Wasn't there a bill back in 80s/90s to pay the ISPs to modernize the grid with 100mbps across the entire country?
Politics isn't the sole problem, lobbying in the company interests instead of the customers is the other problem.
There has to be strict federal laws to outlaw lobbying and any type of incentives for all federal employees including the politicians. No gifting, no promises for the future (job), and so on. If such an occasion has occurred, both sides must be punished and the company must be stripped of its ability to do business in the country. The politician must be banned from holding the office and any company that they were involved with for life.
How about we start with removing all free healthcare from the congress, they pay the same as the rest of us and they must go through the healthcare system just like us. If they have a problem, fracking fix it.
What lots of people don't know is many ISPs across the country took that money and shoved it in exec pockets and then raised rates and never invested in infrastructure. An exec of one in my area for example was caught embezzling millions of that grant money.
If you have more interest in understanding the issue, there's plenty of good assessments. Everything from the explosion of wireless, to hdtv, to local municipalities, to mergers, and technological limitations are to blame.
I really wish that we as a society would spend less time sitting around figuring out who to blame for shit and actually invest in the things we claim to care about. I am sick to the back teeth of bullshit free market ideologies that have an extremely poor track record in reality.
That does not mean I am opposed to or deny the value of markets.
The issue in the U.S. is (and has historically been) that neither side wants to invest in telecom infrastructure--both want private companies to foot the bill. When you start from that premise, all your options are limited by the overriding need to ensure adequate incentives to invest.
As a matter of personal ideology, I'd say: let's build a nationwide public system with a federal/state partnership, and import regulators from Scandinavia to run it. But that's not one of the choices.
You know perfectly well that several states have passed laws forbidding municipal entities to construct their own broadband networks. The left has made some tentative moves towards articulating a goal of investing in national broadband infrastructure (citing the example of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a working example of public utility investment) but has understandably been scared off by the right's strident equivalence of any kind of public investment with communism.
I don't want to oversimplify the issue and don't disagree that everyone in politics would prefer if better broadband infrastructure just happened and all they had to do was show up and cut a few ribbons without investing any political capital. But I think you're being a tad disingenuous here. You are too smart and well-informed to buy this argument if I were to make it to you.
I disagree with those laws ideologically, but they're a footnote. The vast majority of people do not live in one of those states. My county (in Maryland) is building a fiber network and wiring up towns in the rural part of the county that's not served by FiOS: http://archive.aacounty.org/News/Archive2013/News%20and%20Up....
At the same time, I inserted the caveat of importing regulators from Scandinavia for a reason. Public infrastructure in the U.S. (outside of NYC/Chicago) mostly sucks and is poorly run. I say this because I've walked the walk: I used to commute on Metro North every day from Westchester to Manhattan, then on SEPTA from Wilmington to Philadelphia, then on Amtrak from Baltimore to DC, then (briefly) on the D.C. Metro. Metro North was fantastic, but the others are worse than Comcast.
The basic problem is that I don't have the choice to vote for Stockholm's fiber system run by Swedes. My only choice is between Verizon (which is actually pretty damn good in Maryland), or the same folks who run the D.C. Metro.
I'm not sure the free market has much to do with it.
For example, in a lot of areas, the issue was simply local regulations and getting approvals from the local governments. It's hard to build a large metro ring when 1 of the 5 towns you need to go through won't approve the easement expansions necessary.
Or, as another example, should you continue to plow ahead with your fiber to the curb strategy when market forecasts are showing internet connected phone usage growing by multiple thousands of percent within the next 10 years?
Different topic, but on the legal side of the law you'll find that most exclusive franchise agreements by an ISP contain something to the effect of "we will pay the city/county $A, give them an ongoing amount of $B/yr (and are not allowed to break that out as a line item), and perform C, D, and E at no cost."
All these agreements are public. Go down to your local city hall or courthouse and ask for a copy of the franchise agreement.
Point being, part of the evil is Comcast. The other part is your elected local politicians...
I stand corrected. I'd read ours recently, as I was curious. It was essentially an inherited document from the first cable company to build a network for the city.
It specifically noted it was non-exclusive, but I assumed that was the exception rather than the rule.
>Wasn't there a bill back in 80s/90s to pay the ISPs to modernize the grid with 100mbps across the entire country?
No, it's a popular uban legend based on a misunderstanding of agreements between telecoms and the government. A telecom, IIRC Verizon, promised to upgrade their network to 45mbps access across their footprint.
People are now interpreting that to mean they promised to build build a FTTH residential network (capable of 45mbps) to each home for prices similar to what you pay for DSL or cable internet.
