It blows my mind that anyone in a startup community, which is all about creating value and making good investments, would suggest that the government tax him (!) and invest in broadband infrastructure instead of that person investing in it himself.
I've read your sentence perhaps 10 times and I can't figure out what it means in relation to the article. Are you saying telecom incumbents are startups? Does the "him" refer to telecom incumbents? Are you suggesting that the government is taxing startups that are trying to invest in telecoms? Or that the government is investing in telecoms (which is very much not what the article is about)?
I actually did read the article. I wrote that comment before there were any comments, in anticipation of comments in support of subsidized broadband. It was a risky venture, for sure. Heh
> Not government spending. The UK's administration hasn't invested a penny in broadband infrastructure, and most of the network in the Netherlands has been built with private capital.
We have checks on monopolies here in the US. The only problem is that often the people checking on the monopolies are the same people who run the monopolies.
It blows my mind that anyone in the startup community would automatically assume taxes = bad. Startups benefit immensely from tax funded services.
As an example, you can complain all you want about specific laws and their enforcement,but nothing remotely resembling Silicon Valley could exist without the stable legal environment provided by the tax payer funded court system and law enforcement system. Not to mention the role tax payer funding played in the initial development of the Internet, the benefit US startups get from the interstate highway system, local fire departments, etc.
