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Former FCC Head: "We Should Be Ashamed of Ourselves" For State of Broadband
An anonymous reader writes A group of internet industry executives and politicians came together to look back on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and to do a little crystal-ball gazing about the future of broadband regulation in the United States. Former FCC commissioner Michael Copps was among the presenters, and he had sharp words for the audience about the "insanity" of the current wave of merger mania in the telecom field and the looming threats of losing net neutrality regulation.
It took 18 years for them to figure this out? Whiles some grandmother in Sweden had 40 GB back in 2007?
When can I get mine? And can I choose from more than one provider? And, most importantly, will I really get 40 GB?
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
WCIA 2 time champ, too. We all understand the mergers are about extending monopolies and gaining power, the better to gouge consumers.
And what will be done about it? Nothing, as usual. Our national government will even help the poor things gouge us harder. Give them lots of infrastructure, redefine broadband to include even slower speeds, and keep squashing competition from local governments because it's unfair that they should have to compete against a government.
Oh, and Net Neutrality? Just a bargaining chip. Worth a few hundred sinecures.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I'd rather have hookers - maybe they can spell, too
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
There seems to be some sort of cultural tipping point, among those at the important levers of a given nation's economy, between wanting to be captains of industry in a first world nation and being more than happy to help build a third world one, so long as they get to be members of the oligarchy in it.
It's not as though our industrial titans were actually nicer in the past; but they didn't seem to have the same spirit of "Well, the bean counters say that just doing bare minimum upkeep and making oligopoly margins has a better ROI than actually building anything, so fuck trying and let's see about a bonus." Back in the day, when you rolled up your sleeves and got ready for a hard day of ruthless exploitation and wanton destruction, it's because you had some sort of grand plan in mind.
But we haven't given competition the chance it needs
So very true. Most of the impediments are about pole-access for community broadband, and that's at the State level. So many attempts at competition have failed at the pole-access level (which suits the incumbents just fine!). Sure, if you have Google money you can get through all of it, but even they only have a handful of cities, a drop in the bucket. Inequitable pole access is one of the reasons for the meager success of WISP's, and though I wish them well, spectrum is limited, glass is not.
Whose internet is it anyway? And whose democracy is it anyway?
And then he goes off the rails. It's a republic, for Pete's sake, and it's the Internet of whomever builds it. The interconnection of many and varied private networks is the model that has led to the most successful technological innovation in history. Mess with that at your great peril. Yes, the too-big-to-fail fascist/corporate model is attractive to miscreants, but fix that, don't wreck the Internet.
He seems to be concluding that Congress is in a smarter position to fix it than the entrepreneurs who know what needs doing but are held back by the government regulations. Congress couldn't find its way out of a box unless K-Street told them where the exit was. Patching bad code with more bad code is not the way the Internet wins, either in a router or in the CFR. The odds of additional regulation from Congress not making things worse are slim to none.
I'm pretty sure that he just made things worse by correctly identifying real problems and then prescribing unicorn farts as the solution from his bully pulpit.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
a group of internet industry executives and politicians came together...
Did this individual seriously believe he could make this audience of industry executives and politicians feel shame? What next? Will he tell a serial rapist to feel remorse? Will he tell a psychopathic murderer to feel empathy?
These people are incapable of feeling shame. It's what's made them so successful in the first place.
It all comes down to one thing and that is a desire to make sure that pay TV (cable/satellite/fiber/whatever) isn't killed by the internet.
He probably did contribute a lot to this mess, but that doesn't mean he's no correct here.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Cities and towns that create better internet infrastructure should rise as natural software company hubs. If they want the jobs offer utility like internet at a reasonable cost. Get rid of the media managed connection model and special individual company tax incentives in exchange for better connectivity.
The real issue here is that we have far too many unanswered questions when it comes to broadband internet. The biggest, of course, is who regulates ISPs and internet as a service (rather than the content on the internet). To this day, we STILL don't know the answer. Plenty of people have tried (and failed) to answer it.
The FCC tried to initially regulate them as a Title I "information service", but that led to a bunch of lawsuits and eventually the Circuit Court of Appeals stepping in and saying that no, they couldn't regulate ISPs (especially in regards to network neutrality) under Title I. Now, years later, there's a debate over whether the FCC should step in and regulate them under Title II - something that the courts said would probably be in line with the legal authority given to the FCC by Congress. To this day, there is still no hard legislation as to who should regulate them, so it may very well be that even if the FCC regulates ISPs under Title II, a lawsuit by the telecos/cablecos could reverse the whole thing.
The same thing is true of the "last mile", where supposedly it's regulated by local government.. but in practice it's ruled by Big Telco/Big Cableco and their constant lawsuits used to wipe out the competition. They can do this because there is no strong legislation preventing them from doing so, and until there is a law that provides immunity to competitors from being sued simply because they want to compete and prevents local government from signing all of the infrastructure away to Big Telco, lawsuits will continue to be the law of the land.
We need to answer these questions first. Then we can start improving broadband in the United States.
Now, if you think that there's some supernatural method by which arbitrary numbers of telecommunications companies could provide service to every home,
Connection from the home to an exchange point. Use a different VLAN for every ISP that wants to connect to each customer.
At my home I could then connect to multiple ISPs at the same time if I so choose, just by making use of VLANs. Most customers wouldn't need this and they could have a default VLAN set to their port, but the option would be there.
With this setup, you could have up to 4,000-ish ISPs.
But we dont have that in the USA. As soon as the Federal Government started mucking around with things beyond protecting the consumer, it ceased to be that.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Right, that's where all the companies got deregulated... so that they could merge, leading to just a few fighting it out to be the new, but *unregulated*, Ma Bell.
Enjoying the ever-increasing bills for the same service, kiddies?
And make no mistake: that Bill was bought and paid for by the telecoms, including in ways most of you never heard of... like me: I was working for Ameritech, one of the Baby Bells, and our *corporate*, not division, president *ordered* us all to write letters to our Senetors and Congresscritter to push the bill through... *and* they demanded ->copies of the letter-, and if there's any fools or libertarians (but I repeat myself) out there who *don't* understand that it was a threat, and if we didn't, we could be out of a job, you are clueless.
If you're wondering, my letters were as forceful on the matter as a newborn kitten's... but it was enough to satisfy the bastard Notebart.
mark
1st in Death By Volcano: Iceland.
"For 1, it is a much smaller country. The US is by comparison VAST"
This is as much of a bullshit excuse as it ever was.
The thing about the areas of low population density is that MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT THERE. Even if it is true that ti is too hard to cover the large areas of low density that is no reason not to cover the areas of higher density where most of the people are.
Compare New Jersey to Belgium and Switzerland. Given that New Jersey is smaller than either and has the same or better population density, why should New Jersey have the same or better telecommunicaations infrastructure, or trains, or anything like that?
But somebody has to book the hookers or they won't know where and when to show up for work.
Of course if someone wants to book them for doing the work, that's a different problem.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.