Former FCC Head: "We Should Be Ashamed of Ourselves" For State of Broadband 118
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.
It's a problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not as though our industrial titans were actually nicer in the past; but they didn't seem to have the same spirit of "Well, the bean counters say that just doing bare minimum upkeep and making oligopoly margins has a better ROI than actually building anything, so fuck trying and let's see about a bonus." Back in the day, when you rolled up your sleeves and got ready for a hard day of ruthless exploitation and wanton destruction, it's because you had some sort of grand plan in mind.
So close, and yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
But we haven't given competition the chance it needs
So very true. Most of the impediments are about pole-access for community broadband, and that's at the State level. So many attempts at competition have failed at the pole-access level (which suits the incumbents just fine!). Sure, if you have Google money you can get through all of it, but even they only have a handful of cities, a drop in the bucket. Inequitable pole access is one of the reasons for the meager success of WISP's, and though I wish them well, spectrum is limited, glass is not.
Whose internet is it anyway? And whose democracy is it anyway?
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.
He seems to be concluding that Congress is in a smarter position to fix it than the entrepreneurs who know what needs doing but are held back by the government regulations. Congress couldn't find its way out of a box unless K-Street told them where the exit was. Patching bad code with more bad code is not the way the Internet wins, either in a router or in the CFR. The odds of additional regulation from Congress not making things worse are slim to none.
I'm pretty sure that he just made things worse by correctly identifying real problems and then prescribing unicorn farts as the solution from his bully pulpit.
What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
a group of internet industry executives and politicians came together...
Did this individual seriously believe he could make this audience of industry executives and politicians feel shame? What next? Will he tell a serial rapist to feel remorse? Will he tell a psychopathic murderer to feel empathy?
These people are incapable of feeling shame. It's what's made them so successful in the first place.
It all comes down to one thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
It all comes down to one thing and that is a desire to make sure that pay TV (cable/satellite/fiber/whatever) isn't killed by the internet.
Re:About time (Score:5, Interesting)
People act like it's so impossible to leave America. But seriously, if you don't like America, you truly, honestly, don't have to stay there.
I didn't like America. I traveled. I found a place I actually liked a lot (Iceland). I applied for jobs. I got one surprisingly quick. I moved. And now I've lived here for years.
There's nothing preventing you from doing the same. If you don't like America, you really can leave!
Oh, and while we're talking about the internet... here's what my highly isolated, incredibly rugged/unstable terrain, tied-for-second-lowest population density, super-high prices for electronic equipment country's internet stats are:
Fiber's really been taking off since the OECD study was done, it now even goes out to places like Vestfirðir, where in the whole region the largest town is under 4k people, and some towns are so isolated that they're legally classified as islands during the winter because the roads become impassable until late spring. But the fiber stays on. :) We're currently at about 65% home fiber penetration, and the telecoms are talking about hitting 80% by the end of the year.
In general, we've got superb computer and net connectivity and literacy - even on the little stuff (for example, over here, IE is the number *three* web browser, and it's not even close). Reykjavík uses a direct democracy system for bringing public issues directly to the floor at city council meetings, the new constitutional drafting team was credited with online crowdsourcing the constitution (that's overstating the case, but they did make extensive use of online suggestions and discussions), etc. My only real criticism of the net environment here is that while domestic net traffic is generally uncapped, international usually is, you choose an international data package. So this leads to, for example, instead of using Pirate Bay, people use Iceland-only torrent sites like Deildu for file sharing. And one of the local companies, Síminn, is looking at the possibility of domestic caps too, which would suck. Crazy-fast connectivity is great, but not so great if you can't use it to download whatever you want.