Former FCC Head: "We Should Be Ashamed of Ourselves" For State of Broadband

An anonymous reader writes A group of internet industry executives and politicians came together to look back on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and to do a little crystal-ball gazing about the future of broadband regulation in the United States. Former FCC commissioner Michael Copps was among the presenters, and he had sharp words for the audience about the "insanity" of the current wave of merger mania in the telecom field and the looming threats of losing net neutrality regulation.

About time

[just_another_sean]

It took 18 years for them to figure this out? Whiles some grandmother in Sweden had 40 GB back in 2007?

When can I get mine? And can I choose from more than one provider? And, most importantly, will I really get 40 GB?

Re:So close, and yet...

[king neckbeard]

And then he goes off the rails. It's a republic, for Pete's sake, and it's the Internet of whomever builds it. The interconnection of many and varied private networks is the model that has led to the most successful technological innovation in history. Mess with that at your great peril. Yes, the too-big-to-fail fascist/corporate model is attractive to miscreants, but fix that, don't wreck the Internet

Except for the places where they use different models than the US, and also seem to have faster speeds and less bullshit.

Re:It's a problem...

[Jade_Wayfarer]

Well, that's the core problem of post-industrial society vs. industrial society. Maybe even post-modern world vs. modern world. Maybe people like Elon Musk (sorry, I know that everyone are already grew tired of his name, but I can't take another example from the top of my head) can renew the popularity of actually achieving something, rather than "great, we've secured the profit for our shareholders for the next quarter, fuck everything else". I, for one, would really love to see a beginning of a "neo-modern" era.

Re:About time

[just_another_sean]

Oh, that's your solution? "You don't like Amerrika, git out"!

Thanks AC, it's so obvious. We shouldn't focus on making our country better, as long as it's better than the worst shit holes in the world we're doing fine. And if you don't think so, don't bother, just move somewhere else.

Re:About time

[GrahamCox]

And there, in a nut, is why the USA is nose-diving into oblivion. If you believe it can't be improved, it won't improve. Rampant capitalism is NOT the answer to every need, and Sweden proves it. By treating internet access as a piece of necessary national infrastructure, instead of just letting "the market" fight it out, you arrive at a far better end point far sooner. It's got nothing to do with idealism, all you need to do is compare the actual results.

Too many unanswered questions

[Joe Gillian]

The real issue here is that we have far too many unanswered questions when it comes to broadband internet. The biggest, of course, is who regulates ISPs and internet as a service (rather than the content on the internet). To this day, we STILL don't know the answer. Plenty of people have tried (and failed) to answer it.

The FCC tried to initially regulate them as a Title I "information service", but that led to a bunch of lawsuits and eventually the Circuit Court of Appeals stepping in and saying that no, they couldn't regulate ISPs (especially in regards to network neutrality) under Title I. Now, years later, there's a debate over whether the FCC should step in and regulate them under Title II - something that the courts said would probably be in line with the legal authority given to the FCC by Congress. To this day, there is still no hard legislation as to who should regulate them, so it may very well be that even if the FCC regulates ISPs under Title II, a lawsuit by the telecos/cablecos could reverse the whole thing.

The same thing is true of the "last mile", where supposedly it's regulated by local government.. but in practice it's ruled by Big Telco/Big Cableco and their constant lawsuits used to wipe out the competition. They can do this because there is no strong legislation preventing them from doing so, and until there is a law that provides immunity to competitors from being sued simply because they want to compete and prevents local government from signing all of the infrastructure away to Big Telco, lawsuits will continue to be the law of the land.

We need to answer these questions first. Then we can start improving broadband in the United States.

Re:About time

[Rei]

Have you actually started learning Dutch and putting forth the same amount of effort to getting a job in the netherlands that you'd put towards finding a job in the US (aka, months of searching and learning the right jobfinding approaches)?

You might be surprised.