Lessig: 'Why Your Broadband Sucks' > Yes and no.

Yes and no.

Ah, information instead of cynical, libertarian cant. It's like a fresh breeze from a faraway land. You are a better man or woman than 99.9% of the people in this country.

Unfortunately, The Man with No Name, your hopeful point about "all these companies are doing in the end is throwing fuel on the fire of telco distrust" is not likely true, as you can see by looking at most of the other posts on this issue.

No, all that happens in the US when people get screwed again is that we all distrust the "govurmint." That's because in the US, we have about four PREFAB discourses that tell us tools (1)to be quiet about the crap going up all around us, (2) to sit on our asses politically, (3) work ourselves to death, and (4) obey the clergy. For instance, the upshot of a lot of the posts is: "Politicians take our money and buy BMWs and then them rich people buy whatever they want and there's nothing we can do about it, ever (because that would require about 20 people to simultaneously stop playing Halo II for a while)."

Has anyone around here ever noticed that other places in the world have publicly-provided or publicaly-subsidized and regulated (take Sweden for instance) broadband? If government itself were so inevitable, why are we always the ones with a government that gives everything away to the owners?

We do it because we're a land of radically modest needs. We're satisfied with a strict diet of big trucks, ranching subsidies, local sports teams, prescription drugs, white fraternities, and the touching promise that if we just hang in there, pumping away, we will be in the bosom of the Collective Invisible Friend when we're dead...while our neighbors whom we've competed with our whole lives will be tortured unmercifully in death. That's what makes us happy, and that's why we barely count as human. And why trusts rule in the US.

wow! thoughtful post, I actually put down the controller long enough to read it!

the problem is that you cite the "owners" as being someone other than us. as I recall, "we the people" doesn't include Verizon or BellSouth.

Muni broadband makes sense. You whiners who complain about tax dollars just don't understand the issue, at all. Bond issues and service fees for the service itself mean Joe Sixpack doesn't have to worry if he doesn't want to use it.

The fact that companies are standing in the way of the local governments from helping out their citizens and employers should be enough to piss anyone off. I can only imagine the whohash flung here if the fire departments couldn't serve your homes because some law passed by the Magic Elf Fire Company in Podunkum, Miss. prevented local fire departments from being created. NOBODY would stand for that. Oh I hear ya-broadband isn't as important as fire departments...but why shouldn't local gov'ts help if they can? Just because SBC said so?

Yup, well put, much better analogy than I would've come up with

I just find it sickening that the telcos and cable co's would rather spend money lobbying against people being able to help themselves rather than spending it helping the people in the first place. They must be deathly afraid of what kind of a future that ethernet switched fiber holds.