There is a great "Tech Policy Podcast" that covers this issue and why Ajit Pai made this decision. Very much worth a listen, I think he is much more reasonable and inline with HN than you might think. [1]
More specifically, are his 5 reasons for dissent on this [2]
Basically this program has NO budget so costs have spiraled "From 2008 to 2012, Lifeline spending grew from $821 million to over $2.1 billion, an increase of over 160%."
It also subsidizes way too many households instead of helping those most in need. "Roughly 42 million households are currently eligible for the Lifeline program. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that is 34% of all households in the United States. Notwithstanding the decline in economic fortunes since 2009, that is too many. The federal government should not be subsidizing broadband service for one-third of our nation’s households. If we are going to expand the program to include broadband, Lifeline should target our neediest citizens. Yet the Commission proposes nothing of the sort."
No he isn't. He thinks broadband competition in the US is "robust"[1], which is farcical on its face.
Ajit Pai is a decidedly anti-consumer, anti-competition commissioner. His job is to make sure ATT, Verizon, Comcast, et al make as much money as possible. Period.
Your comment would be much better if you dropped everything but the second sentence (and maybe the first, to orient the reader), since that's where all the substance lies.
If you don't think customers matter, you're simply a bad investor, and you won't have any upside. (It really is that simple.)
This isn't a moral statement, just that you are unlikely to have upside. If you want to benefit schools, go ahead and donate, but becoming a stakeholder in a company that hates its customers and vice versa is unlikely to serve your stated goal, in my opinion.
You are absolutely right, but I think there are ways around it that Comcast and friends have figured out. Obviously carving out territories and sticking to your territory is a big one. No competition for what many consider a necessity. Imagine if the electric company did the same thing? What are you going to do? Live without power?
it's one thing to say they'll probably survive, and another thing to completely actively invest in it. I say actively because it's not like gp poster has it in their portfolio due to some mutual fund, etc. They actively bought it as a long position!
I can't believe 3 people downvoted this :) Customers who hate your guts is not a good formula for the medium term. (Long-term, companies can change - customers like Microsoft a lot more these days.)
"Notwithstanding the decline in economic fortunes since 2009" is a rather unsubtle way of attempting to rewrite history and pin the Great Recession of 2007-2009 due to the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 on Obama. So, no, he's not as reasonable and inline with HN folks as you think.
None of this adds any support to the case that a 160% increase in costs is reasonable or expected. In fact, the data points you've presented further call this into question.
I could be wrong, but I believe the issue is not that 34% of households can't afford Internet, but that the eligibility requirements for this problem are so lax that they cover 34% of households, despite the fact that many of them can afford Internet on their own.
From the linked document: "The average annual household income of those eligible for Lifeline support is roughly $38,000. Numerous families with incomes at that level already subscribe to broadband."
I grew up in a family of 6 on 38k a year, I can guarantee that's too poor, even in the country. That was in the 80's, it must be even worse now.
At those incomes all your financial decisions are about food and housing, and hopefully getting clothing donations. Let alone trying to think about educating your kids to try and get them out.
This is a lifeline to people, and helps educate their children. We should be doing more as a society to help those at the bottom.
I did not intend to imply that my family was poor, only that we struggled with that income in suburban PA.
The reason I posted that is because I find it very difficult to believe that any family of 1 or more children on an income of 40k a year today would have a comfortable life, and affording broadband Internet would be difficult.
I was raised in similar circumstances and I wouldn't even consider it poor, let alone ''too poor''. $38k in 1985 is around $80k today. Sufficient to cover 4 kids in most rural and inland suburban parts of the US. This is Dave Ramsey's middle class, middle America audience. For these families it's not what they make, it's what they spend that determines the outcome.
He is responding to someone who claimed that 38k in the 1980s was too poor to raise a family on period, it's a tangent but you're complaining to the wrong person imo
No. I didn't get it backwards. Someone raising a family today on 38k is is roughly equivalent to somone making 16k in the 80s.
Which is exactly my point. In the 80s on 38k a year it meant that we could not afford many of the things that others had. New shoes/clothes etc. my parents luckily focused on education, and other quality of life things, rather than spending on frivolous things, like cable. I'd say cable was roughly equivalent to internet today. So that was a choice that they made to go without. And I say Internet would probably have been the same type of decisions.
So while 80k today may be equivalent to 40k from the 80s, I would say 80k for a family of 4 kids would be hard, 40k would be exponentially harder.
