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Americans Taxed $400B for Fiber Optic Internet That Doesn’t Exist

59 points by punnerud 9y ago

visarga 9y ago
That's capitalism, exploitation of the poor by the rich. It concentrates power to the detriment of society. In EU Apple and FB are avoiding taxes, in US telecoms steal $400B from the public and gauge prices. Is there any way to keep money and power from concentrating like that?
- DeepYogurt 9y ago
  Taxes are a pretty good method of wealth distribution.
  - visarga 9y ago
    But there's a gradient at the top - the more money a company makes, the less % taxes they pay.
- elmar 9y ago
  This is not the result of Capitalism is the result of Governmentalism.
  - leggomylibro 9y ago
    What are you saying? Regulation is how you prevent raw capitalism from blindly spewing negative externalities. Even Lenin came around to that idea eventually.
    - conanbatt 9y ago
      You cant steal from tax payers if you dont have access to tax payer's money.. Companies misusing public funds, and government allowing them to do it is an exemplary case of why people want smaller government. Because it does these kind of things.
      - soulbadguy 9y ago
        The opposite of a bad government is not a smaller government but a better government. Your same arguments could be used to argue that a bigger gourvenement with more authority on companies could be a solution. Ultimately size is just a poor proxy for performance of a government and we need to start thinking in term of transparency and capabilities
        conanbatt 9y ago
        > The opposite of a bad government is not a smaller government but a better government Except if you think all government is bad government. There is no reason to believe that chicago should raise taxes to prevent chicago from selling its taxpayers.
- andy_ppp 9y ago
  Tax authorities need to move to a rule of thumb flat tax on revenue if overall tax take isn’t high enough. It’s so unbelievable seeing someone like Tim Cooke just bare faced lie about Apple’s tax avoidance schemes.
throwaway613834 9y ago
How does the US have 27.64 Mbps average upload? Even Comcast only provides <= 20 Mbps upload...
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  because it comes from people running speedtest/ookla: http://www.speedtest.net/global-index http://www.speedtest.net/global-index They say 70mbit download.. Akamai says 18: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-executive-summary.pdf https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-t...
jesperlang 9y ago
What website is this? It seems to focus a lot on how Trump is doing great, how bad muslims/islam is and on how we should focus on other things than global warming ("carbon dioxide is not a harmful chemical in the traditional sense of the word. It’s actually essential for all life on earth—plants need it to live")
- teraflop 9y ago
  Even leaving aside the other content on the linked site, I do find it suspicious that the only source it cites for the headline is one guy promoting his own self-published book.
barsonme 9y ago
Is there a source that's not run by a self-proclaimed nationalist? https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/contact/ https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/contact/ and isn't on a spammy feeling website?
whataretensors 9y ago
I remember hearing about this a decade ago. The fact that we apparently kept paying them is a condemnation of our entire infrastructure. Likely where there's smoke there's fire. What else in our system is this broken?
cepth 9y ago
A couple critiques of the linked piece. First off, the title is somewhat misleading. See this Reddit discussion on the same piece: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7gob2w/americans_taxed_400_billion_for_fiber_optic/dqkhyms/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7gob2w/american.... It seems like the "taxes" were really fees that went straight to the telecom companies. It's not as if the government collected these taxes, and then failed to push ISPs to roll out fiber or build public fiber of its own. Secondly, this piece tries to make a number of comparisons to countries that have faster wired internet service, namely South Korea and Singapore. South Korea and Singapore have much smaller populations that are concentrated in urban areas, and are generally smaller geographically. The sheer size of the United States, combined with our propensity for sprawling suburban development, in addition to the higher throughput requirements of a much larger population, would seem to suggest that delivering widespread fiber capability will cost a lot more in the U.S. than in South Korea or Singapore. This is not even to mention the eminent domain issues and federal vs. local government conflicts that South Korea and Singapore do not face to comparable degree. Third, the "recommendation" made at the end of the piece seems to be based on a bit of wishful thinking. > "The Trump administration would be wise to make improving America’s digital infrastructure a priority. The South Korean model, market liberalizations combined with hard investments, could be a viable model." What "liberalizations" would lead to growth in fiber connectivity? For the large numbers of Americans with only one ISP choice (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-broadband-still-no-isp-choice-for-many-especially-at-higher-speeds/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...), it's not clear what incentive there would be for a competing ISP to come in, make the large investments necessary to physically lay fiber, and then begin competing with the original ISP on price and service. There is tremendous upfront financial risk, and if the thesis of market liberalization is correct, namely that competition drives prices lower and speeds higher, the ISPs laying fiber may well never see a return on their investment. Fourth, I think we should generally question whether massive national investment in fiber even makes sense at this point. Improvements like DOCSIS 3.1 allow for fiber-like speeds over traditional cable lines. At a certain point, we should ask whether gigabit speeds are really all that useful for most people.
soneil 9y ago
> In fact, in 1992, the speed of broadband, as detailed in state laws, was 45 Mbps in both directions — by 2014, all of us should have been enjoying gigabit speeds (1000 Mbps). This doesn’t sound quite right to me? That’s not how I remember 1992 at all.
tzs 9y ago
rayiner has convincingly demolished the book series upon which the article is based: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556
- cannonedhamster 9y ago
  To be fair, he only showed where the $200 Billion number came from and claimed that it's not an accurate way to evaluate whether or not the number. I'd be curious if he still feels that US infrastructure is really swell seeing as US speed placement appears to have dropped. I can say from my personal and work experience that U.S. connections are far and away better than large portions of the world. Peering agreements between companies are significantly saner than in some parts of the world, and the differences between wireline and wireless connectivity is pretty dramatic in terms of stability and speed. For US ISPs to be using wireless as a comparable service to broadband deployment is flat out fallacious. ISPs have done fantastic work on backbone and datacenter speed and availability, but last mile consumer connectivity just isn't worth it to them financially. No amount of regulation or deregulation will make that worthwhile. This is why municipal ownership of the last mile is most likely going to be the long term solution if the US wants to increase speed and availability for anywhere but the most densely packed areas.

