Telecom's Latest Dumb Claim: The Internet Only Works During A Pandemic Because We Killed Net Neutrality (techdirt.com) 184
Karl Bode, reporting for TechDirt: A few weeks ago, a new talking point popped up among telecom policy pundits opposed to net neutrality. They began claiming that the only reason the internet hasn't buckled during the pandemic was thanks to the FCC's controversial and unpopular net neutrality repeal. That repeal, you'll recall, not only killed net neutrality, but much of the FCC's ability to hold ISPs accountable for pretty much anything, including outright billing fraud. But to hear various net neutrality opponents tell it, the repeal is the primary reason the US internet hasn't fallen apart during COVID-19 quarantine: "We should thank our lucky stars that Title II net neutrality regulations were repealed by the FCC in 2017. In doing so, the US avoided the fate of much of Europe today, where broadband networks are strained and suffering from a lack of investment and innovation."
Except none of this is true. This entire narrative is fantasy -- built almost entirely off of the EU simply asking various high bandwidth providers to throttle certain services in an abundance of caution. There remains no evidence that this was due to any actual congestion, and, at the same time, there's been no evidence that US networks have held up better than those elsewhere (indeed, many of the companies that throttled services in the EU did so in the US as well). Investment at many US ISPs actually dropped post net neutrality repeal. And there's literally no indication that US networks are somehow "more robust" than the EU because the FCC decided to ignore the public and obliterate its own authority at the behest of the telecom lobby. It's just not a supportable claim.
Except none of this is true. This entire narrative is fantasy -- built almost entirely off of the EU simply asking various high bandwidth providers to throttle certain services in an abundance of caution. There remains no evidence that this was due to any actual congestion, and, at the same time, there's been no evidence that US networks have held up better than those elsewhere (indeed, many of the companies that throttled services in the EU did so in the US as well). Investment at many US ISPs actually dropped post net neutrality repeal. And there's literally no indication that US networks are somehow "more robust" than the EU because the FCC decided to ignore the public and obliterate its own authority at the behest of the telecom lobby. It's just not a supportable claim.
Who needs dumbdits... (Score:5, Informative)
Fake News (Score:4, Interesting)
These telcos are kings of fake news.
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Off course, because the Net Neutrality rules allowed telco's to merge with information providers. Disney, AT&T, Spectrum, Comcast, ABC etc used to be all separate companies, nowadays they're just a single entity controlling the creation, distribution and consumption of information, because we had guaranteed Net Neutrality, no way they could abuse their position.
Yeah, right (Score:5, Informative)
European here.
I have 600 Mbps. Currently getting around 500 Mbps, more or less. Perhaps something is a bit strained somewhere, but it's really not a big deal.
I've had zero trouble downloading large disk images from my work servers and voice chat with both local and foreign people.
Re:Yeah, right (Score:5, Interesting)
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Europe here again, same deal. A regulation authority that basically already starts to slap you silly if you consider thinking about pondering that you might want to contemplate whether it could be interesting to explore the idea that you ought to use a preferred traffic system. Zero problem with out internet and I have here, in the middle of nowhere, 5 ISPs to choose from. I chose the one that gave me 100mbit synchronous for 70 bucks. Yeah, it's a bit pricy but their SLAs basically guarantee internet OR ELS
Re:Yeah, right (Score:5, Funny)
European here.
I have 600 Mbps. Currently getting around 500 Mbps, more or less. Perhaps something is a bit strained somewhere, but it's really not a big deal.
I've had zero trouble downloading large disk images from my work servers and voice chat with both local and foreign people.
That's nothing.
I have gigabit running between computers in my house.
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I chuckled when I read this, as I still run a few Fast Ethernet switches. I think the WIFI connection in my house quicker than the wired. =)
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That's nothing. I have gigabit running between computers in my house.
Well, I have negative latency on my inverse tachyon pulse network in my house. Although my house is really a paper bag in the middle of the road.
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For a direct link you can buy 10gb nics with fiber transceivers for like $15 on ebay. Maybe $10 for some fiber and you're good. For the really adventurous there is Infiniband.
Re: Yeah, right (Score:3)
Yep. Everything within the house is pretty damned fast---gigabit between all the hardware (except 100baseT to the WiFi). Then it hits the dirty side of the firewall. That drops down to what we can afford per month. Which is less than most European or Korean broadband customers can get for the same price.
Thanks, Idjit... may your tenure in the FCC be short.
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1Exabitps at least! And with a ping below 0!
Re:Yeah, right (Score:5, Funny)
>>And with a ping below 0!
