Quote Originally Posted by KerrAvon View Post
Perhaps the Blair government got it's priorities right - spending money on a public service that people value and rely upon as opposed to splurging it on nationalising the utilities and upon daft vote buying projects like free internet..? Just saying.
There are actually very good technical and commercial reasons for nationalising the Internet.

The big cost of networking is putting the cables in place. Once they're there the actual costs of operation are negligible compared to what we pay.

The market is "free" in that any company can offer to put a very similar connection on the cable Openreach happens to have connected to your house.

What that means is we have a hyper competitive oligopoly of companies who spend huge sums in advertising and customer acquisition costs, so we all basically just pay a massive overhead on what is these days an essential public utility.

That said, it moves so fast that we'll probably replace fixed line internet with 5g and 6g by the time it would be rolled out anyway, but its still a good idea.