Internet Providers Say the FCC Should Not Investigate Broadband Prices 64
Internet service providers and their lobby groups are fighting a US plan to prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services. In particular, ISPs want the Federal Communications Commission to drop the plan's proposal to require that prices charged to consumers be non-discriminatory. From a report: In 2021, Congress required the Federal Communications Commission to issue rules "preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin" within two years. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel last month released her draft plan to comply with the congressional mandate and scheduled a November 15 commission vote on adopting final rules. The plan is likely to pass in a party-line vote as Rosenworcel has a 3-2 Democratic majority, but aspects of the draft could be changed before the vote. Next week's meeting could be a contentious one, judging by a statement issued Monday by Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr.
Carr described Rosenworcel's proposal as "President Biden's plan to give the administrative state effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US." He also objects to the Rosenworcel plan's statement that the FCC rules may apply to entities that are not broadband providers, such as landlords, if they "impede equal access to broadband Internet access service." Consumer advocates generally support the proposal but say the planned system for handling complaints, ISP responses, and investigations is not transparent enough, reducing the system's potential to act as a deterrent. Consumer advocates also say Internet users who have already been harmed by discrimination may not get any relief because the proposed rules do not apply retroactively. ISPs including Comcast, Charter, AT&T, and Verizon have held a flurry of meetings with FCC officials and commissioners in which they argued that the rules are too broad.
Carr described Rosenworcel's proposal as "President Biden's plan to give the administrative state effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US." He also objects to the Rosenworcel plan's statement that the FCC rules may apply to entities that are not broadband providers, such as landlords, if they "impede equal access to broadband Internet access service." Consumer advocates generally support the proposal but say the planned system for handling complaints, ISP responses, and investigations is not transparent enough, reducing the system's potential to act as a deterrent. Consumer advocates also say Internet users who have already been harmed by discrimination may not get any relief because the proposed rules do not apply retroactively. ISPs including Comcast, Charter, AT&T, and Verizon have held a flurry of meetings with FCC officials and commissioners in which they argued that the rules are too broad.
ISPs want to continue to rip off customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Zero surprise there. And as too much of the US prays to the great God of mammon, they will probably be successful. A core reason why the US has a 2nd world end-user Internet infrastructure.
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If they don't welcome it then there's something shady going on.
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Indeed.
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Even if they do welcome it, there's something shady going on
Re:ISPs want to continue to rip off customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who object to prohibiting discriminatory pricing need to justify why they need discriminatory pricing. Their objections instead are skirting around this key detail. It's clear that they really just object to the government doing oversight and prefer the old style of "we can screw who we want and when we want."
Re:ISPs want to continue to rip off customers (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. Unfettered capitalism. Because that works so well.
Re:ISPs want to continue to rip off customers (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're going to "partner" with the gov, you should be willing to also show the Emperor's New Fiber, or where a common carrier status (now being decided) makes you just a hauler of data to other service providers. Let consumers pick. Forbid models that give a single carrier competition in a market (even if that's a satellite because you're impractically difficult to provision).
No one can be surprised by their objection. May the light of day do us (all consumers) well.
Re:ISPs want to continue to rip off customers (Score:5, Interesting)
or where a common carrier status (now being decided) makes you just a hauler of data to other service providers
The last mile (aka physical layer, Layer 1 in OSI) need not haul any data, or, more accurately, its owner need not haul any data.
In my CLEC days, all the ILEC did for us was provide the physical layer. We had our own voice switch [wikipedia.org] and DSLAM [wikipedia.org] within their Central Offices. The basic workflow went like this:
Ultimate, we just leased the 'pair' from the ILEC. They had no involvement in "hauling" our data, except at the physical layer level, as electrical signals. Our voice switch and DSLAM had their own links to the PSTN and Internet. Of course, the providers of those links leased some lines from the ILEC, just as we did, except in a few large metro areas where the Central Office was co-located with other voice/data providers. In those scenarios we could get direct non-leased connections to our upstream providers.
