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One of the things that causes disparate impact is the fact that as little as 50 years ago, my white parents bought a house in a white neighborhood that my black

One of the things that causes disparate impact is the fact that as little as 50 years ago, my white parents bought a house in a white neighborhood that my black coworker's parents were prohibited from buying by racist redlining policies. Today, in 2023, my mother can do WFH consulting in her retirement in part because she can reliably run an HD low-latency video stream, because their neighborhood has fiber and cheap, high-bandwidth service. But my coworker's parents have hugely oversubscribed cable and no fiber options and can't make a video call out because they have negligible upload. Removing the policy, even all these years later, doesn't change the fact that the policy still has a hugely disparate impact. The red lines are still there in the exact same places, it's just not on an FHA insurance map denoted by "white" or "not white", it's on a fiber coverage map and says "fiber" or "no fiber".

gottorf 3y ago
I do not dispute the past existence of actual race-based discrimination on the part of the government, but it doesn't change my argument. My broader point re: "disparate impact" is that it's virtually impossible, in this country or elsewhere (even in places that have been historically monoethnic), to not have any action, whether public or private, that impacts different subgroups within that population differently. The FCC's ruling (mentioned in the article) piggybacks off of the disparate impact clauses of the various civil rights legislation[0], which says that even when there is no intent to discriminate, any action taken by any entity that results in a difference of outcome along protected lines (whether it be race, sex, etc.) is considered to be a discriminatory action. Which, upon examination of available evidence, ends up meaning that every action taken by every entity can be considered discriminatory, since nothing in life affects every subgroup of a population in equal proportion to their composition of the population. But back to the point of internet access: I submit that it's a better solution to remove the impediments (of which there are many, in this highly-regulated sector of the economy) to some enterprising person coming along and rolling out fiber service in your coworker's neighborhood, than to order private businesses to essentially ignore economic realities on the ground. Heck, I would consider a publicly-funded ISP in LA to be a vastly lesser evil, because to routinely ignore economic realities eventually leads to famine and ruin. As I noted in another thread, you can have the USPS mail a letter for you for the price of one stamp, whether it goes from your house to your neighbor's house or from Florida all the way to Alaska. That's an example of something that explicitly ignores the underlying economic reality (that it costs way, way more to do the latter than the former) because A) the USPS is a government agency that B) has a government-granted monopoly on letters and C) serves the public good. UPS or FedEx, on the other hand, will charge you vastly different sums depending on (among other things) how far your package is going. I find ISPs to be more like UPS and FedEx than USPS. They're for the most part not government agencies and are generally not monopolies[1]. [0]: https://ballotpedia.org/Disparate_impact https://ballotpedia.org/Disparate_impact [1]: Of course, a duopoly can be as bad as a monopoly in terms of internet access. I'd be in favor of something like a public utility that owns the lines, and have competing providers serve access over those lines.

gottorf 3y ago

I do not dispute the past existence of actual race-based discrimination on the part of the government, but it doesn't change my argument. My broader point re: "disparate impact" is that it's virtually impossible, in this country or elsewhere (even in places that have been historically monoethnic), to not have any action, whether public or private, that impacts different subgroups within that population differently. The FCC's ruling (mentioned in the article) piggybacks off of the disparate impact clauses of the various civil rights legislation[0], which says that even when there is no intent to discriminate, any action taken by any entity that results in a difference of outcome along protected lines (whether it be race, sex, etc.) is considered to be a discriminatory action. Which, upon examination of available evidence, ends up meaning that every action taken by every entity can be considered discriminatory, since nothing in life affects every subgroup of a population in equal proportion to their composition of the population. But back to the point of internet access: I submit that it's a better solution to remove the impediments (of which there are many, in this highly-regulated sector of the economy) to some enterprising person coming along and rolling out fiber service in your coworker's neighborhood, than to order private businesses to essentially ignore economic realities on the ground. Heck, I would consider a publicly-funded ISP in LA to be a vastly lesser evil, because to routinely ignore economic realities eventually leads to famine and ruin. As I noted in another thread, you can have the USPS mail a letter for you for the price of one stamp, whether it goes from your house to your neighbor's house or from Florida all the way to Alaska. That's an example of something that explicitly ignores the underlying economic reality (that it costs way, way more to do the latter than the former) because A) the USPS is a government agency that B) has a government-granted monopoly on letters and C) serves the public good. UPS or FedEx, on the other hand, will charge you vastly different sums depending on (among other things) how far your package is going. I find ISPs to be more like UPS and FedEx than USPS. They're for the most part not government agencies and are generally not monopolies[1]. [0]: https://ballotpedia.org/Disparate_impact https://ballotpedia.org/Disparate_impact [1]: Of course, a duopoly can be as bad as a monopoly in terms of internet access. I'd be in favor of something like a public utility that owns the lines, and have competing providers serve access over those lines.