You already told us this tomorrow, you clod.
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Re:Yeah, right (Score:4, Interesting)
And I'm living on the west coast, paying $120 a month for 50/10 service, and until I power-cycled by cable modem, I was getting <3 Mbps down. That's Comcastic.
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That's interesting. I live on the West Coast (Mill Creek, WA) and I have Xfinity (Comcast). I pay around $90 for 700Mbps down and usually exceed that speed (with my own cable modem). There is also another provider in my neighborhood (they drop by to try to encourage a switch once a year). I would assume it's the competition that keeps Comcast honest, but don't want to make assumptions about competition or lack thereof in your area.
If there is competition in your area I'd encourage you to check Comcast's
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If you have to power-cycle anything in order to keep performance, something is deeply broken. That's not a thing one should ever need to do.
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This. When you're dealing with what is supposed to be a business-class router, power-cycling should never EVER be needed.
In the US, anything goes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In the US, anything goes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In the US, anything goes... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:In the US, anything goes... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with people like anti-vaxers is that they invite misery on more than just themselves.
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The problem with freedom is that people end up being free to do stupid things that harm themselves.
Re:In the US, anything goes... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with freedom is that people end up being free to do stupid things that harm themselves.
That's fine.
It's when it harms everyone else that it's a problem.
And even then. (Score:3)
That's fine.
It's when it harms everyone else that it's a problem.
Even then it's normally much LESS of a problem than the harm from the restrictions on freedom that would be adequate to prevent it.
Re:In the US, anything goes... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's when it harms everyone else that it's a problem.
Everything you do harms someone else to some small degree. Everything, including inaction. Every choice you make. There is no freedom without the freedom to cause de minimis harm to those around you.
Not working seven days a week? I'm less well off because you're contributing less to the economy. You're harming everyone else!
Buying a house? You've made house prices go up for everyone by adding to the demand. You're harming everyone else!
Porn? Video games? Not focused on working constantly, you're bringing everyone down with you poor work ethic!
Yes, all of the above are arguments that have been made an believed at one time or another. Maybe a less simplistic philosophy is needed here. Further, maybe your idea of what constitutes "harm" is simply wrong. Read some history for all the harmful things that "everyone knows", and it's nothing but hubris to think that somehow we're the exception that's got everything right.
So, some toleration of "harming everyone else" is required for freedom to exist. It's also required for social progress, as all progress starts with an idea that "everyone knows" is harmful.
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Perhaps they learned something now that their countries' hospitals are overrun and they have more dead than the entire US, China and the rest of the world combined. 100 million EU citizens, some 29% of the EU’s population, use homeopathic medicines in their day-to-day healthcare. Perhaps Coronavirus will fix stupid.
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Down Fido, down! First of all, ddtmm was talking about American freedom, not freedom in general. Lots of countries have as much freedom as, or even more than, the US. It's just that at this moment in time, fewer people in those countries express that freedom by noisily adopting obvious and provable bullshit as a moral imperative.
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Just a couple of days ago we've had news from the UK. People attacking 5G towers apparently because they believe it's somehow linked to the Coronavirus.
And just a couple of days ago a larger crowd (hundreds of people, but still) gathered in Berlin to protest against vaccination terrorism and against violating fundamental rights with the measures against the pandemic. Prompting a response from the police with 260 officers. Two were
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'll take freedom and the invariable idiots that believe all kinds of nonsense over some totalitarian country where you believe what you're told if you know what's good for you.
Click here for the authoritative sources on Covid-19.
You're get neither (Score:2)
We need to control the idiots. That means more education and more voting. People in mass aren't all that dumb, but the ruling class know this and make sure only the dumb ones are allowed to vote.
Re:In the US, anything goes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do Americans always think that there are only two options? Is that what the political system you have makes you think? Accept the corporate overlords because the ONLY alternative is socialism like in Venezuela. Accept bullshit spouting idiots because the only alternative is Orwellian thought control.
As long as you believe that, there's no hope for improvement. You've been bullshitted into believing that you have to put up with the crap you have because the only alternative is worse.
Re:In the US, anything goes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do Americans always think that there are only two options?
This is a curious duality that has always boggled my mind, and not just the duality but the extreme views at either end of the spectrum with no middle ground:
- You're either a Republican or Democrat, worship Trump or be a Democrat.
- You can have private or social healthcare (ignoring the many countries who happily run both systems side by side).
- Schools are perfect or schools should be completely defunded and the entire system thrown out the window and we have to home school everyone.
