Technology

Where do you think the Internet came from? It was a government project that began as Arpanet. And we would never have had it opened to the public if it wasn’t for Al Gore.

Yeah I can't agree with that after decades of ISP dick jacking, public theft, and absolute neglect. They may have burned bright but they also burned fast. Internet service is such bullshit now when it could just be a utility bill, and we can't even get at that cause utilities are fucked private corpos too trying to ratfuck the system so they can continue to charge plebs for energy we have figured out how to capture for free so now we all have to die so some silver spooned diaper can continue to get his.

Private enterprises pocketed the money we gave them, and didn't provide what they promised.

Fuck the corporations and their bootlickers.

What a ridiculous take, tax payers ABSOLUTELY DID PAY FOR IT! WTF?

i currently have one of the few municipal Internet plans in the United States.

best Internet I've ever had. gigabit symmetric fiber for a flat $60/mo. no fees, no outages, no data caps.

during the one outage i experienced in the three years I've had them i was quickly able to find multiple places to see status updates about the hardware issue they had and it was fixed in under an hour.

they also have a 2.5 gig and a 10 gig option for reasonable prices. I don't think many other companies even offer anything above 1 gig outside of business packages.

it will be difficult for me to move anywhere else. with the work that i do this has been life-changing. come to Longmont Colorado, we have good Internet, amazing mountain sunsets, and lots of tacos.

i love my government Internet. it's one of the biggest things keeping me here.

This is a bad take. Several cities in my state banded together to create a municipal fiber network called UTOPIA. The fiber is owned by the cities that bought in and is used by several different ISPs. The ISPs pay UTOPIA for access, and then they have to compete with each other for subscribers based on performance, features, and cost. Like, there's genuine market competition for internet! If the state owns the infrastructure and then forces the playing field to be level, then everyone benefits. People in the cities with UTOPIA got fast fiber internet waaay faster than anyone else, they have a plethora of choices (want a static IP and a business plan in your residence? There's an ISP that sells that!) at great prices, ISPs get access to subscribers without having to maintain fiber, and the cities who bought in get to make money from this and attract residents and businesses who benefit from the service.

My city didn't buy in. Google Fiber eventually came to town so I was able to kick Comcast out, but I am uneasy about what'll happen if Google decides to drop their ISP business. If I was in a city with UTOPIA, it would just be one ISP folding and I'd be able to pick a new one and switch over right away.

EDIT: cool, Cory Doctorow wrote a blag post about it: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-16-symmetrical-10gb-for-119-utopia-347e64869977
UTOPIA users have access to 18 different ISPs. I feel like that speaks for itself right there. This is the future we all should have had.

LOL, you get the award for most uninformed and ignorant comment of the day. Did you get your views on and the history of the Internet from Ben Shapiro or something?

I can think of well over 400 billion reasons why private industry control of the internet infrastructure is a bad idea.