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

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Please, describe your experience with prior government management of utilities.

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I don't think there's any doubt that they are inferior. It seems like electronic billing wise utilities were easily 5 years behind the times of the rest of the economy. Even now to pay some utility bills online I often have to go to a 3rd party site to pay. But has the service been reliable and met all of my needs 99% of the time? Yes.

I don't see an obvious "this is the good path this is the bad path" answer in this situation. A "fast lane" internet will not be as crippling to startups and innovators as many fear, because most startups and innovators still have to use commercial tools like Square Space and Amazon Web Services for building web sites, and if Square Space or Amazon goes up $20 per year to get their sites in the fast lane, is that really going to stop someone from creating a new web service? I don't think so. On the flip side if we go the utility model and our bandwidth is limited by reduced R&D to whatever speed we can get out of fiber optics, I think we'd be ok too. It's not like we're applying the public utility model while we're all still on dial up.