Business Idea: Make it easy for Joe Schmoe's like myself to take action against issues like this.
I hate the monopoly the cable company has in my area. I hate that my parents were paying AT&T $50/mo. for a 1Mbps connection because we hadn't looked at their bill in a year and because getting cable in their building is a pain in the ass. I hate these new early upgrade programs the wireless carriers are rolling that are a plain rip off (give us your phone and pay full price for your upgrade but in payments). I hate that if my phone miscalculates my usage and I go over by even 1MB, Verizon charges me $15 that month.
I'm all for free market enterprise, but recognize (much like Adam Smith) that it doesn't work for all sectors of the economy.
With that said, I am a busy working professional trying to make it in this dog-eat-dog world. I'm well educated, have the means, but even for me, I haven't a clue as to what to do about all the things I just ranted about.
I don't have the solution, but I hope someone finds a way to make it easy for me to contribute to the democratic process.
> Business Idea: Make it easy for Joe Schmoe's like myself to take action against issues like this.
I do believe that's called a PAC. Lets be frank though - how much money are you going to get if you put together an anti-telecom PAC? I'm gonna take a guess and say it'll be an order of magnitude less than what AT&T and Comcast are willing to spend purely in campaign donations, in addition to lobbyists etc.
What's more - AT&T and Comcast will continue to do this year after year. Much like we've seen no lack of SOPA-lookalikes cropping up every few months in the house or senate, this isn't going to be some "donate $20 now and all these problems will go away!" thing. It's going to be a battle of attrition, unless you do something on the very drastic side (I hear some Scandinavian countries have government controlled/deployed fiber and the ISPs all compete to provide service over it; if there's better alternatives I'm all ears).
how much money are you going to get if you put together an anti-telecom PAC
what about free labour? that's what the op seems to be hinting at. people want to take action. but they need ROI on that <action>. They need scale, distribution, co-ordination. etc.
your other points are good ones, especially the persistence and duration of entities like the telco's on influencing legislators over their entire careers, etc. that persistence and their deep pockets make them formidable opponents. for sure.
I see obstacle #1 as raising awareness. While everyone hates their cable bill, it's not obvious that there are viable alternatives to the current structure of the industry. It also doesn't help that the current structure benefits most major TV media outlets (i.e. Viacom, Comcast/NBC, Fox and ABC/Disney).
There are also useful lessons to be learned from history; particularly, MCI's fight against Bell System monopoly. There's a good documentary about the breakup called Long Distance Warrior[1].
If your goal is to destroy all telecommunications companies, then you'd have to out raise them by at least 50%.
If your goal is for their lobbying expenses to rise to the point that there are meetings called and they have to decide whether to invest more than they really want in Washington, you can get away with spending 10 or 15% of what they do.
This especially true if articles written about your position sell easily to newspaper readers.
What about a PAC that was funded similar to a kickstarter. So either you raise all the funds or not towards X goal? I had an idea like this for the common person to crowd source their funds and effectively buy back their government but not a fan of politics
Buy DSL from a third party. Someone like "DSLExtreme", or ACD.net, or similar non-AT&T provider.
They're (some) of the companies who directly use these agreements that AT&T is trying to destroy. If more companies like them existed, and/or had better revenue, they could stand up and fight for their future.
Of course, no one will sign up for their service, because they'll only be able to provide you with 0 to 6mbps of service (because they only are allowed access to Central Offices, and not the smaller offices / boxes AT&T uses to get you Uverse), which makes them significantly slower than either ATT Uverse or Comcast in the vast majority of markets.
Which is why we're in this mess in the first place.
In my current apartment, it's not even possible to get 3rd party DSL. (Reply from DSLExtreme: After looking into your prequalification results we determined that we cannot provide High-Speed Internet Service to your location.) And what's worse is that my apartment isn't wired for cable either (cable guy came out, said "sorry dude").
So what's left? Satellite? Tethering? I wish there was a reasonable alternative, and I would be happy to buy even measly 1.5 Mbps service as long as the money wouldn't be going into AT&T's coffers.
Those providers can't offer better prices because they pay wholesale from the monopolist and add their business on top. They can only compete on service. That's nice, but I want to pay less overall.
If symbolic action is your cup of tea, might I suggest taking a look at my side project, Brian's Taskforce. The model is a hybrid between petition sites and charitable giving. The basic idea is to propose local improvement ideas and put down symbolic donations to charity alongside those ideas to emphasize how important the ideas are to you. The powers-that-be then can see more than just a number of "votes" but see a dollar amount that is going to good causes if they take action.
