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Also, the demographics skew towards the old side. Over the next 20 years, many are going to die rather than cancel.

The only way to get rid of Comcast, I guess.

One would think... Comcast Refuses To Believe My Father Is Dead
(Note: This is from 2010, so Comcast may be better or worse now -- taking bets on which.)

Nice sentiment, but you have grossly understated the genesis of ISP monopolies and what it would take to foster competition.
Saying that the monopolies are government granted is misrepresenting the problem.


I agree that there are many anti-competitive laws pushed through by kickbacks that lead to court battles and delays such as the Google Fiber rollout.

But the problem with monopolies is that they can leverage other monetary streams to lean on smaller competition.
Fixing a few regulations isn't going to miraculously solve the ISP open market dilemma that America faces.
This lack of an open market is stifling growth and innovation and we need Net Neutrality to ensure a level field for startups and small business.

Consumerist stories about Comcast.

One of the stories: Comcast: 2014 worst company in America. In 2014, Comcast was selected as worse than Monsanto!

Comcast is disliked so much, the company is now calling itself Xfinity.

In my experience, it is Comcast policy to be abusive to customers. One result is that Comcast employees abuse Comcast.

How Comcast is Shortchanging Customers In Vermont

Does the U.S. culture accept lies? In 710 days, President Trump has made 7,645 false or misleading claims

Consumerist stories about Comcast.

One of the stories: Comcast: 2014 worst company in America. In 2014, Comcast was selected as worse than Monsanto!

Comcast is disliked so much, the company is now calling itself Xfinity.

In my experience, it is Comcast policy to be abusive to customers. One result is that Comcast employees abuse Comcast.

How Comcast is Shortchanging Customers In Vermont

Does the U.S. culture accept lies? In 710 days, President Trump has made 7,645 false or misleading claims

Meanwhile, Google's mass surveillance of western society continues unabated.

Sorry I know I said I wasn't going to keep trying to convince you but forgot to add these links:

  https://consumerist.com/2014/0...
https://www.theverge.com/2014/...

that shows that ISPs were in fact limiting bandwidth pre-2015 NN rules.

what about if an ISP site has your address has it but it turns that it really does then the ISP must pay the cost to built it out.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/...

https://www.usatoday.com/story...

https://consumerist.com/2015/0...

Wow, there are so many reports of Apple products exploding, how about this one. If Apple was an auto company there would be multiple class action suits already. Why do they get a pass?

Message to Apple employees: Do you understand that these posts you downmod remain on the internet to document your disgusting corporate culture? Fix your products.

Wow, there are so many reports of Apple products exploding, how about this one. If Apple was an auto company there would be multiple class action suits already. Why do they get a pass?

Let's not forget; this is the same company that failed to grasp the difference between $.02 and $.0002

https://consumerist.com/2006/1...

(if anyone has the original audio, please post it)

>The net neutrality laws from 2015 are what required network providers to provide actual numbers on how much bandwidth they provide, under what terms, as well as the price.

Nah. This has nothing to do with numbers, and has everything to with marketing, which is under the regulatory purview of the FTC. The FTC has launched lawsuits over the "unlimited" marketing claims It sued T-Mobile in 2010 for "unlimited" claims and won. Tracfone was sued and required to pay 40 mil in 2015. AT&T was sued in 2014 and but the FCC not made a power grab for net neutrality in 2015 and reclassified broadband and wireless data with common carrier status, the FTC was no longer about to do anything about it.

Right now, with net neutrality dead, the FTC has an appeal to the 9th circuit to rehear the case against AT&T whose position is now weakened because broadband and wireless are not common carrier anymore. If AT&T loses, then Verizon will be next.

https://consumerist.com/2016/10/17/if-ftc-cant-resurrect-lawsuit-over-atts-unlimited-data-telecoms-may-be-even-more-untouchable/

Since the FTC wasn’t suing about the fairness or legality of the throttling practice itself, and only concerned itself with AT&T’s alleged failure to clearly disclose its throttling policy to customers, the judge determined there was no regulatory overlap.

