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AT&T's Net Neutrality Doublethink
GMGruman writes "George Orwell would be proud of AT&T, as Bill Snyder explains in this blog post, for its new ads saying it supports Net neutrality when in fact it is working actively to scuttle proposed FCC rules that would clearly ban discriminatory practices against different types of data, such as video streaming or VoIP. It's also trying to get government subsidies to build a substandard broadband network for the under-served areas of the US. If it and its carrier partners win, 'Internet freedom' will mean freedom for carriers to be the 21st century's robber barons."
Robber Barons? You, sir, slander the good name of brilliant men like Jay Gould and Daniel Drew. How dare you!
They'll be robber barons because like in the 1800s, they bribed/gamed the governmental control system in place to achieve monopoly power.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Would it not be nice for consumers in these rural towns to be able to vote with their dollar and pick the best carrier.
"Hmm, I could choose AT&T who wants $60 to be able to browse 4chan, or, I could choose INTERNET4YOU who will give me free access to every site for only $40"
Why is the government supporting the creation of bigger and bigger monopolies?
Our 40 year "government regulation is bad" experiment ended with disastrous results. Without a referee looking out for the interests of the public, which has a lot of skin in this game, the telecos are going to ride us all like a carnival pony, just like Wall Street.
Try convincing the teabaggers, or most anyone right of center, of that. They'll insist that the reason why things have gone downhill over the past 40 years is because there's still too much government interference (and by that they mean that the government simply existing is too much interference).
Are you sure? I know that in both Australia and New Zealand you are billed differently if you have Nightstore Heater, as just one example.
How long do you think it will be before all those buffet restaurants go out of business? Why do you think they and their customers have tolerated such an unfair pricing structure for so long?
The flaw with your reasoning is that ISPs are already undercharging. So there's no "spare money" to decrease rates. I'm personally paying $15/month - how much cheaper can it get? Instead people are using more data, which will require laying more lines, and therefore require higher rates for those demanding users while everyone else holds steady.
ALSO FROM THE ARTICLE:
"AT&T is asking asking the government to define broadband as anything over 768Kbps downstream and 200Kbps upstream." What's wrong with that. That's ~30 times faster than the typical rural farm or country home connection. When Verizon ran 768k to my home I was thrilled, and I'm sure most people living in empty states like Idaho or Wyoming would also be similarly thrilled. It's better than having no broadband.
Plus 768k can use the existing phone lines - no need to dig-up a million miles of dirt.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Your local ISP might do that, but the big boys do not.
They have peering agreements where traffic in and out of each others networks are assumed to be roughly balanced. If there is a diff over a defined limit, the smallest of the peers usually pays per byte.
If you use more water, or more electricity, you're consuming finite resources that wouldn't be used otherwise. The same isn't true of bandwidth--the ISP is paying for a certain amount on their outgoing connections, regardless of whether or not uses are actively using it.
You need electricity to use bandwidth... Even so, water and electricity are not finite.
P.S.
A better solution, now that we have fiber optic, is simply let as many companies enter a neighborhood as desire. Fiber is so narrow you could run a dozen companies in the space of a centimeter, and then just let each customer decide which company they like best (Comcast or Cox or Charter or AppleTV or LinuxISP or MSN or AOL or...). And before you say it can't be done, some towns already do have multiple ISPs. You pick your ISP the same way you pick what brand of car you want.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall