I do, but then I live in a country where the government (the Conservatives, at that!) declared Internet to be a utility. I have less choice in electricity providers.
The US has so fucking much to lose, here, and most people don’t get it. Innovation in the US will tank as companies who can’t afford or simply won’t pay the bribes to the big three move their servers and services elsewhere. That’s a whole lotta unemployment that’s just going to add to the rest of the “offshoring” pain.
With this, health care and taxes, you guys just better get used to spending the next however-many years calling your reps. I suggest a good headset and putting them on speed-dial
The government can kill co-ops by requiring all ISPs to obtain a license to operate. An insanely expensive, hard to acquire license. So insanely expensive and complicated that only companies like Comcast can get one.
Just beheld Ms Jardin do an excellent job of nerdsplaining the vital importance of internet neutrality on Rachel Maddow. Well done! Now we all must contact our congress-critters and tell them that if they fail to fight against this then we’ll fail to support them in their next re-election attempt.
Hard to justify that one. FCC already got slam danced on by the states on the municipal ISP ban. Federalism at this point is in full effect (selectively).
I have to say, I don’t really share your optimism here. If a corrupt government wants to get rid of you, they’ll find a way, even if it’s just by blatantly selective application of the law.
But more than that, I don’t think the co-op model is any kind of final answer. Like, if a remote town wants to set up a co-op ISP, I am strongly in favor of that, but it doesn’t help poorer areas that lack the wherewithal to do the same. And bigger co-ops aren’t the solution, because a co-op with a million members is nearly as remote from its customers as any other big business, and as politicised as regular politics (“why should we expand into Hoboville? They’ll just drain everyone else’s resources”).
Ultimately, civic problems aren’t solved until they’re solved through the state. I’m not in any way saying people shouldn’t get engaged and try to fix things locally – I’m just saying, no amount of bomb shelters will stop the bombs falling.
It’s ultimately a question of resolve and making it a movement onto itself. Essentially, I’m advocating for mutual aid. And it won’t be us from the outside saving Hoboville, it’ll be Hoboville using the seemingly broken PCs, switches, and ethernet cables of the world to make their own networks. It’ll be slow but as time progresses it grows fast. The thing here is that will people obey laws or their own common sense. I’m betting the latter when push comes to shove. The powers that be seem to have forgotten the lessons of the nationalist revolutions that erupted in Europe that people are easily cowed by threats of violence and legalism. The reality is that their money and their lawyers are no good when someone can literally defy them with little consequence or chance of being caught. For them, it’s a lose everything and gain nothing scenario and for the rest of us it’s we lose nothing and gain everything when we defy them.
Absolutely, and I hope I didn’t come across as disparaging co-ops; the way things are today, the people of Hoboville should 100% try to make it happen by themselves. If they’re all working 3 minimum-wage jobs and none of them have experience or contacts in network engineering, then I wouldn’t be super-optimistic about the results they’ll get. But even if they get nowhere, they’ll become informed, active citizens, instead of passive consumers of Ajit Pai’s bullshit, and when they go into a polling booth they will understand exactly how the politics interfaces with their day-to-day lives.
When people organise on their own, what scares the establishment is not the prospect that they’ll succeed. They never wanted to wire Hoboville anyway. What scares them is people making decisions on their own. Because industries can only buy influence – and politicians can only sell it – in matters that voters aren’t paying any attention to.
