Perhaps. Competition is a realtime mechanism for stopping this sort of fuckery on a provider level presently. I can switch ISPs immediately (provided that there is more than one around).
Remediations for 1A violations are anything but realtime.
You could suffer rights abuses for a very long time with no immediate or cost-effective recourse. Also, such a circumstance in which your 1A rights are violated by your government ISP, which may be eventually protected by courts, remains inherently dangerous for example during declared periods of emergency where the usual rights and remedies are "temporarily" (weeks or months) suspended. Imagine the situation were this the case right now, and your government ISP disconnects you today (let's say on some bogus "local" authority). How long do you think it would be before the thing winds its way through the courts and your port finally gets ordered to be turned back on? A month? Three months? Six?
How much money has it cost you in legal fees? How many dollars did you lose from not being able to work in that time due to being entirely offline?
I don't trust any one player being the "only game in town" no matter who they are or what remedies I have against them. Making it state-run means that not only are they the only game in town (like Comcast is now in a lot of places), but that it's impossible to change that situation. It makes it permanent. We need more competition, not less. More opportunity for more people to create businesses and jobs, not less.
I think the people of Flint should be able to chime in on this thread.
As a counterexample, authoritarian regimes in countries with private ISPs have cut off or filtered internet access by fiat. A private ISP isn't magically exempt from government demands. I believe Turkey is a recent example of this.
> Every ISP must be approved by both the Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI) and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and must implement content-control software for websites and e-mail.
More competition in physical last mile infrastructure just isn't feasible given the costs. A single physical provider (ie fiber as a utility) with legislated common access (ie ISP competition) has worked out quite well for the rest of the western world.
>> I can switch ISPs immediately (provided that there is more than one around).
You may want to look at what percentage of America has this kind of choice (and whether it is a choice between viable and high quality alternatives, as opposed to ones that are equally shitty).
Most places without options are where those localities gave a monopoly to a single company -- so that they would subsidize rural people. In the US we need to stop subsidizing the costs of living in the middle of nowhere. Mail, electricity, phone, etc should all cost substantially more - it should reflect the cost of living there.
> nothing about public internet in any way implies anything even remotely related to your strawman argument
Why not? If the government has a monopoly on internet access, it becomes easier for voters to call for certain sites being blocked or certain sorts of traffic be monitored and/or intercepted.
If we're playing that game, there's a million things they could do as well, but it doesn't make any of them likely. Hell, they could do what you're talking about right now, other countries do that even though their Internet access isn't controlled by the government. The porn ban in the UK is a great example of privately-controlled ISPs being forced to block certain sites.
I'll repeat, there is absolutely nothing about publicly funded Internet service that in any way even remotely connects "internet access as a public utility" to "government starts blocking certain sites". They could do it right now if they wanted to.
The porn ban didn't happen. Even with the "don't go to the pirate bay or we send you a nasty letter" legislation, they stop bothering doing that because nobody paid any attention and threw the letter in the bin.
The only thing stopping them now is the first amendment. That doesn't change depending on ownership. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a wider deeper interpretation of 1A. But it's not relevant to this matter really...
A private company has to comply with all governmental laws and regulations. If the government wants something banned, they can just create a law that lets them do that. They've already demonstrated that they can easily do that with the patriot act.
