Posted on 07/28/2011 6:31:52 AM PDT by Halfmanhalfamazing
If you look at your phone bill, you might notice a fee tacked on for something called the Universal Service Fund. That surcharge is used to help connect underserved parts of America, mostly rural, with phone service.
Well, now the Federal Communications Commission is starting work on a plan to convert that $8 billion fund. Instead of subsidizing phone service, it would instead help provide broadband Internet to underserved areas.
And FCC chairman Julius Genachowski joins me to explain. Why don't you make your pitch, Chairman Genachowski? Why the need for change?
Mr. JULIUS GENACHOWSKI (Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission): Well, broadband, high-speed Internet, is our communications platform of the future. It's how jobs will be created, what we need to lead the world in innovation, what will attract private investment, and that's true around the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
This guy is very slick.
Let’s say the government decides to give everyone free internet service- woo hoo, there is cheering in the streets, the peasants are finally connected- OOPS, how many now will lose their jobs working for ISPs? How many call centers and billing centers will shut down? How many network technicians will lose their jobs.
Nothing is free and something is only a right if it doesn’t demand the service or production of another.
Reparations!
It makes me happy to know that we have all this free money floating around to pay for it.
Freakin idiots.
Oh, come now. You don’t think government supplies anything as efficiently as the private sector, do you?
First there’d be 1 1/2 government employees hired for every private sector employee laid off. Then innovation would come to a screeching halt, and efficiencies that otherwise would have made it to market will never surface. Thus, those employees would never be replaced by employees offering new goods and services.
Mike
Defund.
Now.
So the gubment provides Universal WiFi Service, and all of a sudden...you can’t get Free Republic to come up anymore...uhmmm, wonder how THAT happened?.
This is how AT&T gets approval for their merger with T-Mobile.....by promising to extend wireless broadband to various areas and giving some of it away for free to “the most needy.”
This is how we ended up with free mobile phones for seniors and the poor.
The reason this sort of thing happens is that the incumbent providers keep promising to extend service but never get around to actually doing it.
That’s not the least of it. All of these rules are being supported and drawn up by marxists.
That’s how we know that net neutrality is a scheme for silencing opposition on the internet.
———————So the gubment provides Universal WiFi Service, and all of a sudden...you can’t get Free Republic to come up anymore...uhmmm, wonder how THAT happened?.-———————
Exactly. Obama said we should try going to Huffington Post every now and then.
The fact that you can't make a decent profit after paying all their taxes, though, never enters their heads as the real problem.
the original idea of the break up of at&t’s monopoly was the future of broadband provided cheaply by competition.
but neither side wants to compete:
the telco’s and cable co’s are restricting use of broadband
and the socialists want to make broadband a “right”.
we need congressional foresight to return to the original vision of a competitive market.
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