But that is a total misread.
Really, Verizon was promising to upgrade their Trunk lines (T-Carrier) from T1 to T3. A T3 line is 44.736 Mbit/s. And they weren't promising to deliver a trunk line to each house for 60 bucks a month. They were expecting to charge thousands a month. This was basically a service for businesses and datacenters. Not for residential use.
I don't know about the US, but it surely can't be like even greediest ISPs are not having any expenses and just hoarding cash enjoying their monopolies. Even though customers sometimes feel that way.
I believe the following must be true for every ISP on the planet. Hardware crashes and/or dies - power surges, thunderstorms, vandalism, firmware bugs, old age, human errors - all sorts of stuff happen almost daily. It also has to be updated to match with ever-growing bandwidth and latency requirements. The same goes about the software parts as well, although when designed right and working solid it normally doesn't need updates - except for new features - for quite a while. Either way, all that stuff normally requires a reasonably big number of engineers and technicians, always busy either fixing things or building new stuff without introducing any actual innovation (just connecting new customers).
I'm not justifying $50/mo tag (honestly, I have no idea how overpriced it is, although I guess with a proper competition it would be significantly less), just saying that maintaining the real-world (=a world where all sort of stuff that shouldn't be happens on a regular basis) network must cost significant amount.
Looks at the profits for comcast and time-warner. Last time I checked (admittedly a few years ago) they were really high, especially considering how much people generally hate them
I will keep saying it until people believe me: you can't separate out "politics". Overwhelmingly, whether people think something is "politics" (or "political" or "politicized") is reliably predicted solely by whether it affects them or people they identify with, rather than any kind of Platonically-ideal classification of topics.
> How much money does Google make off of your info?
Alphabet's net income in 2016 was $19.5 billion, as much as Comcast and Verizon put together. Alphabet's return on invested capital and operating margins were significantly higher than either. There are various reasons to regulate ISPs, but "they make too much money" isn't a particularly good one: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corp... (telecom ROIC is among the lowest of any industry).
> If there was proper competition, would we be spending such ridiculously high fees on the internet access we get?
Google has a near-monopoly because it grew out of a natural monopoly; their product was so much more innovative that people flocked to use it and they have managed to maintain their technological lead by constant reinvestment.
An enormous difference, and one of which you are definitely aware, is the existence of legal monopolies for many network infrastructure providers, as well as lobbying of state governments to limit or prevent the building of publicly-owned network infrastructure in many jurisdictions.
I'm not locked in to using Google in any way other than by consumer preference. I use Bing as well but frankly I find it an inferior product.
Google isn't one of the major internet providers here, whether Google's business has proper competition or not is not my point.
My point is that we pay ISPs as much as we pay for the rest of the computing infrastructure, that they are a major player, with tons of money and high profits, and terrible service. That they aren't acting like the big boys, even though they have the cash to.
ISPs are currently entrenched without competition. The current FCC fudges stats to wrongly state that there is competition in the ISP space, whereas in reality almost nobody has more than one broadband option.
The point is that they're not particularly profitable in comparison to Google, even though in theory Google plays in competitive markets while ISPs are "entrenched without competition."
Yes, it's far far easier to switch from google to duckduckgo or some other search provider. Or from any google sub-product to a competitor than it is to change your ISP. And that's even if you have another ISP to change to.
And we need competition if they think they can start throttling our Internet based on the source.
I signed up with my internet provider on the assumption that all traffic would be treated equally, and I will be very upset if I notice degradation in service because I'm not using my connection in a preferred way.
Common myth.
- Comcast made merely $2B in profits last year.[verified]
- ATT made around $5B from wireline data last year. [unverified]
A lot of people think these are monopolies with the help of government without realising that a lot of companies including Google tried to bring disruption and have failed. Part of the reason why not many people are wasting their capital on wireline is because it is unlikely to give better results.
ISPs have terrible customer service because most of their efforts are going into keeping those wires and fibres intact. I would rather have a good working internet service and a bad call center rep than opposite.
Not to mention when you don't allow companies like Comcast etc. to bring cheaper labor from India, they will be forced to spend more hiring American college grads and spend more cash on their training etc. We have to pay for it in the bill.
I've never seen billions of dollars in profits dismissed so casually.
>ISPs have terrible customer service because most of their efforts are going into keeping those wires and fibres intact.
ISP's in other countries, even ones of similar scale to the US, don't have to chose between quality customer service and quality internet service. To call your argument facile would be overly generous.
> I've never seen billions of dollars in profits dismissed so casually.
