Internet In The News
Joining the Senate, the House Approves Internet Tax Ban:
(AP) A bill to extend a moratorium on Internet access taxes for seven years was approved 402-0 by the House Tuesday, less than two days before it was set to expire.
The House initially approved a four-year ban, but last week the Senate passed a seven-year prohibition, despite considerable support for a permanent ban.
So if I’m in Florida buying a memory upgrade from a company in California to be delivered to my brother in New York, who would get the sales tax?
The BBC notes a Warning over net address limits
Internet Service Providers urgently need to roll out the next generation of net addresses for online devices, internet pioneer Vint Cerf has said.
Every device that goes online is allocated a unique IP address but the pool of numbers is finite and due to run out around 2010.
A new system, called IPv6, has been awaiting roll out for 10 years.
This ties in to the next article, because the US is holding things up as “the market” decides to milk as much money as possible from the current system before upgrading.
On MSNBC they wonder: Is U.S. stuck in Internet’s slow lane?
NEW YORK – The United States is starting to look like a slowpoke on the Internet. Examples abound of countries that have faster and cheaper broadband connections, and more of their population connected to them.
What’s less clear is how badly the country that gave birth to the Internet is doing, and whether the government needs to step in and do something about it. The Bush administration has tried to foster broadband adoption with a hands-off approach. If that’s seen as a failure by the next administration, the policy may change.
They aren’t going to upgrade until too late because they maximize profits by spending no money on research and development or new equipment. That’s why so much manufacturing has gone overseas – the antiquated US plants couldn’t compete.
The current US “investors” have no interest in the future. They want their money now, not as constant source of income for decades. They have become gamblers, addicted to an instant payoff, not the accumulation of wealth.
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This is largely because they don’t *see* a future for the US. If there is no future, if tomorrow will be worse than today, why plan for it? Enjoy now, for tomorrow we shall die. That is the attitude of far too many.
The real ruling class is stateless and can live anywhere (just look at all those Hong Kong Chinese who suddenly became “Canadians” when they decided their millions were safer elsewhere as China took over, and Canada was happy to sell them citizenship for a million bucks a pop). Why *not* clear-cut one nation after another, if you have no real attachment to any of the nations you’re clear-cutting? They view the wealth of nations in much the same terms that the timber robber barons viewed trees. Cut first before someone else cuts them, and damn the future — there’s always more trees elsewhere to cut.
Until there are no more, of course. But we’ll just ignore that.
– Badtux the Pessimistic Penguin
There is a lot of that with the prominence of “multi-national” corporations – no need to worry about any particular country.
They move to Dubai and still get US government contracts.
They are a rootless bunch, our current overlords.
We need to get a rural broadband initiative going too.
How about actual 256Kb broadband for less that $50 – that would be nice.
I was an early adopter of DSL here. I’m paying my original rate, because a) Comcast bought the cable company here, so there’s no longer a viable broadband alternative to The Phone Company, and b) I’m afraid to make major changes to my account, based on Stella’s experience of hours on the phone with multiple sales rep’s to save a few dollars a month on her DSL.
They way they work DSL locally is that you have to have a telephone on that line, and any savings on the DSL bill is only “possible” if you increase your phone bill, so I have cheap DSL and an expensive phone that I don’t use.
The cable company is just as bad.