I regard the PSTN with all those high-priced interconnection agreements overseen by the ITU as more of a soviet-style system than the hippie Internet is. Maybe Woodstock works better.

GOVERNMENT TAXATION. They’re getting around taxes.

Yes, my packets don’t have me paying the backbone provider. However EVERY. SINGLE. PACKET. IS. PAID. FOR.

I pay my ISP. My ISP pays the backbone, the destination of my packet also pays the backbone, and then the web site pays that destination network.

The internet is based on capitalism and all transactions are capitalist. Everyone gets paid and all agree based on the terms that they have set out. The agreements are complex because they choose to make them complex. But that’s by mutual agreement. If they didn’t agree they would go to someone else. (to the degree that the government fascists at the FCC allow competition)

The Soviet Union would sought to force my ISP to give me internet because I needed it without me having to pay anything more than what I could afford (or more likely what the government gave them).

The difference is government FORCE. Communism and Fascism as you see in the US (see rural broadband by the FCC rammed down the ISPs throats and being subsidized by everyone else if you don’t believe me) are not voluntary. They have an implicit gun pointed at the head of the business or individual. “Do as we tell you to or you’re going to jail, and if you try and avoid that we’ll come with guns to take you there.”

The internet is the poster child of capitalism. There is no FORCE. Just people trading freely without coercion. To the extent where there is violations of property rights and other legalities it is almost always because of stupid business decisions by the property owners, and there are private remedies and public civil courts to deal with it if they choose that route instead of fixing their business model. In the case of child porn and others there is a natural order that is starting to occur where groups of people that care deeply about the subject are starting to police this themselves, far more effectively than government (see Anonymous).

So get a clue and read some books by real economists (i.e. if it uses the word Keynes or Marx with anything other than derision you’re reading the wrong book) and skip Communist Manifesto. The dirty little secret is that Marx was a lazy bum that couldn’t even finish it. That’s why Ingel’s name is on it. He was Marx’s benefactor and gave up and finished the loser’s work.

The beauty of the internet is that there is uncontrollable CHOICE. This terrifies government because they can’t control who you can buy things from. You can buy anything from whomever you choose to buy from at whatever terms the two parties agree upon. The internet, by virtue of what it was built to withstand also is designed to be uncontrollable by government. Even the great firewalls cannot control them because TOR and others get built and the CHOICE continues. Want to gamble? Go ahead, the government can do absolutely nothing about it, you will always be able to find online casinos despite the government’s efforts to legislate morality. And so it goes. What there isn’t on the internet is communism because communism requires FORCE. It is the removal of CHOICE at the barrel of a gun.

AS FOR YOUR FOLLOWUP THAT THE INTERNET IS A COLLECTIVE: BULL SHIT!!!!! Barter is not a collective. Barter is trade by mutually agreed upon terms the same as using Money. Trading bits and keeping score of the difference is the same as trading services and one party paying dollars for the difference in the value of the services. It’s CAPITALISM. Get your head out of your ass. You clearly took too many social studies classes in communist state subsidized college from communist, union teachers and bought into their complete pile of crap that they spew. It’s time you go deprogrammed from the cult.

I suggest you start with “The Road to Surfdom”. Then follow up with “Free to Choose”. Then move on to “Capitalist Manifesto” then “The Making of Modern Economics”, then when you’re ready start getting into Hazlet, Rand (non-fiction), and finally Rothbard. You’ll see the logical progression that has resulted in the internet that is the greatest kryptonite to socialism there is because of CHOICE and TRADE.

AND PLEASE RETRACT THIS HUGE STEAMING PILE.

The cost of maintaining the networks is dropping each year, but monopolistic telcos are leveraging them more by jacking prices up. The pretense is that there are abuses, and their poor networks are overwhelmed. Well, they’re not spending enough of their record profits to expand them! The “shortage” is artificial; an embargo to keep prices high. High prices make their bundled video services cheaper than downloading from competing vendors.

Since telcos currently have little incentive to expand their networks, as it will have the effect of lowering the value of their product, we need to think of ways to give them incentive. It seems that classic competition isn’t going to be our white knight this time. One idea I’ve thought about is charging telcos an exponentially-increasing tax rate depending on how much they overcharge for service above the cost of providing it. If they want to make money, they should offer us fatter pipes with unrestricted traffic instead of pitiful data rations which even our current slow connections can use up in a matter of days. Too bad the FCC is in telco’s pockets. It should also be said that existing networks were paid for years ago with public funds, so other ISPs should be allowed to share them. Alas, the telcos seem to have managed to close that avenue somehow.

Expanding on Paul’s thoughts about core infrastructure; my thought is that today’s telcos will continue to overcharge and overwork the legacy networks until they literally collapse. They’ll use the “emergency” to force the government to pass more laws to “protect” their exclusive control, and infuse them with more free public money. My hope is that they’ll lose control of the process and these “repairs” will be handed to 3rd parties who will open the networks up to competition once again. A couple thousand upstarts will immediately demonstrate that they can provide infinitely superior service at a tiny fraction of the old monopolies, and the jig will be up.

the problem with this communist state is that eventually no one will invest in the core infrastructure to keep it running… just like the old USSR….