I think your parents may have made a conscious choice to keep cable out of the home for other, non-financial reasons (as did mine).
By the mid 1980s only about half of households had basic cable.[1] In Chicago, there were complaints about a price hike to $13/month.[2]
Housing costs are the problem. The move to dual-income households, the drop in interest rates, and the population boom caused certain real estate markets to appreciate at a level far above incomes and inflation. The coastal home my parents purchased in the early 1980s has appreciated 10x in value. A similar home in the mid-western state capital of their youth has appreciated 3x over the same period. This is why I called the scenario with 4 kids doable in some (most) parts of the country, but certainly not all.
Sorry for nitpicking, but "~half of those households earn more" would have been true if they were talking about median income, not average income.
While many of the commonly seen distributions have median==average, income usually follows a more exponential distribution with the average exceeding the median due to a "heavy tail".
A. Program based (enrolled in Medi-cal, SSI, Food stamp program. (These programs are not easy to qualify for.)
B. Income based (1-2 household: can't make more than 25,900. That includes all income, including gifts. If you have 10 family members you can make $74,900.
I don't think it's "so lax".
They credit a little under $10 bucks a month. So it's a landline, or a lousy cell phone. You still end up paying the rest of the bill. It's not free. (The cell phone providers take the subsidy hoping/praying the customer will go over their credit. "Then we can bill the lousey service!"
I can't imagine a internet provider service for that less than $10 credit. (There must be a catch?)
People complain about the free phones some poor poeople get. It's a horrid cell phone. If you qualify, get the landline, and it's only for local calls.
These days government programs know a lot about households. The Internet has stopped a lot of the fraud. People are very poor, but so many Americans believe the poor are cheating in some way? Those days are kinda over. Big brother knows everything--yea! The Rebublicans stil believe the slackers are cheating the system. Sad.
Many who make claims of poverty can be disengenuous. Income generally excludes non-cash payments from other government programs. You "make" 25,900 a year and get to keep claiming poverty after free healthcare, free housing, free food, free daycare, free internet, free bus transit, etc.
It is the way it calculated, but most of these "poor" live very good lives significantly in excess of their paper poverty. Sometimes far better lives than those making just enough to not qualify for government assistance at all.
This happens in my midwest suburb commonly. It is an unfortunate side effect, more for the middle class than for the poor.
I've been so poor I had to try out that "free healthcare" and it nearly killed me. It may be free in the sense of little or no monetary cost but if anyone has a mental image of gleaming hospitals full of doctors waiting to serve patients they are sadly mistaken. Patients are forced to trade time instead of money for their healthcare, assuming they can get it all.
When you are forced into the bottom tier of the medical system you're competing with every other patient with a complaint from constipation to gunshot wounds. These hospitals do not have unlimited resources and triage patients based on need.
The result is someone like me who had an upper respiratory infection slowly getting worse and turning into pneumonia can sit for a day or two in the emergency room waiting for a shot.
I don't know if you're ever had a full blown case of pneumonia but as someone who did and still has scarring in their lungs it's no joke. You slowly drown from the buildup in your lungs and there's nothing you can do but hope the antibiotics outrace the infection before you can no longer breathe.
Does sitting around Ben Taub Hospital in a plastic chair for more than a day sound like "living a pretty good life" to you? I assure you, it is not.
There are some folks cheating the system like those right-wing militia ranchers who “adopt” dozens of orphaned children and then make them do hard labor, while collecting state support for it.
Basically this program has NO budget so costs have spiraled "From 2008 to 2012, Lifeline spending grew from $821 million to over $2.1 billion, an increase of over 160%."
Sounds like a very successful program that many in need are benefiting from. I'm glad the USF I pay every month is being put to good use.
"High Cost Support Mechanism - provides support to certain qualifying telephone companies that serve high cost areas, thereby making phone service affordable for the residents of these regions. "
So - right into the hands of the telecom companies.
Which is precisely why they (and techfreedom!) lobbied to kill Lifeline. It cuts into the money they get from USF.
Where they take it to claim they need it to serve rural areas, while simultaneously, wait for it, lobbying states and others to pass laws banning those municipalities from serving themselves. Because then they'd be free of this crap. Meanwhile, strangely, rural broadband penetration and speed still sucks for real, and the telecoms (and again, techfreedom!) strongly oppose things like "defining broadband as 10mbps" or anything that would demonstrate this.
