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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone think that having Wi-Fi that's "as free as air" would be a bad thing? If the government was actually doing this, wouldn't everyone react positively?

Excluding lobbying from telcos, is there any reason that the FCC hasn't already done this?

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It wouldn't be "Free as air", it would be buried in your taxes along with twice the bureaucracy necessary to run it. Judging by other government IT projects, especially at the fed level, it would also be more concerned with filling out forms in triplicate than actually getting anybody connected to the Internet.

At the municipal level, though, things seem to run more smoothly and the amount of tax waste seems to be less. Keep the Feds out other than to provide the bandwidth, IMO.

In addition to the inefficiency, putting a large proportion of the communications infrastructure directly under Federal control would seem to make political interferance way too easy as well. Assuming they could get the thing up and running as promised, of course.

The left would require that pro-violence sites be blocked, the right would require that child porn sites be blocked, and everyone would complain about access to "terrorist" sites. And the RIAA would get involved. Having a single government point of failure seems to introduce a lot of problems.

"the right would require that child porn sites be blocked, and everyone would complain about access to "terrorist" sites."

Probably switch those two, and you'd be dead on.

Having a free internet would be as nice as having free electricity, water, roads, etc. Unfortunately designing, implementing and running a infrastructure costs money.

I wouldn't mind as long as it was cheap and I could still get competing services. If it drove out all competitors and left me stuck with an inevitably sub-par public wireless network, I'd be pretty annoyed.

Yep. Wireless cannot deliver the 20+ Mbps broadband that many of us currently enjoy, but wired broadband would likely shoot up in prive once deprived of its economy of scale by a universal wireless network.

It can actually, but only will sites every couple blocks for the useage profile invisioned by this concept.

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