- Education shouldn't be free because then everyone will want one vs education should be free regulated and to be fair to everyone we should forgive everyone's debt.
- The government should be completely hands off or should regulate every aspect of our lives.
- Our privacy should be absolute not even my phone should have a GPS vs we need to hand over everything to the STASI to keep us safe from terrorists.
Hell in this very discussion just above we were talking about anti-vaxxers and choice.
- Reply 1: Having the choice to be anti-vaxxers harms others.
- Reply 2: Everything harms someone, just buying a house raises the house prices for others due to increased demand harming those worse off.
No middle ground. You're either okay with killing people or you should be against buying houses.
How the fuck did people grow up to think that the entire world is black vs wh... red vs blue?
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Natural Selection will help things along. We could give it a rolling start by doing something radical like taking warning labels off of things. It would be a rough and dangerous few years, but... ... I've got to lay of the pot or something... sorry, I'll see myself out.=)
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The good news is that humans everywhere are free to believe and say anything they want. The bad news is that they say and believe anything they want.
Fixed that for you. I'm sure with the proper level of scrutiny we would find the people in whatever shitty country you're from can be just as stupid as humans everywhere else can be, so you can STFU with your fake, passive-aggressive excuse for national pride.
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The good news is that humans everywhere are free to believe and say anything they want.
Fixed that for you.
In North Korea, you are free to believe that your leader is an idiot. If you say, so, however, well, good luck with that.
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There is freedom of expression in North Korea.
There just ain't much freedom after its expression.
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THIS ^^
Sometimes they think they're the only ones on the planet and that their way of doing things is universal.
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The problem with American Internet isn't bandwidth. But infrastructure.
Much of the US internet is from Cable TV Companies. Cable TV has two sources of income. From the consumer (us) who pays for Cable TV service (and Internet), then the stations pay to be on the Cable TV stations and their own stations that get Add revenue and add revenue from the local carriers.
Internet we the consumer just pays for internet access, and wherever we visit the ISP gets nothing. So they are maintaining a large infrastructur
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The good news is that in the US, people can say what you want.
The bad news is, nobody gives a fuck what you say because everyone's talking out of their ass.
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To get what we want, in a world of limited resources, someone else will need to give up something.
Freedom is actually a nebulous ideal and can never be really fully implemented. That said we can increase freedoms or restrict it on people.
As a US Citizen, I have the freedom to vote for my elected officials. This is restricting the freedoms of the elected officials to do whatever they want.
Re:In the US, anything goes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Only if what you want is to take something from someone else.
The world is not a zero sum game.
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As a US Citizen, I have the freedom to vote for my elected officials. This is restricting the freedoms of the elected officials to do whatever they want.
Please don't tell me you really believe that.
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Freedom is Slavery.
-- Alexander H. Stephens
There may be ... (Score:2)
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My ISP has been blocking all of the GOP political spam and websites
Google Fiber? I, for one, welcome our corporate censorship overlords.
When you've only got a 5mbit connection... (Score:4, Informative)
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I live in a city of 13,000 people, in a county of only 174,000 people and I have full gigabit internet.
Less than 1% of people in this country cannot get high speed data... and given that the US is more than twice the size of the EU in terms of area, ranging over more than two MILLION additional square miles, with over 100 million fewer people the physical distances involved in reaching everyone is a considerably greater challenge than exists in the EU making comparisons such as your disingenuous at best.
Re:When you've only got a 5mbit connection... (Score:4, Informative)
Tell that to all those in upstate NY who have to deal with Charter or Frontier or worse. 5Mbit is not high speed anymore.
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Upstate NY Charter user here. I really want another option. We've cancelled cable so we're only giving Charter money for Internet access, but there are no other good options. FIOS doesn't reach my area so that's out. Satellite is slow and expensive with very low caps. (When I was looking at them, they touted how many MINUTES per month you could watch streaming video. When you're measuring it in minutes, your cap is too low!) Dial Up and DSL are way too slow to support our needs. So we stay with Charter/Spec
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You definitely need to look into your state and municipal govt. There are exurban towns (Bixby, OK) that feature GB to the home. They defended it and won.
I live on 20 acres, 1.5 miles from a lake, 25 mins from the nearest town. I don't have city water, or natural gas. I have 570Mbps/54Mbps right this moment.
However, you do have to vote and take action when needed. I lived in a little town in NE OK, when I couldn't get decent speeds to my home, I found some other folks, ranchers with kids and the like. We re
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Less than 1% of people in this country cannot get high speed data...
That's just straight up not the case. Yet another example of Americans believing what they want to believe.
