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Single Group Dominates Second Round of Anti Net-Neutrality Comment Submissions
New submitter aquadood writes: According to the Sunlight Foundation's analysis of recent comment submissions to the FCC regarding Net Neutrality, the majority (56.5%) were submitted by a single organization called American Commitment, which has "shadowy" ties to the Koch brothers' network. The blog article goes on to break down the comments in-depth, showing a roughly 60/40 split between those against net neutrality and those for it, respectively.
If there's ever a time - it's times like this. Koch brothers' evil and the bullshit associations they support, typically lobbying for the opposite of what their names indicate (ie. "America" or "US" or "Family" combined with "Freedom" or "Prosperity" or "Commitment" or some other similar term) and the public would be greatly served by having these organisations dismantled, only, the people need some help -- the lack of transparency and lack of media coverage of these types of incidents means the majority, whose votes 'could' count, are too often taken for a ride.
I wonder why they felt the need to spam the submissions. We all know the decision is going to be based on which side pays the largest bribe.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Agreed! Who could be against the FCC regulating the internet? Nutters and Koch brothers types, that's who! I look forward to the FCC getting it's mitts deeply into the regulation of the interntet. I mean, how else can I be sure of getting cheap, fast pings for my games if not by getting the feds involved? My freedom to ping REQUIRES laws, bureaucrats, agents, and harsh penalties to ANYONE who fucks with my pings!
Given that all a lack of the FCC being involved has got you is a Comcast/Time Warner monopoly, prices 2-3 times as high as the other side of the atlantic, service an order of magnitude slower than the other side of the atlantic, and double charging both the sender and receiver for data... YES, FUCKING AMEN, WHO THE FUCK COULD BE AGAINST GETTING THE FCC INVOLVED!
... of the FCC in the process. That is their primary beef. They see it as an encroachment of federal regulation which they're reflexively against.
This said, if you want the conservatives on your side there is a way to do it while getting effectively to net neutrality.
The issue is that we have a few large companies that are monopolizing everything. Why is that? Mostly because it is almost impossible to lay the last mile of cable from a regulation stand point. Cities, counties, and sometimes even states put taxes, regulations, and conditions on laying cable on the last mile.
Laying backbone cable is much easier. I think I saw an estimation that over 80 percent of US backbone bandwidth is laying idle. The issue is the last mile and the problem is government interference. LOCAL government interference. Not federal.
If you pitch to conservatives "hey, you're allowing monopolistic companies to rob you because local corrupt government officials are getting bribed to shut out competitors" then you're going to have an easier time getting conservatives on board.
If what you want is a better and freer internet... then this gets you that. With expanded competition, the big ISPs will not be able to play these games. Mom and pop ISP providers will sprout up like mushrooms in any area with an issue. Yes, running an ISP is an investment but not nearly as big of a deal as many people think.
If you only serve a given neighborhood then the costs aren't that big a deal. Why does a new ISP automatically have to service the entire city? Does the local sandwich shop need to open 50 locations to be able to operate? Obviously not. You open one franchise in one area that you feel you can turn a profit in and you expand from there if you are successful.
THAT is what the future of ISPing should be. Local ISPs that run last mile internet service in a few square blocks, cut their teeth on that, and then expand to neighboring blocks as they recoop their investment.
You don't need mega billion dollar corporations to make this work.
Right now, look at the cost of fiber cable. The raw wholesale cost of fiber. Look up what a fiber switch costs to serve a couple hundred users. This is the sort of price structure you are looking at and it is comparable to what you find in a lot of other small businesses.
Pitch this and conservatives will be all over it. If instead you say "we need the federal government to come in and regulate everything for the greater good"... you're going to run shivers up the backs of conservatives and they're going to fight you reflexively.
Why do we need to do it this way? Won't it be better this other way? Think about it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Um.... I have 100mbit fiber to my apartment. It costs me about $25usd per month - fully unlimited traffic, no DMCA notices - ever, and includes IPTV with too many channels/movies (mostly Chinese, however).