I've not had a whole lot of luck drumming up interest. But then, I'm terrible at that. While the original intent was to use it for local improvements, I later added national and business-oriented subdomains.
I've been trying to get my local town of El Segundo California to make several changes that would amount to modest but noticeable quality of life improvements for me by putting $1,000 bounties on each. For example, paving better sidewalks along portions of my daily walking commute. But so far, my only successes have been in convincing local businesses to make some small changes.
I believe in the concept, but I think a volume is necessary and I don't have nor have I yet developed the skill to create the volume.
Your solution isn't a business idea that needs to be created. There's already a system in place to take action against issues like these. The solution is political.
These companies, especially cable and land-line, use public resources that can be regulated and expanded. There are politicians and lobbying groups that are trying to reform the system. If you had the time, you could join one of their causes. If you don't have the time, you could donate money to their campaigns and groups.
Think nothing could get done? You're wrong. It's a slow process but, if enough people support the cause, it can get done.
I'm sure people can point out mayors who ran on the platform of reform and lost. That doesn't mean you give up or become cynical. Major fights against entrenched organizations take time but it's possible to change the system. A mayor lost an election? Help him/her run again. Keep at it.
The first line of defense is simply to up-vote posts like this on HN and Reddit, as well as posting to Twitter and Facebook. The more people who know about it, the more fuss we create. I know that's not much, but it's how we've beaten greedy initiatives like this in the past (SOPA).
I agree with you though, if it were made dead simple to contribute in some way towards an initiative against this specific bill and others like it, I'd of course donate.
People also need to vote with their dollars. I understand thats only part of it but its a necessary part. Look at what T-Mobile has done for wireless plans, if more people switched to them for example, I'm sure AT&T/VZW/Sprint will wake up and start offering better pricing/plans. It won't fix the issue, that boils down the law makers need to make the landscape more competitive and easier to compete in. But at least it helps in the short term.
I've been waiting to switch to T-Mo for months now, but they've got incredibly poor reception in my (urban) area. And I'm not talking 4G, I'm talking about basic calling/texting.
>we hadn't looked at their bill in a year and because getting cable in their building is a pain in the ass.
Oh come on. Yes, the situation could be better, but this is your parents' problem. Yell at the landlord/condo board/super and get an agreement with cable or at least get them to drop a line in the basement. Cable is dying to get in every building they can.
We have a small remote office in DC and I single-handily got Comcast to run a line to the building (which isn't even ours). All for a $150 a month deal for a 50mbps line. Before we were paying almost that much for 3mbps Verizon 'business' DSL. Another tenant saw it and bought internet and TV and others will probably in the future. Its not hard to get these guys to run these lines. It takes a few months but it happens.
Interesting. I would say free market enterprise is the only thing that will eventually allow disruption in this market. I work for a company doing just that now, and it's very easy to see that customers are ready for a change. The market is ripe for disruption.
Cute, but free market won't help you if you are fighting big wigs like these. You'll get crushed using dirty tricks that can be 100% free market compatible or just bought out.
I place more faith in Google in this regard. At least they have cash to fight these monopoly titans.
Easy there. I've been doing this for nearly 10 years and have had enormous success at a regional level taking customers from the Big Boys. Now I'm taking it nationally. Don't patronize me I knew a lot about what I'm doing.
Perhaps, it's all as grand as you say. But if you were small enough to not be noticeable, now you'll catch their eye. Best of luck.
Either way free market is nothing to be idealized. It's not that great on its own. Free market never existed in its pure form and from a theoretical standpoint its not that great.
Note: I patronize for your naive belief in the free markets.
Just FYI, If it was a free-market enterprise, you would have reasonable prices and services. As proof I submit certain areas of Europe where companies are required by law to lease the last mile of wires to competitors at reasonable rates.
As it stands, if, say a city tries to band together and make low-cost high-performance municipal internet, the existing companies will sue to maintain their monopoly.
"If it was a free-market enterprise, you would have reasonable prices and services. As proof I submit certain areas of Europe where companies are required by law to lease the last mile"
Did you read that before you hit submit ? If you're pro-regulation that's fine and if you're a free market fanatic that's fine too ... but what you wrote is just pure gibberish.
> If it was a free-market enterprise, you would have reasonable prices and services.
The free market only efficient under certain circumstances: when transaction costs are small and when there are few barriers to entry.
One well-known form of market failure is the "natural monopoly", and one form of that applies here: the geographic monopoly. The barriers to entry for a new ISP may be quite large, if significant investments in physical infrastructure which must be made before the ISP can operate. (One can also intuit that having multiple physical telephone networks connecting to houses in the same neighborhood would be wildly redundant.)
