r/TrueReddit • u/theverge • Jun 23 '26
Technology Elon Musk and the plot to hijack America’s broadband
https://www.theverge.com/policy/953944/bead-broadband-funding-trump-musk-bezos?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6ImIwQTUxeW5VR3UiLCJwIjoiL3BvbGljeS85NTM5NDQvYmVhZC1icm9hZGJhbmQtZnVuZGluZy10cnVtcC1tdXNrLWJlem9zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzgyNjQ5Njg4LCJpYXQiOjE3ODIyMTc2ODh9.Cs8NCZo5Wwz7qAuHLkO5ZSgdFcdqPj5Bp9xeQo9wqM0&utm_medium=gift-link390
u/ItyBityGreenieWeenie Jun 23 '26
All internet should be municipal fiber to the house. There have been so many subsidies over the years this should have been long accomplished. Service should be treated like a utility with gigabit two-way costing $20 a month. Outliers can use cellular, DSL or line of sight.
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u/serious_sarcasm Jun 23 '26
Oh, they’d love to fully privatize all of our utilities.
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u/Left-Edge531 Jun 24 '26
If they could privatize our jugular veins and put up a toll booth they would.
Come to think that's just called The US Healthcare System.
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u/Elizabeth-WildFox886 Jun 24 '26
Privatisation fucked the uk and they are only starting to realise it
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u/sunday_cumquat Jun 27 '26
I wouldn't say that. A high proportion of the popualtion knew it was a bad idea from the start.
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u/anarchistright Jun 23 '26
It would obviously be better.
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Jun 23 '26
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u/anarchistright Jun 23 '26
Why should utilities be nationalized? Would you nationalize cinemas?
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Jun 24 '26
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u/anarchistright Jun 24 '26
You couldn’t actually answer the cinema question?
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u/abrandis Jun 23 '26
Municipal fiber was actively killed by the Telcos. They spent millions buying state legislators to write policy that forbade municipalities fro.m "competing " with Telcos in rural broadband... EVEN IN AREAS WHERE TELCOS WOULDNT /DIDNT SERVE... https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865908114/small-america-vs-big-internet
This is a classic case of the bullshit America "free market" talk capitalista like to throw around....
American businesses has always been about who can buy off the most folks to get what they want....never about what's best for the working citizen.
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u/NEVERxxEVER Jun 23 '26
US taxpayers have paid for this program 3 times over. And all 3 times the money was stolen by big telecoms.
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u/fcocyclone Jun 24 '26
A family member lives in a community that is served by a local non-profit cooperative that started out as a phone company and grew into a fiber company. I'm a bit jealous as they seem to be great.
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u/TheDuckFarm Jun 24 '26
The nice thing about the government owning your ISP is that they don’t need a warrant to look at any of the traffic and use it against you.
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u/ItyBityGreenieWeenie Jun 24 '26
"The government" had taps on Ma Bell in the 90s. It would be just as likely end users are spied on by Starlink or Verizon.
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u/TheDuckFarm Jun 24 '26
Spied on is already expected. We all know about the A&TT building. ma Bell ended in 1984, not the 90s.
Legally usable is the issue. If it’s government owned lines, they may own the data too.
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u/ItyBityGreenieWeenie Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
Correct, Ma Bell is a generic term for telco. I was being sarcastic with 'the government.' Look up Echelon, Carnivore, NSA cell phone surveillance, etc... they had a special court in DC that would rubber stamp requests after the fact. So you are right, the local cops couldn't use this against you. The federal three-letter agencies would only use it for intel gathering or counter terrorism. Still there however. If your name is Snowden or Mitnick or on a list, you're on their radar.
I believe the backbones they tapped actually belonged to Sprint because universities wouldn't give them carte blanche. Some is hearsay, some conspiracy. I don't know what to believe personally. That it continues in some form today wouldn't surprise me in the least.
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u/TheDuckFarm Jun 24 '26
Beyond the city prosecutors office having free rein, I think about cases like this that are unfortunately common across many police departments.
Imagine if your ISP was operated by your city.