I pay very little in taxes/fees, to boot. Thanks, corporate shill #108277.
Isn't that a synonym for suspected but without evidence?
Just so we're on this front, I think that aliens have shadowy ties to the Egyption pyramids. I heard one of those pyramids has a weapon that can destroy planets. Maybe I'm thinking of the death star and its shadowy connections to the Empire.
K
I live in the Netherlands. In your opinion a far left, almost commie country if I read your comment well. We used to have a good health insurance system, good public transport and an excellent mail service, all state financed. Until some of our right wing bastards decided to leave all that to 'the market'. Services would improve and tariffs would decrease under the pressure of all the competitors in The Great Free Market, is what they told us.
The result? As to be expected with companies trying to deliver the least possible service for the highest amount of money (which IS the thing 'Free Market" is all about), health insurance prices are rising through the ceiling while coverage goes through the floor, public transport is more crappy than ever with higher prices and mail delivery goes the same way.
The blessings of Free Market and its Invisible Hand, as touted by right wing parties, are only blissfull for the Big Companies and their filthy rich owners. And taxes? Gone up anyway, except for the richest.
So, i will take a bit higher taxes in exchange for better services anytime. Here we see what your Holy Free Market does, and very, very few people like it. (Why they keep believing the shit the right wingers here spout and keep voting for them against their own interest keeps baffling me,)
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
Mostly because it is almost impossible to lay the last mile of cable from a regulation stand point.
Mostly because it makes a fucking lot of sense to not dig up the street every time someone switches to a new ISP.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Second all of that from Germany.
Energy companies - privatized. Prices have gone up, service is still good mostly because of government regulations, the market is now largely dominated by less than 5 big energy companies. Only recently thanks to renewable energy have smaller, local players re-emerged.
Public transport - long distance privatized. Service down, delays up, lots of smaller stations have been closed and lines discontinued, government subsidizes the whole thing still.
Telecommunications - privatized. Looked like a success for many years, but now that the old monopolist has stopped being a dominant player (it wasn't broken down like AT&T), service is going down the drain and prices are secretly climbing (base fees are low, nobody dares being the first to raise them, but they're all adding all kinds of additional charges, reducing service for the base fee so you have to buy a higher contract for the same, etc.)
Pensions - being dismantled as we look. We had a great state pension system. It survived both world wars and managed to pay out pensions even when the rest of Germany was flat broke. Heck, even in the few years after WW2 when Germany didn't exist at all and it was just an occupied zone. Now the state pension system is being systematically dismantled by politics while private pension funds and insurances work hard to convince you that you absolutely need them or you'll be poor when you are old.
The examples go on and on and on. In the end, it is quite clear that what my old philosophy teacher in school said was right: capitalism, communism, fascism, extremism, islamism, doesn't matter, be aware of everything that ends with -ism.
The free market is a cute idea and it works great for trade. But don't make it a religion. Many human endeavours are not trade and not suitable to be treated like that. I hope we all agree that things like art and love fall into that category, so we should be open to at least discussing if health, transportation and communications might fall into it as well.
The same is true for communism. The idea that every is equal is great for politics, and a lot of what's wrong in the west today is caused by our hidden abolishing of the "one vote per citizen" rule by allowing campaign financing to dominate the results instead of votes. But again there are lots of areas where treating everyone the same is not the right approach. Education, science, sports and business are all places where it's good if people start out with equal chances, but as their talents and abilities emerge, they need to be treated differently. And planned economy has been pretty much proved to be a disaster, too.
In every other -ism you will always find at least one small grain of truth. Maybe even ISIS has a right idea in its idiology somewhere. The problem is always if you think you can explain the whole world by one truth, one interpretation, one approach.
