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As Big As Net Neutrality? FCC Kills State-Imposed Internet Monopolies
tedlistens writes: On Thursday, before it voted in favor of "net neutrality," the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to override state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that have barred local governments and public utilities from offering broadband outside the areas where they have traditionally sold electricity. Christopher Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance said the move was as important for internet competition as net neutrality: "Preventing big Internet Service Providers from unfairly discriminating against content online is a victory, but allowing communities to be the owners and stewards of their own broadband networks is a watershed moment that will serve as a check against the worst abuses of the cable monopoly for decades to come." The laws, like those in over a dozen other states, are often created under pressure from large private Internet providers like Comcast and Verizon, who consequently control monopolies or duopolies over high-speed internet in these places.
Good on you FCC!
Finally!
(actually, one word is impossible due to the lameness filter, and honestly some other words would be good, like: hahaha, die bastards die, suck it, etc. etc.)
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
when we all found out who was taking over the FCC, I was terrified. Former cable lobbyist, now in charge of the group intended to regulate the same people. But it really looks like wheeler may be the right man for the job
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Does the FCC even have the authority to do that? Under what legal theory does an unelected federal regulatory commission have the authority to overrule state government laws on matters of state government interest? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see such laws go, as they're a major competition inhibitor, but how does the FCC have any authority in this?
Up with service! Down with monopolies! Up with net neutrality! Down with regulation! Up with Pluto! Down with Kim Dotcom!
Wait a minute - Today's stories leave me feeling edgy and confused.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'm still dubious about the end effect of net neutrality regulations being passed (remember that none of us have seen the actual regulations to take effect, and none will until they are finalized).
That said, the real road to true Net Neutrality is and always will be in allowing real competition for your ISP provider, and that's the kind of thing that this allows for. If a community cannot be well served by a "real" networking company it makes no sense to block them from taking matters into their own hands.
So I applaud this action, I just wish they would be open in other regards rather than limiting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As far as I know, Systemd has no capacity to think and therefore has no opinion on net neutrality.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Myth: Anyone gives a damn about factually dubious rants.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
/. kind of runs together sometimes.
Why is the FCC suddenly being competent? Does anyone stand to gain from this financially? Is it about doing lots of happy things to the 'net to sway the public sufficiently in favour of regulation that it can then start doing things like making rules about, say... encryption keys?
Or is this one of those weird stopped-clock-right-twice-a-day things that'll be broken down when suddenly Verizon starts sponsoring all Republican candidates only at the next round of elections?
(Anyway, until FCC spends more resources dealing with equipment and people who piss on the ham radio spectrum, any respect I have for them will be limited.)
Speaking of roads and public schools...
The biggest wastes of money when it comes to roads and public schools is the enrichment of private entities who have found a way to get themselves access to the public purse.
Same with the corrections industry.
They seem to be on a righteous warpath, of which I fully approve.
Yes, the @bigbrother.texas email address is so much better.
You are a complete moron.
The net neutrality vote gets a lot more attention, but this is even more important IMHO. Net neutrality wouldn't even need to be enforced by the FCC if there were sufficient competiton.
Not really. I'm from a socialist country, and on of the key aspects to our prosperity and competitiveness is enabling private entities to get to compete for and win profitable infrastructure contracts.
This is because private contractors bring significant amount of expertise and capability that government would have to build from ground up without them, as well as force costs down through competition. Problems only arise when said private contractors become big and powerful enough to corrupt those making decisions behind these projects to favour them in various ways.
It's another one of those "capitalism works really well as long as it is properly managed and doesn't get big enough to corrupt powerful entities" moments.
They have these duopolies everywhere. They have it in New York city and Los Angeles and Miami and Seattle.
I'm reserving judgment until they break the monopolies that are CITY and county imposed as well. They're not any better.
A monopoly is a monopoly. I don't care who imposed it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The government is acting with sense and doing so in a honest way that fair to citizens.
This is not right, so I firmly believe that the world is coming to an end.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Here's Karl Denninger's take on this. I don't agree or disagree. I just want to see what the reaction is: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-...
And I speak as a Republican. Unless there's some outrageous hidden agenda yet to emerge, net neutrality just means that Internet service over cable, because it is in many places a natural monopoly, is henceforth to be treated as a utility, like your electrical service. How you use the watt-hours you buy for your home is your own business, and we are all more free if the same applies to your Internet feed. Regulation of business is something we by instinct would rather not have, but if you live in an area where Comcast is the only game in town, treating it as a utility is more palatable than giving a single company full control of your access to the Internet.