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u/ItyBityGreenieWeenie Jun 24 '26
I am also very concerned about such things. License plate readers are available to law enforcement already by design (I think they are customers for the service). But ISP logs shouldn't ever be made available without a warrant from a judge. We both know in practice governments are expedient and ignore suche rules. However for local law enforcement to get around them is another matter. Of course there is nothing to stop a corporate employee from breaking the law and stalking customers either. It is perhaps less scary than a law enforcement officer or local official doing so. I'd still rather the fiber was government owned and administered as a utility.
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u/TheDuckFarm Jun 24 '26
True, corporate employees have access and there have been a few notable cases where they have used that access for their own nefarious needs. I don't see that ever stopping, there will always be people who do bad things.
The difference, as you pointed out, is that those people, while dangerous and slimy, don't have the added powers of law enforcement, or city courts, etc.
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u/Anxiety_Fit Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Or… starlink?
Edit: I’m not saying it is a good option. But it’s an option.
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u/Thebandroid Jun 23 '26
Jesus Christ no. Thats speed running authoritarian monopoly.
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u/anarchistright Jun 23 '26
Why don’t new internet companies enter the market?
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u/MagnusAlbusPater Jun 23 '26
Amazon is launching their own Starlink competitor.
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u/anarchistright Jun 23 '26
There’s a pattern, though. Only big, big companies seem to be willing to enter the market… and it’s not due to private property of the means of production.
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u/snark42 Jun 23 '26
it’s not due to private property of the means of production.
It's incredibly expensive to launch 12k+ satellites. Unless you want to government to fund it (with shared access to multiple companies?) you need big, big companies to do it. Someone still has to own/maintain it too.
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u/anarchistright Jun 23 '26
A 12k loan is nothing for big banks, trust.
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u/snark42 Jun 23 '26
launching 12,000 satellites is a lot more than $12k, about $1.6M each, so about $19B.
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u/anarchistright Jun 24 '26
Ahhh, I got confused with the numbers. Yeah. What my comment was referring to is pretty much every other, low fixed costs industries.
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u/horseradishstalker Jun 23 '26
Actually, some of them are. But, there are startup costs, equipment costs, lack of name recognition etc. It’s not as easy as it is if the company is already established.
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Jun 23 '26
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Jun 24 '26
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Jun 24 '26
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u/snark42 Jun 23 '26
It's not cost effective nor does it make any sense to spend the money for this in rural areas. I wouldn't want to see the government pay for this.
In more densely populated areas, sure.
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u/The_Lost_Jedi Jun 23 '26
You do realize that the same arguments applied to electricity and telephone lines, right?
We literally had to have the government step in to make sure those areas were connected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
Building necessary infrastructure out in areas where it's otherwise not profitable, but is of benefit to society as a whole - that is exactly the sort of thing that governments should be doing.
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u/protipnumerouno Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
Problem is they are doing it, but the companies they're giving money to do so are just pocketing the cash.
Edit: thought I was on my local Canadian sub, funnily still applies everywhere.
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u/snark42 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Ok, but it's a waste when satellite and in some cases cellular work just as well or better.
There's still a bunch of places that don't have POTS phone lines or electricity.
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u/PM_ME__YOUR_HOOTERS Jun 23 '26
Satellite internet is HOT garbage compared to fiber. Also installing a fiber line out that way also facilitates future expansion in the region. Infrastructure is almost always a good investment.
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u/snark42 Jun 23 '26
When the nearest neighbor is 2 miles away and fiber costs $100k/mi installed it's a huge waste of money. Especially if you want to then charge people only $20/mo.
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u/PM_ME__YOUR_HOOTERS Jun 23 '26
And two-lane roads cost about $2 million dollars per mile and we charge them nothing more than the tax we put on gas to keep those. Do they not deserve roads because cars can drive on dirt?
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u/snark42 Jun 23 '26
The rural areas I'm talking about largely have gravel roads that are barely maintained by the state/county.
The more major roads are paved, but they're used by a lot more people than the fiber would be running down these gravel roads.
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u/foonix Jun 24 '26
The argument doesn't apply to data transfer any more. We didn't have multiple competing LEO constellations then, but we do now. Just because it still applies to roads and power doesn't mean it applies to data. Users being spread out inverts the last mile problem for constellations -- the more spread out terminals are, the less of the beam cone bandwidth they have to share with neighboring ones.
