

How lobbyists are keeping the public in the dark about broadband - miked
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2010/03/18/follow_that_por.html

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CWuestefeld
Methinks the goddess doesn't understand very well how money flows, and how
external forces like government regulation are what distort the market.

 _state grantees getting paid to collect the information are expected to get
some of their data from the Federal Communications Commission, begging the
question - why not require the FCC to create the map and save $350 million?_

She also seems to assume that when the government does something, it's free.
How can she not realize that if the FCC does something, it needs to pay its
employees, etc. If the FCC doesn't need to do it, then it needs fewer
employees, and we can all save on taxes?

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spamizbad
Given how little government involvement there is relative to other nations
that are building faster networks than us, I highly doubt Government
regulation is what's holding us back. The US has significantly less red tape
involved in building out nationwide infrastructure than countries like Sweden,
Japan, and South Korea.

Is there some supernatural market force that amplifies US bureaucracy over
these other countries? I guess that depends on whether or not you consider
lobbyists the super-heroes of Democracy.

~~~
CWuestefeld
_I highly doubt Government regulation is what's holding us back._

I said that regulations _distort_ the market, which is precisely true. The
result of the distortion might be to retard the market, or to cause over-
investment that accelerates the market; I suspect that's the case in the
countries you cite.

Just because they're getting more broadband faster does not mean that they're
better off overall. It may be that there are other, more important investments
that are being made in the USA, but those other countries won't benefit
because they squandered their money on universal ultrafast broadband.

Of course, it's difficult to impossible to prove this either way. The market
is a mind-bogglingly complex emergent system, and like a neural net, you can't
fully reverse-engineer any particular piece of it. The fact that money acts as
a communication mechanism, carrying information about the relative importance
and substitutability of goods, allows the market to dynamically adapt to what
the participants actually want (as demonstrated by their wallets), rather than
what is forced on them from above.