Comcast has around 25 million customers [0], so that's around $65/year/customer. So if you cut that profit to $0, you can return $5/month on combined TV and internet to each customer. When people say "cable and internet are so expensive," they don't generally mean "if I got a $5 price cut I would be happy."
I'm not suggesting that fast, consistent internet service is cheap to provide. However, I'm also not convinced that comcast's prices aren't as high as they are, and their margins as low as they are, only because its a costly service to provide. It's also because they are really bad at providing it.
But that wasn't even my main point. My point is that Comcast is more interested in providing a return to their shareholders than they in providing effective and satisfying customer service.
> It's also because they are really bad at providing it.
What makes you think that? A huge chunk of an ISPs' operating expenses go to paying people to move dirt around, and the metal and plastic they put in the dirt. How do you expect to disrupt that?
Second hand experience. My father owned and operated a small tv + ISP (cable when I was young, Internet by the time I was in middle school), and my uncle still operates his. Both have or had ~50k subscribers. My father sold his system to Comcast and worked for them for a while before quitting, frustrated by inefficiencies and dissatisfied customers, and his experience is the reason my Uncle is holding out from selling.
I ran an ISP (then Chicago's most popular) in the mid-1990s, and even then, the whole enterprise mostly relied on infrastructure provided by telcos, who were required to lease us POPs under fair and reasonable terms.
> However, I'm also not convinced that comcast's prices aren't as high as they are
The math is for you to see.
> It's also because they are really bad at providing it.
And how many ISP companies do you have experience running ?
> My point is that Comcast is more interested in providing a return to their shareholders than they in providing effective and satisfying customer service.
What is wrong with it ? Has worked well for Google.
How much did they spend on acquiring movie studios, television stations, etc. etc. unrelated from the core utility business? My internet connection fees shouldn't be subsidizing media conglomeration.
It is bewildering how different these Senators' concepts of reality must be from mine to consider this a good idea. I wouldn't even consider it debatable... There's a reason, after all, that ISPs around the world have largely shied back from such practices in the past.
Part of the problem may be that those most hurt don't even exist, yet. Depending on how blatantly ISPs would exploit their position as gatekeeper of the last mile, it could doom any startup. Oh, your two-person team wants to run a ride-sharing service? Start by negotiating access fees with every ISP, in every market...
I guess the best hope is that former startups act somewhat altruistically: Apple, Google, Facebook, or Netflix may have the clout (cloud?) to stop this. Maybe thousands of calls and emails help, but it appears that Republicans consider this their rumspringe, and are probably emboldened by polls showing the ideological divide is so deep, policy is no longer relevant for public opinion.
These are mostly the same people who think that climate change is a hoax and that creationism is a valid alternative to evolution. Reality is not their strong suit.
Their ideology says that government regulation is bad and free markets are good, with essentially no wiggle room for nuance. This implies that ISPs are being hobbled by government regulations, and that freeing them to do as they please will benefit us all.
It doesn't matter whether or not it's true, it's what they believe, and they're approaching it from a perspective that's impervious to facts.
The word "freedom" is really overused, and nobody seems to have an idea what it actually means. This will get ISP more freedom to charge their customers higher rates for the same service they enjoy today.
I'm still a little bit jealous about what the city of Stockholm did. They started to built a dark fiber network, which ISPs can use to get to their customers. The result is, more competition and lower prices. Essentially net neutrality on layer 1.
While the existence of net neutrality-breaking ISPs could have caused any of these companies to fail in their infancy, their current position in the market allows them to largely benefit from this environment.
They may have added costs, but to them, that may be worth it if it artificially filters out possible future competition.
It seems to me that reaction to this has been tame so far. I believe EFF and phone calls alone aren't going to do anything. You basically need awareness on the level of blackouts.
Current headline: "GOP’s “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority"
More accurate headline: "GOP’s “Internet Freedom Act” preserves 2015-era FCC Internet regulation status quo"
Another headline: "GOP’s “Internet Freedom Act” temporarily prevents FCC from enacting 3-2 partisan Internet regulations, unless a future Congress changes things"
Yet another headline: "GOP’s “Internet Freedom Act” shifts authority for Internet regulation from unelected bureaucrats, who may not even have the power to regulate here, to elected officials in Congress, who do"
Keep in mind that "Net neutrality" has become a partisan issue. The current 2015 rules were passed by a 3-2 party line vote when the Democrats controlled the FCC. (They're currently being litigated, with U.S. Supreme Court review likely.)
Now that the Republicans control the FCC, the 2015 rules are probably going to be repealed by a 3-2 party line vote. Even if Congress does nothing.
