Railroads and fiber optic cable have very similar economic characteristics.

Fundamentally, Socialism is any kind of coerced collective action. That would be most of what a government does. Technically Socialism used to have the replacement of markets with government planning, but even socialists have gotten over that idea. Have you?

Look up the history of the Great Northern Railroad. It was the only transcon that didn’t get land grants, and NOT coincidentally, the only one which never went bankrupt.

Railroads built multiple gauges for good reasons, and when the standard gauge overcame those reasons, they voluntarily regauged, like the Erie (broad gauge), or the Herkimer, Newport and Poland Railroad (narrow gauge).

They also had a clever system for exchanging the trucks at a transition between narrow and standard gauge explicitly so that freight and passengers didn’t have to “change trains”.

You *do* pay tolls at every turn on the U.S. highway system, through federal gas taxes. Drive a mile, use up some gas, pay some tax.

How do we know that the change that the government wants is desirable? Because people voted for it? It costs nothing to vote to spend other people’s money. The way that you find out if a “change that is too big” is when private industry pays for it because it expects customers to desire it more than that. Short of that, you cannot conclude that government is doing the right thing.

If you want rural broadband, build it yourself. You have a fantastic lifestyle, with quiet, clean air, cheap land, big skies, and low crime. Don’t come whinging to us about your need for bandwidth on TOP of those benefits. To get a 3pt hitch cable plow, put it behind a big tractor, and plow down some fiber. Stop asking someone else to pay for something that you are unwilling to buy.

Wow. Not a single fact correct. Sucks to be you, doesn’t it?

The transcontinental railroad wouldn’t exist without the land grants and finance guarantees from the government. We’d still be changing trains where the gauge changed.

You’d also not have the US highway system without massive support from the Feds. Your car wouldn’t have many places to go without paying tolls at every turn.

Government is there to push change that is too big for private industry. Just like rural electrification, we need rural broadband.

Around here, County A is hell to get fiber laid. They have fees, and they fight it at every step….. and then they get tax revenue off that fiber, every year once it’s in the ground. Makes no sense. County B is all about laying fiber. They invite everyone to do it for basically zero cost (other than the recurring tax revenue).

Government needs to say “Ok, everyone can lay fiber.” and “We won’t hold you to the telecom laws if you go lay fiber in to someone else’s territory.”

Over the weekend President-elect Barack Obama scrubbed Change.gov, his transition Web site, deleting most of what had been a massive agenda copied directly from his campaign Web site.

Why dont you submit that here – http://change.gov/

To do this, we should encourage Internet access for all Americans. One very low cost way is to help encourage a culture that shares this resource. The recent FCC rulings concerning “White Space” or unused radio channels are a great step forward. We should also encourage the FCC and others to allow communities that wish to build their own Internet infrastructure, instead of forcing them to wait for one of the incumbent monopoly providers to decide it’s worthwhile.

The Internet was meant to be shared, anything you can do to help would be greatly appreciated.