Whether to build municipal broadband is a decision that any locality should be allowed to make for itself. Because wired Internet service so often is a natural monopoly, there are all kinds of situations in which towns or villages or even small neighborhoods find themselves cut off from any service by a company that simply does not feel it worthwhile to extend service to that market. Value decisions like this should be the company's right, but has no business standing in the way of any group of users who wish to band together to organize service of their own.
Disbarring the government from offering Internet service is not a state imposed monopoly. They are onyl baring one single entity from becoming an ISP.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It's another one of those "capitalism works really well as long as it is properly managed and doesn't get big enough to corrupt powerful entities" moments.
IOW, exactly what I already said. Things are good unless they are bad. The story that they tell you that their expertise is better happens to be a good one. They're not dumb. Their sales pitch is plausible and appealing.
When it is true. When they deliver. When they don't, oops, now we've got a problem. Especially when they've convinced the government to outsource its entire expertise.
Yay.
Corruption, it isn't a commodity in limited supply.
It can be especially bad when people think it is all still the fault of the government.
While it would be great if the government offered Internet and gave many an option other than Comcast, I could see it going pretty Orwellian pretty quickly. The government offering its own service pretty much guarantees that they will subsidize the service more than they already subsidize ISPs. Making it impossible to compete. And the government would not have to pass any data retention laws if they already handled everyone's internet data. There is a point to not allowing the government to compete with businesses, and there are benefits to keeping the lawmakers and enforcers one degree of separation away from citizens.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
As far as I know, Systemd has no capacity to think and therefore has no opinion on net neutrality.
Three days ago the Systemd-UpdateAgainstYourWillD automatically installed SystemD-AiD, which is a requirement to even boot the kernel because it was deemed no human being ever has or ever could be capable of the overwhelming task of "run some programs", which of course includes programs written by humans.
Two days ago there were promises SystemD-AiD would also gain enough intelligence to read corrupted syslogs, while insulting your petty human intelligence via way of SystemD-FortuneD, and injecting them into all outbound emails sent from your username via SystemD-SpammerD.
It was also rumored to soon be capable of washing your dishes, since no init system wants to start dirty programs or use plastic fork()'s.
Yesterday they canceled the dish washing patch based mainly on a usenet poll where "fuck systemd!!!" was interpreted by a similar AI as voting against the feature, thus canceling the patch due to overwhelming demand.
I can't wait to be able to get an @bigbrother email address.
What's holding you back? GMail stopped requiring an invite years ago!
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Do you know why private companies seem to always do things right from an economic sense? because those that don't do things right die off. Government can just do things wrong for a lot longer....that does not mean government WILL or does anything wrong and it certainly does not mean private industry does anything correctly.
As a constitutional matter, municipalities do not have any independent existence; they are organs of the state governments. Municipal governments only have whatever powers states choose to give them, and the federal government may not commandeer a state government. So if a state chooses to deny its municipalities the authority to sell Internet access (or sell it below a certain price), then no declaration from the FCC can give the municipality that power, nor require the state to give a municipality that power.
So, all this vote means is the FCC majority has decided to waste a bunch of taxpayer dollars losing a lawsuit.
Hope you fkin a$$holes who voted for Obama are getting what you wanted.
YOU GOT THAT RIGHT!
Is that right? Do you have any actual evidence, or are you extrapolating what the FCC will do?
So ... get the message?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Got a reference to that statement anywhere? I haven't seen one.
I'll assume that you don't claim any deductions on your taxes, otherwise you are being hypocritical (taking from government while decrying the idea of government assistance).
Umm.. Deductions is geting pennies on the dollars in taxes I already paid. It is NOT govt. assistance. Furthermore thank you for also revealing that you don't believe I am entitled to the fruits of my labor and should be grateful for the privilege of keeping what is not taken from me.
Thank you for demonstrating the GP point.
I can't quite reconcile this:
With this:
How does allowing the neighboring municipality or neighboring utility somehow allow "communities to be the owners and stewards of their own broadband networks"?
Think about it, don't react emotionally.