Whatever you think of the reasoning behind "Net neutrality" regulations, it makes little sense for hundreds of pages of regulations to be enacted when the Ds win and repealed when the Rs win. It means regulations applying to a multi-billion dollar industry bounce back and forth every 4 or 8 years. It makes more sense for Congress to come up with a lasting solution that isn't subject to regulatory bounce-back, and this is what the bill being described in the article seems to do.
It makes more sense for Congress to come up with a lasting solution that isn't subject to regulatory bounce-back, and this is what the bill being described in the article seems to do.
From the article:
But from what we know about Lee's bill so far, it appears the proposal wouldn't impose any type of net neutrality rules to replace the current ones.
If they were going to do that, why wouldn't they just put it in the same bill? It would be extremely naive to assume that they are going to do anything on top of repealing the current NN protections.
So ISPs get freedom and the users get screwed? The "Net Neutrality is like a Obamacare for the internet" is one of the most disingenuous claims I've heard from Cruz in awhile, Trump was right with his "lyin Ted Cruz" line.
From what I understand, there is the concern that potential new technologies wouldn't be allowed under a strict interpretation of net neutrality. For a hypothetical example: go back in time when voice over IP first came on the scene. At that time there wasn't enough excess bandwidth to guarantee voice packets would arrive on time. Now you could prioritize voice traffic, but you'd have to either charge a fee, or find a way to positively identify voice data (otherwise everyone would turn on the voice QOS flag in all their apps even if they didn't need it). This would then not be net neutral.
Of course, today there is enough excessive bandwidth that voice traffic doesn't need to be prioritized. But what about an application where an expert doctor is controlling a robotic surgical instrument from cross country? Would a special service class for those packets be allowed under net neutrality laws?
But the real reason, is that as soon as there is additional bandwidth available, technology finds a way to consume all of it and then some. So the ISPs want to be able to de-prioritize some heavy bandwidth users (such as bittorrent), and/or give higher priority to traffic with paying users like Netflix (for a toll fee, of course), or their own video services.
ISPs charging their own customers for prioritization is completely compatible with net neutrality. Detecting and prioritizing voice would be open to interpretation but would probably be considered reasonable network management. Letting people mark whatever they want as latency-sensitive but charging more for it? Totally fine.
Of course, it is a fine line between an ISP allowing someone (who is not a customer) to pay them for higher priority, vs the ISP purposely maintaining a low quality route to certain other web sites to "encourage" them to pay up (this is what Comcast did with Netflix a while ago -- Netflix traffic came through a smaller pipe into Comcast, until Netflix paid up).
It was more complicated than that. Level 3 took advantage of its peering agreement with Comcast to undercut Akamai for Netflix's business. Comcast argued that the agreement was meant for transit, not to subsidize Level 3's CDN operations. All three companies had valid points, and all three had ulterior motives.
The purporse of anti-net neutrality advocates is basically to make the web less free so their clients (large telcoms) can capture more profits.
I think big money realized fairly late in the game that the Internet's decentralized structure makes it difficult to perform rent-seeking, so any legislation that tends to centralize the Internet is viewed as a pro by these people.
In other words, it's the same effect you see in every other field -- special interest lobbyists for large corporations want to rewrite the rules to suit them, at the expense of ordinary people's privacy and a democratic Internet
I generally just don't see the point is making certain business models illegal when there wasn't anyhing that bad going on before the net neutrality laws were passed.
Tmobile is certainly violating net neutrality with it's binge on and free music streaming features. But it's generally good for the consumer.
All the arguments for net nuetrality sounds like slippery slope fallacies to me. "They'll block everything except their own AOL like service!" No, they very probably won't.
I'd rather have a wait and see approach. If the ISPs become abuse, then we should apply net neutrality.
But I see no reason why we shouldn't then apply "OS neutrality" to apple and google. Or search neutrality to google and bing. Or social networking neutrality to facebook and snap.
Facebook and google actually do the sort of stuff people are upset that ISPs might do.
Comcast effectively blocked BitTorrent and exempted its own video service from data caps. T-Mobile throttled video that didn't participate in BingeOn. AT&T blocked FaceTime.
How to regulate operating systems, search engines, or social networks, if at all, are entirely separate questions. Most American households have only one option for high-speed Internet service; nobody has to move to a different city to use a different search engine.
Net neutrality is an important topic, but some politicians sponsoring a bill generally doesn't count as a substantive story. The vast majority of proposed bills go nowhere.
