At 8/28/2012 04:20 PM, Jim Patient wrote:
Content-Class: urn:content-classes:message Content-Type: multipart/related; type="multipart/alternative"; boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01CD855A.858D9814"<http://www.ijreview.com/2012/08/13896-fcc-may-soon-tax-internet-service/>http://www.ijreview.com/2012/08/13896-fcc-may-soon-tax-internet-service/
It's jut an idiotic screed from an idiotic extreme right-wing website that looks at everything through red-colored conspiracy glasses. USF was created by Congress in TA96 as a way to pay for telephone service in rural areas, mostly in fact red states, by taxing everyone, but mostly from blue states. At the time, all that officially mattered was POTS. (However, any facilities that could carry POTS could be subsidized, including Fiber to the Ranch. Only the actual ISP content was not subsidized.) Now POTS is declining so the FCC has decided that something called "broadband" should be subsidized instead.
Now the right thing would have been to subsidize the telecommunications part of the service (basic service, "el broadband") and allow open access competition to use it by ISPs and other content providers ("la broadband"). But the Bells wanted vertical integration to keep off those pesky ISPs. So the Cheney-Rove FCC revoked Computer II/III and took away the right of ISPs to use common carrier telco facilities, except dial-up. The Genechowski FCC then decided that this vertically-integrated "broadband" was more important than dial tone and so it will get the subsidies. The actual subsidy flow was capped so it, and the tax rate, will be lower than it would have been otherwise under the pre-2011 blank check USF.
So money will flow from New York, Massachusetts, California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and other states that are either a) almost all Bell or b) low cost, and go to Mississippi, Wyoming, Alaska, Iowa, the Dakotas, Idaho, Puerto Rico, and Utah, to name some big per-capita recipient states. This is hardly robbing the poor to give to the rich. It's a direct result of the "two senators per state" rule and the negotiations that led to the Telecom Act, a subsidy to rural states.
WISPs are caught in the middle since they're the unsubsidized companies proving that in many places it is possible to do the job far more cheaply than the subsidy whores can do it. The FCC recognized that with the unsubsidized competitor rule that CenturyLink is trying to overturn. It's not perfect but WISPA did an excellent job of lobbying, certainly by the standards of the otherwise-does-a-great-possum-imitation ISP industry. So it could have been a lot worse -- the old USF would have funded ILECs to compete with WISPs anyway, and did so in some locations.
-- Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701
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