I wish I could snark like that
Tam:
What do San Francisco, Philadelphia, Nashville, Anaheim, and Portland have in common? They all seem to believe in the importance of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Free WiFi Access.
“Free”, that is, in the sense of “a free education” or “free health care”. In other words, the taxpayers take it in the shorts, and this time you can’t even pass it off as a benefit to the poor, since the bag lady under the bridge is unlikely to be using the service to update the iTunes on her laptop.
November 11th, 2005 at 12:24 pm
The SF initiative specifically doesn’t allow taxpayer money to be used..o.k. so I’ll believe it when I see it, but apparently proposals were received that claim to use other revenue sources.
November 11th, 2005 at 12:45 pm
I go back and forth on the idea.
Sure, it annoys me that the government would be doing something the private sector is better equiped to do. However, current telecom regulations and the extremely competitive (and highly self destructive) behaviour of the telecom sector has prevented time and again building the backbone needed to compete with asian telecom sectors. So, in that regards I think it MIGHT make sense for the government to construct the backbone – but only if like Korea they then open it up to everyone with minimal regulatory oversight and allow commerce (and hence revenue) to flourish.
Its a complicated and highly competitive (not in the sense of free markets but in the sense of existing players fighting to the death to keep competitors out of the market to the point of crippling infrastructure if thats what it take) industry and a complicated problem and the more I study it and learn about it the less sure I am of what the right solution is.
November 14th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
The bag lady under the bridge is unlikely to drive on the interstate, either, yet you hardly ever hear libertarian-types complaining about freeways…
November 15th, 2005 at 5:22 am
Allow me to be the first, then.
November 15th, 2005 at 5:24 am
More specifically:
Why don’t they use those stolen tax dollars to fix the crappy services they’re already half-heartedly providing, rather than looting taking more money to screw up yet another thing that for-profits do better?
November 15th, 2005 at 4:50 pm
Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting that democratically-established taxation policies constitute “theft.” Silly me, I left my libertarian decoder ring at home.
And while the interstate highway system is certainly not without its flaws, I wouldn’t call it “crappy”; further, I defy you to show me a large-scale privately funded and maintained roadway system that even approaches that scale or quality.