You raise an important point, and if this event took place in isolation, I might even agree with your sentiment. However, this, in combination with FCC Chairman Pai's recent actions demonstrate an organized, concerted effort to deregulate Internet Service Provision. And with the GOP in control of both houses and the Executive branch, combined with their desperate need for political wins, makes me concerned that they will aim for the low-hanging, and highly profitable, fruit.
5k I believe is the congressional donation limit, but only by one person or org. Generally when digging through public finance statements from congress (that's the sort of crazy I am), I often see the 5k limit hit by multiple entities in the same industry around the same timeframe, so that 5k limit ends up being 50-100k, not including all the other ways to pay for a legislator.
That's not even adressing the issue that ISPs have so much data they could probably run their own blackmail ops and similar dirty tricks if donations weren't enough.
Please don't post ideological talking points to HN. The combination of that and lack of other substance in the comment amounts to trolling, as this subthread demonstrates.
Let's ban all regulation. You can't imagine what wonderful things I could achieve if I could just help myself to your capital. I know that sounds like a bad deal for you but market forces will prove me right in the end, just wait and see.
Your answer actually resonates with me to some degree. It is not my position but I get it and think it would work in an ideal world without corrupted officials. As it stands, I see the less advanced technology thriving for longer than it should, for example fossil fuels today are not being replaced at a pace that would align with what the market demands. More and better government programs to increase sustainable energy would lead to breakthroughs, more (better) jobs, and a healthier economy for 99%. Musk's space-internet would be pushed against for years or decades because of entrenched institutions.
How do you feel about the effect killing net neutrality would have on small businesses that can't afford the fast lanes that their larger competitors would use?
You're right - government officials (not necessarily corrupt even) write legislation influenced by lobbyists who are hired by the big guys to protect their own interests. All legislation is influenced by lobbyists. It's just the name of the game. More legislation and regulation generally has the opposite effect of getting in the way of innovation and market efficiency.
Regarding sustainable energy - a lot of government funding is already going to that in the form of research grants awarded to people in academia looking at those things. We can increase funding, but that's already happening. The surest way to kill those chances would be, for example, create a carbon tax which has the effects of getting government dependent on revenue coming from fossil fuel emissions, and introduces incentives to ensure that revenue source continues.
Regarding your last question - I don't know. Haven't done the research. But I have read enough of classical economics to know that it's probably not a big deal - or if it is an issue that it will be short-lived. If the consumer is sufficiently fucked then it is the corporation who will have shot themselves in the foot. Law of supply and demand in action
Anyone who asserts "the less regulations the better" style arguments has automatically lost the debate. It's trivially easy to demonstrate that some regulations are good, so to start off the discussion with a blanket attack on regulations in general, without addressing any specifics regarding the actual regulation in question, broadcasts solid evidence that this is not an argument presented in good faith.
No. Most people have only one choice for ISP, and that wouldn't change if you got rid of all federal regulation on them. Therefore, regulations are required in order to make sure that people don't get fucked by their ISP.
In the long run, the only barrier to competition is regulatory capture, which is much harder to overcome than short-term problems like there not being enough competition. Technical challenges are a lot easier to solve than regulatory challenges, which 100% of the time increase the barrier to entry by, among other things, raising the cost of compliance (have to pay more lawyers, accountants, etc to make any moves in the market).
Regulatory capture seems to be much less of a problem at the FCC than it does at the state level, where ISP lobbyists have convinced various state governments to forbid the construction of things like municipal broadband networks. Get back to us after you've solved the smaller problem.
I move in other circles besides this one. I'm not sure what the point of your comment is; you want to promote your anti-federalist views, but when those are challenged you back off and say individuals are powerless to impact anything? Sounds hypocritical to me.
"In the long run, the only barrier to competition is regulatory capture"
Not true. There's the fact that for many places, they just can't support multiple choices for things like that. There's the equipment, which is extremely expensive anyways. There's running lines.
And, quite frankly, when you say that regulations should be removed, you're basically saying that those in less profitable markets, where there likely wouldn't be much competition even without regulation, don't deserve to have net neutrality.
In many parts of the country, consumers don't have the luxury of choice between ISPs. Heck, I live in the Bay Area and my two options are between Comcast Xfinity and Comcast for Business. (I went for the latter because they have slightly stronger promises around my personal information.) I have to do business with Comcast because I need internet service, and I have no other reasonable source for it.
Enough with this crap, many places have one provider to choose from. This is especially true in cities where many live in apartments or condos, and also in rural areas where the cost of build-out is very high.
Your claim is bullshit. There's a whole thread here with discussions in varying levels of detail about the market for internet services, and HN is a community with a lot of technical expertise, experience, and economic knowledge.
