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.
About time (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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If you mean 40 GBps, then no: AFAIK no one gets that yet.
If you mean a 40 GB cap thn I have news for you: Most of Europe (and I assume Sweden too) don't have data-caps on broadband anyway.
Capping for max data is ridicouls anyway, you pay for bandwith not data, if they can't handle you streaming your bandwith they're not delivering what they should. And sure, they oversell because almost no one streams that much, but that doesn't mean that when you do, and they messed up their overhead that you as the consum
Re:About time (Score:5, Informative)
I wasn't talking about caps [theregister.co.uk].
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Re: About time (Score:3)
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And the bandwidth you pay for is an average bandwith of 600GB/month (Comcast), or about 230kbps sustained. But you get the option of using more in bursts, you have to make up for that later, though, to keep the average about the same.
The consumer would be "the victim" if most people were forced to subsidize an infrastruc
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Sorry, make that 2.3Mbps or 230kBps.
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Everyone messes up the overhead, because the bandwidth usage is not constant. It may even quadruple in one year as a bunch of people start discovering TV over internet. Sharing the bandwidth is good, and the caps allow the people with moderate usage to get their data even if their next door neighbors are downloading 24/7. This is like the early cable modem internet where speed was awesome, if you were the only guy on the block or apartment building using it, but over time that fast low latency network st
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Perhaps somebody of importance started reading slashdot.
Re:About time (Score:5, Funny)
That's unpossible. Most of us don't even read Slashdot.
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That's unpossible. Most of us don't even read Slashdot.
Well, not the articles or summaries, anyway.
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40gbs or 40 GB of data / month. If the later you probably already have more. If you have less, are you kidding. That's an incredibly fast pipe. Some grandmother does not have that kind of speed anywhere.
Re:About time (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, some grandmother does [theregister.co.uk].
I realize that's not typical, but it does illustrate what other nations are doing to continually increase their capabilities. Faster, no caps and lack of monopolies seem to be the norm for all developed nations except than the US.
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Read the article. She's buying commercial internet. That was a consumer grade service, he just put a commercial grade line into a house. You can get 40gbs most places in the USA providing you are willing pay for it too. That's not really relevant to discussing consumer speeds.
Re:About time (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Copp had this figured out for quite a while. Being slashdot and all, I understand the general inability to RTFA, so here's the pertinent part about this guy's history:
The general gist of the rest of the article goes on to say how the rest of the suits were congratulating themselves on a job well done with the Telecom Act in '96 and generally celebrating the current state and where they see themselves going... until Copp takes the stand and gives everyone a verbal bitchslap:
What I take from this is that this guy is a single life jacket trying to defend us in a sea of self-serving destruction bound sharks. Good luck to us all.
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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?
If you actually read the original article:
http://www.thelocal.se/2007071... [thelocal.se]
You'd find that having a son who is a Fiber optic researcher/engineer that wanted to demonstrate a new technology would help quite a bit. i.e. you fell for a publicity stunt.
To make it even more silly, read the followup article:
http://www.thelocal.se/2008033... [thelocal.se]
Where it's revealed she didn't really use it much. The equipment was so large, and hot, she actually used it to dry her laundry.
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I didn't fall for anything. I was using an extreme example of research being done in other countries to push the boundaries of bandwidth. I know she is not typical and I too found the laundry thing amusing along with the rest of /.
My point is that most of the developed world continues to improve their internet infrastructure while the vultures in our country continue to fight over the week infrastructure we've built here and how they can squeeze even more money out of it without doing anything to improve it
Re:About time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Asshole has a point. Endless complaints about how much America sucks always come from the same people, who always wish America could be more like their favorite foreign countries. But they never seem to actually go to these countries to enjoy these benefits.
Honestly, I'm convince they just enjoy the hatred. If they actually emigrated, they'd have to shut the hell up. Instead, it's far more recreational to endlessly complain, while enjoying all of the positive aspects of America. Sweden has punitive t
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Re:About time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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But they never seem to actually go to these countries to enjoy these benefits.
Perhaps they'd rather improve the country they were born in?
Nah, here in America, we don't allow that. Get out, complainers!