The other model, which I was never part of, is where the CLEC is just reselling ILEC services. DSL Extreme [dslextreme.com] I think uses this business model. In that case, the ILEC is "hauling" the data, DSL-X's services that I've seen terminate on AT&T supplied modem/routers, supply the customer with AT&T IP addresses, it's an AT&T tech who shows up for install day, etc. The win for AT&T is they're not dealing with consumer billing. The win for the consumer is they don't have to deal with AT&T's caps.
I am biased from my time in the business, but I think the "leased physical layer" model makes more sense. We paid a very small wholesale rate (under $3) for each last mile pair we leased. We did not have to pay for maintenance issues and ironically had priority over the ILEC's own residential customers for dispatches when such issues arose. We additionally paid co-location fees for the floor space consumed by our voice switches and DSLAMs. We also paid optional fees to leverage the ILEC's battery banks and generator power, that infrastructure we could have supplied ourselves, but it was cheaper/easier to let the ILEC manage it.
This is very definitely the model we should be pursuing for fiber. It doesn't neatly translate to the DOCSIS world, where there's a shared physical layer, not sure how you'd bring this model into that universe to be honest. In that scenario it probably does have to be the MSO "hauling" your data.
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Consider Layer -0 the easement or airwave path to your device. Today, you need to have something called an ISP, which is goofy. The highway ought to be non-toll roads. Cut out the middlemen.
The Tariff 12 carriers often used their status to become ILECs because the incumbents had monopolies that would be taken from their cold dead hands. Judge Greene changed all that, but we're back to the same turf war with different shareholder interests with their hands out.
Cable, a viable alternative, no matter how you d
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5G shouldn't be priced out of the picture. T-Mobile's standalone price is cheaper than most wireline broadband, Verizon's is about the same, and if you have cellular service with them it's very cheap with bundle discounts. Not an option for everyone, cellular is very location dependent, but I'll tell you as someone who used to live under the Cox monopoly that T-Mobile and Verizon were lifesavers. Cox bent us over for years until LTE and 5G home Internet emerged on the scene. I derived nearly orgasmic
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On a good day, 5G can be outstanding without a day.
And on a bad da
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There were no 'bad days' in my previous metro. The dense small cell network meant you were only sharing the cell with a block to a block and a half worth of your neighbors. It was a better contention ratio than Cox had with DOCSIS. Less available downstream but way more upstream. Signal quality was very good so modulations like 256QAM were the rule rather than exception.
The one issue, the small cells didn't have backup power, so in a power outage the macro cellular network would have to take over. I n
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That's great!
Our area is already oversubscribed and weather makes edge connection ugly. It's not rural, and every week the connections get stranger. How long until more towers are converted? Who knows.
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If your connection is 'edge' enough for weather to make a difference you aren't a candidate for cellular home internet. :(
Like I said, it's location dependent. Where I live now, it'd never work, no small cells, and the macro serving my house has several hills, trees, and buildings in the way. I get 4Mbps in the back of the house and 11Mbps in the front. If they started putting home users on that it'd perform even worse.
Verizon and T-Mobile aren't likely to target this area for small cells because we ha
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It is a little surprising that they publicly stated their desire to rip off customers for bigoted reasons in 2023...
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That depends on your point-of-view.
Fuck the ISPs (Score:5, Insightful)
Investigate them. Regulate them. Fine them. All ISPs in the US are subpar. And none of them deserve any kind of leeway or protections.
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If ALL are subpar, none are. They are simply par.
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Are any of them birdies?
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If ALL are subpar, none are. They are simply par.
This only works if you completely ignore the rest of the world.
That's the real "problem" with the information age. The indoctrination and "America is best at everything always" rings really fucking hollow when we can directly communicate with people all over the world. Are there worse countries than the USA to live in? Absolutely. But are there far, far, FAR better? Um, yeah. Pretty much every civilized country in the world has various degrees of better over us. Better / more available healthcare that most
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It must be hard to have no critical thinking.
Funny (Score:4, Insightful)
How they will gladly take government money to expand their network, but balk at the idea of actually being accountable...
Re:Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more than Government money. Their entire business model is only practical because of the Government. Remember that the next time some free market asshole chimes in saying regulation is foolish/unnecessary/communist/whatever. The Government created the right-of-way without which their product would be impossible. If they want to die on the hill of the free market, I'm down for that, I'll be removing their lines that cross my property until we can work out a reasonable deal for rent. I think I should get a percentage of all of my downstream neighbor's monthly service bills. Seems fair, right?
I'm shocked, SHOCKED! (Score:3)
Companies providing a service that may be overpriced don't want the .gov to investigate their pricing? That's INCONCEIVABLE!
In Other News.... (Score:5, Funny)
Tony Soprano says FBI should not investigate Cosa Nostra.
Yes, I absolutely just compared the ISP business to the Mafia. Seems unfair to the Mafia. They have better customer service. Granted, their debt collection department is a tad bit more aggressive than Comcast's. ;-)
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Tony Soprano says FBI should not investigate Cosa Nostra.
Yes, I absolutely just compared the ISP business to the Mafia. Seems unfair to the Mafia. They have better customer service. Granted, their debt collection department is a tad bit more aggressive than Comcast's. ;-)
If only a bit :D
As a non American I'm continually amazed at how much bad behaviour you tolerate because free market.
In the UK, I have the choice of a dozen different ISPs, some as low as £20 a month even for fibre. All nicely regulated to ensure they don't just take out money and run.
Fox claims hen house not disturbed (Score:4, Funny)
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and in other news... Serial killers say FBI should not investigate homicides.
If... (Score:3)
...ISPs are charging people a premium based on race, religion, or skin colour, then I think the government has solid grounds to intervene. These are not legitimate grounds for price gouging.
Now, if an ISP were to offer a special reduced rate to people who are poor, especially families with children at school who really do need Internet access to be able to succeed at school, I could see justification. But this would mean changing the rate based on income.
Now, I very much doubt that that's the issue here, ISPs aren't known for their philanthropy. Still, I'd hate to see ISPs barred from subsidising poor areas. The question would be how to encourage it. That the ISPs are averse to investigation doesn't suggest they're doing stuff that would boost their popularity, though. More likely, they're abusing customers and don't want to be caught.
Still, laws should be crafted not just to inhibit bad behaviour but to enable and encourage good behaviour. This means regulations regarding income would need careful consideration.
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Now, I very much doubt that that's the issue here, ISPs aren't known for their philanthropy.
Oh no, I think that is the reason. You've just phrased it the wrong way.
They charge poor people less money because if they didn't then they wouldn't get any money from poor people at all. Meaning that they're still making a profit, even at those reduced rates. Meaning that the real victims here are people who aren't poor, or who don't qualify for the reduced rates. The non-reduced rates are artificially high.
Now I'm sure that's not a surprise to anyone who knows anything about broadband service in the
In other news (Score:2)
Criminals (Score:2)
Of course, no criminal ever wants to be investigated.
Alternate generalized headline (Score:3)
"Price fixers not keen on regulators having a look at their price structure"
Now you can apply it to energy companies, supermarkets, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft "Select" licensing, etc.
You say that as though it's a bad thing! (Score:2)
Carr described Rosenworcel's proposal as "President Biden's plan to give the administrative state effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US."
While I'm mindful of the danger that lies in giving governments yet more control, I'm pretty sure that in this case government control is better than letting Big Telecom continue to abuse their control over what has become an essential service.
I hate government intervention, BUT .... (Score:3)
We've really reached a "tipping point" in America where everyone using the Internet in any kind of reasonable fashion is doing so with a "broadband" package provided by one of only a few providers. (All of your major cable companies and selected telcos like AT&T or Verizon.) Others seem to just be reselling their products under their own name.
