Can Of Worms Or A New Pipeline Full of Crap?

Salt Lake City is beginning to ask the questions it should have asked quite some time ago before it signed on with UTOPIA.

The last four paragraphs of this story bring up an issue with government created data networks that I hadn’t considered:

…Municipal involvement in a network such as Utopia also raises the question of how much influence city governments will have over the programming on their system — programming Utopia’s Black acknowledges likely will include pornography.
“It is a content issue that our service providers will have to deal with and offer in a competitive way,” he said. “We are not concerned with what specific programming they want to offer. Our job is to provide a fiber-optic network.”
Murray Mayor Daniel Snarr conceded there may be some taxpayer fallout when residents discover they are being asked to guarantee the payments for a system that carries pornography.
“Some people may be upset but most are wise enough to know that with the wonderful things the Internet provides, there comes content that make some squeamish. But I’m not anticipating too many problems. We have a sewer system full of crap and nobody seems to mind paying for it.”

Mr. Snarr is a ‘Grade A’ moron. I’m sorry for the residents in Murray. They really should fix their mayor problem next election.

UPDATE 12-11-03 9:04 PM

Dan started a pretty good discussion. Even Kelly weighed in with a nice summation of why UTOPIA and other government funded schemes to create data infrastructure are misguided and wasteful.

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