Posted on 10/04/2007 1:13:26 AM PDT by bruinbirdman
> Not how I would phrase it. It’s more like public transportation.
Yup! I wouldn’t disagree with you on that. All of these things enable better things: things that we can and should, as a Society, legitimately exploit for profit.
You're not cheering me up with that.
DARPA did start the large network we know as the internet. However, most of the intercommunication promoted during that era was text based. Not many people would come to the party if they were using telnet, ftp, irc as the primary protocols.
It was the advent of the PC based on integrated circuits developed by the private sector and O/S technology developed by the private sector that put a web browser on almost every desk.
Transistor technologies didn’t take off until consumer electronics developed during the late 60’s. Even vacuum tube TV’s were the norm until after 1965. It was television and radio usage that brought transistor manufacturing along.
It comes down to: How do you attract businesses to a city? Infrastructure is one way.
Is english your first language?
Pretty much agree with you — the internet was a gubmint program that private industry enhanced and exploited. Nothing wrong with that. It was also Cold War military spending that boosted transistor sales and bulked up the manufacturing infrastructre in the 1960s.
This stuff isn’t a one or the other type deal. It’s chaotic with a lot of gray area.
p.s.
If you’re interested in transistor history, there’s a very good book called Crystal Fire that details it indepth. Terrific and exciting reading.
Cuba is a human cesspool.
Any other characterization is a Liberal lie.
Perhaps you should consider phone service from the 1930's through the 1960's. Then consider the changes in the phone services just in the last 10 years.
The first period was one of stagnation. There really wasn't much difference in the services other than refinement of trunk line handling and switching equipment allowing subscribers to get private lines. The hand devices had literally NO improvements.
During the last 10 years you have seen wireless EVERYWHERE, my phone provider lists 16 different features available with their phone, I have wireless phone service within my house. That has nothing to do with Ma Bell's phone monopoly, you say! Yes it does, Ma Bell wouldn't allow any NON-Bell equipment to be connected to their precious phone network. They claimed it would harm the reliability. Therefore, for many years, you could get a phone any color you wanted, as long as it was black. They finally relented on that issue and there were color choices! WOO-HOO!! That is the type of service you get out of a monopoly server.
And I get free long distance with my cell phone. For years long distance was considered a premium service.
It was Edison and Westinghouse who began the wiring of America, but government, via the TVA and the Rural Electrification project, that completed it -- similarly, Ma Bell wired much of the country, but government subsidies, via a tax on the phone bill, brought telephones to remote areas.
In both those areas, the basic principle was to let the private sector do what it can and the government do what it must. I don't see something like city wi-fi as a drastic move toward socialism -- it's an amenity, like providing parks or landscaping or more street lights, but far less expensive than those. On the other hand, cities ought to be careful not to crowd out the many private businesses that are also offering wi-fi.
My favorite analogy is companies providing restrooms and water fountains. If enough companies do it, then it's just a part of the environment and no one company spends much on it. The community benefits because it's easier for folks to spend a day shopping and dining and just enjoying the scenery.
Where private business doesn't provide enough of those amenities, I don't think it's unreasonable for the government to step in. Especially in a city like Paris, where a lot of the local culture is built around lingering at sidewalk cafés, it seems like a sensible way to keep folks around and spending.
That's why people are willing to risk death trying to get out of that hell hole.
After your "vacation" why don't you invite the bellboy at your hotel to visit your home? Oh, he isn't allowed to leave. Last time I checked, they called places you couldn't leave a prison.
I’d consider that argument, except for the fact that those features have been made possible by advances in technology outside the phone industry, i.e. chips.
I’m also not arguing that those features are a function of the free market system.
And yes, I can have it both ways.
We’re in agreement. One of America’s greatest strength has always been a willingness to do whatever works. And if something doesn’t work, then stop doing it and try something else.
Completely agree with you. I would also add that it nowadasy Internet access is not a luxury but practically a necessity of daily life, especially for businesses. Having said that, it makes perfect sense for a city to provide this service knowing that it will make the city that much more attractive to investment. More businesses being attracted to the city, and more tourists/pedestrians out spending more time experiencing what the city has to offer, means economic growth. Bottom line, the benefits of providing wi-fi outweigh the costs.
> Is english your first language?
I speak Canadian as my mother tongue. That makes me bilingual.
In The Beginning, Ma Bell was a "natural monopoly." Imagine if competing phone companies were running around, each putting up posts and running wires, each with its own subscriber base that could talk amongst themselves, but not to other companies' subscribers without paying stiff fees (if at all). It would have been hard to get the thing off the ground.
When the technology made it feasible for other companies to handle the switching and transmission from the customer's one wire pair, first in long distance and then in local service, the monopoly no longer made sense.
Actually, let me rephrse -- much smaller, local monopolies made sense. I can choose from a number of cable and DSL providers, but Bell South still maintains the one and only copper pair coming to my house. I can choose from among seferal natural gas providers, but Atlanta Gas Light still runs the one gas line coming to my house. The monopolies became smaller because it became more feasible for a small last-mile monopoly to provide access to multiple providers.
Back in the day of telegraph there were multiple companies setting up point to point wires for businesses. So you’d have a private line between the factory on the outskirts of town and the office in the center of the city. Even with the very basic technology, it was a mess.
> Cuba is a human cesspool.
>
> Any other characterization is a Liberal lie.
You may well be right — I have never been there and do not know. The introduction of “Cuba” to this discussion on useful infrastructure is a Canard.
My point is that as long as the phone company held a monopoly they had a vested interest in strictly controlling the rate of progress in such a way that their control would not be reduced. Hence, they did not allow competitors to build their own phone equipment and they had a vested interest in suppressing wireless. Yes, it may have happened anyway, but a monopoly Ma Bell would have been in the fray throwing up roadblocks.
Why would we want that in the future?
Once Government adopts wireless G, for instance, they will have a vested interest in NOT going to wireless N or beyond. With cars, California is dictating to the car industry car features. Do you think they won’t try the same tactics with the wireless equipment purveyors?
Do you really want to be pretty much guaranteed that your handheld personal device had better be wireless G compatible 10 years from now? That’s what will happen if governments take over the wifi arena.
Stagnation is not just a problem with government organizations. When I worked for an oil company in the early 1970’s I was constantly replacing switching equipment based on vacuum tubes. Other pipeline facilities would send the broken equipment to us for repair. I pointed out to my boss that some simple transistor circuitry could replace in the tubes within the same enclosure, provide the same feature, and probably last indefinitely due to the lack of heat. He wouldn’t let me make the changes because those boxes would be “different” than those in the rest of the company. It’s a matter of inertia.
Not to mention the network itself. It was the private sector, companies like AT&T and Sprint, that gave the network the capacity to handle millions of customers, after voice and data merged and could share the samefiber-optic cables; services like Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL that started getting people online, even if each was its own little sandbox; and then an act of Congress in 1993 (ish) that removed the prohibition against commercial activity on the Internet.
Not to take anything away from Tim Berners-Lee, who invented both the Web server and the Web browser.
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