re: #137 freetoken

Since when was “access to the ‘net” not been highly restrictive, if not monopolistic?

Utilities tend towards monopolies for reasons, some of them good reasons.

Could a community implement a fiber network as part of a community property effort, akin to public parks?

Yes, but I notice how few communities actually do this. And no, it’s not because of some evil monopoly holding an incorporated community under their thumbs.

Towns just don’t do it because, apparently, people don’t want to do it. A few small towns here or there, or a neighborhood here or there, but mostly it’s not happening.

Very, very few Americans have ever had multiple possible accesses to the internet, in the sense of true competition. Even in the old days of AOL and Compuserve the access was through your local monopolistic telephone company.

I may have sympathy for that, but I am also convinced that the “little guys” will simply morph into a few big entities (through buyouts or hostile mergers or subversion.)

Society has been down this path in many different ways.

Automobiles were initially just neat inventions, and all sorts of companies sprang up. But they coalesced (in this country) into a hand full of big corporations (yes, with gov’t help.)

Railroads were just a neat invention and started to spring up all over the place, and then started to coalesce into large and powerful mega-corps (and yes, lots of gov’t help there.)

I guess I don’t expect the “internet”, if by that we mean the actual connectivity and not the content, to be any different.

As I wrote above, if a community wanted to they could install their own public local network, pay for access then to larger global communication infrastructures, or work with other government entities to connect the local town to educational and federal backbones.

I know the guy who founded my ISP. (He’s a jerk. His jerk ex-wife has a shop around the corner. The original IT guy sorted out all the phone lines in here when I opened my shop. He’s nice, and still there.) That said, they used Qwest lines (now, whoever bought them). Hybrids have their advantages.

This doesn’t address content. I only read LGF and a very selective twitter feed. Other content sucks, AFAIK.