Additionally, the dollars not going to subsidize lifeline go back to them double, because they also get the money from the higher telephone bills. Kind of a neat racket, if you can get it.
In case you want to argue that there are other programs that are getting the money anyway, the one i cited gets billions in funding given to phone companies.
is there such a thing as neutral on this? you're either for or against net neutrality. the only neutral people are those people who are not involved/don't care. and I don't really care to hear from those people.
also the universal service fund is paid for by you and me. the rate we pay is calculated based on what they need to spend and not vice versa. so if we don't pay for 1/3rd of us households we will pay less tax and the fund will be smaller
"is there such a thing as neutral on this? you're either for or against net neutrality. the only neutral people are those people who are not involved/don't care. and I don't really care to hear from those people.
"
You kind of answered your own question. There is such a thing as neutral on this, you just don't like to hear from them :)
Actually, i'm pretty neutral, surprisingly, and i don't really care that much, so i'd fall into your latter category. I only commented because of how much bs the original comment was.
Personally, i don't care mainly because neither side actually gives a crap about me. Only their bottom line. That isn't going to change anytime soon. It's certainly not going to change while the FCC is literally appointed by two parties.
"also the universal service fund is paid for by you and me. the rate we pay is calculated based on what they need to spend and not vice versa. so if we don't pay for 1/3rd of us households we will pay less tax and the fund will be smaller"
This isn't quite true due to how the forecasting is done, but sure, it's lose enough
But we could also stop paying the billions to the telecoms and instead, pay for 1/3rd of the households, for the same price.
:)
But you are also saying that 1/3rd of households fall into this category:
"Establishes a National Eligibility Verifier to verify eligible Lifeline subscribers. Eligibility will be based on participation in SNAP, Medicaid, SSI, Federal Public Housing Assistance, the Veterans *Pension benefit program, current Tribal qualifying programs, or those who can demonstrate income of less than 135 percent of the federal poverty guidelines."
If 34% of america falls into that category, then we pretty much better do something anyway!
> is there such a thing as neutral on this? you're either for or against net neutrality. the only neutral people are those people who are not involved/don't care.
You could say that about anything -- anyone who cares about something has an opinion on it.
What matters isn't a lack of interest, it's objectivity, which is what you apply to each side's argument to figure out who is wrong.
And notice that really all of the arguments against network neutrality take the form "if you don't let ISPs leverage their wire monopoly to monopolize over-the-top services too then they won't upgrade the wires."
And we know how to prevent that from happening. Keep network neutrality, and authorize a bond issue to fund municipal fiber in any location where the incumbent doesn't offer high speed service within a fixed amount of time.
That makes the truth or falsity of their argument irrelevant -- if it's false then they'll make the upgrades anyway, if it's true then we'll build municipal networks, and in either case the result is fast neutral networks.
Their way is to destroy over-the-top competition and then in many cases they still won't upgrade.
I'm neutral on net neutrality - I think legislating it is just treating the symptom rather than the real problem - a lack of competition. I live outside the US and in the places I've lived, I've never once worried about net neutrality since I can trivially change between many providers. I'd prefer they target the actual problem of local infrastructure monopolies rather than patching the symptoms, but I guess doing what they can is better than nothing...
But even if it's true, that's not super constructive, and the readership benefits more from an argument against gp's position. Please don't do this, hn isn't Reddit. Still, have an upvote.
This is not surprising at all. Our govt is now very firmly anti-consumer, anti-poor/middle class, anti-public service, and things will only get worse.
Meanwhile the rest of the world gets free public health, close to free Internet access, open research and actual science, while we increase spending on an already ludicrous and nonsensical defense budget justified by imaginary threats.
(We need to be careful with this next infant mortality stat. The US has stricter reporting)
> While the USA outspent the UK on healthcare (£6,311 and £2,777 per person respectively) in 2014, average life expectancy at birth in the USA was 78.8, compared with 81.4 in the UK.
> Despite spending, by far, the largest amount on healthcare, the USA was among the 10 OECD countries with the lowest life expectancy.
Okay, I just want to get clarity. Is there anyone on here that thinks that universal high speed broadband that's affordable to every American isn't going to be good for everyone long term? Increased opportunity, access to online resources, jobs, training, education, etc.
