F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

"Democracy" and "Republic" aren't part of a formal system where they're mutually exclusive.

America is a Democracy, and was meant to be without any question. It's a Republic, too. If a programming metaphor helps, it inherits traits from both. It's democratic republic with elected representatives. It's a lot of things. Including some mistakes which we've eventually recognized with official amendments and court rulings and other forms of change. One of the principles of the American system is that any part of the system is open for review, criticism, and even rewriting.

Maybe the way we elect the executive branch is one area that needs change.

> Each state has 2 senators/electoral votes because this country was founded as the United States. It was supposed to be more of a coalition of states united under a federal government, than a single nation.

The "coalition of states" thing was tried first, and it wasn't working out super well, so we got a new system that actually made a single nation and it's worked out better.

Giving states 2 senators and electoral votes wasn't done just because it was Totally The Best Ideal Thing Ever For Everybody. It was done in large part because it had to be done to get buy-in and make the actually working single nation happen.

Now, the practice does have some other merits. Rural areas shouldn't just be resource colonies for metropolises and regional voices are important and hiding 100 extra electoral vote easter eggs around the country could help everybody get attention and in principle be part of ensuring the POTUS is a reasonable representative of a plurality across the whole country.

But the thing that's manifestly un-representative (and doesn't serve any clear purpose as far as "Republic-ness" goes) is the whole winner-take-all approach to awarding electoral votes.

We could fix that as a country and have a more representative presidential election by requiring states to award their electoral votes proportionally to how the population votes.

If the principle you care about when you say "we're a Republic" is something along the lines of avoiding the tyranny of the majority, awarding proportional electoral votes to the candidate that came away with the minority state-by-state is right in line with that.

A couple years ago there was an ISP in the Caribbean who did something similar for Google and Facebook ads: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151001/06351732404/isp-a...

They don't disagree, they just don't care.

And that's before we get to the signs of influence/interest contact points.

Say you have a HOA with 100 houses and you got the last mile wired with fiber. There is probably some place ( such as community center ) that is owned by HOA itself. You get 100 pairs to that building. 10G LR SFP+ are $40 a pop all day. So you need $80 per link once. 48x 10G port switches are $3k all day. So it is 24x edges with a reasonable fabric oversubscription - so you need 5 of those because you want to oversubscribe core rather than the edge as edge requires interaction with a customer while core requires simple internal upgrades. In reality we are goig to do 1Gbit/sec to every drop delivered over 10G so we only need 100Gbit/sec to the edge. Lets spend another $10K on the "core switches" - which in reality are going to be the same as the edges but we will provision them in a way where should this take off we could replace core with 40 and 100G. All of this is going to cost us very little money. Hell, lets pretend it costs us $50K just for the sake of the argument because we like buying really expensive stuff

We can ride a single fiber pair ( remember, this is a residential service, so screw redundancy ) to one of the major interconnect centers because we can drop DWDM gear on our side ( prisms are cheap as hell ) and rent a rack in that interconnect location.

Monthlies:

$10K/mo ( worst case scenario ) DF to interconnect point $2.5K/mo ( rack at the interconnect point )

This gives us the L2 access. But that's not a problem. The problem is that 100Gbit/sec of non-congested IP transit is abou 55c per mbit/sec so that is $55K/mo.

So your cost is $67K/mo to provide 100 houses in a HOA with 1Gbit/sec of IP.

Lets say that you are in a magic place called say... NYC and it just happened that this wonderful thing is a building located right next to one of the big interconnect points and the developer who developed this highrise owns both buildings. You nuke dark fiber monthly cost. Hell, lets even pretend that the developer who owns both buildings lives in a building that we are wiring and he wants high speed internet connectivity to be able to watch NetFlix and PornTube. So there's not only no cost for dark fiber but there's no rack cost.

You are still at $55K/mo of non-congested IP to provide 1Gbit/sec access to every one of those 100 apartments.

Isn't this the problematic issue, though? If you have some disposable cash, politicians will pay attention to you even if you come form outside their district. If you don't, they won't. Sure, they want people to vote for them but that's basically a function of how much money they can throw at the problem.