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Since When Did Phone Service Cost $13,000 Per Year?
from the cha-ching dept
The Universal Service Fund is a rather mysterious thing, its only visible effect for most people being the 10% or so tax on their phone bills that funds it. The idea behind the fund is that it's supposed to subsidize phone service in rural areas or to people who couldn't otherwise afford it, but unsurprisingly, taxpayers don't look to be getting much value for the $7 billion they pay into the fund each year. A new study says that the government is paying up to $13,345 per telephone line for subsidized USF service -- meaning it would be far cheaper to simply buy people cell phones to use and pay for the service. The study further underlines what others have said about the USF: it encourages inefficiency, acts as a barrier to competition and, ultimately, harms those it's supposed to help by stifling newer, better technologies that can provide better service, much more cheaply.
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Universal Service Fund
Though it is not explicitly for such services as 911 support, etc., you have to figure that most of the excess is being tapped to support such infrastructure improvements as to support all the spying that is done.
the 911 upgrade paid for a lot of the caller id stuff, which is used for tracing, but you know that the phone companies were forced to put this crap in to the phone system and they weren't about to do it on their tab.
so they have to make up a term other than "spy tax" to do it under. and the whole bill obviously would not go under the 911 upgrade stuff.
the funny thing to watch now is the same mob of spies trying to get the voip telco people to do the same. with peer to peer skype, etc, about the only thing you can really do is maybe tap the supernode transactions, but it probably is near impossible to capture the whole thing with the internet technology, and some reasonable encryption.
if the networks are not allowed to pick and choose on what traffic they carry and from what to what, then maybe there will be a bit of hope for lasting privacy in communication.
I suspect that is the real reason that there is such a high amount of pressure in the various power centers (law, telco, consumers, politicans) and the stakes were never higher.
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