When you make cliche ideological claims with zero supporting evidence that ignore all that pre-existing context, then I'm going to call bullshit every single time I see them. I do not think you're arguing in good faith here.
Starting an ISP is incredibly expensive, even if you didn't have regulations. If you got rid of all ISP regulations tomorrow, you would be lucky if in 3 years you'd start to see competition. And most places wouldn't be valuable enough to have more than one provider.
When you argue for getting rid of these regulations, you're basically saying that a bunch of people don't deserve quality, neutral internet.
I've been to rural areas, I'm well aware that millions of people live without reliable high-speed internet connections all over the United States, and those regulations you support haven't fixed it.
Meanwhile, there are poor people in India who aren't going to get internet access because they can't afford it themselves, and net neutrality legislation has removed the profit-motive that would have incentivized private corporations to provide it to them for free.
And net neutrality advocates are cheering it on like it's a huge victory that they've deprived all these people of modern technology.
How about making your argument without shifting it to the other side of the globe.
The brand new regulations that have been fought by the same people introducing this bill haven't been effective? Duh, they weren't even in existence long enough.
Sure the best way would be for our lawmakers to actually make laws protecting privacy and providing basic consumer protections rather than relying on the FCC, but Congress is almost completely dysfunctional.
> How about making your argument without shifting it to the other side of the globe.
Because most lifeforms are capable of observational learning.
> The brand new regulations that have been fought by the same people introducing this bill haven't been effective? Duh, they weren't even in existence long enough.
I don't know what alternate universe you live in, but the government has been meddling in the telecom industry for a long time.
You haven't answered the question as to why people who live in rural areas, where there likely wouldn't be competition anyway, don't deserve net neutrality.
And I'm sorry, but if the only reason you're giving internet "for free" is so that you can violate net neutrality, then you are not doing anyone a service.
They don't deserve net neutrality if they choose to do business with an ISP that doesn't give it to them. You say that they don't have a choice because there's no competition; I say there's no competition because government regulations raise entry barriers and remove profit motives.
> And I'm sorry, but if the only reason you're giving internet "for free" is so that you can violate net neutrality, then you are not doing anyone a service.
You're certainly not doing anybody a service by trying to prevent a transaction that doesn't even involve you because you don't like the terms.
No. Your argument completely falls flat when you ignore the fact that most people do not have choice for their ISP. Because you keep ignoring this, and saying it's the fault of people who had nothing to do with it, I have to believe you are not discussing in good faith.
m80, if there's only one ice cream truck that drives through my neighborhood and he won't stock mint chocolate chip, the correct solution to this problem is not to petition the government to make a law requiring all ice cream flavors to be stocked equally.
We're not talking about ice cream. And yes, the proper solution is to have government require that all data is treated equally. Because, despite your attempts at dodging, there are places in this country where competition just is not viable, as those places are not profitable. And removing regulations WILL NOT CHANGE THAT. Those people deserve a neutral net too.
Okay. I'll become less effective at my job, because the only search engine worth a darn is the second largest dataminer in the world.
In fact, scratch that, I won't even have internet access, because the ISP datamines me. Now I'm out of work and homeless.
No bank accounts either. The only stuff near me are instances of corporate banks that datamine my spending habits all to hell. Same for credit cards.
When you figure out how to do this "just don't do business with companies you don't like" thing in a way that doesn't turn me into a homeless pariah, please let me know.
Probably because I have a concrete notion of what "my privacy" entails, and I consciously don't place "things i'm typing in a search box to $company" in the "things $company shouldn't know about" box.
On top of all that, there's the functional aspect as well. DDG's results plain and simply suck, and using a search engine out of principle is purely an exercise in self flagellation if I can't accomplish the goal I set out to do.
Commenting like this will get your account banned. Personal attacks are not allowed here, regardless of how wrong the other person is. Please don't do it again.
If your child is dying and I have a medicine that can save him but my price is that you hand over your life's savings and become a slave in my salt mines for the rest of your life, and you do it because you don't want your kid to die, was it worth it? Or is there something else going on?
ISPs are a cartel protected by corrupt politicians. Let's sort that out before we start claiming that the free market is working and these services are priced appropriately and fairly.
First question - yes, duh. Except it is unrealistic in the context of free market because some other guy will just copy your drug and sell it to me for the cost of half of my life savings. A silly argument you have made.
Second paragraph - get the corrupt politicians out of the picture and the problem solves itself.
> Except it is unrealistic in the context of free market because some other guy will just copy your drug and sell it to me for the cost of half of my life savings. A silly argument you have made.
