Wednesday Evening Links

here are the five potential reasons U.S. Internet speeds are slower and more expensive than those in South Korea.

Countries with fast, cheap Internet connections tend to have more competition. While there isn't good data on how many broadband carriers the average consumer has access to, "I think we can infer that South Korea has more [competition in broadband] than the United States," Faris said.

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So much for that theory. They admit they have NO proof.

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The South Korean government has encouraged its citizens to get computers and to hook up to high-speed Internet connections by subsidizing the price of connections for low-income and traditionally unconnected people.

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So S.Korea subsidizes broadband with taxes - big surprise!!

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South Korea and Japan and several European countries, have experimented with or embraced infrastructure-sharing

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Shared infrastructure is good they say and S.Korea has experimented with it. But no facts on how much is shared.

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South Korea, with more than 1,200 people per square mile, is a lot denser than the United States, where 88 people live in the same amount of space
It costs less to set up Internet infrastructure in a tightly populated place filled with high-rise-apartments, such as South Korea, than it does in the United States, where rural homes can be great distances apart. Data can travel fast on copper wire, but it slows down the farther it goes. In South Korea, that's usually just from the base of an apartment building to a particular unit. In the U.S., copper wire may have to link a home with a fiber optic cable that's a mile away.

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Well duh! This is obvious. But people who compare US & S.Korea pooh pooh this fact.

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"A big difference is that Korea made a decisive move to expand Internet in the country," he said. "They said we want to be very good at connecting to the Internet. A lot of government money was thrown at it ...

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Well Korea had a plan. But that plan was for the taxpayers to pick up the cost.

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said by ThrowDemsOut:

So the US too can have real fast internet. All we have to do is move everybody in to dense apartment buildings & tax them like crazy.

BARACK H OBAMA, President of the United States; NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY and KEITH B ALEXANDER, its Director; OFFICE OF FOREIGN ASSETS CONTROL, an office of the United States Treasury, and ADAM SZUBIN, its Director; FEDERAL
BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION and ROBERT S MUELLER III, its Director, in his official and personal capacities, Defendants.

President Barack H Obama is now substituted for former President George W Bush because a suit against a government official in his or her official capacity is deemed to be against the current holder of the office.

"This created a ridiculous Catch-22 situation. As long as the government hid its illegal activities and never said who it spied on, it could spy on anyone illegally. No one could bring a lawsuit, since there was no proof that they had been impacted by the illegal spying.

Then the feds screwed up. They accidentally sent the evidence of wiretapping some lawyers for the Al-Haramain group to those lawyers. Suddenly there was evidence. But, of course, the government tried to cover it up. For a while it claimed that even though it had revealed that it had illegally spied on these lawyers, and everyone knew it, since those documents were classified, everyone had to pretend that it was still a secret and no one knew about it. This resulted in a series of positively ridiculous hoops that lawyers had to jump through to bring the case, without actually using the document.

The Federal Communications Commission will begin the long process of creating regulations out of its national broadband plan, starting with a half-dozen policy inquiries and proposed rules to be announced at its April 21 meeting.

The agency has said it would roll out more than 40 policy proposals from its plan.

That includes a proposal to reform the Universal Service Fund, a phone service subsidy. The proposal will add broadband services to the $8 billion annual fund.