On 1/29/13 7:43 AM, William Allen Simpson wrote:
On 1/29/13 1:20 AM, Rob McEwen wrote:
[...] the US Federal government:
(A) ...cannot do a darn thing without MASSIVE graft & corruption... plus massive overruns in costs... including a HEAVY dose of "crony capitalism" where, often, the companies who get the contracts are the ones who pad the wallets of the politicians in charge. [...]
Ummm, this isn't true. As all of us old enough to remember know, the ILECs promised that with *REDUCED* regulation they'd roll out universal broadband IFF they were given the revenues from DSL -- putting the CLECs and small ISPs out of the broadband business.
The graft and corruption was in *private* industry, not the Federal government, due to lack of regulation and oversight.
The other big problem with putting the government in charge is that it creates too 'big' of a project. Every large contractor wants a piece of it, every vendor wants a part, and the end result is a specification that is expensive and difficult to build. Then the bidding process to build/supply it starts and takes 3 years plus the 5 years for the lawsuits from everyone who didn't win. By now the specification is well out of date but we start building it anyway. Yeah - it's built. But we need to upgrade it.... Repeat the above. Don't believe it? Take a look at a much smaller Federal system - Air Traffic Control and the attempts to upgrade that system. Why would "Federal Internet" be any different? -- Mark Radabaugh Amplex mark@amplex.net 419.837.5015