White House Makes Last-ditch Push for Internet Subsidy Program - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  • 1 hidden comment

  • Re:

    Yeah, like we do for quantitative easing, why not?

    This is more of a subsidy for the telcos than the users

    You should not have been modded down.

  • Re:

    Given now that 100% of discretionary spending is borrowed money, you're not wrong.

    • Re:

      There was an element of sarcasm. It's clearly election year vote buying, at the expense of creating more off-election-year crushing inflation.

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  • Re:

    What do you imbeciles consider "trolling" versus stuff you just don't agree with? This is clearly election year spending, yet pointing that out means I'm "trolling?"

    And the enshittification of Slashdot continues unabated.

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    • Re:

      Opposing political views technically aren't supposed to be modded down so long as they're expressed in a sincere manner. I'd guess the mistake you made was the use of condescending snark rather than writing something along the lines of "Deficit spending is not an ideal way to address this problem."

      • Re:

        Now we gotta cleanse our posts of any hint of "snark?" That's fucking ridiculous.

• • Re:

    Carlos Slim. Mexican Telco Tycoon.

    • Re:

      Everybody around here has gotten so earnest and serious.

      I was telling a joke. Laugh.

      Seriously, that a Mexican drug cartel was forcing residents of a town to subscribe to their internet service was discussed on Slashdot. A lot of the comments were that the fee the cartel was charging for this was a sweet deal compared to what those of us in the U.S. are getting stuck for by our telco or cable company.

      OK, alright already, maybe the fees were quite high on a purchasing power parity basis considering w

• With that amount of money plus all the revenue from the "universal service fee" scam.. the telcos must have a massive toilet in which to flush so much cash down the drain and have nothing to show for it. How do they manage to do it without clogs?

  • Re:

    If you want a simple answer, just ask the student loan forgiveness recipients.
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    • • Re:

        I imagine many people felt that on Jan 6th... and, unfortunately, still do.

      • Re:

        Mostly the problem is that you can't discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy. Also, at the risk of having an popular opinion, perhaps approval for a student loan should have some stipulations about which sort of majors the funds can be used towards. That'd put a real quick end to schools pushing students into unmarketable majors. If you really did want to major in something that doesn't have a reasonable likelihood of leading to a career where you'd be able to pay off the loan, you should have to pay f

    • Thanks,

      that's the dumbest thing I've read this year. Tells me you have no idea what's going on with student loan debt "forgiveness".
      
      I'm putting "forgiveness" in quotes because Biden doesn't have the right to forgive *anything*. Nor has he.
      
      What Biden did was find a bunch of loans for which the terms of the loan were already satisfied and no debt was owed but which somehow the loan officers were somehow still illegally collecting payments for and made said officers follow the damn law
      
      You're a right wing

      • Re:

        This makes no sense. Citation neded.

        • Re:

          Did your mom take google away because you were using it for p0rn again?

      • Re:

        Good point, if a college educated person can't figure out they already paid off their loan they should definitely get their money back.

        • They *did* figure it out

          the loan companies said "fuck you pay me".
          
          You can stop paying I guess, but you'll get sued and they'll wreck your credit score and garnish your wages.

      • Re:

        If anything you just driveled out in that post was true, then it wouldn't be called forgiveness would it? Also take your political bullshit somewhere else.

  • That's America for you

    you're not allowed to do anything nice for the poor unless 50-60% of the money goes to the rich. And that's when somebody like Biden's in office. Change him out with Team Read and it's more like 80/20 (oops, we're supposed to pretend BSAB).

    • Re:

      The idea that it must either be "Team Red" or "Team Blue" is a worldview six times dumber than astrology.

      • Re:

        I agree, and yet it's a worldview most Americans have.

        That's what decades of voting for "the lesser of two evils" has reduced us to.

    • Re:

      Since the broadband subsidy money basically ends up in the hands of the major telcos anyway, it does all ultimately go to the rich. You don't honestly feel bad for the greedy telco companies?

      If we're talking about giving poor people an extra $30/mo, great. Increase food stamps or some other means-tested assistance program, and let the families decide for themselves how to spend the money. Internet certainly is a nice-to-have thing, but it's a bit insulting to the people who are stretching every penny to

      • Re:

        I don't know what rock you have been living under, but life today is almost impossible without some form of daily internet access. There is nothing wrong with making sure money actually goes to where it is intended. If only the food stamp program was as focused as the ACP program.

        • Re:

          I'll agree with that to a point, but perhaps those issues could be directly addressed rather than considering internet access to be an essential service in need of a government subsidy? Banking and shopping can still be done in the real world at brick and mortar establishments. I still see plenty of people doing things this way. Receiving and paying bills can be done through the good old US postal service, though some companies have begun to charge for paper billing.

          The main pain point where not having a

• by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @01:47PM (#64364246)

  Verizon (VZ.N), Comcast (CMCSA.O), and AT&T (T.N), have all called for Congress to extend the program.