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Re:About time (Score:4, Informative)
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I actually get average of 20Mbps down/2mbps
Consider yourself lucky. A lot of people in a lot of areas don't get anywhere near that, especially at peak times. Where I used to live, I only had cable available and during peak times I was lucky to be able to stream Netflix. Speeds were all over the place, but usually between 2Mbps and 10Mbps (when I was lucky) and only a few times above that (I was paying for 50Mbps). I actually called them once hoping that there was something wrong with the connection, their techs came out and did some tests and co
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Consider yourself lucky
Oh, we used to dream of dowloadin' 2Mbps! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to get 12 baud from a tin can an' string connected t' the corporate monopoly. Whenever we dared t' call customer service, they'd spew invective for 90 minutes afore sending a tech down to dump rotting fish on our stoop! Megabits? Huh. [phespirit.info]
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The right and the left in the United States spend too much time making speeches about how awesome our country is. If George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were satisfied with the state of the 13 colonies, we would still be part of the United Kingdom. If Abraham Lincoln was satisfied with the state of the United States, there would still be slavery. Our national motto is not and
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.
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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.
We aren't really talking about people who desire to leave America but can't. Being allowed and able to leave always has been an option, one exercised by many who desired to leave, not unlike yourself.
The problem is people who have NO desire to leave while at the same time having no desire to have what is rightfully theirs either taken away or just ruined by those in power.
In a very real way for those cases, leaving is about the worst option you could take.
Leaving is basically telling every one that yes the
1st (Score:2)
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Haha, well, actually, yes, we do have the undesirable record of having the deadliest volcano in modern history, the 1783 eruption of Laki that killed (by one measure) up to 6 million people worldwide, and kicked off so much poison gas that tens of thousands were directly poisoned to death in the UK. ;) Ironically, most deaths in Iceland were not from direct poisoning, ash asphyxiation, lava, pyroclastic flows, or anything of the nature - they were from famine from skeletal fluorosis of the livestock (Laki
Re:About time (Score:5, Insightful)
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But you have to hope that where you end up will be adequate for a long time, because you're going to be stuck with it. That's not to say that the private companies that dominate the US market are doing very well right now, but they're all locked into government mandated monopolies so they have no reason to even try.
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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.
But you have to hope that where you end up will be adequate for a long time, because you're going to be stuck with it.
There's nothing about nationalizing infrastructure that makes it impossible to upgrade, nor anything about privatizing it that makes it likely to be upgraded. Some of us still remember when Pacific Bell was pledging that 100% of their customers would have "litespeed/light speed" DSL (fiber to the neighborhood) by 2000 or whatever it was, which got pushed back repeatedly until they were bought by SBC, which not only continued but celebrated the Pac Bell tradition of splicing copper runs beyond all usefulness
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Typically, when they nationalize infrastructure, private competition is not allowed. Even if it is allowed, they have to compete with a service the customer has already paid for. So you are stuck with whatever the state has to offer.
Obviously, private entities with no incentive to upgrade will not do so. That's what's so infuriating about this debate. People say: "well, I guess it's time to give up on having private telecommunications infrastructure" but like the ex-FCC chairman said here, it hasn't really
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Typically, when they nationalize infrastructure, private competition is not allowed.
That's not a law of nature, however. And besides, we don't have private competition now, in most markets. Towns sell monopoly right-of-way to a single cable company and then the only competition possible (aside from the phone company) is wireless. It's not clear that competition for physical wiring is actually needed; it's possible now to buy some types of connection provided by other providers over AT&T's (or whoever's) fiber or copper.
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Only the FCC dismantled any requirement that infrastructure owners be required to sell access to their lines at all, and certainly not at any kind of fair rate back in the mid-2000s, so the other providers over AT&T's fiber or copper will never be real competitors. They only exist at the whim of the wire owners.
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Only the FCC dismantled any requirement that infrastructure owners be required to sell access to their lines at all, and certainly not at any kind of fair rate back in the mid-2000s, so the other providers over AT&T's fiber or copper will never be real competitors. They only exist at the whim of the wire owners.
They're not even requiring them to keep the infrastructure up, really. The standard is something like 28.8kbps for modems and "acceptable" voice quality, where some crackling is OK. The telco ain't required to make sure you can get any kind of reasonable internet on the wire, for example, yet they still get to claim that they "serve" rural customers. But that's bullshit, because today you are at a severe disadvantage without at least around a half-megabit of bandwidth, without which just basic surfing for i
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Yes, I wasn't disagreeing, only commenting on how bad the current state of affairs is.
