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Comment by Dah00n | Hacker News Reader

It would create huge shockwaves in the US if these problems were fixed, like fixed for real. It's an ingrained part of the North American market. You would, IMO, have to go all the way to removing all money, except state funds, from politics to start to fix this. Top to bottom fixed are needed. Turtles all the way down.

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At least in the areas so rural that the power companies didn't want to build out infrastructure either, where electricity only became available after FDR's Rural Electrification Act formed non-profit local electrical coops, the problem can be solved by allowing those still existing coops to get into the broadband business.

Mississippi changed the law to allow this, and gave out matching block grants to get the ball rolling, and has seen great results.

https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-coronavirus-stimulus-...

can you elaborate on this? in particular, why are state funds excluded?

The comment makes sense to me if I read “state” as “government entity” rather than “individual state in the union”.

Elections cost money to run, someone has to pay for that, so allowing funding but forcing all the money coming into the system to come from the government makes it harder for private individual or group X to subvert it in a “I scratch your back here and you remember this later” way.

I suspect that first amendment will bar bans on advertising that would be necessary for this to be fully effective (without another amendment, of course), but a lot of progress is still possible without running afoul of 1A.

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