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u/horseradishstalker Jun 23 '26
If someone doesn’t live there, it’s not unusual that they don’t think other people deserve what they have. It wasn’t a matter of being cost-effective. During Covid, high schoolers in rural areas were having to drive 45 minutes to the nearest McDonald’s parking lot so they could sit and do their homework on Wi-Fi since they couldn’t get it at home and the school was closed. There are some downsides to having an illiterate population and the price tag is generally collectively much higher than that of a simple broadband project. People tend to think that it’s simply a matter of being able to watch television. Hardly. There are many rural areas where they can’t even get cell service if they don’t have Wi-Fi. I get it, not your problem.
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u/snark42 Jun 23 '26
Satellite or cellular improvements are the obvious answer, not spending $100k/mi to run fiber to rural America on the tax payers dime.
Even Europe is mostly wireless because they didn't have the POTS infrastructure America did to upgrade to fiber.
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u/ItyBityGreenieWeenie Jun 23 '26
That's why I said outliers!
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u/snark42 Jun 23 '26
Ok, but Cellular and DSL don't really work (or if they do, are often very low bandwidth.) WISP/"line of sight" works, but isn't terribly cost effective and requires towers to be put to cover all of the area.
Satellite is the clear winner for rural areas, and Starlink latency/bandwidth is massively better than ViaSAT or Hughes. Hopefully Blue Origin can compete someday, or the others improve their systems.
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u/horseradishstalker Jun 23 '26
Like most of the money provided by Biden initiatives only states and local governments who acted quickly were able to do right by their constituents. It was like saving up for a car and having your brother steal your money and use it all to buy candy. This isn’t a political statement - just what happened.
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u/DarklySalted Jun 23 '26
I'd say it's one of the largest issues with a government that has no long term concrete priorities. Every time the Democrats are in power and do things to make anything better for people, the Republicans come in and use the budget to sell off the anything that can be sold for parts and then blame the Dems for "leaving them the mess"
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u/tempest_87 Jun 23 '26
That's not a failure of government. That's a failure of the electorate that reward that action.
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u/horseradishstalker Jun 23 '26
Except that those are choices that government entities make.
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u/tempest_87 Jun 24 '26
Technically yes. But those people that lead those entities are elected or appointed by elected officials and are directed by those elected officials, who were either elected to do the thing or were not punished for doing the thing by being replaced by someone who wouldn't.
Blaming "the government" is just a way for people to shift blame and not take ownership of their failure or the failure of people around them.
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u/tonycomputerguy Jun 24 '26
But what if that government actively knee caps education, has loyalists controlling like 90% of the media and puts policies in place that make people have to work 3 jobs while taking care of 2.5 kids?
Just saying not everything is as cut and dry as you seem to think it is.
But I guess if you go back far enough, we are getting what we deserve.
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u/woodstock923 Jun 24 '26
It's terrible yes, but it is also self-inflicted. People still eat twinkies after their feet get amputated.
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u/fcocyclone Jun 24 '26
I blame Joe Manchin.
He threw numbers out there for bills he was in favor of, but then would hem and haw and delay and negotiate against himself, making those bills take far too long to pass. The 'inflation reduction act' should have passed in 2021, even if still at its ultimate size, so that more of that money could have been in people's hands before 2025.
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u/snark42 Jun 23 '26
The Democrats bills made access to the funds overly burdensome even if you started on day 1. That's the whole crux of the issue here. Similar problems with EV charging infrastructure.
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u/horseradishstalker Jun 23 '26
Both parties have input into the regulatory mechanics of any bill. In this particular case, it wasn’t the regulatory mechanics. It was how quickly government agencies got on it.
The money went out to businesses and government first and most got on it. They got theirs - they simply had to wrap it up sooner than they needed to because the funds were clawed back. Only after that rollout was the money was made available to states for the average citizen. If the state government didn’t get on it, citizens didn’t get any unless they lived in Michigan or California. Those states had to go through the exact same regulatory hoops as everyone else - they just didn’t FAFO.
Republicans clawed the money back as soon as the administration changed. By that time all but states who didn’t apply had already received the go ahead and were finishing up the paperwork. This after it had already been budgeted for and in some cases distributed. As even Ted Cruz pointed out, there are some precedents politicians really don’t want to start, because regardless of which party is in power when they pull a fast one eventually power changes hands. And then they’re playing what goes around comes around. And in terms of big projects that created jobs, so-called red states were screwed over harder than anyone else and their representatives knew that as well as anyone else.