Most monopolies are not natural or at least not entirely so. They are enabled by government regulation. In many areas for example, even if you wanted to and had the funding you would be prohibited from starting up a new cable or telco because of local franchise regulations allowing only one provider of those services.
I hate to be Debbie Downer, but --- this battle has already been lost. Not just this battle, this war has already been lost.
Go ahead, write a letter. But you won't. Maybe, just maybe, you'll make the effort fire off an angry email. Yeah, right. That will really accomplish something. Err, no it won't.
Don't like what I said? Neither do I! But, tell me, in specific, concrete terms, what can "the little guy" do about this? Nothing, except for opting out. E.g. using Ooma instead of ILEC dialtone. Use Netflix instead of a cable subscription. Big deal. You're still buying IP dialtone from the oligopoly. And the number of cord cutters is still relatively insignificant.
The state of this situation is getting worse, actually; remember that net neutrality lawsuit Verizon is trying to push through? Their lawyers made it clear they want not just to prioritize traffic, but to block some altogether.
So really, short of getting your service from infrastructure laid down directly by a CLEC, there really is no opting out. That's why I still say writing a letter of concern is the very least you can do.
EDIT: It's worth mentioning here that not all regulators are spineless. Pay attention to how New York is handling the Fire Island case. After Verizon refused to install new infrastructure (offering them wireless service as a substitute), some of the state officials proposed fines of somewhere in the six figures per customer. Verizon buckled under the pressure, and wired the whole island for FiOS.
It gets better too; despite Verizon's protests, the state is launching an investigation into how much it costs them to provide wireline service.
So seriously, please don't be apathetic about this. The people of Fire Island weren't, and it seems to have worked out for them.
No, using Netflix just feeds these bureaucracies more money. Torrent everything that you can, and encourage others to do so. It really is the only way to take these horrible entities down.
If you want to support the content creators, then give them a direct donation after torrenting the content instead of letting the record companies or what have you get its dirty hands on a huge chunk of it.
Additionally, they are all rolling out DPI ad-serving platforms that sniff your traffic (and I'm sure also sell it to any .gov with a dime) -- AT&T being the current worst offender by charging a $30 a month penalty if you try to opt out of it. (See www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Offers-70-1-Gbps-in-Austin-With-a-Big-Catch-126969)
They're a corporation. They can charge you to not spy on you because you don't HAVE to use them. It would only be illegal if they spied on you without you signing their contract.
Edit: It's the same way that when you agree to the TOS of a service like, xbox live or something, if they had a line about how you can't talk badly about Xbox or they delete your account, it's not breaking the first amendment, because they aren't the government, and you consented to that agreement.
Just a sidenote; TOS are not concrete law-binding forces. You can't put "unreasonable" things in a ToS. If MS dropped a gamer's subscription because she complained about XboxLive on her Twitter, she could take action against MS and have a chance of winning if a Judge says "You can't tell people not to complain". Also, I'd be very annoyed if I ever heard of a company dropping customers who complain about them. I think that's unreasonable. Every successful company I've ever heard of has complaints about them.
NOTE: A "normal" complaint is different from outright excessive/exaggerated slander.
The law obviously isn't as simple as that. If I agree with an electrician that I will pay him or her to install a switch that we are both aware is unsafe and against building codes, that is still illegal.
That isn't really relevant here, though. The contract in this case is essentially "We'll give you a good deal on high-speed Internet in exchange for letting us serve you context-sensitive ads. You can of course opt out of the ads, but then we'll charge you more." No element of this contract involves breaking the law, and no element of the contract places unusually burdensome requirements on the customer — you just decide whether you'll accept $30 to let AT&T show you some ads.
(The fact that AT&T's ad-supported plan is not a better deal than Google's fiber plan is not really material. It isn't generally illegal to have an inferior product or to charge more than your competitors for the same goods.)
You're not paying $30 extra to opt-out. They're giving you a $30 discount for you to hand over your data.
It's the same way gas stations get away with "charging extra" for credit. Most credit card vendor agreements do not allow the merchant to pass along the 3% or whatever fee to the customer. So what the gas stations do instead is give you a "cash discount".
This is no longer true re: credit cards. As part of the consumer protection package that passed a few years back, charging fees became permissible by merchants.
Thanks to Snowden's revelations, Internet traffic will be fully encrypted sooner rather than later. They can't serve you ads if they can't examine your packets.
doug says:
December 11, 2013 at 11:51 pm
I was led to your site by Hacker News. But no matter
what you have to say, I refuse to read white and
fluorescent green text on a black background. Get real.
