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What we really need is less centralization and more communities able to invest in 21st century infrastructure. We might be too far gone, though. Take this for

What we really need is less centralization and more communities able to invest in 21st century infrastructure. We might be too far gone, though. Take this for example: I am a student at the University of Wisconsin. There's a nonprofit/cooperative in Wisconsin called wiscnet [1]. They provide(d) libraries and schools with Internet. A Wisconsin telecom association (mostly backed by AT&T) was able to use their lobby to push it out. Millions in infrastructure made useless because it was argued to be anticompetitive. The story is told much better by Ars. [2] [1]: http://wiscnet.net/ http://wiscnet.net/ [2]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/wisconsin-public-internet-fights-telecoms-attempts-to-kill-it-off/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/wisconsin-public-...

mrbill 11y ago
I think a lot of states have (if not active, legacy) Internet backbones where schools and such had connectivity back in the day before the "general public". Oklahoma's is "OneNet"[1], and we had a T1 at usao.edu back in '93 [2]. [1] https://onenet.net/ https://onenet.net/ [2] I set up the very first USAO web site as a summer Independent Study project in '95, running a web server on our VAX 4700. People told me "You have to have a Sun box to run a web server!" and I proved them wrong. It was a fun 9-week gig, because the actual work only took me a couple of weeks, including creating a HTML version of the Student Handbook. Bits of the site I created persisted for almost a decade.