Slashdot Mirror
Cablecos, Telcos Working To Strengthen the Duopoly
The LA Times is running a piece on cooperation among cable companies and telcos. No, not cablecos cooperating with telcos; rather, both industries working on industry-wide initiatives aimed at getting a leg up on the other. AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest have been working on a site, Moveroo.com, aimed at easing the pain of people moving within the US — by making it easier for them to hook up with the incumbent telco at their destination, for instance. Odd that there is no mention of which cable services might be available where they are heading. The cablecos are cooperating on a more ambitious initiative to standardize targeted advertising nationwide, using data gathered from the set-top boxes used by Time Warner, Cox, Comcast, Cablevision, Charter, and Bright House Networks. The article quotes a spokesman from a utility consumers' action group: " [The spokesman] said these moves by the telecom and cable industries may be good for the respective businesses, but they almost surely won't be good for consumers. 'All they're doing is creating obstacles to each other's industry from gaining an advantage,' he said. 'That's not competition.' Well, it is. But not the kind that benefits customers."
Given that the government has been bought and paid for by large corporate donors and there is no other game in town, and given that boycotting is impractical (and would make no difference) --you expect us to do WHAT exactly?
Jesus was a communist, Jesus was a pacifist, Jesus was a communist, Jesus didn't like the rich - Reagan Youth
Back to the topic at hand, I firmly believe these industries need to be nationalized. Or at least something along the line of utility companies. The fact of the matter is they exist to serve the citizens (or at least should due to public easements and what have you), but their commitment is to making that dollar... I don't see how that is ever going to change. But I do see how I never have to worry about gas or electric company trying to pull some underhanded move or using my payments to fund lobbyists to further their agenda. Nah when the power company wants to raise rates it's done in a public forum and it has to be okay'd by whatever governmental committee is in charge of that. Which obviously isn't a perfect system but it works and you don't see massive consumer unrest towards entities with such oversight.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
" [The spokesman] said these moves by the telecom and cable industries may be good for the respective businesses, but they almost surely won't be good for consumers. 'All they're doing is creating obstacles to each other's industry from gaining an advantage,' he said. 'That's not competition.' Well, it is. But not the kind that benefits customers."
People have been saying this all along. There is no move by either company that is aimed at achieving anything other than coin for the shareholder. Their level of collusion with the **AA et al is debated, but seems inevitable. We are seeing the beginnings of the next level of content cartel being born. Each is seeking to be the biggest triple or quadruple-play content provider. The rumors that they want to charge you for access to various content on the Internet is not so far fetched as you might at first think. The large ISPs finally figured out that they now own the distribution channel for content in the foreseeable future and want to own it the way that the **AA have previously done.
No, I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat, this is a logical conclusion. Without control of distribution there is no big bucks to be made, no expensive houses, cars, coke parties. Yes, $45 for your standard package, with tiered charges for extra 'Internet channels' like YouTube or Google or MP3World etc.
What they are fighting about now is how to legally divide up the Internet content and not be taken to court. Comcast just lost one of the test battles.
If remuneration for good services rendered were their goal, there would be no court cases. There would be no throttling of traffic. There would be no hints of collusion with the **AA. There would be no one questioning what ISPs should monitor and what they should not.
In an ideal world, a massive boycott of commercial content would put everything in perspective for them. Unfortunately that won't happen. We are all the poorer for it.
What can be done? support independent content makers now. Encourage more bands to use the pay what you like model. Eventually the message that if people won't even pirate your content, you are not worth supporting will become an industry insiders golden rule.
It's time that such a message was sent to those spending money in Washington. Sad that it will never get there.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I've been pricing packages for phone/television/internet lately, and have found that the local Verizon and BrightHouse offerings all happen to offer a minimal price of $100/month plus equipment rental and misc fees moving the realistic cost to $130/month, and a demand for long-term contracts with heavy penalties for ending the contract.
I was pricing these because we had work crews installing the FIOS lines around the neighborhood, and wanted to see how I could use that fact to negotiate a better price with either the cable company or the new Verizon FIOS. But I was surprised at how strictly each company matched eachother's offerings without offering any cheaper options for those interested in the cheapest option. I was interested in FIOS speeds a little, but I discovered that they would be cutting the independently-powered copper and replacing it with an 8-hour battery on the wall of the house. But... if they do that, and then a hurricane comes, then the landline is nothing more than a glorified cellphone with an 8-hour battery... most hurricane power outages last much longer than that, and there is a need to call city lines for messages on drinking water and the like that just aren't available from radio.
In any case, I don't understand the rationale of Verizon here - they're spending all this money rolling out the fiber for FIOS, but they aren't using the opportunity to compete other than offering faster, but still traffic-shaped internet. The end result is just two cables running to neighborhoods, each privately owned and vulnerable in the same ways, but not really distinguishing themselves.
Ryan Fenton
The pieces became obvious last month. It's not something that could happen in a competitive system and it's not something I would have imagined just a year ago but the end of the free internet is here.
The cable company doesn't need to know that the screen is blanked, the audio is off, and you've left for the weekend -- meantime, your STB is religiously searching out reruns of Speed Racer or maybe the original Star Trek. If one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they'll ignore it. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they'll ignore both of them. And three people do it, they may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day? And friends they may thinks it's a movement.
Well, Arlo, what if millions -- yes, millions -- of people sold their non-watching cable time to run up the viewership for worthy programs like My Little Pony? Easy enough to coordinate over the internet, after all. Either the producers go into panic mode changing their programming or else they give up on spying on their "customers." Either way, it's all good.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
This is quite an illustrative example of how to fight a partisan fight.