But as this was happening, the FCC successfully enacted new “net neutrality” rules. In order to make those rules stick, the Commission had to reclassify broadband and wireless data as a common carrier. Even so, said the lower court, the FTC’s lawsuit was about deceptive marketing, not telephone service.

Even though AT&T was the marquee plaintiff in the lawsuit that sought to overturn the FCC’s rules, it gladly accepted its common carrier status when it appealed the ruling in the FTC case — and this time it was more successful.

Net Neutrality is a separate issue from the regional monopoly BS that most ISPs enjoy. That doesn't make it unimportant after we've already had blatant examples of both Verizon https://www.theverge.com/2017/... and Comcast https://consumerist.com/2014/0... throttling streaming video services like Netflix to try and get customers to subscribe to their services instead or to extort money from streaming video providers.

And that's where I think things get murky fast. I'll be the first to admit I don't understand the details of what happened between Verizon, Comcast, and Netflix. In general terms, I think it was basically a contract dispute about who was going to pay whom for what. I guarantee armies of lawyers and CxOs were involved in the negotiations and I'm not going to try to outguess them. I'm pretty sure Comcast and Verizon would find it a Pyrrhic victory if they really reduced the quality of Netfilx streams for no good reason other than to make their service look better. Anyway, we have ways to resolve contract disputes, they slug it out in courts and the court of public opinion and eventually settle. I, personally, am more comfortable depending on that process than FCC regulation.

Just a few things to add re: Net Neutrality: The Netflix and ISPs throttling streaming video was just one example (the most prominent). In 2007 the FCC took Comcast to court over throttling P2P traffic and forced them to knock it off. Unfortunately, the courts overturned this ruling in 2010 because they ruled that the FCC did not have the authority to issue commands regarding Comcast's shaping practices. But, the courts gave the FCC another option: reclassification. That's why the FCC reclassified broadband services under Title II common carrier protections in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Other services that have previously been (and are sometimes still) affected by ISPs throttling/shaping traffic are VoIP services (ex Skype and others) as well as VPN use. VoIP services (particularly free ones like Discord) don't have the money to fight ISPs in the courts, but worse is VPN service. VPNs are used by any number of small businesses and individuals and to this day Comcast is still presumably guilty of throttling users' VPN traffic (a quick google search will return dozens of user complaints re: Comcast vs VPN). Short of a class action lawsuit, small businesses and individuals are never going to get Comcast to stop messing with VPN traffic, especially without a solid foundation like them being in violation of Net Neutrality rules to take them to court over.

Net Neutrality is a separate issue from the regional monopoly BS that most ISPs enjoy. That doesn't make it unimportant after we've already had blatant examples of both Verizon https://www.theverge.com/2017/... and Comcast https://consumerist.com/2014/0... throttling streaming video services like Netflix to try and get customers to subscribe to their services instead or to extort money from streaming video providers.

And that's where I think things get murky fast. I'll be the first to admit I don't understand the details of what happened between Verizon, Comcast, and Netflix. In general terms, I think it was basically a contract dispute about who was going to pay whom for what. I guarantee armies of lawyers and CxOs were involved in the negotiations and I'm not going to try to outguess them. I'm pretty sure Comcast and Verizon would find it a Pyrrhic victory if they really reduced the quality of Netfilx streams for no good reason other than to make their service look better. Anyway, we have ways to resolve contract disputes, they slug it out in courts and the court of public opinion and eventually settle. I, personally, am more comfortable depending on that process than FCC regulation.

You're not wrong about how congress is supposed to work and how fragile policy put in place solely by the executive branch is.

Wow, someone on Slashdot admitting another poster has a point! Thank you!

