Hacker News Reader

Comment by lexicality | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused as to why the comments are getting so heated on this, typically I see people complaining that the USA has very inconsistent and bad broadband, with people being forced to switch to satellite services to get any kind of reasonable connectivity.

Could someone explain to me why forcing the broadband companies to provide better service isn't a net positive action please?

View on HN

I think the most reasonable issue many people have is that, from a utility deployment perspective, inconsistent delivery of service is bad enough in of itself and should be fundamentally actionable without having to involve any discrimination laws.

Who cares why ISPs are failing to provide a basic service to a chunk of the population? The government should be in a position to force their hand based on the fact that it's happening at all.

And I can see both sides of the argument here. One one hand, yeah, it sucks to be doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, government agencies' capacity at putting pressure on private enterprise has been severely neutered, and if this is what it takes to get essential services delivered, then whatever, I'll take it.

This is forcing telecoms to make business decisions with a racialized lens, ie rebuilding systemic racism.

People are objecting to that.

If we want to help (as another commenter put it) “underserved populations that can't get better internet” — we should do that directly, for people of all races.

How does mandating racialized thinking help that problem?

You do have to actually acknowledge that classes of people exist to know whether systematic biases exist between them. Why would you hide pieces of data with an extremely high degree of predictive power? Surely more sunlight is better? It doesn't have to come with any judgement, no one is saying look at these blatantly racist telecoms clearly they hate... checks notes the Vietnamese, but instead, "hey your policy of where you decide to roll out internet has a blind spot."

How do you know if the track you're on is inadvertently disadvantaging particular populations if you never look?

> we should do that directly, for people of all races

And this bill does that, you seem to be arguing for the exact same effect but just worded differently. If you require everything be equal then a rising tide for inner city black folks also comes with a rising tide for rural white folks. It means that a person of arbitrary demographic makeup can be sure that better internet will come to them which is all people all races.

I have now read the PDF and struggle to understand how you've come to that conclusion. Could you point me at where in the PDF it mandates that ISPs make their decisions based on only the race of the customers?

The ISPs already got 42B in funding to build out in these areas and basically just stole the money and ran with it.

Maybe read the dissenting comments? Some of these are rather articulate.

Because investment resources in broadband aren't unlimited and go to the areas with the highest return on investment first. The government wants to use its power to change this, so there will be demographic quotas that determine where investment goes. If one particular demographic groups has lesser access to broadband than another demographic group, under threat of government penalty, investments must be made to equalize the demographic groups.

But the devil is always in the details. Beyond the danger of causing reductions in the total investment available for broadband, there's the problem of government defined demographic groups not being homogenous. If a wealthy area of a minority racial group gets high level of investment because it will make a better return on investment than an impoverished area of that same racial group, have things been made better? Or has the inequality simply been moved from racial to financial?

And of course, there's the fact that government equality almost always means some groups are more equal than others for various reasons, including the desire to "makeup" for past inequalities or simply one group having more clout with the government agency than others. Additionally, the government gets to decide the groupings for demographics, so some demographic groups get lots of attention and resources while others are considered invalid groupings and ignored.

> If one particular demographic groups has lesser access to broadband than another demographic group, under threat of government penalty, investments must be made to equalize the demographic groups.

If only the government had thought of that and created a $42 billion grant allocation to fund deployments to less profitable areas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com