ISPs tell the FCC that poor people don’t deserve fast internet speeds. It wouldn’t be fair on these corporations otherwise.
In a letter [PDF] recording a meeting between the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) and the legal advisors to two FCC commissioners, the industry group “emphasized that the Commission’s goals would be better served by directing support to areas that lack any service at all and those that have access only below 10/1 Mbps.”
I’m continually amazed at the human capacity to be giant d*cks to each other. The amount of hatred leveled at poor people in this country is also a bit scary.
Check It Out: ISPs Say That Poor People Don’t Deserve Fast Internet Speeds
Disagree with this assessment. If you decide to open up a hotdog stand and you do it in the middle of the city because there are a lot of customers, and 3 customers 200 miles away “demand” you open a shop there, which cannot be justified, it’s not evil. It’s just good business.
Many of these ISPs are small businesses.
Now, if we get to common carriers. Basically large govt common carriers/monopoly owners, I think it’s a reasonable quid pro quo in exchange for their monopoly status to support areas where they will lose money.
Here’s the thing. Reasonable and good people can disagree. Unless you’re very religious. I guess when it breaks one of your religious beliefs, then the other people must be evil.
Andrew:
Vilification, disparagement and demonstrable disrespect towards the poor is not new, nor is it geographically constrained. This is practically universal, with rare and notable exceptions. In fact, I can think of no country in which I’ve ever lived or visited where this was not the case. Indeed, if often is ascribed to moral failure, karma, fate, or to other uncontrollable forces (hostile foreign powers that made us do it).
While I am a proponent of a free market, having experienced its opposite more often than I care to recount, it is equally apparent that a measure of government regulation is necessary to protect the poor, politically weak or disenfranchised and otherwise vulnerable. And in representative democracies, this is why voting matters.
By and large, most people have few choices in which ISP they have. (Mine are AT&T and Time Warner, which are trying to merge.) That makes them near monopolies. When AT&T was THE phone company, it was required to wire the whole country and to charge the same rates regardless of local. This did mean that cities were subsidizing rural areas, but without that rural areas would have been without telephones until cellular arrived. I think it should be a priority to make sure high speed internet reaches as much of the country as currently has telephone service. I’d say the whole country but there may be places that don’t want it.
Expecting corporations to behave ethically is – at best – naive. That’s why we’re so fortunate to have the government to oversee them and prevent them from … oh wait, in the United States we now have a government that SUPPORTS them in their unethical deeds.
Ajit Pai can go straight to you know where without passing go and without collecting $200 … especially since he’s already lining his pockets with kickbacks from the ISPs.
And why are we surprised. Poor people and Internet access? We’ve got an administration that doesn’t believe that poor people deserve health care. That leaves their own citizens to die by the thousands because they’re not rich white people.
We’ve got much bigger problems than internet access…
Old UNIX Guy