59 points by punnerud 9y ago

That's capitalism, exploitation of the poor by the rich. It concentrates power to the detriment of society. In EU Apple and FB are avoiding taxes, in US telecoms steal $400B from the public and gauge prices. Is there any way to keep money and power from concentrating like that?

DeepYogurt 9y ago
Taxes are a pretty good method of wealth distribution.
- visarga 9y ago
  But there's a gradient at the top - the more money a company makes, the less % taxes they pay.
elmar 9y ago
This is not the result of Capitalism is the result of Governmentalism.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  What are you saying? Regulation is how you prevent raw capitalism from blindly spewing negative externalities. Even Lenin came around to that idea eventually.
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    You cant steal from tax payers if you dont have access to tax payer's money.. Companies misusing public funds, and government allowing them to do it is an exemplary case of why people want smaller government. Because it does these kind of things.
    - soulbadguy 9y ago
      The opposite of a bad government is not a smaller government but a better government. Your same arguments could be used to argue that a bigger gourvenement with more authority on companies could be a solution. Ultimately size is just a poor proxy for performance of a government and we need to start thinking in term of transparency and capabilities
      - conanbatt 9y ago
        > The opposite of a bad government is not a smaller government but a better government Except if you think all government is bad government. There is no reason to believe that chicago should raise taxes to prevent chicago from selling its taxpayers.
andy_ppp 9y ago
Tax authorities need to move to a rule of thumb flat tax on revenue if overall tax take isn’t high enough. It’s so unbelievable seeing someone like Tim Cooke just bare faced lie about Apple’s tax avoidance schemes.

throwaway613834 9y ago

How does the US have 27.64 Mbps average upload? Even Comcast only provides <= 20 Mbps upload...

rgbrenner 9y ago
because it comes from people running speedtest/ookla: http://www.speedtest.net/global-index http://www.speedtest.net/global-index They say 70mbit download.. Akamai says 18: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-executive-summary.pdf https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-t...

