
AT&T allegedly “discriminated” against poor people in broadband upgrades - perseusprime11
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/att-allegedly-discriminated-against-poor-people-in-broadband-upgrades/
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rayiner
Lamenting the death of municipal franchising shows a basic failure to
understand the economics of telecom. Municipal franchising is the worst of
both worlds: all the downsides of creating local monopolies with none of the
upsides of having a government-owned network.

If we want to build broadband to poor neighborhoods, we should just tax people
and have to government build it. The municipal franchising model is an awful
way of accomplishing that goal. In return for building broadband to poor
neighborhoods (where most people can't afford it anyway), you basically kill
competition. Nobody but the incumbent can make enough money in an environment
where they have to build _everywhere_ in order to receive permission to build
_anywhere_. And it basically bans "MVP" models of deployment, where a provider
starts in a focused area with demonstrated demand and expands gradually.

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hubert123
Poor people dont pay a lot of anything in taxes, so essentially what you
propose is yet another tax increase for the middle class.

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hvidgaard
Things are more complex than this. If your view of humanity includes making
sure people have something to eat, somewhere to sleep, and don't die from
simple preventable medical issues, some amount of investment is a net
positive.

Instead of just providing food, shelter, and basic medical care - helping them
to get a job turns them into tax providers rather than consumers. Helping them
to eat and live healthier reduce the medical cost.

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Chris2048
It is this simple. There maybe other angles to consider, but it is just a
money from another community.

> helping them to get a job turns them into tax providers rather than
> consumers

So does cutting welfare.

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hvidgaard
We have this retoric in Denmark in the current political climate. It only
works to a certain degree, but the liberals have this wet dream where
everybody becomes contributing citizens if we just take away everything and
threathen their existens. It just doesn't work that way for everybody.

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jimbokun
"Ok fine, we will just deploy municipal broadband in our community and pay for
it ourself."

...and watch AT&T lobbyists start crying and screaming about the "unfair"
competition from local governments. Rememeber, government is good when it
helps the rich, but bad when it helps the poor!

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thanksgiving
It isn't so easy to build and maintain a utility. Esp when you're the
government and have to deal with unions (alongside fair wages, acceptable
working conditions), there are ongoing costs that we need to pay somehow.

Another commenter complained how it would raise taxes on the middle class. I
wanted to disagree but can't because the upper middle class has its tax
credits/deductions and the upper class has even better loopholes leaving the
rest of the middle class to pick up the tab.

Money is a difficult topic. Looking at Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri hand
out tax breaks to attract businesses to come to their side of town. Can we put
a tax on the national level? Then we need to distribute the money and it gets
messy.

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csydas
Well, yes, maintaining a utility is difficult, but it's also quite doable in
many locations around the US where municipal fiber is present and running
pretty peachy. I lived in Tacoma, south of Seattle, for a bit, and the
municipal broadband there was pretty darn good in all aspects. Set up, config,
cost, billing, and discontinuation when I left was incredibly simple, speeds
were comparable to Comcast wired households, and honestly, it was just a great
experience all around. I never heard a peep from them for anything besides
when there were large issues or outages they needed to report.

While I dislike Comcast, AT&T, and their contemporaries as much as the next
person, I don't really have a horror story of my own with them; I just greatly
preferred the service and support for a home-grown ISP instead of having the
looming threat of bandwidth caps or other such changes over my head for time
to come.

Municipal broadband is VERY easily doable and a great solution for many places
where the incumbents refuse to meet the needs of the taxpayers that are
subsidizing the networks. Having internet as a public utility resulted in some
really great service and a fantastic product.

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Oxitendwe
Is this even news? If they thought there was a profit to be made by offering
them upgrades, they would do it. They haven't, so you can probably assume that
there is no profit in doing so. Last I checked, AT&T was not a charity and
does not have an obligation to give people things at cost. This isn't
discrimination, it's business. Nobody has a right to a fast internet
connection.

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farva
That would be all well and good if they didn't collude with the local
authorities against competition and collect "universal service" funds from the
government in exchange for, at most, the barest minimum effort. Either be a
benevolent monopoly (no such thing IMHO) or compete in a free market.

~~~
Oxitendwe
That's a separate issue though, and something I am quite strongly against. The
article was about "discriminating" specifically against the poor, and unless
you'd like to argue that their collusion is willfully and knowingly done
specifically to discriminate against poor people, I don't think it applies.

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farva
I agree that we shouldn't be too quick to label every potentially unfair
situation as discrimination. But part of the original intent (Ajit Pai
notwithstanding) of the USF was to bring quality service to rural and low
income areas, so AT&T should be careful to fulfill their obligation and,
ideally, the government should hold them to it.

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Oxitendwe
I agree completely, AT&T should absolutely honor their legal obligations.

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arca_vorago
Can anyone explain to me why the internet isn't public like roads?