If I live in a community that is served electricity by power company A, and power company B in the neighboring community offers internet access that I want, allowing power company B to sell Internet access in the territory served by Power company A isn't 'self-ownership'... If the county next to me offers Internet access and now they can offer Internet service in my county, does my county now control the Internet backbone in our county or does the neighboring community?
Communities and public utilities can already offer service in thief own areas, this change would allow them to offer service in other communities, exchanging their old provider for another, neither owned or controlled by them.
I guess you have to believe that it will be better when the big power utility companies displace the big cable companies...
Ken
I do not support the ruling party in the White House or their motivations?
Hence: The devil's in the details.
$2 will get you $10, we've been well and truly fucked.
3. Myth: systemd's fast boot-up is irrelevant for servers.That is just completely not true. Many administrators actually are keen on reduced downtimes during maintenance windows. In High Availability setups it's kinda nice if the failed machine comes back up really fast.
Does systemd speed up BIOS POST? Does systemd speed up RAID array startup? Does systemd speed up IPMI startups? Does systemd speed up filesystem checks on boot? OS boot time for a RAID10 or RAID5/6 server is very low compared to a desktop with one drive. But OS boot time is a minor fraction of the time of a machine's reboot process.
How so, deductions are a part of the tax code, put there for a reason. It is the government saying you owe us X% of your income above a certain amount, but if you have a mortgage you don't owe taxes on the money you spent on interest, if you have children we know they can be very expensive, so keep some of that money you were going to pay in taxes to cover the expense of your children, etc.
Deductions is the government telling you what money it is not entitled to, not 'taking money from the government'...
Ken
Really, because the "company simply does not feel it worthwhile to extend service to that market"?
They decline to extend services to areas that they don't think will be profitable, see they are a profit-driven enterprise in most cases.
Now, what we'll see is taxpayers absorb the losses extending services to areas that were otherwise unprofitable to service - that's a great step forward, I can just see your local taxpayer having no problem running fiber cable for miles down a rural road to offer high-speed internet service to the seven farms over 20 miles of county road...
Ken
A municipal Internet service, funded with tax-payer dollars, what could go wrong?
Gee, there isn't any chance some activist groups would file suits forcing the government to filter out hate speech, pornography, extreme violence, gun sales, etc on their "tax-payer-funded Internet"? No, that would never happen...
Oh wait, we already do that on taxpayer-funded Internet in our schools and libraries!
Ken
Probably the most intelligent, logical, and well-reasoned argument I've seen on Slashdot in years!
Ken
Achieving socialism by the capitalist road never works, friend. Give it up, it will just come back ten times worse.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Ah yes, the old "europe doesn't exist" argument.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
What I learned from school was the that capitalism was where you have several bakers in a city and if one has either better bread or better prices that one will flourish and the other one will have to either increase quality or price.
I am not even going on to what would happen if there is only one bakery, because that is obvious.
In school I also sold cigarettes. I was able to buy them cheaper, because I lived in a different country then from where I went to school. (One hour travel, so no worries). This is the basis we learn works.
I had a cheaper product, so I was able to sell and make a profit.
Asume a normal package would cost 5 in the country of my school, I bought for 4 and sold for 4,50. Thus making a profit of 0.50. All great till there (leaving out the part I was smuggling)
There were some brands that were not available in the school country, but were in the home country. I still bought them for 4, but sold them for 5, as that was the 'normal' price. This because I had found a niche market. I jacked up the price to 6.
Now people are paying MORE than standard and I made 2.00 insead of 0.50 for the same investment. Still nothing special, but that amount of profit will atract others. A friend of mine (we rode the train each day to and from country A to country B) started buying the 'high brand' cigarettes and seling them for 5.50 instead of my 6.00.
I could have easily gone into a bidding war for the customer and going as low as 4.01 and still make a pofit, but what I did was something else.
I went to those people buying from him and told them :"You want to smoke brand X, BEACAUSE they are special and everybody knows you pay extra. You smoke them to stand out and show you are willing to pay more. So paying less would counter that image. So if you want to keep your image of somebody who ays 6 for the cigarates, you can't buy them at 5.50. I am willing to sell them at 6 to you.
Long story short, I bough over his cigarets (at 4, he was still my friend)
and kept selling at 6.
That moment I learned the power of marketing. And sure, you would not have bought them. The majority of people did not buy them. They bought the ones for 4.50.