Oakland is so redlined that my local loop is over 3 miles long. AT&T one day fucked up the loop. They've never fixed it. DSL speeds went from 1MB to 300Kbps.
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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.
While your screed against capitalism has some interesting talking points embedded in it, I would like to point out that there is no "market fighting it out" concerning network communications in America. In a few markets, there may be more than one provider but they are NOT competitors. Capitalism is definitely not a word that is associated with communications in America.
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The libertarian fantasy is that you can remove these legal advantages and the market will improve by being fair. But it's a fantasy because once you deregulate, nothing short of divine intervention will prevent companies from lobbying to get favorable legislation again. It's their ticket to
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Often times in socialist countries, there is a lot of back door and secret meetings where deals are made and the people are not aware of have no choice in the matter. Sometimes it works out in their benefit, but a lot of times it's nothing more then wealth redistribution to the rich and powerful. Often times the real cost of the deal is realized generations later...
Thank god that only happens in those socialist countries!
Continues to be a bullshit excuse (Score:2)
"For 1, it is a much smaller country. The US is by comparison VAST"
This is as much of a bullshit excuse as it ever was.
The thing about the areas of low population density is that MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT THERE. Even if it is true that ti is too hard to cover the large areas of low density that is no reason not to cover the areas of higher density where most of the people are.
Compare New Jersey to Belgium and Switzerland. Given that New Jersey is smaller than either and has the same or better population density,
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1. Even in the areas of highest population density in the US: New York City, Los Angeles, Orlando, etc... the internet connection cost far more for far poorer bandwidth than the average internet connection in some foreign countries.
2. 31% income tax. Oh no! Let's see, I pay 1% local income tax, 3% state income tax, 20% federal income tax, 8% Social Security and Medicare tax. Well damn, looks like Sweden isn't so bad. Now imagine if I lived in America but instead of having a nice middle
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But somebody has to book the hookers or they won't know where and when to show up for work.
Of course if someone wants to book them for doing the work, that's a different problem.
Comcast is Worst Company in America (Score:2)
WCIA 2 time champ, too. We all understand the mergers are about extending monopolies and gaining power, the better to gouge consumers.
And what will be done about it? Nothing, as usual. Our national government will even help the poor things gouge us harder. Give them lots of infrastructure, redefine broadband to include even slower speeds, and keep squashing competition from local governments because it's unfair that they should have to compete against a government.
Oh, and Net Neutrality? Just a bar
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.
Re:It's a problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ah, that's not what unions do. They guarantee that no matter how poorly you do your job, you can't be fired, because that's not fair. Pride in your work and building a better future is a whole other thing.
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That very much depends on who is running the union. And a proper union should be run by it's member workers, not some fat cat who is brought in from who knows where to run it. Sadly far to many american unions went capitalist and started to be run by people who didn't care about the workers and instead only cared about the money. Properly run unions are effective counters to abuse by corporations and business owners and are not corrupt rent seeking agencies that make it hard to fire people who do no work.
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But somewhere in the second half the 20th century many unions switched from "protect members against abusive employers" to
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Unfortunately, in today's America pretty much everyone is looking to screw everyone else, and do as little actual work as possible while doing it. Blue collar workers included. We just notice the guys at the top more.
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While I have an emotional bond to the idea of "accomplishing something" I don't think it's all that important economically.
That's all well and good if your only hopes are economic. I, for one, would like to see the human race move forward rather than simply stagnating and waiting for a big rock.
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Something's going to give, just not sure we're at the point where people are fed up enough to organize in a meaningful way.
The problem is that it's a lot easier to organize a bunch of people together as a lynch mob or revolutionary cadre than as a union. God knows how our country came out of the thirties without a revolution. I don't think we could this time. I'm thinking democracy's time has finally come, overwhelmed by the power of inequitable wealth distribution (exacerbated by improved technology deval
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We don't need
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Obviously I would much rather see more people like Elon Musk and fewer like Ellison, Bezos, and the Waltons.
My belief is that the world is loaded with people like Elon Musk, but in most industries they get plowed under by people with similar goals and fewer morals. I have no suggestions for fixing that aspect of capitalism, to me it seems to be inherent to the
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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.
Re:So close, and yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
Except for the places where they use different models than the US, and also seem to have faster speeds and less bullshit.