If you are a newspaper journalist who have an ideological stance that you wish to use your job to fight for (and an enemy you wish to fight against), it's not always a straightforward matter to do so. If you start introducing your article with "The evil AT&T corpirate fascists recently announced that.. ", people may stop seeing your paper as a source of reliable news that includes all relevant facts whether they help or harm your cause.
What you can do instead is simply interview people who have your ideological stance. Rather than saying "gypsies smell", you can write a descriptive article about gypsies and finish off with "a spokesman for the anti-gypsy association commented: 'the problem is that gypsies smell'".
In this case, the journalist "concludes" that the competition in this case is likely to be harmful to consumers.
There is nothing to back up that statement other than prejudice. A website to make it easier to organise a house move as well as identify what the telecom provider is at your destination is not harmful to consumers. A method for standardised targetted advertising, meaning that you are likely to see more adverts for things that people who share your general background tend to buy and less of what they are less likely to buy, is not harmful to consumers either.
To make these things bad you must supplement the facts with ideological prejudice.
Anyone posting or moderating on this thread should be aware that Erris, myCopyWrong, willeyhill, westbake and Odder are the same person.
twitter sockpuppets can be recognized from the shilling and the fact that 11 out of 12 post at -1 for trolling.
I had hoped that twitter wouldn't use his latest account for astroturfing, but I was obviously wrong.
Also watch out for these.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Corporations trying to stay ahead of their competitors? Unheard of!
...is a "cableco"? Am I to assume this is some sort of abbreviation for "cable company"? Or maybe this refers to Cableco, a division of The Carpenter Group?
Note to /. editors: Making up words makes one look ignorant and naive. "Telco" has been around for decades (its original meaning wasn't "telecommunications company" but rather "telephone company," back when there were more than a handful). "Cableco" is a made-up word that makes /. editors look like rubes.
When did cable TV and digital phone service become as important as water and electricity? The fact is that if you want to watch basic local TV, then you don't need to interact with the cable company at all. If you just want a basic no-frills phone line, it's still under $20 a month where I live. Where the hell do you get off deciding that the government should be allowed to seize control of what are essentially luxury items? In case they didn't teach this principle to you when you were in elementary school, this country was founded on the principle that the government derives it's power from the people. The people DO NOT derive their rights from the government. If you don't agree with that basic notion, then do us all a favor and pack up your house and move the fuck out of here.
They are both going to have severe pain over the next two to three years. A lot of folks are going to be more worried about food than cable.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The thing that always gets me about liberals is their constant instance that government regulations will do a better job than the free market would. They complain that the "hidden hand" is bit of hand waving that libertarians use to justify their own selfish ends. In reality the "hidden hand" is guided by the individual decisions of people trading goods.
Any yes, if individuals have enough information when making decisions, the "hidden hand" is quite good at taking resources from where they are available and putting them where they are needed. When it doesn't work, it is always a case where poor information had lead to poor decisions.
In reality, liberals are just arrogant people who think they know how to spend your money better than you do. That's not to say that they aren't well-meaning, they're just hopelessly misguided.
Why do you insist on crapflooding Slashdot this way?
Because Slashdot lets him write posts bigger than 140 characters. Grandparent post was 201 characters long, not counting markup or bracketed domain.
Idaho population ~ 1,466,465
Kansas City Metropolitan Area (ranked 29th Us Metro)
~ 1,985,429
Treasure Valley ID ~587,689 (ranked 86th)
I say approximately, because these are probably 2006 figures and people die and are born every minute.
So yes in the top 100, but you're also talking about 1/3 of the entire state's population and rather small in comparison to Houston or Dallas-Ft. Worth. You could triple your state's population and still not equal the population of either one of those metros.
Not exactly a fair comparison. Not to mention the natural layout of the two places, that allow you to use hydro cheaply as opposed to the options the residents in the state of Texas can. Although, I'll bet if Texas wanted to they could build a nice large field array of solar power and power the whole state from a single plant rather cheaply.
They've got plenty of places with nice sunny desert like conditions.
I have a cell phone. Ha, ha!
And the cableco can have my rabbit ears when they pry them out of my cold, dead fingers.
P.S. Please don't tell either of them about my power company's fiber/wireless network.
Have gnu, will travel.
If roo are moving, roo don't haf to srow down your rife. Ree can hehrp roo to get connekeeted verr fast. Ret us move-a-roo!
"Second, the prices consumers see will obviously be lower if an industry is subsidized/owned by the government because money is coercively taken from one group of people (taxpayers) and given to another group (the providers of the service/utility)."
Uh, there's no need for money to be taken as profit.
Cost+Profit > Cost
And in the private industry, money is spent on advertising (no government advertises utilities), money is spent on bonuses (CEO renumeration is VASTLY higher than civil servant renumeration), money is spent on lobbying (the government don't have to lobby themselves).
Parent post contains 218 characters. If you want to troll using confusing names, could you please do it in under 140 characters?
You assholes character count now? That's about as pointless a waste of time as I can imagine. Here I was thinking tepples was some kind of Windows accessibility expert. Now we see this kind of pointless harassment.
Your request is probably malicious, but it may be based on ignorance. You should know that the willyhill name was created to smear and harass Baton Rouge LUG member Will Hill back when the twitter haters were sure they had identified twitter. More pointless activity, I know. YHBT hand, and that BS.
You assholes character count now?
That was a joke son. "Twitter" has two meanings: a microblog service and a /. user with alleged sockpuppets.