This seems awfully parallel to the situation with our cellular providers. They're regulated because nearly everyone relies on them (even if only for data "hotspots", which again, are ways on to the modern Internet), yet we only have T-Mobile, Verizon or AT&T to choose from (plus all the companies reselling their service under their own names).
Given the fact we generally can't even choose more than ONE option in a given area (two if we're lucky)? It's crazy Internet broadband hasn't been more scrutinized already.
Where I live, for example? My only broadband option is Spectrum/Charter cable, and their gigabit Internet (which only provides 40mb/sec upload speeds) costs me about $110 a month. A relative few people in my city can also choose AT&T fiber where they pay a little bit less for gig fiber, but it's bidirectional so a much better value proposition. For 3 years now, though? I've been checking to see if AT&T fiber is available at my house, and they keep saying no. There's very little evidence they had any interest in expanding their fiber infrastructure in my city at all. I think they only brought it in, initially, for E911 services as part of some big modernization push. And they discovered it was easy enough to branch it off from there to a few neighborhoods to sell it.
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My only broadband option is Spectrum/Charter cable, and their gigabit Internet (which only provides 40mb/sec upload speeds)
Come over to Minneapolis Metro. We get Xfinity, with enough bandwidth to chew through your data cap in 4 days. Or AT&T DSL, with enough bandwidth to download an xbox game update in about 4 days. We "finally" got access to 5g home internet from Verizon, which is a reasonable-enough solution, but still barely adequate for $50/month. I was kind of surprised, honestly, that Xfinity hasn't tried to compete harder (Lowering their price, or getting rid of their data cap) now that 5G home Internet is a viable
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I am in Minneapolis and I have CenturyLink fiber and have had for at least 7 years (it was already run to the house that I bought at the time).
I pay $65/month for 100Mbps symmetrical with no data cap (that I have ever hit) and that fee hasn't wavered by one penny since I signed up for it.
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Where I live, for example? My only broadband option is Spectrum/Charter cable, and their gigabit Internet (which only provides 40mb/sec upload speeds) costs me about $110 a month. A relative few people in my city can also choose AT&T fiber where they pay a little bit less for gig fiber, but it's bidirectional so a much better value proposition. For 3 years now, though? I've been checking to see if AT&T fiber is available at my house, and they keep saying no. There's very little evidence they had any interest in expanding their fiber infrastructure in my city at all. I think they only brought it in, initially, for E911 services as part of some big modernization push. And they discovered it was easy enough to branch it off from there to a few neighborhoods to sell it.
We have cable internet where I live, it's actually OK, decent speeds. There's a fiber line (installed by the phone company) running up our road that provides fiber internet services to a community further up the road but the phone company is still telling us that fiber internet isn't available in our area. This is because of exclusivity deals with the cable provider. This practice is bullshit!
Witch hunt (Score:2)
If there is collusion not to compete in poor areas, investigate that. Couching this in terms of racism means that the moment they are accused they have already lost. Might as well have an official investigation of them supporting paedophilia while at it, not as an end result, but explicit support.
It's stupid and betrays common sense, this is clearly a witch hunt. Innocents need to fear witch hunts as much the guilty. Examples must and will be made.
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They probably aren't discriminating on the basis of race. They're gouging based on where they can get away with it.
If there's only one provider in an area then they'll charge top dollar for low speeds on aging infrastructure.
Good precedent. (Score:2)
I would like to request that my local department not investigate the source of my rather expansive car stereo.
Fox says henhouse is secure enough (Score:2)
Film at 11.
Commissioner Carr Sounds the alarm... (Score:2)
FWIW, Carr punches up the fear-factor in his statement against the proposed rule making. See https://www.fcc.gov/document/c... [fcc.gov] for his take on this. If you read the proposed rules, it sure looks like the FCC could pretty much exert a lot of control over ISPs ability to operate and how much profit they can make. For publicly traded companies, this would be a disaster.
What does that actually mean? (Score:5, Informative)
What is digital discrimination?