Capitalism works if people were smart. Persons are smart, people are stupid and that is why it doesn't work, unless you put a LOT of efford in it. With teh cigarettes, I was not legally allowed to sell them at those prices (or at all).
However what you need to keep all this in check is an overseeer who has the interest of the public in mind and that of the public as aa whole, not just those who voted for them (or who gave them money)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
So long as localities get to vote on this sort of situation, I see a much smaller problem than if the cable companies are able to lobby a state legislature into getting government to give them a lock on the entire state. That is the situation the FCC just ruled against.
Wilson made a profit last year....
When you cant win, ad hominem.
I live in TN. And our internet sucks in counties that don't provide government sponsored (via community owned utility company that must pay its own way) internet services.
Clarksville, where I know people, has great bandwidth and reliability from the electric utility run ISP. Comcast and AT&T do well in that market, just not well enough to drive out the utility ISP. It has kept prices down too. Chattanooga TN had the nations first Gig to the home ISP service available to all. While AT&T & Comcast (and others) COULD have done it, they are more interested in keeping profits up than serving customers. Not it seems that all ISPs in the area seem to come up to the level of the local utility company. ... In Clarksville the utility ISP does provide phone and TV service if desired, but that is where the others shine (better contracts with content providers). For basic ISP even at high rates, local utilities CAN be a great alternative.
In my county, AT&T and the cable companies don't serve the entire county, but they have ensured (using appropriate gratuities to local officials I am sure, just no hard evidence), that the local utility that wanted to install an ISP was not allowed to do so.
I cannot get any landline or wireless 'broadband service'. AT&T and Comcast and Charter all provide it within 3 miles. Charter wants $14,000 at one time, $24,000 at another just to install the cable service. Even when we had land lines, nice Currier 56K modems could not contact anyone anywhere at more than 20kbit rates due to had copper that AT&T installed but would not maintain. So we use cell phone now. But I do get commercial electricity here, and they read the meters via data over the power lines remotely (once a minute).
It is just politics keeping me from having proper ISP service, and I am not the only one by any means.
I suspect the more usual cause is pressure from local independent ILECS, mom and pop ISPs and WISPs, and smaller regional ISPs than the big national carriers. Typically "community" or municipal broadband tends be contracted out to the big boys anyway. The clowns won't usually spec and purchase equipment, hire engineers and IT staff themselves. Completely beyond their competence, usually. So the question is merely who is paying the bill, the users, or the taxpayers in general. And we all know what hatppens when somebody gets a bug up their ass about this or that Internet activity. Something-must-be-done!(tm) and a new ordinance is born.
When are you tools gonna stop sitting around the campfire singing Kum-bye-yah, marching on Ferguson or Wall St., and wake the hell up? If the FCC was going to do something about state sanctioned telecom monopolies it would have unbundled local loops. Do you people really think Comcast, Verizon, etc, really lost anything in the Net Neutrality vote?
Give me a break.
Socialism is based around the idea of giving a heck about your fellow man. Sadly it tends to not work so well in practice. Working towards a common good is, ultimately not something people do on large scales. They work towards their own good, and the hell with everyone else. Oh sure there are exceptions, but exceptions aren't enough to make a system of government work. Capitalism works for more, but still leaves a lot of people in the dirt, and worse, conspires to leave as many people in the dirt as possible. After all, the ideal business is one that makes a profit without paying anyone, other than maybe some robots, a few engineers, and the janitor, and his job won't last long. Government is supposed to be the people's voice. It is supposed to be the voice that organises and distributes scarce resources so that the good of the many is seen to. More and more it doesn't do that, because the good of the few, particularly in the short term, can be enhanced by extracting more blood from the many. The few of course are best at working the levers of power, and if need be manipulating the many into shooting themselves in the foot, over and over again. Of course, sometimes, the many get their way, which is sometimes good, but sometimes they go too far and shoot themselves in the foot with their own bullets (Unions have done that in the past). Real issues are complex and if you have heard them resolved down to a sound byte there is a better than even chance that it is a lie meant to serve someone other than you.
People always want a quick solution. There isn't one save education and vigilance although I'd still argue that picking our representatives at random would be better than the status quo... At any rate, require people to have more education, including and especially history and the humanities and that they maintain that education. Further require them to participate in the democratic process and take away this nonsense that you can lose your right to vote for any reason. A right is not something you can ever surrender or yield to government. The very idea is ridiculous.