Maybe if we can accomplish goals like getting money out of politics, implement systems like ranked choice voting, stop voter suppression, make voting easier with early voting/no excuse needed absentee ballots or some other fix, and get a healthy five or six active political parties going we can have a truly representative democracy again. But that's a very big, and very long if.

Amen brother. I doubt you'll ever get money out of politics. At best, you and I can tell our representatives that we don't want them to "bring home the bacon", we want them to vote in the best interest of the city/state/country as a whole. And we can vote that way (which doesn't make much difference, not one vote, but get a million like thinking voters and now it's interesting).

OK, really off topic here. There's some actual science in Political Science. They can show how having winner-take-all, first-to-the-finish voting systems, like we tend to have in the US, basically guarantees we'll have two dominant and largely stable parties. So I can't agree more that we need to get rid of our intuitively obvious but flawed system of "one person, one vote, most votes wins, winner takes all". You think about it a bit and only something like a third of American voted for our current President, which means that minority gets a lot of power over the majority. How busted is that?

I live in California, a reliable Democratic state for the last 20 years. My vote in 2016 made absolutely no difference. No matter what I did, all our Electoral votes were going to Clinton. As a result, neither Trump nor Clinton had to give a rat's a** about anything Californians cared about, other than how it affected fund raising. I think it would be better for all Californians to divide our Electoral votes proportionally somehow (county by county, district by district, proportional to the popular vote state wide, there are many ways). That would be good for all Californians, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, Pirate, whatever. The Democratic leadership, however, will never go for this, they'd be crucified by the national party. The Republicans could get behind this but they have no say in how the state is run. I don't know how to break the logjam.

I'd also love to have a system other than plurality voting. Instant runoffs, approval votin

Net Neutrality is a separate issue from the regional monopoly BS that most ISPs enjoy. That doesn't make it unimportant after we've already had blatant examples of both Verizon https://www.theverge.com/2017/... and Comcast https://consumerist.com/2014/0... throttling streaming video services like Netflix to try and get customers to subscribe to their services instead or to extort money from streaming video providers.

You're not wrong about how congress is supposed to work and how fragile policy put in place solely by the executive branch is. Unfortunately, our congress is almost completely broken, and has been for years, decades even. https://www.realclearscience.c... Maybe if we can accomplish goals like getting money out of politics, implement systems like ranked choice voting, stop voter suppression, make voting easier with early voting/no excuse needed absentee ballots or some other fix, and get a healthy five or six active political parties going we can have a truly representative democracy again. But that's a very big, and very long if.

Agreed 100%!

Originally, corporations could NOT own other corporations but I'm not sure what year that got hijacked.

This whole "I want to reap the benefits of a company but not have _any_ responsibility for when they are liable" has gotten WAY out of hand.

The fact that corporations are treated like people in the eyes of the Law just makes things worse.

Some interesting reading:

https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28...
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/co...
https://consumerist.com/2014/0...

“This was unequivocally not a data breach,” tweeted Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook executive. “No systems were infiltrated, no passwords or information were stolen or hacked.”

So, what really happened is that a bunch of people installed a bunch of Facebook apps, and the users authorized their personal data to be used by the app. What happened after that was standard Facebook Business Model stuff, they sell your eyeballs to advertisers and take a 30% share of sales. It's how all social media stays in business, by passively collecting data about you, where you eat, your income levels, what you buy, etc. All in the name of "targeted advertising", which we as users frankly embrace. We love seeing ads for things that may interest us, companies like the opportunity of us buying stuff, FB loves collecting data and giving it to the govern.... I mean collecting data.

The difference here is that even with that authorization there were things that Kogan (who collected that data) and CA were not allowed to do with that data. And even after Kogan and CA claimed to have destroyed the data they were still misusing that data.

I agree it's a very difficult policy to enforce, and if you're in the habit of clicking agree some of those 3rd parties are probably violating it, but it doesn't change the fact that Kogan and CA are one of those scummy 3rd parties misusing your data.