"SEC. 60506. DIGITAL DISCRIMINATION.
(a) STATEMENT OF POLICY.—It is the policy of the United States that, insofar as technically and economically feasible—
(1) subscribers should benefit from equal access to broadband internet access service within the service area of a provider of such service;
(2) the term ‘‘equal access’’, for purposes of this section, means the equal opportunity to subscribe to an offered service that provides comparable speeds, capacities, latency, and other quality of service metrics in a given area, for comparable terms and conditions; and
(3) the Commission should take steps to ensure that all people of the United States benefit from equal access to broadband internet access service. "
https://www.digitalinclusion.o... [digitalinclusion.org]
"NDIA submitted comments urging the Commission to:
- Recognize that digital discrimination can occur regardless of whether discriminatory intent is involved. Digital discrimination is not a problem of intent. It is a problem of drastically unequal digital opportunities and outcomes.
- Understand that digital discrimination involves more than just discriminatory broadband deployment but also discrimination in broadband adoption, broadband affordability, and the actual use of broadband.
- Elevate the transparency of existing data and collect additional data that can be used to identify and measure digital discrimination.
- Establish a dedicated and transparent complaint process through which the public can lodge complaints related to digital discrimination and unequal access to broadband— where the responses from ISPs are made publicly available. "
What does this whole FCC push mean in practice?
For one thing, it appears to mean that the ISPs will have to pay a shit ton of money to provide the exact same gigabit fiber to the hermit on top of a mountain in the middle of Appalachia, that it does to the remote branch of Google in the small town in a rich hamlet of Appalachia. That means spending more money on construction and distribution, which will almost certainly *NOT* come out of wasteful spending or exorbitant executives' bonuses, but instead be passed on to the consumer as another fee.
If you read the report[1], it appears there has been a lot of testimony & evidence gathered by USG that small businesses are being discriminated against based on racial or ethnic bias. So certainly, something does need to be done to increase access. But the scope of this solution seems wide enough and generic enough that it will probably end up costing the consumer more money, and get tied up in legal fights for years.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/117/p... [congress.gov]
sounds familiar (Score:2)
Foxes were quoted as insisting that farmers should NOT investigate disappearance of chickens from hen house.
Government takeover of ISPs (Score:2)
Obviously, no one should be denied or given different pricing by being a member of these 'protected classes'. The headline here is BS. What is happening is a big push towards the FCC regulating the day-to-day activities of ISPs, in a great takeover. This supposed 'discrimination' is just an excuse of the executive branch to enforce its will upon US ISPs, and therefore the Internet as a whole, and should be resisted with vigor. I submitted an FCC document about this takeover as a story to Slashdot a few days
"Don't look at that man behind the curtain!" (Score:2)
OK, we won't (Score:4, Insightful)
The proposed investigations need only apply to telecommunications common carriers as a condition of receiving broadband service subsidies. You don't want any part of that money, we won't audit you.
Carr is an empty suit. (Score:2)
With saying "President Biden's plan to give control to...",
he reminds us he's another cheap, performative GOP seditionist.
Criminals say Police Should Not Investigate Crimes (Score:2)
That's what they all say... (Score:2)
Bank robbers say the police shouldn't investigate robbery.
Tax cheats say the IRS shouldn't investigate tax fraud.
Domestic terrorists say the FBI shouldn't investigate domestic terrorism.
And on and on it goes.
I get reminded of that one lawyer joke (Score:2)
"Your honor, I demand this case be dismissed!"
"On what ground?"
"Because else I lose it, duh!"
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"I object!"
"On what grounds?"
"Because it's devastating to my case!"
Jim Carrey, Liar Liar.
What is discrimination based on income level? (Score:2)
Foxes say you shouldn't investigate the henhouse. (Score:2)
Thanks for Streisand-effecting that for us so we know where to look.
Corporate equivalent of ... (Score:2)
Do't look here (Score:2)
Don't look here, because we've got nothing to hide.
\o/ (Score:1)
Heh. (Score:2)