  Ah, there ya go! Need any more be said?

  • by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @02:23PM (#64364370)

    You have a lemonade stand. At your stand, you sell lemonade for $1 a glass. The government announces that they are giving everybody a $0.50 coupon you can turn in to a lemonade stand, and the lemonade stand can hand it in to the government to get $0.50.

    If you were a lemonade stand operator, you could keep prices the same, or raise prices $0.50, as you know everyone will have an extra $0.50 to spend on lemonade.

    This happens with subsidized housing. This happens with the mortgage tax exemption. This happens with government contracts in general. This happens with student loans. If you want something to be cheaper, you make it easier to make more of it and you don't dump gobs of money into the market.

    • 1 hidden comment

    • Not exactly

      this is more like "we need poor folk to have lemonade. The sane thing to do would be to just make lemonade and give it to them, but voters won't allow that, so we're gonna let lemonade conglomerates skim 30% off the top".
      
      As for subsidized housing, that's how affordable housing gets built. Period. Full stop. We normally do our subsidies by doing all the land prep and utilities roll out, which costs trillions. That's how boomers afforded houses. The government rolled it, built a new city 85% of the way an

      • by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @03:51PM (#64364624)

        The government rolled it, built a new city 85% of the way and let private companies do the easy part (throwing up the frame and spackle) and get fat profits from it.

        LOL, no. Read about Levittown. Housing became more affordable because Levitt figured out how to mass produce homes, and did so in an area with no zoning restrictions. The only subsidies were a few hundred dollars from the GI bill.

        If you wanna have some *real* fun go look into how our food supply works. It's more centrally planned than anything the soviets ever did, we just don't talk about it because we're worried dumb Americans will dismantle the system, which is working quite well thank you.

        You mean all the subsidies going to US farmers, and protectionist tariffs, so we have some of the highest grocery prices in the world? Yes, I agree with that. California and the federal government subsidizes almond growing, because California has little extra water laying around, and almond growing uses a lot of it so it gets expensive. Which, to me, means almonds are a poor crop to grow in California.

        I am for free markets. That crap is anti-free-market.

    • Re:

      That really only works if you have a monopoly controlling the market. As soon as there's competition then the rules of supply and demand take over

• Ah, there's the problem. "Ensure" and "insure" are very close phonetically. We all know how loathe Republicans are to approve any program that helps poor people get insured, so they really need to rewrite their talking points to imply this program is about giving tax dollars to telecom giants. Then they'll jump at the chance to approve it.

• • Re:

    The fragrance of change of popular opinion is in in the air.

• Nah (Score:4, Insightful)

  by sizzlinkitty ( 1199479 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @02:23PM (#64364372)

  The internet is already super cheap, it's on every phone and every isp has low price plans. Can't afford internet at home, local libraries, and pretty much every other restaurants offers free wifi. This discount program is being abused by every major ISP out there already.

  • Re:

    > Can't afford internet at home, local libraries, and pretty much every other restaurants offers free wifi.

    Do we send the kids who have a "remote day" called at school to McDonald's? The library doesn't open until two hours after school starts. And there's a snowstorm going on.

    Maybe we could forego one day of war spending to help out the poor kids?

    • Re:

      Nice idea, but it will never happen because we might accidentally help the "wrong" poor kids.

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    • Re:

      Remote primary school has been one of the worst ideas in the past two decades. Both of my kids were subjected to it during COVID, both of them actually LOST points on standard testing in the same school year (they are tested at the beginning of the academic term, the middle and at the end to show progress, it was negative each time.)

      And my kids are not unusually stupid, nearly everyone in their classes showed the same, it was the same at the city and state level.

      When it became clear COVID stupidity was goin

• I did some digging into the ACP's funding landscape over the years (you have to delve into the FCC's programs budgets), and it turns out that the underlying reason behind the $6 bln USD ask is that's roughly the amount of UNUSED previously-appropriated funds from the past several years.
  
  In essence, Congress appropriated (allocated) a massive chunk to the FCC to operate this program (Affordable Connectivity Program, ACP for short) over a multi-year window; the latest appropriation was for years 2022-2024. But looking at their "spend" (how much was actually deployed/paid out to program administrators and internet service providers alike) during these annual budgets, combined, came short of their maximum appropriations/allocations.
  
  The net difference? Roughly $4+ Billion USD (to complete the 2024 Fiscal Budget Year which ends on Sept 30th 2024) plus $2 bln to complete the 2024 Calendar Year allocations -- which was possibly unused appropriations from the original 2020-2022 approvals.
  
  The end result? Previously-appropriated funds could be re-allocated to close-out 2024... and allows a new President (or Biden's second term) to negotiate with their Congress on whatever the FCC programs get for 2025+.