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He wasn't talking about the telecom shithole that is the US. Stop being an illiterate moron.
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The only way that's true is if you reduce the definition of "high speed data" to cover 99% of the people in this country. Even the FCC [fcc.gov] doesn't believe 99% of people in this country have access to "broadband":
For instance, the data demonstrates that six percent of Americans, over 19 million households, lack access to fixed terrestrial advanced telecommunications capability and we recognize that the situation is especially problematic in rural areas, where over 24% lack access, and Tribal Lands, where 32% lack access.
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In the USA, we have a hole in the ground that is bigger than about 80% of the EU member nations. It is silly to compare us to little postage stamp countries.
Re:When you've only got a 5mbit connection... (Score:5, Informative)
If the only sin of American ISPs was that people out in the sticks were stuck with satellite population density would be a viable explanation; but that's not exactly the situation.
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I'm paying $40 a month for a 100/100 connection. A full gigabit each way is $70. For me 100mbit is fine.
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Just look at actual data: https://www.speedtest.net/glob... [speedtest.net] https://www.fastmetrics.com/in... [fastmetrics.com]
Data caps are bullshit ISPs use to get more money, but they aren't exclusive to the US.
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When your customers in the USA have internet connection speeds and data caps which would be an embarrasment in even the poorest nations the EU it's easy to maintain current service levels of internet access.
Net Neutrality did not mandate higher connection speeds. Who told you it did?
Net neutrality wouln't be an issue.. (Score:5, Insightful)
If there were actual, real competition with internet services.
The US is a miserable little pile of telco monopolies, legal ones at that.
Customers tend to go to the net neutral options when available because well, getting throttled is never fun.
It got to a point where freaking brazil have better internet than the US.
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This is why I always encourage people to find out which layer of government is causing the monopoly in their area and get them to stop it. In a few states, the monopolies are granted by a state agency, but in most places, it is the local city or county that is granting these monopolies.
In my state, it is local. I used to live in a city that had granted the monopoly to one provider for decades, and it sucked. I moved out to a place that had refused to issue any monopolies, and now I have two choices for f
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Step 1: Get rid of Trump, which enables Step 2
Step 2: Send Ajit Pai packing, and get someone in his place that isn't licking the boots of the ISPs
Step 3: ???
Step 4: ISPs stop over-profiting
Would probably help if people in general would bang as hard as they can on their congresscritters and motivate them to bang as hard as they can legislatively on the ISPs so they stop gouging everyone.
Re: Net neutrality wouln't be an issue.. (Score:3)
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We've only had one reliable ISP for the past 2 decades and one shit one. For the reliable one, I'm paying $80/month for 25/5.
We're about to get fiber, 100/100 started at $45/mo (plus at least $15/mo in fees... love how they misle
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If there were actual, real competition with internet services.
The US is a miserable little pile of telco monopolies, legal ones at that.
Customers tend to go to the net neutral options when available because well, getting throttled is never fun.
It got to a point where freaking brazil have better internet than the US.
Net Neutrality didn't promise to break up monopolies or add any competition at all.
Why weren't we pushing for more competitors, higher connections speeds, and the end to monopolies instead?
Can we learn something? (Score:5, Insightful)
It worked before Net Neutrality. It worked during Net Neutrality. It works after Net Neutrality.
How important was Net Neutrality? Why did Net Neutrality become a religion?
Why do you believe what activists say?
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The activists have an agenda, to force these fictional people we call businesses to do something they normally would not, But it's at least one that is not a step above criminal intent to defraud their customers. In my opinion that's an agenda that a rational customer should support.
The definition of 'worked' is different before Net Neutrality, during and after.
That is the point of the telecom lobby buying the chairman of the FCC: change the meaning of words to suit the marketing department's needs.
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I’m not sure what you think your point is. Did Net Neutrality proponents say the Internet would be more-or-less the same without Net Neutrality? Or did they predict it would be dramatically different?
My point was to stop taking activists seriously when they make dramatic predictions. Dramatic predictions are the least likely predictions to come true.
Hope that helps. (There's no need to imagine 10 million tons of goofy subtext when someone says something simple, BTW.)
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Very affordable???? where do you live.
I have 1 choice for internet. The cheapest rate for 50mbps is 95$ a month before taxes addon charges etc. The largest blow to having competition and real access to internet in the US is people like you.
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Yeah, I've definitely heard that before - internet would be great everywhere except MikeRT gets in the way.
NN and lack of competition are different if not related issues, no ?
