It was very interesting that iProvo and Spanish Fork City had no choice on whether they would build out an area or not. They were required to provide their service to every resident inside the city limits. At times we saw them running miles of cable and equipment costing in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in cable, equipment and labor for 1 or 2 residents who may or may not actually want to use any service provided by the city. A private business would never choose to do this.

Government, when allowed to work in the private sector, is not concerned with silly things like cost/benefit, profitability, or demand. If they run out of money they can just extend the amount of time that the taxes will go toward building the system. They also don’t have to bother with accurate budgets, proposals and other rubbish. If they get halfway through a project, no one wants to see it abandoned for lack of funding. All the money that went to the infastructure would have been wasted or heaven forbid a private company might buy it and make an attempt at profitability. Of course I’m sure no one will receive a refund of taxes paid in any case.

The idea that the government wants to compete against private business is ridiculous. What makes UTOPIA even worse is that the government already has so much control over Qwest and Comcast (the businesses that UTOPIA is competing against). This is a case of the governemnt competitng against itself at the taxpayer expense.

I worked for Qwest Communications in 2004 when UTOPIA was introduced. The “experts” at Qwest were certain that UTOPIA’s build out budgets were misinformed, construction requirements and timeline were drastically underestimated, and that their sales forecasts were extremely naive. To bad the cities that adopted UTOPIA failed to inform their citizens that they had no idea what it would take to deliver what they were promising. Unfortunately, it turns out that Qwest’s experts were right.

If the government would stick to protecting individual rights, we would have more UTOPIA in society and less DYSTOPIA. As a side note, if the government lessened the abusive amounts of regulation on private utility service providers such as Qwest and Comcast, their products, customer service, availability, would be better and less expensive than they are now.