Hey everyone, I’m new here but all this news about age verification and data privacy got me thinking about how the Internet itself works and how we connect.
I recall hearing somewhere that a town in the US created a city run internet provider and it significantly increased speeds and lowered overhead, as well as provided more of a voice to its users.
How would you go about implementing this from the technical side? I figure it would be an uphill battle politically, but I don’t see a lot of good alternatives in this day and age. I love the idea of I2P and Yggdrasil, but as a matter of user accessibility, they take at least some technical experience and time to set up.
Where I lived before in Sweden, it was the municipal power company that built a fiber network, since they already had all the right-of-way and know-how/staff for pulling cables. The power company itself only maintained the physical network, and opened it up to third party ISPs to run the actual internet service, allowing to could start an ISP using the network and any customer could choose any ISP. ISPs would compete on price, support and value-adds like IPTV and telephony.
Germany could learn from this.
Germany’s problem is not building stuff but corruption.
Our street/sidewalk was opened up f****ing 7 times in the last 3 years for fiber-optic cables. Because if there is money to be spend they will find a way to give it to some buddies for putting the 2nd, 3rd or 10th set of redundant cables into the ground.
Oh, and guess what is not available here… a fiber connection, because actually connecting those cables is not where they can make money. And if they somehow manage this some day… I’ll pay insane prices compared to any other country.
Which is both again caused by corruption, a.k.a. a few big companies and their well-paid lobbyists working hard to be the only option.