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If you pay for a connection and they cannot provide the service as advertised, then they lied, and that's fraud
If they advertised a service with restrictions and variable speeds dependent of their inability to keep the service up then give me real competition and watch the customer go to the provider that can
Lack of Net Neutrality means they can and do shape traffic so they don't have to invest and can only provide proper service to those who pay extra
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The big telcos built their networks using government handouts and do the bare minimum upkeep and upgrades.
As a consumer, I am concerned over a lack of net neutrality. I watch my ISP pay their CEO roughly $120 million over a 4 year time frame and yet they want to squeeze more money out of me if I wan
Oh they did defeat it? (Score:2)
True, they raised my internet bill to $66, but they'd been raising it all along anyway.
Yeah net neutrality. Good thing we had that or things might be just like they are now. Or always were. Or something.
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Net neutrality doesn't deal with pricing.
It simply means that the ISP cannot make backdoor deals with oh say, Epic, to give the Epic store priority routing (Translation: sabotoge connections to steam).
Speaking of dumb claims (Score:2)
This entire narrative is fantasy. Whatever the Executive government's decisions, fraud remains a crime.
Mark up one more on the "dumb claims" side. -1 Slownewsday
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Yep fantasy alright [insidesources.com]
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Were you trying to show, that fraud is no longer a crime now? 'Cause that's not, what your link is about...
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Who believes Telecoms? (Score:2)
The only time you can believe what a Telecom is saying is when they are going to raise your rates. Everything else if false.
The shit the Americans put up with (Score:2)
This is not forced onto them, being a democracy they elect the enablers of these crooks.
I can't speak for all EU countries and their ISP's but those that count for something have had little or no issues with the increase in traffic due to Corvid-19.
Have a look at this, AMS-IX (one of the largest hubs for internet traffic in the world) saw a 17% increase in traffic.
They can handle up to 34,6 Terabit per second (Tbps), they expect to hit 8 Tb
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AMS-IX [ams-ix.net]
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The joke is that Americans still believe their country is a democracy -- it actually is a political sing and dance show sponsored by corporations, specifically created to polarize voters against each other. It runs for months and months with a face off between two candidates that nobody directly elected, representing the exact same interests with some slight controversial twists to give the semblance of choice.
Lying is the "New Normal" (Score:3)
Today, with President Trump comfortably 'WINNING!' the competition for the global "Most dishonest national leader', maybe these companies simply don't feel the need to be honest.
Dumb claim? (Score:2)
Full net neutrality here in Cannuckistan (Score:2)
...and as you can see, the internet's working fine.
In Europe (Score:3)
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If "there isn't enough evidence to make a definitive claim", as most of the article goes around, then you are really trying to fire up a political discussion here and not bring up news for nerds that can be digged up in high quality discussions.
I think we're supposed to be getting outraged about the loss of whatever net neutrality was doing for us before.
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ISPs were given a LOT of money to expand infrastructure.
They didn't, and just pocketed the money.
I'm not arguing with your timeline, I'm just saying there was money earmarked for this, and promises made to bring your connectivity, that were not kept. This is a problem that has a solution, and it is to not let companies pocket money without expanding their network.
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Don't forget all that stock buyback to make their shareholders happy. Gotta keep them shareholders happy!
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And the probably only reason they can do it just like that is because they hold monopoly. Their customers don't really have a choice and that is something they can exploit. That tends to happen when there's no competitors around.
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That's not true. You have to understand what "Net Neutrality" (the Obama version) did. It wasn't technical Net Neutrality where everyone gets equal access, if that were so, T-Mobile wouldn't have been allowed to introduce zero-rating their own music service the day after Obama NN was introduced.
It was a bunch of paperwork for ISPs to fill out whenever they needed to expand. It was ISP's accountable to the FEC instead of the FCC which basically meant they were able to do whatever they wanted (including zero-
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We've had very similar issues in my state in Germany.
The incumbent (the privately owned Deutsche Telekom) had already proven to be assholes over a long time by treating customers like garbage. They could do it because the only alternative was not having a land line (that was before cellphones became more widespread). And after having lost lawsuit over ISDN internet connection monthly costs they were given
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I highly doubt that the Federal Elections Commission would have any regulation over the Internet under Obama, Bush or Trump.
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Yes, the EU has faced some slowdown.
Even with their slight slowdown, they are still orders of magnitude faster than the US.
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The EU does allow ISP's to sell FTTH 1 up to 10G. Off course they don't tell you the entire backbone for your neighborhood is also just 10G. Effective broadband speeds in the EU are slower, because there is a lot of bureaucracy with expanding your networks.