Because we can debate HOW to do that effectively, if subsidies are effective or just increase costs overall, if we agree on the what. But if we don't agree that universal high speed broadband internet is a good thing, then talking about the How to do that is farcical at best.
I think there is a lot of latte liberal projection around this issue. They want to bring fiber to every poor person, ignoring the fact that a huge percentage of them don't even have computers. What would be much more useful is subsidizing smart phone access for poor people (because that's where computing is headed).
Also, the "how" is really important. Democrats always want to pay for these programs with highly distortionary targeted taxes and cross subsidies instead of general tax revenue. When you target an industry for extra taxes, you disincentivize it. That's why we tax cigarettes and propose to tax sugary drinks. Imagine putting a 16-18% additional tax (the current USF rate) on all cell phones to help pay for cell phones for poor people. That would make cell phones more expensive, reduce cell phone sales and industry revenue and make the industry less of a desirable place to invest.
And the distortionary effect hurts consumers too. For example, Baltimore requires any would-be fiber provider to subsidize access to poor neighborhoods (by mandating providers build into neighborhoods where only a few subscribers will share in the cost of the node). That tanks the economic case for fiber in Baltimore, and as a result nobody gets fiber. And Baltimore is broke, so municipal fiber isn't an option either.
I am not familiar enough with the history of paying for infrastructure by taxes to comment, except to say that sin taxes seem to be more likely to pass then a general tax increase. That said, I think relatively small fees and taxes assessed on items where demand is inelastic probably work fine to promote investment and growth, especially if they were provided directly to municipalities for high speed rollouts and state and federal restrictions were reduced on municipal broadband organisations.
Not sure about Baltimore either, though I wonder if it follows the pattern I've seen in a few other American cities where there is a large urban center surrounded by smaller wealthier townships/suburbs who's residents take advantage of the city as a resource by aren't part of the tax base. Maybe the Balitmore Broadband Coalition will comment though.
The FCC under Pai could start by starting to support local municipal broadband efforts. That wouldn't solve the problem, but it would be a start.
This wouldn't get anywhere in the US in the current climate, but I think it's time for public broadband ISPs to start being created/funded at a national level.
My personal dream is to see something like this being undertaken through the auspices of the USPS. The handwringing over the USPS's relevance in the age of the internet, when there's such lack of competition in ISPs, seems short-sighted to me. I think the original founders would have supported broadband being offered publicly through federal programs, especially given that the internet was a publicly developed product; the Postal Clause in the US Constitution arguably was intended to address this issue, as there's no way constitutional authors could have anticipated the internet. So, when the constitution enables congress "to establish post offices and post roads," I think public ISPs are what they had in mind. It seems natural for me that the USPS would become a point of development for public ISPs.
I love seeing small private ISPs--there's some in our area--but, at least when I've seen them, they often seem to be holdovers from anomalous circumstances during the initial boom of the internet. They started when it was possible to compete, and have maintained a foothold by doing things well, but haven't been able to expand.
I agree it's good, but I pay $30 per month (10% of my family cell phone bill) to pay for someone else's internet and other government programs. That's too much. $3 would be OK. So, I agree with the new FCC head lowering the budget of this program.
> Is there anyone on here that thinks that universal high speed broadband that's affordable to every American isn't going to be good for everyone long term? Increased opportunity, access to online resources, jobs, training, education, etc.
I do. Internet, day by day is becoming a channel to deliver more and more targeted ads.
I think the free internet provision is driven by this need, and not out of a honest urge to "empower" the poor. So in other words, if you give free internet to poor who is uninitiated, you are paving way for their oppression and exploitation....
Here is a suggestion because this problem has festered for decades and is going to get persistently worse and poison any meaningful and informed discussion in the public sphere.
Issues are being hijacked by funded groups pushing specific corporate interests and agendas masquerading as operating in the public interest.
2 issues need to be addressed urgently. And study, paper or public statements in the media from such groups should explicitly mention details on their formation, their employees, day-to-day organizational funding and all other funding. Anyone being paid to say something should declare they are being paid to say that.
Names like 'techfreedom', 'netfreedom' and other 'orwellian' names cannot be used unless they are a verified public service organization with a verifiable source of public or community funds with no corporate funding. Anything claiming to represent the public interest should do exactly that and cannot be a deceptive hijack of their interests. If funding dries up there will be no shills.
Instead, they check if you are already on the SNAP supplemental food program. If so, you get internet access for either $5 (up to 3mb/sec) or $10 (up to 10mb/sec) a month.
