Finland has declared that every citizen has a right to a 1 Mbps broadband connection. Now, I love Googling myself and watching cat videos on YouTube as much as the next person, but to call a fat pipe a "right" has the tendency to trivialize prior declarations of rights such as the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.
In the United States, things have a tendency to become de facto rights by legislative or bureaucratic fiat. Rights in the sense that the government starts paying for it, and people expect the government to continue to pay for it. Unfortunately, broadband is about to become a de facto right in the United States, and it's going to cost you a lot of money.
Case in point, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and its plan to extend the wonders of broadband to every American household. Congress told the FCC to explore the so-called digital divide and recommend means of addressing it, and the FCC is proceeding as if money is no object. The FCC wants to deploy broadband infrastructure to households that currently lack it, and to convince people who don't use broadband (or the internet for that matter) to join the 21st century and start their own Facebook pages. FCC estimates that the effort will cost $25 billion, with an astonishing $14 billion needed just to extend broadband to the last 250,000 hard-to-serve unserved households. That's $56,000 per unserved household. With apologies to Sam Kinison, wouldn't it be cheaper to move these hard-to-serve people where the broadband is?
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