this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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if they are going to fight regulation this bad, maybe we just need to declare it a utility and strip the profit motive from these profits-over-humanity asssssssholes
Maybe? It is a damn utility. Just another key national resource trapped behind the claws of capitalist scum, just like medical and the like
I gave old people the benefit of the doubt before. If you're not of working age you may have missed the internet transitioning from a novelty to an essential way of life over the last 20 years. But post-Covid it should be clear to everyone how essential it is.
My mom retired from teaching but her last year was spent teaching kids remotely. In a rural area it's tough to get an internet connection that can handle a video call, and for poor families it's a luxury they can't afford. Students without a good internet connection fell way behind. Is it even possible to find a job these days without using the internet? At least one that pays above poverty wages?
It definitely should be a utility. It's yet another way the government allows private companies to extract wealth for an essential service while ISP's spend their profits lobbying the government to ban municipal community owned fiber.
Is Internet access in the US this bad? I come from a very rural area in Germany and we got upgraded from 100KBit/s to 100MBit/s about a decade ago. Not that 100MBit/s is anything to write home about.
It truly, truly, truly depends where you live.
In my neck of the woods, I can get 1.5 gigs for $85usd a month. In the same state, in my "small" home town (population 10k), you'd be lucky to find 30mbs for less than $135 a month.
If you live in town, even in a very rural area you typically going to have at least one, maybe two options for decent internet even if the cost might be absurd compared to areas with more competition. The further you stray out of town though, your options might disappear entirely leaving you with options like satellite internet or mobile hotspots.
When my mom was teaching through Covid she had at least 2 or 3 students in class (class size varying between 15-25 students) that either had no internet at home or their internet was not sufficient to handle a video call.
Actually in cities, due to government-instituted monopolies on infrastructure, it can sometimes be worse. Until recently, in my city there was only one option for wired broadband.
Can we declare Healthcare a utility?
Happened mostly everywhere else in the world. Problem is, they now try to errode that as well.
This is happening. By the people who are going to be the only ones with access to care when they're successfull
I highly recommend checking out this video on American healthcare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1TaL7OhveM
It really opened my eyes to the situation.
I don't expect Americans to have public healthcare at the federal level without states doing it on their own first.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=U1TaL7OhveM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Man, that is a such a good idea....it will never happen. Because it's a good idea.
I think there was some effort, back in like 2010, to try to get the government to go into the market like a business, and just out compete the actual cable companies. Obviously, nothing ever came of that on a national level, but there are some local governments doing it. My grandpa is the township commissioner for a little township in northern Michigan, and he's been working on getting it for his township for a while. I think they just started rolling it out recently
Been trying for twenty years. The Internet is still pretty fly by night for most people. Flash in the pan, nobody will ever use it for anything important.
Draw up the proposition and I'll sign it