What if I have a patent on it? ;)
> get the corrupt politicians out of the picture and the problem solves itself.
Exactly; the whole point is that there is not a free market here. Like I said, ISPs are a cartel.
It's funny, since these corporate goblins and their government lackeys spout bullshit about free market and competition and innovation and blah blah blah whenever someone asks them to justify their blatantly anti-consumer maneuvering (or something tangentially related).
He makes some really good points and generally comes across as well-informed and well-intentioned. In this climate of crazy media hype it's good to keep an open mind and listen to the actual people working on policy.
I don't know if he's just misinformed or if he's being intentionally deceptive.
He talks about the "light touch" framework of the Bill Clinton era, which saw telecos profit immensely and never feed any money back into their system. I've know Comcast line who, back in the early 2000s, would tell me they'd take parts to their shop where people would resolder and reconstruct equipment that no one in the world manufactured anymore instead of just upgrading the lines.
Comcast sued the Electric Power Board in TN a few years later to keep them from offering Fibre to the home; a service that provided amazing speed at about the exact same cost.
He brings up AOL CDs versus Gigabit fibre, not talking about all the companies that are keeping that from happening.
There is still a bunch of dark fibre that hasn't been used. Telecos are still charging insane amounts for mobile bandwidth that's nowhere near saturated.
None of this stuff even touches network neutrality, which is simply saying "You pay for x quality of service and you get x quality of service, to everyone. We don't add a faster pipe just for Google. We don't throttle Netflix and give priority to YouTube. We won't throttle VoIP so you buy our VoIP service instead. Equal access, to the best of ability and equipment."
Even if he says Title II isn't the right framework, why gut it until it's replaced. If you say "we'll get rid of it and replace it," more likely than not they'll just git rid of it and telecos will do the same bullshit they've always done and run with it.
I think he's in the pocket of big teleco and is weaselling around giving them more power.
He obviously is intelligent if he has made it this far, but taking everything he says, I can't regard him as more than an idiot.
He says contradictory things. He says he supports an idea but doesn't support the act of enforcing it. His apparent ideology is in direct conflict with his actions. He either fundamentally misunderstands the situation, is majorly corrupt, or is simply malicious (which I doubt).
It's good to give people the benefit of the doubt - once. If they persistently behave in perverse fashion, then it's also OK to conclude that they're assholes.
I understand your point and will address it, but I think you chose a bad example. I don't think anyone thinks that government on any level should enforce a marriage (as in, forcing two people to stay wed). On the other hand, Pai thinks that some of these things should be regulated, just not by the FCC or the federal government.
The problem is, there isn't another place for the regulation to happen. The FTC simply does not have the expertise or resources and the internet needs broad conforming rules to perform well, so a state-by-state solution would prove disastrous.
> He talks about the "light touch" framework of the Bill Clinton era, which saw telecos profit immensely and never feed any money back into their system.
Even in the 1990s it was obvious that the copper network was obsolete and any additional money put into it would be a wasted investment.
> Comcast sued the Electric Power Board in TN a few years later to keep them from offering Fibre to the home
Chairman Pai specifically speaks about FCC initiatives to increase competition including opening up access to utility poles. It's a difficult issue because many utility poles/corridors are locally or municipally owned and the FCC has no jurisdiction there.
> Even if he says Title II isn't the right framework, why gut it until it's replaced.
The point is that it doesn't need to be replaced. It's a heavy-handed and unnecessary imposition of federal regulation on a market that needs to be as free and open as possible due to the speed of innovation in the tech space.
What's this great innovation in the wireline broadband space being stifled by overeager regulators? Presumably there's some concrete example of what our friends the competitive ISPs want to do and are unable to because of the regulations. Or even, what they _used_ to be able to do: Title II reclassification is obviously very recent and the prior "Open Internet" or net neutrality orders weren't long before that. I suspect that the "innovation" they're looking to provide won't be of the kind most people are interested in fostering.
I'm generally amenable to the argument that robust competition is the best solution and that we should be aiming to reduce those barriers but... unbundling was very unpopular with the ISPs and didn't really work and is dead, and as you said the big last-mile problems are local.
Knowing that the FCC isn't actually successfully creating the robust competitive local broadband markets they say they'd prefer, doesn't it make sense for them to do what they _are_ able to do and keep the existing (already "light touch") regulations?
> It's a heavy-handed and unnecessary imposition of federal regulation on a market that needs to be as free and open as possible due to the speed of innovation in the tech space.
This is nonsense. Because of the capital investment involved there are few "startups" in the ISP space. If there's technological innovation happening it's not filtering down to the consumer in the form of lower prices.