I would think that those prices would make it affordable well below the $38k/year figure.
Of course, not everyone has access to this one ISP. I wonder if others have similar non-Lifeline subsidized programs.
ATT/Verizon/Comcast: Nice startup ya got there... be a shame if anything happened to your packets wink.
That is the future without net neutrality. The large ISPs will charge content providers. It will start slowly and only affect the largest services (like Netflix) but when they need to juice the quarterly numbers they'll start working their way down the list. Because we don't have competition in this country they will just start severely degrading traffic from anyone they want to make pay.
Google or facebook could easily extract a $1 or more a month from any ISP. Start with cell providers where there's choice. If ISP doesn't pay, put up a page with the ISPs support number with a message that the ISP is preventing the user from seeing the page and to contact the ISP. You see this strategy employed on cable all the time.
Have you ever rented a VPS, Colo space, or served up content from a cloud service? Practically every service already charges for outbound data. The idea that somehow net neutrality will lead to an increase in those charges seems unlikely to me.
If you have an ASN in North America you can get settlement free peering with most networks. That means all you pay for is the hardware/power cost to transport your content. Usually this is fairly unbalanced, and providers will compensate eachother (reach a settlement) if data is too skewed in one direction, almost always in the datacenter's favor (as ISPs are really upstream light).
Comcast, Verizon and others have recently tried to turn this on its head by witholding peering upgrades to Netflix, who wasn't even charging them a dime for all this data that their customers requested! This is not net neutrality, and performance degradations like this made Comcast uncompetitive in my neck of the woods since I have Fiber available by rare happenstance. That being said, my fiber provider (Centurylink) has even worse peering with Comcast, such that loading xfinity.net is a chore on gigabit fiber, let alone the Xfinity Go app. These performance issues caused me to cancel my TV service with them and get a different provider that worked better on my kids tablets, and so long as providers play games to throttle eachother, stories like this will be common.
Except most people are conditioned to pay for content on cable. Not so the internet. It will be interesting to see how many people would pay extra to their ISP to access Facebook.
You assume they will be charged extra by the ISP, or more correctly that they will know about it.
It'll probably end up like most people's cable bill: a large block of charges that are mostly not understood by most people.
Also keep in mind that most services don't actually want to charge the ISPs for access to their content, they just want access. Facebook doesn't want to charge your ISP to reach you reliably, nor does Netflix, they just want to be able to do it.
> You assume they will be charged extra by the ISP
Given that ISPs aren't charities, yes - the cost will be passed on. And the first time a major ISP agents in a dispute about the charges and access is blocked, everyone will know - look at the various ESPN/cable/directv disputes over the years.
The author of this story flatly ignores the fact that the Lifeline program -- by law -- was never meant to subsidize broadband. It was VERY explicitly intended to subsidize only basic telephone service. Read the law.
If Congress wants there to be a broadband subsidy for the poor, it needs to specifically authorize one. The current law simply does not provide for it, and the FCC needs to obey the law.
There was a pilot project in 2015 for broadband subsidization. From what I remember, it went well and they were going to expand the program to cover it, but I haven't heard anything about it since.
As the owner of a small ISP, I'd like to figure out a way to provide to service to everyone regardless of their income. Internet access is critical at this point for even the most basic societal functions.
> Internet access is critical at this point for even the most basic societal functions
No, it isn't. I'm at a tipping point of canceling my Comcast cable/internet because I don't think it's worth $80/month. 90% of what I do online at home is for entertainment. And I would guess that is the same for most households that don't have a tech worker. (I am a tech worker, but I've finally trained myself to not take work home).
Really the only reason I keep it is because I don't want to deal with griping from the kids.
Have you tried applying for jobs lately? Ok, so you can use the internet at a library. But you can't afford a car, so now you need to take the bus across town, with your the kids in tow...
I would not want to apply to anything via a smart phone. While you may get away with 3g and a hotspot for getting through critical online activities like job applications, my experience has been that mobile carriers will charge for the ability to hotspot if they can. Not a solid option for the poor. A better option would be something like Juno/NetZero with N hours free per month, but with speeds that can actually handle today's bloated websites.
Until you realize that the pre-paid phone service doesn't exactly work well for that and is rather expensive, and your refurbished phone doesn't work too well with modern websites.
