3 ms·
Nearly 100 years ago the citizens of my rural locality built a co-operative telephone company. The organization still remains owned by the customers and, as suc
by randomdata 14y ago
Nearly 100 years ago the citizens of my rural locality built a co-operative telephone company. The organization still remains owned by the customers and, as such, have to act to the interests of those customers.
The result is that the entire service area – which consists of mostly farms, and some small town areas – have had DSL connections for more than a decade and they have been working to roll out fibre to those locations for the past few years.
If the citizens are going to pool their money to build infrastructure anyway, what advantage does the government model bring over the co-operative model?
- mmagin 14y agoArguably, those should be nearly the same thing. (In a perfect world, at least.)
- eli_gottlieb 14y agoIn a rural area with a strong sense of community, a non-governmental cooperative can work pretty easily. In an area with more fighting and less community, you need government power of eminent domain to acquire the rights to intrude on people's land for infrastructural purposes.
- randomdata 14y agoGiven the battles that are heating up over wind turbines, I'm not sure rural areas have any more sense of community than anywhere else. Though perhaps things were different a century ago.