TScheisskopf
World News Trust
join:2005-02-13
Belvidere, NJ
 ·Sprint Broadband D..
edit:
August 22nd, @10:44AM
| I live in the most densely populated state in the US, NJ. That said, we do have rural areas, areas that do not enjoy the coverage of any broadband scheme. In the past, one could have expected that economies of scale in a state like NJ could have propelled deployment of services to the less-populated areas of the state. But no more.
And that's what is wrong. Both here in NJ and in the rest of the nation.
Increasingly, broadband is necessary for communities to be competitive on an economic basis, especially as regards the attraction of a business base and the resultant tax ratables, not to mention jobs. This is why those de facto redlined communities, in places where they do not meet the requirements of some arcane computer program that divines population densities like the reading of the entrails of a goat, are looking for ways to bring in government-supplied broadband services. They want to compete in the modern economy and they need the tools to compete. Broadband is one of those tools. When they try to compete, the incumbent broadband providers, with their far superior lobbying dollars and political connections that result from them, exert great political and legal pressure, far beyond what these municipalities can afford. This attrits them out of the picture and redlining continues.
There is something very, very wrong with this picture. It goes far beyond mere "choice". I suspect that, at least partially, the use of the word "choice" is a trope.
But situations like this have the nature of a pendulum and the nature of a pendulum is to swing. I expect that the broadband incumbents will, in the fullness of time, discover that the pendulum has stopped going their way and they will find themselves facing new legal realities. Realities like being named utilities, instead of "information services". Because they have pushed the pendulum very far in their favor and have forgotten that when it starts to swing back, it will just go farther in the other direction. |
