So I have a few thoughts regarding a lot of the stuff talked about on The Tek.
Regarding fiber roll-out how would you guys feel about Local government (not the feds) owned the fiber lines, and in order to get any federal grants, you had to allow a minimum of 2-3 ISPs to operate on it. That way you can have competition, and maybe allow smaller isps to grow.
Also on the DMCA Requests, have some legal consequences. IE If you send a request that isn't valid, the owner of said content can get compensation for the time it was down. And if a company sends more lets say 2 million invalid requests in a year, they get fined a fairly substantial amount, and maybe have the amount based a pone profits, with a minimum amount.
Now on the twitch stuff, I feel the best way to handle it is instead of have the audio muted, make it a TOS that if you play Copyrighted music you run a program (and have an api for it) that shows the current song playing And it displays a buy link under the video that changes with the song. (And maybe make it an affiliate link for the streamer)
This one relates to Twitch and YouTube. I think having a option that allows you to pick a game, and any music in is build into the game isn't flagged. I think this would be a far better option, as in 90+% of the time (more then that I bet) people watching game streams or game videos aren't in it for the music, but the people playing the game.
So let me know your thoughts, I've had these rolling around in my head for quite awhile.
Look regarding infrastructure, the situation in general is that it sucks, they are for the most part natural monopolies, in that they are formed naturally as the result of high set-up costs which entrench their position, which is reinforced in many cases by some form of government backing which goes as far as outright bans on competition in many places, or requirements to underground cables (which was sometimes subsidized for the existing provider) which is effectively a ban on competition.
There are many ways to change this, most of them just make it worse, its important to note that government monopolies have all the same drawbacks as private monopolies, but with the added benefits of not requiring to obey the law, make a profit, and with added government protection. They also lack the motivation, the incentives that competition provides to improve services and reduce costs.
Honestly in americas context the best, quickest and cheepest thing that the Federal Government could do, would be to crackdown and annul all local government protections for big businesses, including local franchise monopolies for utilities, and forcing utility poles underground. The next thing they could do would be to break-up these big telecommunication companies into much, much smaller ones, and rewrite the tax breaks in the telecommunications act too only apply when a certain percentage of profit or whatever is used on the networks. Of-course it would have to be LLU (local loop unbundled) as part of the conditions of recieving these tax breaks. Then wait till the market fixes itself.
It could even be advantageous to provide grants, awards or prizes to deploy this infrastructure to the lowest bidders that can prove they can do it, or to set up some public trusts with well established charters, and then award money in a similar fashion to build networks. But monopolies in general are bad, they suck, they really doo.