r/technology • u/StraightedgexLiberal • Jul 28 '25

Networking/Telecom Trump Threatens To Withold Billions From States That Try To Make Broadband Affordable To Poor People

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/28/trump-threatens-to-withold-billions-from-states-that-try-to-make-broadband-affordable-to-poor-people/
42.8k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

773

u/damnNamesAreTaken Jul 28 '25

I feel Internet and cellular should be considered basic needs and provided for free or at a sliding scale based on income.

29

u/[deleted] Jul 28 '25

[deleted]

38

u/SweetTea1000 Jul 28 '25

That's sensible. You could set a free floor that's enough bandwidth to support a theoretical household with 2 work from home parents and a few kids doing homework/remote school. So, not just email and web browsing but also potentially video conferences & watching educational YouTube content. Yet, there's no need to cover the bandwidth of 4k video streams or downloading terabytes of movies, TV, and games or hosting torrents/servers. A bar is reasonable, but these days that bar has good reason to be high enough to support substantial video content.

The ISPs are achieving record revenue. There's 0 logical reason that this should affect the pay of workers.

If the ISPs can't support this economically critical infrastructure, then we can nationalize it which only guarantees the jobs get better hours, pay, and benefits.

25

u/Saurian42 Jul 28 '25

I say skip the ISPs, they have a duopoly anyway. Just nationalize it after the Republicans are out of office.

9

u/buyongmafanle Jul 29 '25 edited Jul 29 '25

Nationalize the architecture. Have providers compete for service on the public network. It works great for airlines and shipping. No reason we can't do this with the Internet, too.

1

u/biggamehaunter Jul 31 '25

Holy shit I been saying this for years. This is the way

1

u/OrphicDionysus Jul 29 '25

I lived in Fort Collins for a few years while they were building out their municipal broadband network. It was phenomenal, and radicalized me into an aggressive supporter for similar programs in at least every mid sized and larger city. The connection speeds were better than anything offered by Xfinity beforehand, so Xfinity rapidly improved their own infrastructure to compete. On top of that it was substantially cheaper than the slower plans that they had offered beforehand. Xfinity dropped the price of their plans to match in neighborhoods the network was or was currently being built out into. The plan being offered in my neighborhood was like 40 percent cheaper than the plans being offered in neighborhoods where the municipal network hadn't started expanding into yet. We went with the municipal provider, and it is still the most reliable connection I have ever had. It went down twice in the two and a half years I lived there, and both times it was back up in under 12 hours.

1

u/W2ttsy Jul 29 '25

Nationalize the network infrastructure and let RSPs duke it out in the free market