“This was unequivocally not a data breach,” tweeted Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook executive. “No systems were infiltrated, no passwords or information were stolen or hacked.”

So, what really happened is that a bunch of people installed a bunch of Facebook apps, and the users authorized their personal data to be used by the app. What happened after that was standard Facebook Business Model stuff, they sell your eyeballs to advertisers and take a 30% share of sales. It's how all social media stays in business, by passively collecting data about you, where you eat, your income levels, what you buy, etc. All in the name of "targeted advertising", which we as users frankly embrace. We love seeing ads for things that may interest us, companies like the opportunity of us buying stuff, FB loves collecting data and giving it to the govern.... I mean collecting data.

So, if we the public are clicking Accept every time we want to do a survey, or use a service, or install an app.... the horse is out of the barn. Then we get to Cambridge Analytica, who is accused of using personality quiz apps to gather information.. yeah, which is pretty much the whole purpose of those little quizzes to find your interests. The user answers a bazillion personal questions, and it spits out "Your Medieval Name Would Be Patsy", but what do you think happens to all that data after you click Commit? They aren't even building a profile of you, because Facebook already did that work by getting you to fill it out yourself. CA figured out, like Obama did in 2012. What do you think "big data" is really all about? Joining all these little data sets, like purchased this here, travelled there, likes flying, hates TSA, lives here, people that live here tend to earn this much, people that travel there and live here tend to vote this way, so hook them up with some targeted political ads and bam, you've increased your probability of an election win.

Best Buy's childish marketing gimmick has backfired. Photos on the wall behind the repair counter with badges. They call them "agents" and the repair counter a "precinct." Any company that would refer to 20,000 of their employees by an insulting name like "geek" has an attitude problem toward their own people. If there actually is a paid reward system, there is a non-zero risk that an employee of a computer repair place might plant stuff on someone's computer to get the reward. Why trust them anyway for repairs? "9 Confessions Of A Former Geek Squad Geek" https://consumerist.com/2011/0...

https://consumerist.com/2011/06/10/9-confessions-of-a-former-geek-squad-geek/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Squad#Controversy

https://geek-squad.pissedconsumer.com/review.html

https://www.bbb.org/washington-dc-eastern-pa/business-reviews/computer-repair/geek-squad-in-quakertown-pa-160210889/reviews-and-complaints

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/retail/best_buy_geek_squad.html

Here you go. Government (local, in most of these cases) granted monopolies. You get a choice of one provider. Remove the local monopoly grant and you'd find lower prices and more services. The problem in most of the US is the local Government granted monopoly.

Here in Ventura, CA you can have either Cox or Spectrum - depending upon where you live. Verizon is available in some neighborhoods, AT&T in the others. It's all sliced-and-diced up and maintained that way by the cable companies who work with Government to swap neighborhood exclusivities to get around monopoly restrictions.

Imagine how much better it would sounds with a $485 wooden knob

Of course there was that time when a bunch of audiophiles couldn't distinguish the difference between the results when using Monster Cables vs coat hangers...

The price of a speaker and a bunch of so-called-audiohpihles endorsing it doesn't mean much.

Yeap, totally didn't happen. ISPs never blocked or throttled anything.

You are correct, and it's been like that since at least 2009.

https://consumerist.com/2009/1...

Think of all the new community broadband that federal NN rules held back.

Net neutrality didn't hold any new community broadband back.

Net neutrality doesn't protect telco monopolies. Local communities protect telco monopolies.

You sound like Ajit Pai. Everything you say is ass backwards.

SuperKendall sometimes you are such a stupid fucking asshole.

Comcast throttled Netflix and Netflix made the problem go away by paying an extortion fee.

Consumers dissatisfied with Comcast (or AT&T or Time-Warner or what-have-you) often have no choice of ISPs. I live in fucking downtown San Francisco and my ONLY choice of high-speed cable Internet is Comcast.

