Pretty sure Google Fiber doesn't have much to do with politics. Correlation does not imply causation. However, I do agree that it will be a while until NYC gets Google Fiber.
Actually Google has made it pretty clear that it does have to do with politics; specifically, how easy the local/state governments make it for them to roll out fiber. It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that red states may have a lighter regulatory/more pro-business hand.
It may be less about being "in bed" with the ISPs than the philosophical point of view that internet service is properly a private sector concern, not a governmental one.
All the "philosophical" views become rather hypocritical when those who have them receive a lot of money from monopolists who want to prevent competition. So stop the nonsense please. It's not about any philosophy. It's about money.
> This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2013-2014 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.
> The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families.
And that makes a difference how exactly? ISPs are owned and controlled by various family clans and key people there.
In the end, the result is that politicians are paid to push the agenda of existing monopolists.
If that were even remotely true, they wouldn't be enacting laws to protect the entrenched ISP monopolies. They'd be passing laws reinstating things like local loop unbundling.
It has everything to do with politics: one party is more prone to regulation than the other, and it's easier to build where there is less regulation. There's a spectrum of regulation levels in the country, and Republican areas tend towards the lower-regulation side of the spectrum.
That logic doesn't seem to work as expected. Didn't community broadband face problems because of the local overregulation backed by existing monopolists? Many of those states are Republican dominated. So it means they are perfectly fine with regulation which protects monopolists, and they oppose one which boosts competition. Google is a threat to existing monopolists too, so why aren't they opposing the effort?
You're right. A more nuanced way of putting it would be that the Republicans prefer that government interfere less with economy. To that end, they support regulation which restrains government from interfering with the economy, and are against the more-typical regulation which directly interferes with the economy.
I think this restraint has merit, but not when applied to interference with monopolies and utilities.
> more nuanced way of putting it would be that the Republicans prefer that government interfere less with economy. To that end, they support regulation which restrains government from interfering with the economy, and are against the more-typical regulation which directly interferes with the economy.
But in this case this logic isn't even correct. Since they support laws which ban competition, and that is clearly interfering with the economy. I.e. it's interfering for the benefit of monopolists, and against the benefit of their competitors and the public. I get an impression that this abstract idea of "don't interfere with the economy" is simply inconsistent. More consistently that position looks like "against competition", which equals against free market.
Community broadband is not competition, it's seizure of a market by the government, an entity that does not have to make a profit and has generally broad authority to take other people's money by force.
More ISPs is competition and more choice for the public. Having a monopoly is surely not competition. There are no two ways about it and no amount of demagoguery will change that fact.
