re: Obama's plan to save the internet draws bold reactions

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On the other hand, regulating broadband as a public utility will likely lead to less investment and innovation by the telco industry and probably be bad for the consumer.

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This is the biggest straw man argument in the book. Less investment and innovation?! ISPs have gotten by with the bare minimum investment over the past 20 years, even though they took over $200 Billion in tax payer money for infrastructure upgrades that they never completed. As for innovation. What the frick are they innovating? Google had to jump into the game to get them to do ANYTHING, and even still, the ISPs doing the bare minimum to compete against them.

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AT&T tried to steal some of Google's thunder earlier this year when it announced its "intent" to build out gigabit internet just hours after Google revealed its high-speed broadband service would come to Austin. Now AT&T is trying to one-up Google by getting out of the gate first at the expense of less-than-gigabit speeds. (Google Fiber won't reach its first homes until the middle of 2014.)

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Innovation is not needed right now as we have the tech to put 1+ Gbps service into 90% of homes in America. The technology is already there.

If you look at the history of telecommunications in the US in great detail with regards to the cable and telephone companies, you will see they do this over and over again.

Whenever they need a government concession or tax break, they claim if they don't get it they will not provide universal service. When they want to keep their monopolies and destroy competitors, they claim that competition would weaken them and make universal service impossible. When they Argue against laws enabling technologies that threaten their revenue stream, they actually state that anything that reduces the amount of money they take in hurts their company, making it impossible for them to deliver universal service.

Telecom companies in the US are pretty much a case study in corporations corrupting the government, lying to the public, and getting away with it.