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Originally Posted by motordavid
What's "capitalism" got to do with fooked up bureaucracies,
(which is prob. redundant)?
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This is what it has to do with it....
Do you ever notice on your telephone bill (not cell phone, but landline), there is a charge that says "Federal Universal Service Fee" or on some bills it says "Universal Connectivity Fee"??
This is a government surcharge. Many decades ago back when landline telephone were first becomming popular, a problem developed.... It was not economically profitable for the telephone companies to run lines out to rural areas. The cost of doing so was higher than the few subscribers that lived in those areas would pay for the service. So in the first 30 or so years of telephone service, people in rural areas did not have telephones.
Then the government passed laws regulating the telephone companies, and saying that they must provide service to everyone. This "Federal Universal Service Fee" is a tax on all subscribers which is used to subsidize the cost of providing telephone service in rural areas -- something that would not be profitable otherwise.
So we taxpayers are paying a tax so that someone in a remote location can have telephone service. This is clearly a form of socialism. People paying extra taxes to provide a service to someone who cannot have it otherwise. That is socialism in its most simple form.
Now the same issue is happening all over again with regard to cell phone service and broadband internet service. People in rural areas do not have access to these things. It will be interesting to see if the government passes similar regulations in the future regarding these items.
My guess is they will not. Our country is much less socialist today than it was 60 years ago. If today's political climate had existed 60 years ago, there would have never been a "Federal Universial Service Fee" and those living in rural areas would still not have telephone service.
As for bandwidth, I would guess that those living in major urban areas do have a pretty high bandwidth, although obviously not as high as Japan or Korea, but perhaps as high as Canada and France. It's those living in rural areas that are still using dial-up and they are the ones who bring down the average.