Verizon CEO Says "We Will Hunt Heavy Users Down"

Zerocool3001 writes "In an interview with WSJ editor Alan Murray,Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg talks about how the FCC's broadband access studies are wrong (and the US is definitely 'number one, not even close'), how he had someone else stand in line for him Saturday to pick up his iPad, and how Verizon will soon hunt down, throttle and/or charge high-bandwidth users on its network."

Comments

This is it.

[vivin]

This is it, people! The end of the internet as we own it! After the ruling yesterday anyway... oh and also that combined with the fact that earlier this year we took a step towards corporate personhood, allowing corporations to participate in the political and legal process.

Say goodbye to the free and open internet. Say hello to the tiered-pricing model, and the metered-usage model. These companies don't care about the users. They care about the bottom-line and profits. The free market won't help here, because obviously they're going to strong-arm any competition.

Welcome to the Digital dark age. The US, the pioneer of the internet, will end up as a backwater province of the intarwebs.

Maybe I'm being cynical and alarmist. Oh well.

Re:want more bandwidth?

[bennomatic]

I'm actually with you on this. The cake^H^H^H^H flat-rate offerings are a lie. If they had reasonable per GB charges and easy ways to monitor them throughout the month, I see no reason not to go that route. A few bucks per GB in $0.01 increments would be fine with me.

Re:Come to Verizon!

[AliasMarlowe]

Seidenberg talks about how the FCC's broadband access studies are wrong (and the US is definitely 'number one, not even close')

I think he meant to say "definitely not number one, not even close" as that would be true. What he actually said is malformed rubbish.
The US is well behind countries such as Japan and Korea, which have widespread high speed access, either uncapped or with caps far higher than levels in the US. The Nordic countries also generally have uncapped high speed services. If you pay for bandwidth, it's there without any monthly capacity limits. I have 100/10 fiber to the house in rural Finland, and there are no caps. On bandwidth tests, I get the speed I'm paying for - all the time.

Re:Come to Verizon!

[theaveng]

Hold on. Before you go too far in your European praise:

According to speedtest.net, the European Union is still 0.9 Mbit/s slower (average) than the American Union (US). And about 3 Mbit/s slower than the Russian Federation.

Re:Come to Verizon!

[iamhassi]

" I have 100/10 fiber to the house in rural Finland, and there are no caps. On bandwidth tests, I get the speed I'm paying for - all the time."

And you use it for what, exactly?

I've had my same 10/1 cable internet service for nearly ten years in the US. Two years ago I cancelled my regular TV cable service and went purely internet based media, streaming Hulu, torrents and iTunes to my TV. I don't even have an antenna for OTA programming. I haven't suffered, I still watch TV every night, and surf the net constantly without ever wishing for higher speeds.

If I had 100/10 fiber my activities wouldn't change. Even though I'm constantly downloading everything the internet has to offer I have never felt like I needed a faster speed. It'd be like having a car capable of 200mph when the speed limit's 65, sure it's fun to have but how often would I get to use all that power?

I think Ivan Seidenberg is absolutely right. All the tech news I've read, I don't see Japan and Europe coming out with anything amazing thanks to their faster internet services. Hulu is based in the US and only accessible to US citizens. PlayON, which I use to stream Hulu content to the TV, is based in the US. Sites I use daily, eBay, Slashdot, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Myspace and many others, all created in the US. The best phones of the past decade, Google Android/Nexus and iPhone, were both created in the US for the US network, not other countries that are suppose to have amazing wireless networks.

So tell me, all you other countries of the world with amazing fiber internet connections, what are you doing with your bandwidth? Are you using that 100mbps download often, or does it sit idly by at a few mbps 99% of the time?