Here in Canada the effective price of LTE access per GB has continuously gone up in the face of "innovation" on how to structure billing for optimal revenue generation. Meanwhile Canadian ISPs fight any regulation that would help foreign entrants into the space with tooth and nail.
That's amusing considering that some state governments have been passing laws to prevent cities within their borders from offering any kind of public internet or building their own telecoms infrastructure.
How specifically is Title II "heavy-handed"? What are the legislative requirements that are so burdensome?
I'd be all for the "free and open" solution if we take it to its logical conclusion - that means franchise agreements, single-provider-multi-dwelling building agreements, and so on all become null and void at the same time.
I'm not sure it's inaccurate to describe Title II regulation as heavy-handed and unnecessary when the most rapid and beneficial growth of the Internet occurred in the 90s when there was little/no regulation.
My puppy grew at a great rate in the first year of her life but her growth has since slowed and now she hardly seems to grow at all. I blame excess regulation!
There were three basic reasons for the super-fast growth of internet in the 90s, which I remember quite well as I was making a good living selling computers and networking services.
1. It got way easier to use. When I first got onto the internet it was (almost) all text-based and unix-like, and conceptually difficult for many people to get to grips with, until someone invented a thing called a 'web browser' that regular people could figure out more easily.
2. No taxes on internet business, which had nothing to do with net neutrality but led to a stampede of people looking to make a quick buck and keep more of it than they would in other lines of business.
3. there was huge market potential because lots of people in developed countries had enough disposable income to own a computer, and modems were relatively affordable. Lots of people were doing peer-to-peer networking or running bulletin boards. If you wanted to start an internet company int eh 1990s all you needed was enough capital to rent a T1 line and a buy a or lease some network switching equipment (which was also becoming suddenly affordable with the growth of ethernet), and people would use your service because there weren't that many services out there.
I wrote a book for consumers on how to use the exciting new world of the internet back in 1995. Sadly it's long out of print but you can buy my copy for a mere $1000 and educate yourself on what things were actually like >20 years ago instead of your ideological imaginings.
The last mile infrastructure in the 90s was heavily regulated, and in fact it was those increases in regulation that had a huge part in democratizing the Internet.
Up until the mid 80s, telcos would only allow devices that they had approved to be connected to their networks. That's why you had acoustic coupler modems until then. The device that made an actual, electrical connection to the phone company's network had to be one of their approved phones. They maxed out at 1200 baud (most of the time much lower ~100baud).
Then with the breakup of the bells, and subsequent regulation forcing them to open their networks and allow unapproved devices as long as they didn't have a demonstrated adverse effect on the network.
So yeah, the FCC wasn't regulating AOL in the 90s, they were regulating the last mile: the Bells, GTE, etc. That's where the value in government regulation is, and that's where we want it now as well.
My ideal situation, IMHO, would be nationalized last mile, with a host of choices of companies handling the peering from the local office to the internet. You then pay the peering company, and they pay rent to the gov for the last mile. By reducing the barrier to entry (by making it so that any company can easily attach to last mile fiber) you increase competition. That's unlikely to in the current political climate however (to say the least).
This interview is a smokescreen to divert attention from real NN issues. What about interconnection problems, caps and zero rating and the rest of crooked stuff that incumbent ISPs are doing to stifle competition and keep prices high?
I actively welcome and even seek out conversations in opposition to net neutrality. I do this because, to me, an echo chamber becomes claustrophobic extremely quickly.
But, despite all this searching, I have yet to find a meaningful argument in opposition. They are either vague or filled with misassumptions. I have yet to find someone (with a correct understanding of the concept) to argue that it actually helps consumers. Their argument always stems from the fear of over-regulation or a historical lack of net neutrality regulation that still allowed the internet to flourish (which is a nonsensical argument). They never challenge the technical rules themselves.
This interview (along with almost anything else coming from Pai) falls under this meaningless argument in opposition.
At the end of the day, they want to make it so that my ISP can charge me more based on what sites I want to go to, and charge the providers of those sites more to reach me. I don't care what the rationale is, I don't want it.
We need some grownups to represent us.
If you spend ~$50/month on home internet access, and $50/month on cell phone access, that's $1200/year for internet connectivity.
How much do you spend on hardware per year? Do you buy a >$1200 laptop per year? How much money does Google make off of your info?
The ISPs are rolling in cash. They have terrible customer service. They typically have no competition in their markets and they refuse to innovate.
Yet, we give ISPs soooo much money. If there was proper competition, would we be spending such ridiculously high fees on the internet access we get?