So kindly accept as truth when I say that you're a goddamn fucking shill for the telcos (even if you're unpaid), I mean you go so far as to ejaculate all over the screen that "my own gigabit internet service fee probably keeps a nice shine on some executives yacht."

Fucking moron.

Comcast: 2014 worst company in America

How Comcast is Shortchanging Customers In Vermont

In 298 days, President Trump has made 1,628 false and misleading claims

Comcast: 2014 worst company in America

How Comcast is Shortchanging Customers In Vermont

You're technically true on all points, but you're missing some details:

The peering provider had upgraded to switch toward comcast with a higher bandwidth network card and asked comcast to do the same to their switch.

This, by itself, was not newsworthy because this is what they had done in the past. What was different was that Comcast refused (source 1, source 2).

Also of note is that Netflix tried to get ISPs to join their Open Connect program, where Netflix would install servers within Comcast's own network (at no cost to Comcast) so the switches wouldn't need to handle the traffic, but Comcast refused (source 1, source 2).

Netflix was trying to deal with its growing data usage as inexpensively as possible. Without the above details, though, it looks like they were trying to do so at Comcast's expense. IMO Comcast was in the wrong here because Comcast's customers were the ones paying for the network/data, but again, that's just my opinion.

Comcast: 2014 worst company in America

How Comcast is Shortchanging Customers In Vermont

a party who's central plank is laissez faire capitalism

Sadly, its worse than that. They want the government out of the picture as long as profits are rolling in, but as soon as shit goes south they're quite happy to beg for giant bailouts on the back of the taxpayer rather than simply letting failed companies fail as should happen in a laissez faire system.

If we look at ISPs (with all the recent flutter over net neutrality..) Their main argument against NN is that regulations are bad competition will fix it. Yet those same ISPs are continually trying to block competition, frequently by lobbying for you guessed it .. regulations .. that impede if not outright block new competitors.

"John Oliver, champion of wealthy doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and excessive medical costs in America."

[citation needed]

Counter citation: John Oliver buys $15M in medical debt, then forgives it. Is he perfect? No. But if you want to claim that he is the opposite of what the citation shows him doing then please be so kind as to give a reason for someone to think you didn't just pull that line out of your own posterior.

Bose recommends you buy your speaker wire from your local hardware store, in the form of lamp cord. They certainly know more about the subject than I do, so I'll take their word for it. You, on the other hand, are some guy on the internet

Plus, of course, most people can't tell the difference between Monster cable and coat hanger wire.

It's normal to hate on audiophiles because it's normal for audiophiles to be idiots.

The title should read:
"FCC Ignored Your Net Neutrality Comment."

The explanation is just a pretence. Remember how the FCC didn't want to investigate all those anti-net-neutrality robo-submissions?

There is simply no rational explanation other than malice under which robo-submissions with one point of view would be accepted while what appear to be genuine, but assisted, submissions with the opposite point of view would be ignored.

Netflix for one.

Just because you're too stupid to think of how this may be abused doesn't mean it won't be.

It's not like Amazon has a workplace reputation for being rainbows and lollipops.

No... It's for drawing genitalia.

Comcast: 2014 worst company in America

nothing stops the user from changing the SSID on their home network or owning their own router.

Other than that if you subscribe to home high-speed Internet in a Comcast territory, and you're not renting Comcast's latest gateway, Comcast will inject pop-up ads for its gateway into randomly chosen HTML responses in cleartext HTTP connections that your PCs, tablets, and smartphones make. (Source; Source; Source) Is this a reason to break down and rent Comcast's gateway? Or to boycott sites not available through HTTPS? Or to ditch Comcast and instead pay nearly 100 times more per GB for satellite or home cellular?

Comcast: 2014 worst company in America

It appears that United Airlines posted a statement retracting the ban before the Slashdot article was posted.

