I heard the quote the other day during an NPR news story about expanding national internet service. The two parts I love best were the comparison to the national highways (not sure I see a defense related component here) and the talk of internet service as a Utility, like water or power. It's bad enough that government sanctioned monopolies exist in most communities in these public utilities, now they want to degrade my internet service by making it a "utility".

http://iamtheeviltwin.spaces.live.com

I work for a company that offers Internet. I don't think its right for the government to use the tax dollars we pay to subsidize a business that will compete with us. They should auction off the spectrum to the highest bidder and if companies want to build equipment and provide service in the band then let them. The only function the FCC should be playing here is coordinating frequencies so individuals don't cause each other interference.

First: What good would free internet if the one thing that you're going to the internet to find isn't available?

Second: You can't filter out porn. It's just not possible. You could stop the .xxx sites and known websites but the technology doesn't exist to stop every single potentially offensive site on the internets.

Finally: I don't have problem with a company buying the airwaves to provide internet access. That is really how the www was started. The military (and now many police departments) have a version of the internet that uses this technology. The problem is that bandwidth isn't vary large. Bandwidth is like lanes on a highway. If your cable modem is a 24 lane highway (12 lanes in each direction) than wireless internet using the AM bands would be much like one way dirt road... Good for sending and receiving text-only e-mails and that's about it... All that for only 3 times as much as it should cost, and all on our dime!

Every library, school, hell even the malls have free internet access. Its also cheap to have it at home.

McDonalds, starbucks and other places also offer free WIFI access points. They are using it as a promotion to get more people into the store. I don't get why we need to add another pile of spending for something thats already available.

Nope.

After a company wins the auction for the "public airways", all they need to do is ask the government for a bail-out on the grounds that the government plan is not feasible without taxpayer money.

I'm wondering how they can provide "free" internet access while censoring what some bureaucrat thinks is porn. Doesn't that violate the 1st amendment?

I have suffered through letting the "Free" market provide. I live near DFW; however I don't choose to live in the Metromess (not Metroplex) but in the rural areas just south. While this year I moved closer to town, I am still in the "country".

My previous residence was a bit further out. Since SBC (doing business as AT&T) has a monopoly on phone lines in the area the only hard wired internet is dial-up at a blazing 16 to 20 thousand bits per second (about 1/40th the speed of the slowest DSL)and it was constantly being taken down by rats chewing the wire, as stated by the repairman. They have told me they have no plans of deploying anything faster since we are in a "rural" area. I think that is to be translated as you bunch of drooling, half-wit rednecks don't need any decent Internet. But then the local telephone company is a monopoly and acts like it; and they will use the full force of bad law to enforce that monoploy.

The only wireless provider is pretty much useless too in some ways. When they announced that they were coming into the area, I signed up for a survey to get the service. The individual that came out to do the survey drove onto my property, stopped, and then turned around and left. Through their sales people he stated that I couldn't get it. When I sent them pictures taken from my property of the watertower that their antenna was on they finally installed it. They were more rude to my neighbor when they wouldn't put the antenna on his roof because it was "too" steep.

What is going on now with internet service is much like the electricty situation back 50 plus years ago. People who live in rural areas had powerlines running by their properties but no electricity. It was not "cost effective" to provide them with electric service. The government came up with the rural electric cooperative idea. The power companies screamed that it was unfair but would still not provide power in rural areas. The rural electric co-ops are now thriving customer owned companies that generally provide better service than the big, publicly-traded electric companies.

Maybe the FCC needs to set aside some of this spectrum and provide monies (loans) for Internet Cooperatives (even in non-rural areas) to be formed. Not fully Libertarian, anarchic free markets but a solution that doesn't force something onto companies.

Not only has the FCC started selling the airwaves, but, as for February 2009 the frequencies used by wireless microphones will be sold and no longer available for use. This means concerts, churches, football refs, No more microphones for you. I have over sixty wireless microphone I use at work...too bad. Now I need to to stop using them or spend an extra $$120,000.00 buying new mics in the new frequencies. No big deal for me. I work for the Government. I'll just ask for bail-out money.