But religion doesn't built space ships, and science doesn't write operas, and capitalism doesn't create families.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
In the states, health insurance skyrocketed after obamacare forced insurance companies to carry high risk people as well as the 'rights' demanded by special interest 'social justice' groups that the rest of us must now pay for.
A fast search led me to factcheck.org where they disagree with you. Anecdotally I know of not one single case where this is true. Everyone I know got a better deal under Obamacare. Some stories are remarkable how much Obamacare helped them. This is personal experience only. But after a decade of alarming inflation of health care premiums, we are finally seeing it slow (4%).
The Affordable Care Act has it's problems. It could be fixed. But return to lifetime caps, dumping high risk clients, & no coverage for existing conditions, no thanks. & yes, we did have "skyrocketing premiums" regardless. Become a cancer survivor & your opinion will change.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
What you say would be true if we were talking about sample letters put out by organizations funded by George Soros or Tom Steyer, but these are not like those. No, these sample letters were put together by organizations which got a small amount of money from organizations which got a small amount of money from the Koch brothers. Everybody knows that the Koch brothers are truly evil, unlike George Soros, who unrepentantly collaborated with the Nazis as a teenager, and everything with even a remote connection to them is therefore evil.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Where I work, everyone's health care went up about 40% on average last month, with everyone getting either equal or worse coverage than they had previously. I think the ACA was a necessity, but premiums certainly did spike for a lot of people.
If you want to be seen, stand up. If you want to be heard, speak up. If you want to be respected, sit down and shut up.
Yep, my total cost of healthcare here went up by about 40% but not as a result of the ACA. My employer's raised it but not because their costs went up my 40%. They raised it because they could. We are a Fortune 500 company & are self-insured. Their costs did not rise by anything close to 40%. OH, the HR asshole brought up the ACA, hinting around about reasons why we got such a huge increase, but when I brought up current healthcare inflation, he had no straight answer.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
thats not even a valid logical argument. after you talked about last mile, he also talked about last mile, specifically the from the box to the house, and then you accuesed him of being stupid by talking about NOT-last mile cable laying and some stupid failed car analogy. JFC you are stupid. his whole point is that it make no sense to redo the cabling anytime you switch proviers, no more than it makes sense to dig up your driveway and connect to a "different" road if libertarians ever got their "private/subscription road market" fantasies fulfilled. its simply another area that is best served by a single entity because it makes for a natural monopoly and the costs to consumers of trying to create a "market" for them are out of proportion to any benefit recieved from doing so.
but since you want to talk about that: barring the invention of teleportation there pretty much is only one way to put things in the ground, and it involves digging a hole.
They already use conduit in many places, and horizontal drilling and cable pulling, buts its limited in practicality because of the magnitude of force needed to pull/push cable over long distance would break the cable. which means the access points cant be very far apart. and they have to route around other underground infrastructure. they cant just go in straight lines for long distances. and you cant push/pull around corners (again: breaks the cable).
Idiots like you shouldn't enter speculative discussions.
Take thine own advice knave.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The last solution is by design not possible for everybody. The solution no1 does not always work. State on the other hand is the only force that helps capitalism kind of work. Without state there is only tribal warfare like in Somalia. It is of course true that the state in its different forms failed us many more times that it helped - sometimes because design was flawed, sometimes because bigger state invaded (US has a good record at invading, Russia for instance much less rosy). Some state/societies managed to destroy basis on which their livelihoods were based. All modern functioning states, over their and their predecessors history, had the state intervention as a basis for their success. This intervention was usually not complete, not as overwhelming as in the case of say NK but it was there.
You can of course argue that EU and its drive for power is sick and makes us all sick. I can buy this argument albeit I disagree that this is the only effect of EU on our lives and economy - there are also positive ones. I think however if not EU our arses would be as painful as they are now.
...Says the AC...