From United Airlines spokesperson earlier this afternoon:
“While TSA is recommending that customers keep their comic books in their carry-on bags, there are no restrictions on packing them in checked luggage,” reads the statement. “We misunderstood TSA’s instructions and regret any inconvenience this may have caused our customers.”

At 4:55 PM:
https://consumerist.com/2017/0...
At 5:15 PM:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/...

https://consumerist.com/2012/0...

http://reason.com/blog/2016/05...

http://www.wnd.com/2005/04/297...

Hi. Reality here. If Comcast could do that they would have, they are ALREADY FREE to do so even under current rules.

They are not currently free to do this. Under current rules all internet sites are given the same speed. And this is why ISP's are fighting these rules, because they are mostly giant corporations that only care about their stock holder's short term gains, not the user's experience. They did it previously in the couple of months where net neutrality rules were struck down Netflix Speeds Drop on Two ISPs

But this is stupid because it also blocks the highly desirable goal of giving traffic priority to Netflix, which many would pay extra for. What is wrong with letting most people do something that is beneficial for them and they would like? Preventing that is how we got the war on drugs.

Why should I pay extra to get the internet I want, I already pay a higher price than most other 1st world countries for. And if that were the case how long would it be before you had to start paying $50 or $100 a month to get Netflix at a reasonable rate of speed plus the cost to access a slow version of the rest of the internet?

Why? Why does it have to be that way? What if that's what a lot of people want and are willing to pay for?If people did not want that they would not pay for it and it would die off.

So if I don't want to pay for my ISP's version of the internet, I would just have to stop using the internet? Oh wait, I guess I could switch ISP's except I only have one ISP where I live, like a lot of this country. Most ISP's operate in localized monopolies. And this is the reason why we need Net Neutrality rules. If I could switch between Cox, Time Warner, Comcast or some other ISP with ease, Net Neutrality rules wouldn't matter, but most Americans cannot do this because the ISP provides both the service and the line to the house/ apartment.

> FCC chairman Ajit Pai hinted that the agency would likely honor those astroturfed comments
But since he previously said that "what matters most are the quality of the comments, not the quantity" [1], so we're fine, right, right?

[1] https://consumerist.com/2017/0...

In 2014, Comcast was voted worse than Monsanto!
Consumerist stories about Comcast.
Comcast: 2014 worst company in America.

Comcast is disliked so much, the company is now calling itself Xfinity.

In 2014, Comcast was voted worse than Monsanto!
Consumerist stories about Comcast.
Comcast: 2014 worst company in America.

Comcast is disliked so much, the company is now calling itself Xfinity.

Consumerist stories about Comcast.

One of the stories: Comcast: 2014 worst company in America. In 2014, Comcast was selected as worse than Monsanto!

Comcast is disliked so much, the company is now calling itself Xfinity.
 
In my experience, it is Comcast policy to be abusive to customers. One of the many negative results is that Comcast employees abuse Comcast.

Consumerist stories about Comcast.

One of the stories: Comcast: 2014 worst company in America. In 2014, Comcast was selected as worse than Monsanto!

Comcast is disliked so much, the company is now calling itself Xfinity.
 
In my experience, it is Comcast policy to be abusive to customers. One of the many negative results is that Comcast employees abuse Comcast.

https://consumerist.com/2017/0...

Prior to the net neutrality rules, they had the chance to do things voluntarily, and they proved they cannot be trusted. And so the feeding frenzy will continue.

They used to charge up to $14 per minute for collect phone calls until the FCC recently put a stop to it. Now, they're capped at no more than $1.75 for 15 minutes. Can you believe it? On a 15 min phone call, there is now a shortfall of $208.25

Prisons have come to depend on this extra income for their sludge funds. Now that the FCC took it away from them. They just need to start providing services on cheap devices that the FCC hasn't even thought to regulate for prison yet. This is the real story here.

The court blocked the FCC's rate cap and then the FCC gave up on it anyway.

https://consumerist.com/2017/0...