I should also mention that not everywhere has access to a public library that is free to use. I lived next to one of those districts - the next township (and town) over didn't have one. Since they didn't pay taxes into the library, they had to pay a yearly fee. Only pre-school children were exempt.
How about simple things like finding a phone number for a business? Or a map and directions to an address?
Phone books used to be the primary source of that information, but they are getting thinner and thinner as the years go on. Not to mention it's only updated once a year.
Internet is replacing telephone for necessary basic communication.
Obviously it was explicitly tailored to telephones when it was passed over 30 years ago. That doesn't mean that reworking the program under the existing law is automatically a bad idea.
I'm probably reading more than I should into "under existing law", if you mean "change the meaning/interpretation of the words in the existing law" then ya, that's a bad idea.
This is correct. There are rural programs like CAF to subsidize the construction of internet connections in rural communities. I'm not sure if anything exists (or needs to) for the urban poor.
No I'm indifferent because networks to urban poor communities already exist. It's much cheaper for a provider to build out inside of a city than out to a town in the middle of nowhere.
Rather than assuming motives you should assess the actual cost/benefit.
38. The principles listed in section 254 of the Act make clear that deployment of, and access to, telecommunications and information services are important components of a robust and successful federal universal service program, including the directive to address low-income needs.86 In section 254[2], Congress expressly recognized the importance of ensuring that low-income consumers “have access to telecommunications and information services, including . . . advanced telecommunications and information services” and that universal service is an “evolving level of telecommunications service.”87
...
41. Our approach is also supported by section 254(c)(1)(A). Under that provision, the Commission considers whether a given supported service is “essential to education, public health, or public safety.”97 We explain above the importance of BIAS to education and healthcare, among other things, along with the need for discounts in order to enable low-income consumers to realize those benefits.98 We therefore conclude that BIAS is essential for education and public health for low-income
Americans.
42. Section 254(c)(1)(B) directs the Commission to consider whether the service at issue has “through the operation of market choices by customers, been subscribed to by a substantial majority of residential customers.”99
footnote 92. ... Even before that, however, during the time the Commission had classified BIAS as generally an information service, it recognized the possibility of broadband Internet access transmission being offered on a common carrier basis as a telecommunications service. See, e.g., Appropriate Regulatory Treatment For Broadband Access to the Internet Over Wireless Networks, Declaratory Ruling, 22 FCC Rcd 5901, 5913-14, para. 33 (2007);[3]
> (j) Lifeline assistance
Nothing in this section shall affect the collection, distribution, or administration of the Lifeline Assistance Program provided for by the Commission under regulations set forth in section 69.117 of title 47, Code of Federal Regulations, and other related sections of such title.
What makes it relevant to the discussion, then?
With Chevron deference (soon?) gone, perhaps courts will actually adjudicate whether this interpretation is within the framework of the law.
In the 2016 Lifeline Modernization Order, the Commission established a framework for the Bureau to designate providers as LBPs, eligible to receive Lifeline reimbursement for qualifying broadband Internet access service (BIAS) provided to eligible low-income consumers.
I just found it somewhat ironic that the photo used to illustrate "internet for the poor" was a top of the line Macbook Pro..
Making it easier for everyone to access the Internet should definitely be a priority though. I'm especially thinking about educational benefits for kids in poor families.
Ya know, it's interesting to me how many people on HN suddenly have knowledge of esoteric telecom laws (which, if you look at past telecom discussions, this didn't happen), and just happen to have handy links and quotes and such less than 30 minutes after this was posted to HN at all.
I'm sure everyone stopped and took the time to read up on strange corners of telecom law just in case this came up, so we could have a vigorous intellectual discussion.
No need to ascribe to astroturfing that which is likely just someone regurgitating talk radio propaganda. I find it prohibitively unlikely that your siblings have any esoteric knowledge of telecom laws. One says "read the law", I did and it flatly contradicted his other claims.
This is a very peculiar tone to use in describing a detail-oriented fact-based discussion. I didn't know _anything_, if the other comments didn't help contextualize this I'd not get much value from the story at all.
If you feel like there's astroturfing abuse going on on HN, we'd appreciate links at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. It's hard to run across a comment like this in a large thread and have any idea what you're specifically referring to.
It's also a breach of HN's civility rule to insinuate astroturfing by commenters you disagree with—that trope is far more often (probably a hundred times more often) a below-the-belt rhetorical move than it is an accurate assessment of others' behavior. Though the latter does happen.
