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Ask Slashdot: When and How Did Europe Leapfrog the US For Internet Access?
New submitter rsanford, apropos of today's FCC announcement about what is officially consided "broadband" speed by that agency, asks In the early and middle 90's I recall spending countless hours on IRC 'Trout-slapping' people in #hottub and engaging in channel wars. The people from Europe were always complaining about how slow their internet was and there was no choice. This was odd to me, who at the time had 3 local ISPs to choose from, all offering the fastest modem connections at the time, while living in rural America 60 miles away from the nearest city with 1,000 or more people. Was that the reality back then? If so, what changed, and when?
EU wide publically funded projects to bring high speed broadband across Europe?
We had plenty of choices for dial-up too, what we lacked particularly in the UK was free local calls, that made modem calls expensive compared to the US. Since then everything has been going our way.
Jason.
After that, things started tanking and telcos took their government hand-outs from the 90s and paid their CEOs' bonuses - and a few of them walked away with billions personally.
In some cases there was outright fraud.
It's kind of like living in a Third World country where the billionaire class rigs the system for their benefit, bitches about government interference (all the while lobbying for it to boost their profits) and John .Q. Public falling for the BS and thinking that one day, if he works hard enough, he'll be one of those billionaires with a private jet.
Or let's put it this way: we have a corrupt economic system in the States and no one wants to change because they have been brainwashed into thinking we have free market capitalism and anything other than our crony capitalistic system is Communism.
Yes, most Americans are that stupid.
Basically it's because of the lack of corruption in Europe and the Asian nations that achieved high speed broadband rollouts. The USA is a pretty corrupt place, and it's embedded in the culture from the very bottom of the food chain: Tipping for basic goods and services (where a decent minimum wage should be paid by employers rather than just ripping off customers with tips and surcharges which are still a form of corruption), to the top of the foodchain: Golden parachutes, kick backs, earmarks etc. In an environment that allows corruption to flourish, and where people expect to get something extra for just doing the job they are paid to do. Of course there is going to be gross program mismanagement and failures. The US has up until now not been completely destroyed by the internal corruption because it's been focused elsewhere, fighting WW1/2, rebuilding the world, fighting communism, stealing other countries resources etc. Now that the wars against communism in South America (1980s) have ended. The corruption has settled on he closest target: The American People. Until the USA deals with the gross corruption within it's own borders (yes that includes the two-party system, minimum wage, drug wars, war on terror (military handouts) golden handshakes etc) They will continue to decline as a nation. At the same time that America has been declining there has been a serious move in most of the world to stamp out corruption. Sure it hasn't been 100% effective, but it's more than the USA has done and it's why we're seeing other countries pull ahead. Basically when your politics aren't being bogged down with bullshit issues from corrupt people. You get things done. This is why Germany is doing so well, they have strong laws against corruption and they are the manufacturing heart of Europe. Sure countries like Greece and Italy have stuffed up (mainly due to high levels of corruption) But the Nordic/Germanic countries are pulling the whole of Europe with them.
I don't recall quite what happened, but that arrangement didn't last very long, I don't think a year had transpired before ELN and AOL were booted back off the pipes.
National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services happened.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Pre-2000, the US had "open access", meaning that cable owners had to sell use of their infrastructure. This made it relatively easy for startup ISPs to enter the market: every time you sign up a customer, you just need to buy time on the extra bit of cable you need to serve that person. Almost every country in the world uses this regulatory model.
Under intense pressure from lobbyists the US changed to a closed model in 2000. Now cable owners are also ISPs and have exclusive rights to the bits of wire they own. There are only a few ISPs, it's very, very expensive for anyone else to enter the market, and they can charge what they like, not only to customers, but upstream as well, as we're now seeing.
tl;dr: this is a failure of regulation.
Lessig talking about this:
http://blip.tv/lessig/america-s-broadband-policy-3505079
The 2007 action put some limits on local (but not state) franchising practices. It did NOT eliminate them. In fact, most of the US population still lives in areas with restricted franchises. The FCC said that local franchising authorities could not be "unreasonable" in their demands. More info:
https://www.wilmerhale.com/pag...
I just left Germany. The internet speeds there were terrible and very expensive compared to cable in the US.