What has failed us is putting people like Ajit Pai in charge of the FCC and the federal government trying to remove net neutrality.
The economics textbook version of the term "regulatory capture" is what has failed us in the large telecom and large ISP industry.
The private internet has failed us? No shit, maybe we shouldn't allow entities like the combined Centurylink/Level3 to acquire various mid sized players and reduce the market competition. Maybe we shouldn't allow Rogers and Shaw to merge in Canada. Things like that.
Maybe when the US federal government hands out subsidy money to companies like Frontier and Verizon to build suburban and rural FTTH they should be held accountable when they just take the money and don't actually build the service promised.
Maybe people in their ordinary homes in ordinary neighborhoods should have better options than degraded DSL from the local "phone" company on 30 year old copper POTS lines or the near monopoly local Comcast DOCSIS3 coax cable service, squeezing every last dollar of ROI out of that legacy coax plant.
bias/point of view: I do network engineering for a small/mid-size ISP that directly competes with the telecom dinosaurs.
It's gotten really bad, and still seems to be accelerating in that direction. When government stops responding to voters, it's no longer a democracy (or democratically elected republic if you want to go there).
Call it corporatism, techno-/neo-feudalism.... Call it a mess.
Make no mistake: these dominating and coercive structures and the natures of their functions are built with intention. In each example you will find expressions of capitalist ideology, namely, control and exploitation at the behest of the profit motive, as fundaments of their construction.
This is not how government ought to be, and I really hesitated before using that word because I don't like to assert it lightly. Government is for governance -- in democracies and even democratic republics, it is by definition a service for the people. The cost of those services, inasmuch as you can quantify a cost borne by a sovereignty that manages its own fiat currency, cannot use the same language nor apparatuses as are applied "at the kitchen table" so to speak. That is ridiculous in the most spiritedly literal interpretation.
Additionally, we know by now that optimizing for wealth re: quarterly profits does not mean optimizing for cultural/societal/civilizational longevity and sustainability. I have not yet seen a significant apologia regarding this basic fact. So clearly the incentives are wrong vs the stated justifications for the existence of governmental bodies. The fact that corporatists infiltrate sovereign governments to install or convert allies who manipulate public opinion and policy to produce such a narrative should be considered a political crisis second to none.
Do you not live in the USA? It's not as bad as is portrayed. I have lived in other countries with superior quality of life but every place has its tradeoffs.
Transport is quite safe -- federal regulation of road construction, air traffic control etc is quite good. Food and drug safety (though I could write a book full of complaints) is quite high -- you can't imagine what it looked like before the pure food and drug act and all the work that's happened. Food stamps and welfare get paid out, and despite rhetoric otherwise, will continue to be indefinitely. Yes, farm subsidies are a rat's nest of petty corruption but that's a thermodynamic loss in exchange for which there hasn't been a famine in the US in almost a century; and widespread malnutrition, which was true when I was born was solved before I came to the States. NASA has made some amazing satellites; NASA, NOAA USGS, NIST etc generate and publish enormous amounts of earth and other data. DOE means the military doesn't control the nuke tech, and is why we were able to stop doing physical nuke tests; despite visible homelessness HUD has ensured a roof over the heads of people who in living memory would have not had access to one. The court system is generally non-corrupt and by international standards quite fast and effective. OSHA saves lives. The fed is probably the best central bank in the world. I remember what the US looked like before the EPA was formed (by a republican government no less) and all the consumer product safety rules the dept of commerce has promulgated mean you can take much for granted when you go to the shops. Financial regulation means nobody remembers a run on the banks or all the "widows and orphans" fraud that was rampant a year ago. I believe it was just discussed on HN in the past couple of days how the US process for insuring and rolling up bad banks is unique in the world.
I could go on. People form governments for a reason and the fact is most of what we "hire" the government to is stuff we don't have expertise for ourselves (nukes? radio interference? Bank controls? road safety standards?) or for which it's simply easier to have a convention defined (speed limits). But since it works who bothers to pay attention?
There isn't a single functioning agency of the federal government. The entire thing has been turned against the American people in order to serve these large corporations.
> What has failed us is putting people like Ajit Pai in charge of the FCC and the federal government trying to remove net neutrality.
Net neutrality is good, but so far it hasn't fucked with us so I don't know what you are saying... What really messed up the internet/world is the centralization... Google, Facebook, etc... which allows them to control speech on a major scale.
My semi-ranty post is more on the topic of actual large carriers/telcos/cable company/ILECs/last mile and middle mile ISPs. Although google has some last mile stuff through their acquisition of webpass they are not in the same market segment.
There are definitely a whole lot of screwed up things going with walled garden social media platforms and centralization there as well.
As this article very aptly points out, "centralization" and it's counterpart, "decentralization" have very little to do with how, "free" a system is. Consider that when Standard Oil was broken up it became more powerful and as many small companies than one large megalith. I'm no fan of Google, Facebook, the like (..._) but it wasn't these institutions that failed us necessarily-- it was an uneducated and tasteless public which had demand for, "dopamine-rich" social experiences and a lack of insight into what the real causes of innovation have historically been that created the many-headed tech Hydra of the day. The present crisis is an educational and cultural crisis. The structural characteristics of institutions isn't the only determining factor in terms of how the public comes to participate in technology. It's actual marginal in the grand-scheme.
tl;dr-- Freedom of Speech is stifled in the United States not because of tech companies but because of its toxic, unrectified post-Civil War culture where-in huge swaths (100 millions) of people are systemically kept in cycles of social stagnancy as a result of the real realities of human life in post-industrial societies. We've chosen the Machine for ourselves and the desperation of Americans (you see it in the Trump people) is the manifest spirit of people caught in the teeth of the gears of history. What makes this so appalling to us is the almost religious belief that this is period of great historical exceptionality-- consider though that Caesar, Alexander, Hegel, and Napoleon also considered their time, "exceptional." Consider the October Revolution and Marx' historicism.
Life is better than it's ever been. We're upset because out expectations are made artificially high by our own lack of historical prudence and a strange overabundance of imagination. The post-war culture lied to us and told us anything was possible. We're constantly traumatized by the fact that we're not living in a perfect world. Bless our little hearts.
People like Ajit Pai are flies in the ointment. When the priests see what's happened they'll throw the whole jar away and I'm quite sure all the little flies will have learned their lesson; that is of course until they have the cunning to become wasps or dragonflies.
The economics textbook version of the term "regulatory capture" is what has failed us in the large telecom and large ISP industry.
The private internet has failed us? No shit, maybe we shouldn't allow entities like the combined Centurylink/Level3 to acquire various mid sized players and reduce the market competition. Maybe we shouldn't allow Rogers and Shaw to merge in Canada. Things like that.
Maybe when the US federal government hands out subsidy money to companies like Frontier and Verizon to build suburban and rural FTTH they should be held accountable when they just take the money and don't actually build the service promised.
Maybe people in their ordinary homes in ordinary neighborhoods should have better options than degraded DSL from the local "phone" company on 30 year old copper POTS lines or the near monopoly local Comcast DOCSIS3 coax cable service, squeezing every last dollar of ROI out of that legacy coax plant.
bias/point of view: I do network engineering for a small/mid-size ISP that directly competes with the telecom dinosaurs.