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.

Comments

About time

[just_another_sean]

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?

Re:About time

[just_another_sean]

I wasn't talking about caps.

Re:About time

[just_another_sean]

Oh, that's your solution? "You don't like Amerrika, git out"!

Thanks AC, it's so obvious. We shouldn't focus on making our country better, as long as it's better than the worst shit holes in the world we're doing fine. And if you don't think so, don't bother, just move somewhere else.

Re:About time

[GrahamCox]

And there, in a nut, is why the USA is nose-diving into oblivion. If you believe it can't be improved, it won't improve. Rampant capitalism is NOT the answer to every need, and Sweden proves it. By treating internet access as a piece of necessary national infrastructure, instead of just letting "the market" fight it out, you arrive at a far better end point far sooner. It's got nothing to do with idealism, all you need to do is compare the actual results.

Re:About time

[NotDrWho]

That's unpossible. Most of us don't even read Slashdot.

Re:About time

[RavenLrD20k]

Actually, Copp had this figured out for quite a while. Being slashdot and all, I understand the general inability to RTFA, so here's the pertinent part about this guy's history:

Copps has been a longtime pro-consumer advocate. He was the lone member of the five-person FCC to vote against the merger of Comcast and NBC, and since the 2010 net neutrality rule was vacated in February he has been urging the FCC to reclassify broadband ISPs as a common carrier service. He has also advocated against continued media consolidation and big telecom mergers.

The general gist of the rest of the article goes on to say how the rest of the suits were congratulating themselves on a job well done with the Telecom Act in '96 and generally celebrating the current state and where they see themselves going... until Copp takes the stand and gives everyone a verbal bitchslap:

He led off by agreeing with the several executive speakers that true competition is the way of the future, and the best way to serve consumers. “But we haven’t given competition the chance it needs,” he continued, before referring to how poorly U.S. broadband compares on the global stage. “We have fallen so far short that we should be ashamed of ourselves. We should be leading, and we’re not. We need to get serious about broadband, we need to get serious about competition, we need to get serious about our country.”

What I take from this is that this guy is a single life jacket trying to defend us in a sea of self-serving destruction bound sharks. Good luck to us all.

Re:About time

[Rei]

People act like it's so impossible to leave America. But seriously, if you don't like America, you truly, honestly, don't have to stay there.

I didn't like America. I traveled. I found a place I actually liked a lot (Iceland). I applied for jobs. I got one surprisingly quick. I moved. And now I've lived here for years.

There's nothing preventing you from doing the same. If you don't like America, you really can leave!

Oh, and while we're talking about the internet... here's what my highly isolated, incredibly rugged/unstable terrain, tied-for-second-lowest population density, super-high prices for electronic equipment country's internet stats are:

Data compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows Iceland with:[1]

83.2% of households having broadband Internet access in 2009 (2nd out of 34)
99.5% of businesses using the Internet in 2009-2010 (2nd out of 31)
91.5% of the broadband access being DSL in 2010
  8% of broadband connections using optical fiber in 2010

The Global Information Technology Report 2010–2011[2] by the World Economic Forum ranked Iceland:

1st out of 138 in terms of Internet users (93.5% of the population used the Internet in 2009)
1st out of 138 in the use of virtual social networks (a score of 6.8 in 2009-2010, where 1 is not at all and 7 is widely)
1st out of 138 in terms of Internet access in schools (a score of 6.76 in 2009-2010, where 1 is very limited and 7 is extensive)
1st out of 138 in accessibility of digital content (a score of 6.62 in 2009-2010, where 1 is not accessible at all and 7 is widely accessible)
1st out of 137 in the number of secure Internet servers (1,711.3 servers per million population in 2009)
4th out of 138 in the extent of business Internet use (a score of 6.58 in 2009-2010, where 1 is not at all and 7 is extensively)
5th out of 138 in terms of international Internet bandwidth (626.8 Mbit/s per 10,000 population in 2009)

Fiber's really been taking off since the OECD study was done, it now even goes out to places like Vestfirðir, where in the whole region the largest town is under 4k people, and some towns are so isolated that they're legally classified as islands during the winter because the roads become impassable until late spring. But the fiber stays on. :) We're currently at about 65% home fiber penetration, and the telecoms are talking about hitting 80% by the end of the year.

In general, we've got superb computer and net connectivity and literacy - even on the little stuff (for example, over here, IE is the number *three* web browser, and it's not even close). Reykjavík uses a direct democracy system for bringing public issues directly to the floor at city council meetings, the new constitutional drafting team was credited with online crowdsourcing the constitution (that's overstating the case, but they did make extensive use of online suggestions and discussions), etc. My only real criticism of the net environment here is that while domestic net traffic is generally uncapped, international usually is, you choose an international data package. So this leads to, for example, instead of using Pirate Bay, people use Iceland-only torrent sites like Deildu for file sharing. And one of the local companies, Síminn, is looking at the possibility of domestic caps too, which would suck. Crazy-fast connectivity is great, but not so great if you can't use it to download whatever you want.

Re:About time

[Rei]

Have you actually started learning Dutch and putting forth the same amount of effort to getting a job in the netherlands that you'd put towards finding a job in the US (aka, months of searching and learning the right jobfinding approaches)?

You might be surprised.

It's a problem...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:It's a problem...

[Jade_Wayfarer]

Well, that's the core problem of post-industrial society vs. industrial society. Maybe even post-modern world vs. modern world. Maybe people like Elon Musk (sorry, I know that everyone are already grew tired of his name, but I can't take another example from the top of my head) can renew the popularity of actually achieving something, rather than "great, we've secured the profit for our shareholders for the next quarter, fuck everything else". I, for one, would really love to see a beginning of a "neo-modern" era.

What's the point?

[Pollux]

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...

[jonwil]

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.

Too many unanswered questions

[timrod]

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.