  • Re:

    You were right the first time, of course:)

  • Re:

    And allows Biden and whoever (in either party) in Congress to crow about how they are giving people a nice handout / charity in 2024. Everything being done by everyone from now until November is crucial optics.

• unpopular opinion: the government isn't responsible for leveling outcomes across all of its citizenry.

  A humane state certainly takes care of the least-fortunate, ensuring they have basic nutritional needs, gainful work to do, basic clothing, a place to live. This is one of the reasons we formed societies; first for security, but second to collectively care for those who cannot care for themselves.

  However, beggaring both the middle class* and the future** to ensure that those who are perfectly healthy and able but simply don't want to work have comfortable lifestyles, cell phones, private homes, nice clothes, a car or two, the internet, enough food to be obese... is absurd. Almost as absurd as massive subsidies to huge, profitable firms because they're so big we fear the consequences of their failure. (Setting aside the pedestrian realities of government corruption, backscratching, nepotism, etc)

  Understand that the government makes no money. Every dollar of wealth printed by the government is EITHER:
  a) represents wealth taken from it's citizenry by skimming from what they have by any number of taxes, or
  b) a tiny little decrease in the buying power of every other dollar in existence, like modern-day form of of seigniorage

  So when you hear the phrase "federal dollars will pay for..." - that's (for at least half of us) YOU. YOU are "federal dollars". When "federal matching funds" are spent to not-build a gigantic white-elephant high speed rail in CA that nobody's going to use? That means some UPS driver in West Virginia is paying for it, a little bit. So is the dancer in Austin TX, the piano teacher in Boise, and the youtuber in Portland.

  *let's not kid ourselves, the main people paying taxes are the middle class, and *maybe* the lowest tier of wealthy. The highest tier of wealth have the spare money to hide it or hire lawyers to structure their lives so that they pay nearly nothing.

  ** that the wealthiest society in all of history still can't afford all the shit we want to have so we have to borrow 38% (!) of our budget every year against the future is reprehensible.

  https://fiscaldata.treasury.go... [treasury.gov]

  • Re:

    I work with many "least fortunate" people with disabilities. The average person is assumed by the social safety net to have internet at this point. Some doctor's offices are "portal driven", and calling them has a cheerful bot telling them to check the website. Plenty of different forms and paperwork are accessible online and you are expected to access it that way. Our city newspaper is online.
    
    Government benefits haven't gone up measurably in years, but inflation is roughly constant at 3% per year

  • Re:

    So, what about those who are disabled and trying to make their lives better? I am currently going to a local community college to finish my education. But, because the college is on a hill, I must take most of those classes online since I cannot drive. The public transit where I live does not run at night and everyone else, I know works. The ACP means I can get a better Internet connection and one more appropriate for my needs if I need Zoom to communicate with tutors and professors. It is one of my fe

  • Re:

    "Are there no prisons?"
    "Plenty of prisons..."
    "And the Union workhouses. Are they still in operation?"
    "Both very busy, sir..."
    "Those who are badly off must go there."
    "Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
    "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

    -Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol"

  • Re:

    >> to ensure that those who are perfectly healthy and able but simply don't want to work

    Elitist nonsense. A considerable fraction of the US working population doesn't earn a living wage and can't afford basic necessities. Access to the internet is one of them these days, and a few dollars of assistance there is a good national investment.

    Your whining about taxes is also bogus. The local, state, and federal governments provide essential services. That costs money and as a recipient you are going to hel

• by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @04:26PM (#64364714)

  Why don't we have Universal Basic Internet with 100mbps to every household for free? Like water!

  Oh wait.

  Well I was kind of just trolling, but are there countries like that?

  • Re:

    No. There are no countries like that. Because TNSTAAFL

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    • Re:

      You misspelled TANSTAAFL

      The first A is for Ain't

  • Re:

    Funny you mention that. My water, electric and gas service connect fees (rates too) have gone up double digits in the past few years. Water is around 9, juice 14 and gas is a whopping 23. But fear not, juice just announced they are raising the connect fee. I guess they want to catchup to gas.

  • Re:

    Free water? The only place you get free water in my neighborhood is from the retention pond near the entrance road. Hope you enjoy dysentery. However, the city water that comes out of the pipes and has been properly treated to potable standards? You get a bill for that.

    My brother has a well and he's spent so much money fucking around with replacement pumps and other various issues related to the water quality that I'm not sure I'd call that "free", either.

• I see people whining here because they think it is some kind of election year pandering but clearly that's not the case. This would merely allow previously allocated money to be spent. I had qualified for the subsidy and I have appreciated it very much

  "Congress previously allocated $17 billion to help lower-income families and people impacted by COVID-19 gain broadband access through a $30 per month voucher"

• You subsidize 30 USD/month for 12 months, that is 360 USD/year. Mulitply by 23 million households, you get 8 billion per year

  We talk about 17 billion. Where are the remaining credits going?