FCC Claims Millions Of Americans Being “Denied” Access To Broadband Internet
In Europe access to broadband internet has, believe it or not, been declared a basic human right. Here in the United States, all but about 2% of our population has access to broadband services. But according go the FCC that’s not good enough. The agency claims that this tiny fraction of the population is being denied access to the internet (via Seton Motley):
The latest Broadband Progress Report to Congress from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveals that approximately 26 million Americans, mostly in rural communities located in every region of the country, are denied access to the jobs and economic opportunity made possible by broadband.
If you live off in the woods or out in the boonies, are you being denied access to public water, sewer and trash pickup? Or have you just chosen to live in an area where it’s not practical to provide those services?
The same applies with internet access. It’s not just practical to provide some areas of the country with broadband internet access. But the federal government is intent on spending billions subsidizing the building of that infrastructure.
Here in North Dakota, broadband internet spending was costing thousands of dollars per customer. Jobs “created or saved” through broadband spending in Colorado were costing the taxpayers over $200,000 each.
All to build hard-wired internet infrastructure out to places where few people live. And this is happening at a time when wireless technologies – internet access through cell phone networks, wide area networks and satellite – are increasingly bringing service to those areas anyway.
So what’s really going on here? I think it’s about control. The more dependent internet companies are on the government for subsidy, the more the government can manipulate the internet. It’s clear how desperate the federal government is to begin regulating the largely unregulated commerce and communication on the internet.
Getting their hooks into the gateways to the internet is a back door way to getting what they want.
It’s a put like how FDR got the government’s hooks into the electrical companies through his push for rural power. Electricity would have come to the rural communities eventually, when it was profitable and practical, but by turning it into a political issue FDR justified the government’s involvement and got his statist hooks into the emerging industry.
Tags: fcc, internet, Stimulus