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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.
And so he extolls the virtues of private enterprise, without acknowledging that there wouldn't even BE an internet without the government (DARPA).
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[...] it's the Internet of whomever builds it
If only! But the reality is much different when you look at those laws that forbid municipalities from laying their own fibers or operating their own network. How many stories on Slashdot have we had about this issue already?
No, rather, it's the Internet of whomever greases the palms of lawmakers the best, at least in North-America (Canada included of course).
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Everywhere a community has tried to build community internet service, the big telcos have fought it tooth and nail in court. You can't blame the local government for that one. That might actually be a good place for the Feds to do some real good and explicitly permit any community to build a co-operative provider (with or without the local government).
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Yes, the too-big-to-fail fascist/corporate model is attractive to miscreants, but fix that, don't wreck the Internet.
"too-big-to-fail fascist/corporate model" is a great description of the USA's existing internet infrastructure.
So according to your logic, the internet is already wrecked.
Sure, there are tens of thousands of companies involved in "the internet," but if you look at the core, it's one or two dozen major corporations that control the vast majority of back hauls, interconnects, and last-mile infrastructure in the USA.
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Now, if you think that there's some supernatural method by which arbitrary numbers of telecommunications companies could provide service to every home,
Connection from the home to an exchange point. Use a different VLAN for every ISP that wants to connect to each customer.
At my home I could then connect to multiple ISPs at the same time if I so choose, just by making use of VLANs. Most customers wouldn't need this and they could have a default VLAN set to their port, but the option would be there.
With this setup, you could have up to 4,000-ish ISPs.
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But we dont have that in the USA. As soon as the Federal Government started mucking around with things beyond protecting the consumer, it ceased to be that.
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.
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Do you remember the days when a politician would do something slightly out of line, he'd get caught, and then he'd resign? Well, I'm only a touch over 30, so I don't remember that happening but I know that it used to happen. Modern politicians seem to have no shame, no honor, no integrity; they will say whatever is required to get elected, do whatever they want while in office, and tell you, "Yeah? What are YOU going to do about it?" if you call them out on it.
The worst part - the absolute worst part - is t
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The trouble is that the R's keep putting in people who look worse and worse to D's and vice-versa. Hooray for the gerrymander. And, since we have FPTP voting, any vote against the guy who barely acknowledges your point of view is automatically a vote for the guy who actively works against your views. From the point of view of the incumbents in safe districts, this is a win. For everyone else? Not so much.
You want to actually have people vote for someone on the other side? Start having the other side stop pa
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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.
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Pay TV is already dead. Do you know when it died? It died when I bought a Nintendo in 1988.
I've never been bothered by not having cable TV, which is amazing when you consider that I grew up in a rural town with only 2 broadcast TV stations. Once I found that there was a machine that let me control the story, all of those non-interactive stories became less interesting. I watch TV for the local weather report and an occasional baseball or hockey game ("if available in my area", which is another bullshit poin
Cities should move to connection utilities (Score:1)
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One of the problems is that cities and towns that have tried this have found an unexpected expense: Legal bills from fighting against the lawsuits that the Big ISPs start to prevent these projects. This is even the case when the Big ISPs don't server those cities/towns. To hear the ISPs put it: Competition from the government is unfair and if they don't serve that area then it is still unfair competition since they might, some day, decide to maybe serve it.
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That would make things interesting.
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I'll agree that cities shouldn't have to fight these legal battles, but once an ISP files one of these lawsuits, the city can either fight back or roll over and accept the ISPs' demands. What is needed is clear indications from the FCC that municipal broadband is completely legal - with the backbone to stand up to the inevitable ISP complaints.
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Why is it that one of the few instances where the argument "we have sovereign immunity; go fuck yourself" is legitimate is one of the few instances where they don't use it?!
Too many unanswered questions (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The Telecom Disaster of 1996 (Score:1)
Right, that's where all the companies got deregulated... so that they could merge, leading to just a few fighting it out to be the new, but *unregulated*, Ma Bell.
Enjoying the ever-increasing bills for the same service, kiddies?
And make no mistake: that Bill was bought and paid for by the telecoms, including in ways most of you never heard of... like me: I was working for Ameritech, one of the Baby Bells, and our *corporate*, not division, president *ordered* us all to write letters to our Senetors and Cong