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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?
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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.
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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.
One of the problems is that cities and towns that have tried this have found an unexpected expense: Legal bills from fighting against the lawsuits that the Big ISPs start to prevent these projects. This is even the case when the Big ISPs don't server those cities/towns. To hear the ISPs put it: Competition from the government is unfair and if they don't serve that area then it is still unfair competition since they might, some day, decide to maybe serve it.
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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.