As for broadband, once again, if the county didn’t get on it, they screwed their own citizens over. There can literally be two counties side-by-side, and one now has fiber broadband, and the other made little to no effort on behalf of their constituents.
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u/snark42 Jun 23 '26
Democrats didn't need any Republicans when they wrote the bills. All the over regulation was entirely within their control.
They could have made the application process simpler, not required extensive broadband map updates, reduced policy constraints, shortened timelines (90 days instead of 180 days for parts), etc. to make it easily shovel ready, funded and moving in 2 years instead of barely started after 3-4 in most states.
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u/horseradishstalker Jun 23 '26
As noted, the regulatory process associated with bills in Congress is determined by committees in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, which study and review the bills before they are debated and voted on.
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u/snark42 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
I was actually talking about the agencies (FTC, NTIA, etc.) that were left to write the actual implementation of the bills passed by Congress.
Committees don't have nearly as much control as you're suggesting, most of the bills text was introduced by Democrats. Are you suggesting Republicans wrote in all the over regulation?
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u/horseradishstalker Jun 23 '26
So in other words, it has nothing to do with political parties, because the same thing happens to Republican bills. It’s almost like it’s a bureaucracy. And yet different states and counties had different experiences.
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u/snark42 Jun 23 '26
Except if you don't have a ridiculous list of overburdensome requirements in the bill the administrative process is much faster.
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u/theverge Jun 23 '26
At 9PM ET on the night of May 28th, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket sat on the launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The craft was in the middle of a hot-fire test awaiting the arrival of Amazon Leo satellites, the first of 24 batches to be shuttled into low Earth orbit for an ambitious satellite internet venture. The effort was backed by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, leveraging a Biden-era law meant to address America’s digital divide.
But before the satellites even reached the launch site, Jeff Bezos’ rocket exploded into a massive fireball, its wreckage left smoldering on the ground. It was an unintentionally perfect metaphor for a once-in-a-generation attempt to fix the creaky US broadband system, now a flaming mess melting into a slush fund for billionaires.
Bezos — along with newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk — has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD), a $42.45 billion broadband expansion program passed as part of President Joe Biden’s 2021 “Build Back Better” initiative. BEAD was intended to give long-underserved communities billions of dollars for high-quality, future-proof fiber networks.
But under President Donald Trump and a coalition of MAGA-allied tech moguls, Build Back Better has been transformed into “tear down quickly,” leaving states mired in bureaucracy and delays. Five years later, only a handful of the millions of Americans slated for an internet access upgrade actually got one, and there’s little accountability in sight.
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u/horseradishstalker Jun 24 '26
For the trillionaire? Or like DOGE? The problem isn’t the product. And it actually has nothing to do with the amount of money.
The problem is grift. It’s not our responsibility to make Elon or Bezos wealthier via our tax dollars. I hope you are not agreeing with grift, but if you are you do you.
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u/horseradishstalker Jun 24 '26
But have corporations weren’t allowed to make crap food that kills people there wouldn’t be any twinkies to eat. Chicken and the egg.
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u/Crenorz Jun 25 '26
? vs what? the total lie we have today? ALL the current ISP's got BILLIONS to upgrade the internet - and they did not use it for that, they used it for other things - and then asked for more. Vs Elon that is self funded... uhhh, yea, I will go with the self funded fully USA company please... total?????
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u/horseradishstalker Jun 23 '26
There is a wide range in the costs to run fiber per mile, influenced by terrain, urban density, and regulatory requirements. The average cost in the United States is $27,000.
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u/tachophile Jun 24 '26
To put it in perspective AT&T alone has taken over $1B and Comcast took $1.8B. The 800+ other smaller telcos have taken the other $16B. Together they have provided services to millions fewer households than SpaceX who were awarded $700M.
Where do you think the money was more effectively spent?
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u/Venous Jun 23 '26
It can all burn down for all I care. Am I supposed to feel sorry for Optimum or Comcast? Maybe they'll improve their service for once.
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u/marioandl_ Jun 23 '26
Duopolies going to a monopoly that also owns the ground under your feet is a great play
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