Way to show some class, Doug, whoever you are. A shining example of Hacker News wisdom and congeniality.
There are plenty of technical options for overriding a site's stylesheet. I'd much rather have this jarring white and green on black than an AJAX-loaded JavaScript-only "app" that takes a week and a half to load a few paragraphs of text.
This is an important story. Comcast in particular is already a monopoly, and just might be the most hated
company in the history of man--by customers and their
own employees.
"Civil" disobedience? If they are truly this hated (and they seem to be), why hasn't anything been done? What's holding people back? Internet/TV addiction?
Even without all the rapey regulatory conditions, the whole concept of these bills they're trying to pass are pretty important.
It's fair to say that certainly after the most recent Snowden leaks, there should be a viable alternative to wireless service; the way it's being used for such invasive surveillance, nobody should have to depend on it
I sent mail to my state's public utilities commission and the FCC about this very issue. AT&T's lobbying efforts being what they are, please take some time to do it yourself too.
Can someone please write a TL;DR for me? I sense that this is an important issue but my eyes seem to glaze over trying to figure out what's really going on here. The accusation is that AT&T is lobbying to attain a monopoly to share with Comcast, but the gist of the move is quite hazy. Thanks.
Very heavy statements. "They are working together to screw you."
Actually, they're only going to screw the very narrows subset of rural users who don't have access to competitive wireless or internet options.
If your only choice is Landline or Nothing, then this is a big deal.
If you have cable companies, landline broadband, wifi, and other broadband providers fighting for your service, this is a much less big deal. It's stupid scare mongering.
The only service to be slightly worried about is in emergencies. Your landline phone plugged in to the wall will usually still take a call if there's a power outage since the switching station has backup energy. But that's only if everyone isn't calling at once.
"If you have cable companies, landline broadband, wifi, and other broadband providers fighting for your service, this is a much less big deal. It's stupid scare mongering"
I live in a suburban area. Not too far from metropolitan. and close to (5miles) to a major ivy league university. Lets see my options:
verizon dsl (3mbs to 6mbs) - 54$
optimum - (15mbs but I barely get 1mbps at peak) 54$ soon to be 60$
wifi - sprint (4g/3g speeds, can say I get around 1 to 2 mbps)- 54$ for 4GB.
dslextreme (3mbs) for 24.99$
For me the best value for my money is dslextreme. If that option is taken away, then I don't really have much chioce because very one else is colluded and price is fixed in some private inter company meetings.
So you are the one without any real facts just discrediting the real issues the article points out.
No, these choices are not really competitors for each other. I don't mind having only 2 choices if they were just comcast and optimum or at&t and verizon. I think you are confusing between choices and competitors. dslextreme is a competitor to verizon and thats what will keep verizon delivering better service. But if verizon and optimum are the only choices (with prices fixed) , none will work to make it better for the consumer. And lack of competition is the reason why these companies are jacking up prices.
You're going to DOS their offices then. Just write a nice, single email free from spelling or grammatical errors. I've started corresponding with the offices of my congressmen a few months ago, writing a letter whenever some issue comes up that matters to me.
I lay out my case for why the issue is important to me, then illustrate the importance of the issue to larger US society, then I ask what sort of actions or policies the politician is going to take on the issue.
I have gotten a response every single time and while some of the responses have tended towards the more formal, "blow off" type of response, I can tell that someone at the office is at least reading what I've sent them and responding.
Damn you Google Chrome. I thought of switching back to Firefox due to privacy concerns, but got accustomed to Chrome's dev tools. But then this happens... that might be the final straw.
Here's a business idea, start a company that competes with AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, offering better service at a lower price? If they are as awful as everyone says, that should be easy I would think. Shrug.
I hate the monopoly the cable company has in my area. I hate that my parents were paying AT&T $50/mo. for a 1Mbps connection because we hadn't looked at their bill in a year and because getting cable in their building is a pain in the ass. I hate these new early upgrade programs the wireless carriers are rolling that are a plain rip off (give us your phone and pay full price for your upgrade but in payments). I hate that if my phone miscalculates my usage and I go over by even 1MB, Verizon charges me $15 that month.
I'm all for free market enterprise, but recognize (much like Adam Smith) that it doesn't work for all sectors of the economy.
With that said, I am a busy working professional trying to make it in this dog-eat-dog world. I'm well educated, have the means, but even for me, I haven't a clue as to what to do about all the things I just ranted about.
I don't have the solution, but I hope someone finds a way to make it easy for me to contribute to the democratic process.