It's not 'I'll pay more if someone else worries about it', It is 'we all CARE about each other and we all contribute to each other's wellbeing'. But that concept is apparently totally strange to right-wingers, who have only one thought: ME, ME, ME! and their only concern is about Me, Myself and I.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
Ah, yes, this is obvious to us in Europe, who have lived privatisation of public services. Here's an anecdote to illustrate how these things go:
I used to live on a small country lane outside London. The roads, water pipes etc are supposed to be maintained by the local council. In the past, the work was carried out by people who were employed by the council, but then, along came privatisation with the golden promise of cost savings. Now the work is all carried out by private companies. Strangely, though, the water mains seem to burst at least 3 - 4 times a year now, where it was almost unheard of before. Why can that be? My theory is that since the council always give the job to the same company, and they profit every time they carry out this work, they deliberately do it poorly, so they can come back and do it again. Thus, the council may save some 10% for the work each time it is carried out, but they pay 4 times as often. How much did the tax-payer save on that, then?
It no doubt works the same way with health care, which is why I think we would be better off with public health care, as well as state owned medical companies.
Right, because there is no other possible way to lay cable then the way they've always laid cable.
If you actually could re-invent the cable-putting industry, you'd not be posting in /., you'd be busy making your first billion. (you'd already have your first million)
Any place that had frequent changes to the cabling would either have an accessible conduit system or run the cables on poles.
You'd have to install the conduits first, which means digging up all the streets. A hunch tells me that is even less likely to happen in the near future.
Poles are not really practical in the places that the majority of the population in the west lives in. These places are called "cities". Cities are where the money is in telecommunications, so if your solution can't work in cities, it's dead in the water.
Disclaimer: I've actually worked in the telecommunications industry for 10 years.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Who said anything about redoing the cabling every time you change providers you complete fucking retard?
I did, because that's what your ignorant argument would lead to.
Situation now, in almost all homes: There is one cable going to the nearest street node. This is the famous "last mile".
You want that cable owned by the ISP, which means for every home where the inhabitants are not customers of the current cable owner, either the new ISP needs to buy the cable, or put down a new one, since these are the only two ways in which he can be owner of the last mile.
If they switch ISP again, this repeats.
If a new ISP company wants to enter the market, suddenly the barriers to entry are much, much higher than they are now. Goodbye free market.
And let's talk about multi-story houses with a dozen or a hundred flats, and lots of different ISPs serving different flats...
Instead of admitting your argument was stupid, let's insult people around you who put you straight.
Going through the streets, you have a similar situation.
Not at all. The office building example is at the other end of the last mile. We're talking about the cable connecting the (office or whatever) building to the telco network in the street. Completely different things.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The reasons they were privatized and the like was that the other wasn't sustainable
Get a clue before you enter a discussion. Many of the companies that were privatized were doing as good or even better than the private companies that replace them today. That doesn't always mean they are or were profitable - for some things such as public transport or universities or garbage collection maybe the benefit to society should be the important factor and not ROI and shareholder value.
You are repeating the ignorant blabbering of typical right-wing americans who think that anything that's not cut-throat capitalism is automatically communism. The thought that a world inbetween the extremes could exist has never crossed your mind, has it?
The strange truth is that the very america that had McCarthyism was very interested in and actively promoting the social market economy model of western europe, because they realized that if they had attempted to install the no-hold-barred brutality of pure US capitalism, most of post-WW2 europe would have become communist by free choice.
That economic model was the synthesis (to use philosophy terms) between the two equally wrong extremes. It gave us all the advantages of free markets, free choice of jobs, private companies and competition while at the same time protecting those areas where pure capitalism does more harm than good, like health care, public transportation or natural monopolies.
Sadly, the two competing extremes didn't fail at the same time to the same degree, so we've now been janked towards the "winner", and all the advantages are slowly evaporating in favor of higher stock prices and an economy based on bubbles and bullshit.
I'm not in favour of communism at all - had capitalism failed first, the same would have happened in the other direction and we'd be equally bad of. But on almost every metric you choose, western Europe was in a better condition 30 years ago.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org