From: mccoy@communities.com (Jim McCoy)
Date: Wed, 15 May 1996 16:19:49 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Rural Datafication (Was Re: Edited Edupage, 9 May 1996)
Message-ID: <v02140b03adbedfdeadf3@[205.162.51.35]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Tim May writes:
> At 3:57 PM 5/14/96, Doug Hughes wrote:
>
> >I wouldn't normally respond to such an offtopic post, but this post is
> >so egregious I couldn't let it pass. Who says they make a choice to live
> >in rural areas? Do they also choose not to have enough money to pay
> >for shoes? So, because they live in a poor district they are not entitled
>
> Your shoe example is apt. Fact is, we *don't* pay for people's shoes. Why
> should we pay for their Net access when we don't pay for their shoes, or
> their food, or their electricity, or their phone bill, or their cable t.v.
> subscription? Many of these things seem like higher priorities than being
> able to "surf the Net."

Well, this sort of subsidization is in the grand tradition of the Rural
Electrification Act of the new deal era and it seems to have worked out
pretty well.  The point being that we, as a social group, benefit when
everyone has access to certain pieces of the general infrastructure:
if everyone has electricity then appliance manufacturers can sell to
everyone, etc.  This is particularly true when it comes to services like
electricity, phones, etc. where it is much easier to wire up the cities
than areas with a lower population density.

BTW, while there may have been a decent argument against the electrification
act, I think that you are paddling upstream when it comes to net connections.
The value of your net connection (or any connection to the net) _increases_
according to the number of people who are connected to the network.  Unlike
all of the other rural subsidies you pay for as an urban dweller (with the
possible exception of the phone subsidy), this is one which has direct benefit
to you.

Oh yeah, and you are already subsidizing their phone bill (at least the
increased cost of running a line out to them and maintaining that line), and
their electricity bill, and satellite TV took care of any need to run cable
TV lines out there or else you would also be subsidizing their cable TV by
now.  So what was your point?

jim