jesperlang 9y ago

What website is this? It seems to focus a lot on how Trump is doing great, how bad muslims/islam is and on how we should focus on other things than global warming ("carbon dioxide is not a harmful chemical in the traditional sense of the word. It’s actually essential for all life on earth—plants need it to live")

teraflop 9y ago
Even leaving aside the other content on the linked site, I do find it suspicious that the only source it cites for the headline is one guy promoting his own self-published book.

barsonme 9y ago

Is there a source that's not run by a self-proclaimed nationalist? https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/contact/ https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/contact/ and isn't on a spammy feeling website?

whataretensors 9y ago

I remember hearing about this a decade ago. The fact that we apparently kept paying them is a condemnation of our entire infrastructure. Likely where there's smoke there's fire. What else in our system is this broken?

cepth 9y ago

A couple critiques of the linked piece. First off, the title is somewhat misleading. See this Reddit discussion on the same piece: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7gob2w/americans_taxed_400_billion_for_fiber_optic/dqkhyms/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7gob2w/american.... It seems like the "taxes" were really fees that went straight to the telecom companies. It's not as if the government collected these taxes, and then failed to push ISPs to roll out fiber or build public fiber of its own. Secondly, this piece tries to make a number of comparisons to countries that have faster wired internet service, namely South Korea and Singapore. South Korea and Singapore have much smaller populations that are concentrated in urban areas, and are generally smaller geographically. The sheer size of the United States, combined with our propensity for sprawling suburban development, in addition to the higher throughput requirements of a much larger population, would seem to suggest that delivering widespread fiber capability will cost a lot more in the U.S. than in South Korea or Singapore. This is not even to mention the eminent domain issues and federal vs. local government conflicts that South Korea and Singapore do not face to comparable degree. Third, the "recommendation" made at the end of the piece seems to be based on a bit of wishful thinking. > "The Trump administration would be wise to make improving America’s digital infrastructure a priority. The South Korean model, market liberalizations combined with hard investments, could be a viable model." What "liberalizations" would lead to growth in fiber connectivity? For the large numbers of Americans with only one ISP choice (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-broadband-still-no-isp-choice-for-many-especially-at-higher-speeds/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...), it's not clear what incentive there would be for a competing ISP to come in, make the large investments necessary to physically lay fiber, and then begin competing with the original ISP on price and service. There is tremendous upfront financial risk, and if the thesis of market liberalization is correct, namely that competition drives prices lower and speeds higher, the ISPs laying fiber may well never see a return on their investment. Fourth, I think we should generally question whether massive national investment in fiber even makes sense at this point. Improvements like DOCSIS 3.1 allow for fiber-like speeds over traditional cable lines. At a certain point, we should ask whether gigabit speeds are really all that useful for most people.

soneil 9y ago

> In fact, in 1992, the speed of broadband, as detailed in state laws, was 45 Mbps in both directions — by 2014, all of us should have been enjoying gigabit speeds (1000 Mbps). This doesn’t sound quite right to me? That’s not how I remember 1992 at all.

tzs 9y ago

rayiner has convincingly demolished the book series upon which the article is based: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556

cannonedhamster 9y ago
To be fair, he only showed where the $200 Billion number came from and claimed that it's not an accurate way to evaluate whether or not the number. I'd be curious if he still feels that US infrastructure is really swell seeing as US speed placement appears to have dropped. I can say from my personal and work experience that U.S. connections are far and away better than large portions of the world. Peering agreements between companies are significantly saner than in some parts of the world, and the differences between wireline and wireless connectivity is pretty dramatic in terms of stability and speed. For US ISPs to be using wireless as a comparable service to broadband deployment is flat out fallacious. ISPs have done fantastic work on backbone and datacenter speed and availability, but last mile consumer connectivity just isn't worth it to them financially. No amount of regulation or deregulation will make that worthwhile. This is why municipal ownership of the last mile is most likely going to be the long term solution if the US wants to increase speed and availability for anywhere but the most densely packed areas.