, especially if your phone lines are in poor condition, as mine were.
I recommend this article for background info.
On the plus side, there’s lots of local bluegrass bands, and lots of drugs.
(I don’t live there, but I have family from there.)
The thing is, the market isn’t evil, or even amoral, by the definitions of how the market works; the market is there to make money.
And there’s the rub. Instead of looking at Internet service, let’s look at healthcare, mainly because one of the arguments I’ve seen against Medicare for All is that it’s leftists saying it’s evil to make a profit.
Right now, there are researchers looking at delivery of chemicals which will kill a wide range of cancer cells dead, and are seeing success with something that may be much cheaper than current treatments.
But there’s the problem, isn’t it? Even in my rural-ish part of the world, there are loads of specialists in oncology and surrounding specialists. Yes, your doctor is going to tell you to stop smoking, possibly stop drinking, eat healthy, and all that. But the nearest hospital, in a town with less than 30,000 people, just built a cancer center that’s got slightly more square feet than the local Super Walmart. And that’s just the cancer center. Here’s what their CINO had to say about it:
““When I look at these hospitals, I see an untapped resource, a way they could provide greater value to their communities and the country.”
Here’s what the CEO said about it:
“Physicians see growth as a sign of stability for their future."
Here’s what the local newspaper’s headline had to say about it:
“Hospitals helping bring money into the local economy”
You know what doesn’t lead to growth when you’ve just spent several million dollars on an oncology department? Cures for cancer. Buckminster Fuller used to live here. Built a geodesic dome home here. But a nanostructure named for him, if it was approved for use by the FDA, would likely be devastating to our local economy.
First, do no harm bring in the Benjamins.
But, good news: if that drug is being developed by a publicly traded company that also sells chemo and other supplies, the pressure will be on them to continue growth, so they’ll make sure the price is high enough, with the reason given being “recouping R&D costs”. Everyone wins! Well, except patients, maybe, but they’re not top priority.
And that’s the interesting conundrum here. I live close to a state university, in a state where one of the universities was one of the first to be on the Internet. I pay the same amount of money for 5M down/768k up that a lot of people pay for download rates 20x that high. I know I live in the middle of nowhere so there’s not any real money in it…but if you like to eat, you’re going to need for people to be out in the middle of nowhere, and good luck telling 'em to piss up a rope and move to the city so they can order seed now that their main supplier takes their orders on the Internet.
As for your obvious libertarian leanings, I’d rather not go into it…there’s always an excuse for why libertarianism can trump human nature, and all I’ll say to that is that the Tea Party leaned libertarian, but the main Tea Party movement enthusiastically endorsed Donald Trump, and that Andrew Breitbart hated Donald Trump, but here we are, with people who leaned Libertarian during the Obama years embracing an allegedly charismatic tyrant wannabe, and Andrew Breitbart’s old tabloid being one of the most enthusiastic Trump cheerleaers.
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I hadn’t thought of that. Where I grew up (small, midwestern town; phone co-op) the phones went out every time it rained. And then there’s also the problem with load coils, of which I was also unaware.
But now we’re back to talking about creating new jobs laying fibre optic cable.