Or another interpretation is that a tech news site like HN has many people who regularly and closely follow policy and regulatory developments in Telecom, cable and the FCC.
That's certainly another possibility, though it seems some of them are either totally brand new (IE < 12 hours) , or been around forever and never posted in any of those types of discussions previously, but suddenly are first to comment on this one with, like i said, very well prepared comments and quotes and links to things from lobbying organizations that strongly support the policy position taken here.
I feel like i'm allowed to find that a little odd.
But yeah, you are right, it could be that they just decided, this second, this is the place they wanted to jump in first.
I agree on the general feeling. On one hand, I don't have any particular reason to think that these folks are shills. On the other hand, rayiner's classic product line "Here's why Your Biases and Suppositions about Telecom Policy are Ill-informed Garbage" has proven perfectly suitable, so why take a chance on Brand X?
Admittedly I did not look at any profile information. That is certainly very odd I agree. This was not at all how I interpreted your original post. Maybe inform the moderator? If this is true it would certainly be a disturbing development.
Haha, nope I'm just a normal person who listens to that podcast on the way to work and did some internet searching to dig up his dissent. Maybe I need a more popular hobby? I feel like more of us should be reading the background information instead of ad hominem accusations of astroturfing.
First, its an ad hominem attack on credibility which while sometimes useful does not refute the central points that Pai made. "If there's something wrong with the senator's argument, you should say what it is; and if there isn't, what difference does it make that he's a senator?"[1]
Second, I have no clue who funds them or why.
Third, they really do have a great podcast about the intersection of technology and policy (Uber, AirBnb, self driving cars). Specifically the one on bringing back supersonic airplanes is really cool. [2]
"First, its an ad hominem attack on credibility which while sometimes useful does not refute the central points that Pai made."
First, your messaging on this is confused.
Since how is it both ad-hominem and "sometimes useful". By definition, ad-hominem is not useful. So it's one or the other.
Second, I believe i directly refuted each one, actually. We should in fact, be subsidizing 1/3rd of the households broadband if that's what it takes to get broadband for the categories of people i listed. Especially when Pai's alternative is "encourage investment", aka give AT&T or whoever another 100 million to do nothing with. He doesn't actually give a real plan, just a magic thought that we'll somehow "encourage investment", ignoring that literally none of these companies want to be investing.
Heck, they even say that in their investor filings, which he apparently doesn't bother to read. Nowhere do they say "hey, we really want to provide rural broadband, but are held back by regulation". Instead, they said "We don't think rural broadband is worth it for us, but we want to make sure no one else gets a foothold, so we are going to do what we can stop them from doing it any other way than paying us high prices".
Don't worry though, i'm sure magically, his "investment encouragement" will change the literal written down plans and presentations of the large telecoms.
Also, it doesn't seem to apply to municipalities, since he's strongly against any of these rural communities being self-supporting by starting their own rural networks. How strange that is. you think he'd be all for it, since it means the government doesn't subsidize them anymore. That's what he said he wants! Apparently people investing is not okay, but companies, that's awesome!
It's also strange techfreedom don't seem supportive of this, for an organization dedicated to "tech freedom", it apparently doesn't mean for people.
Meanwhile, Pai lives in a mythical world where they are desperately trying to provide large scale broadband at low prices, and sadly stymied at every turn simply that doesn't exist.
But really, he's not an idiot. He knows this already. He's not even really that malicious. He just wants something he can do that is business friendly so he can declare victory and go be a million dollar telecom lobbyist like all the others. I just wish he didn't play the game along the way. Because that's what would make me really respect him.
But hey, you can classify my argument however you want, because i already knew i wasn't going to convince you.
More specifically, are his 5 reasons for dissent on this [2]
Basically this program has NO budget so costs have spiraled "From 2008 to 2012, Lifeline spending grew from $821 million to over $2.1 billion, an increase of over 160%."
It also subsidizes way too many households instead of helping those most in need. "Roughly 42 million households are currently eligible for the Lifeline program. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that is 34% of all households in the United States. Notwithstanding the decline in economic fortunes since 2009, that is too many. The federal government should not be subsidizing broadband service for one-third of our nation’s households. If we are going to expand the program to include broadband, Lifeline should target our neediest citizens. Yet the Commission proposes nothing of the sort."
[1]http://podcast.techfreedom.org/e/153-trump-picks-ajit-pai-fo... [2]https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-71A5.pd...