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Given how little government involvement there is relative to other nations that are building faster networks than us, I highly doubt Government regulation is wh

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 17y ago
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.
bobbin 17y ago
> The US has significantly less red tape involved in building out nationwide infrastructure than countries like Sweden, Japan, and South Korea. I'd like to read about that. Do you have any links?
binspace 17y ago
Oh man, the lobbyists are definitely the superheroes of democracy. 1 lobbyist has the power of something like 1000000 voters.

CWuestefeld 17y ago

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.

bobbin 17y ago

> The US has significantly less red tape involved in building out nationwide infrastructure than countries like Sweden, Japan, and South Korea. I'd like to read about that. Do you have any links?

binspace 17y ago

Oh man, the lobbyists are definitely the superheroes of democracy. 1 lobbyist has the power of something like 1000000 voters.