Either way, to say Government is the problem as if by killing it you shall fix all the worlds ills, is to admit to being an idiot of the highest order. Don't believe me, go visit places without government. I hear somalia is a fun place to be.
No government is not the problem. The problem, like it or not is the people who elected these people to government. We got _exactly_ what we deserved, like it or not. If you want to fix government, you first must educate the people, encourage them to take an active part in democracy, and to examine all issues rationally. This does not mean being spoon fed by Faux News. Seriously, anyone who tells you they are honest and balanced and all that jazz on an hourly basis should be run from on general principle.
I, for one, am concerned over the constant use of the words "legal content"
Exactly, none of us are going to be happy when we find out what that means - because it implies a whole set of other actions for anything deemed "illegal content".
Well except for me; I plan to laugh and laugh when the other thousand shoes drop and the internet lets forth a vast and pitiful wailing. So that will offset the sadness substantially. If I can't be free at least I can be proven right.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would have thought people would be more critical on /. about this. They're *Prasing* net neutrality? Have any of you even looked at what they can do/should do? No, of course not. This is /. after all.
Well lots of people wished for it. Now they have it. Good luck to us all (as they take out the strait jacket).
Actually, the FCC's action will have exactly the opposite effect. I own and operate a small, competitive ISP, and am quite willing to (and capable of) going up against any competitor on a level playing field. But I simply wouldn't enter any market where the city was providing service. Why? Because the city would engage in all of the following anticompetitive and predatory practices:
* The city would completely control my access to rights of way and pole attachments, and would be motivated to keep me from getting that access or make it expensive;
* I would be taxed and the taxes would be used to subsidize my competitor;
* The city would engage in horizontal monopoly leverage from its other monopoly businesses (trash, water, sewer, and in many places energy) and would enjoy cross-subsidies from them; for example, it wouldn't have to build a new billing system but could use its existing one;
* The city could also use its ability to tax, and bonding authority, to obtain capital for the buildout at bargain rates;
* The city, with its deep pockets and by expending some of that capital, could engage in predatory pricing, offering its service below cost due to taxpayer subsidies. It could do this at the outset, to take customers away, or possibly permanently;
* The city, because it provided those other services, would GET PAID more easily than I would because users wouldn't want their water, etc. cut off if they didn't pay the bill;
* The city would know when both owner-occupied and rental real estate was turning over (because of changes in the party being billed) and so could always sell to people as they moved into a new home before they would have a chance to consider my service;
* The city ISP would get the lucrative business of the city itself (eliminating one of the largest potential customers), as well as that of other government entities such as the county government and state government offices; and
* The city, under the FCC's new Title II regime, could demand franchise fees from me that it would not have to pay itself.
So, if you put yourself in the shoes of a hard working local ISP (which I am), or of a customer who wants choice, this no longer seems like such a good idea. Any ISP entering the market would have to fight an uphill battle against City Hall. So, new ISPs will not enter the market and existing broadband providers will have a strong incentive to pull out, leaving a monopoly. What is needed is FAIR, PRIVATE competition, not the unfair competition that turning unaccountable city bureaucrats loose would bring.
Like many things, the theory is great, but the execution isn't necessarily so. I agree that the "needs to not be big enough to corrupt the entities that should be overseeing/counterbalancing" part, and would add that it also works best in areas where other competition exists. For instance, the government (or some level thereof) is the only "consumer" for private prison services. There's no outside expertise specific to this area, save to the extent that we create it by privatizing an inherently governmental function. On the other hand, things like construction are commonplace, because everyone uses it, and it makes no sense for the government not to rely on the same private companies that everyone else does when they want to put up a new building.
...working for the government. It basically amounts to creating increased competition for the same pool of workers, causing the cost for those workers to rise, which winds up costing the government far more. To some degree it's good for the workers, since they have more options for more money, but most of the extra money isn't going to them - it's going to the companies, some as wasted duplicative overhead, but mostly as profit.
To toss in a pair of anecdotes from my personal experience:
When I was in the military, I saw what I'd consider a "good" example. Instead of having soldiers run the dining halls during basic training, rotating in a new group of wholly untrained people every 1-2 weeks, and taking that time away from training (at severe cost to the government, who was paying not only salary but food/housing/etc), they contracted it out to a food service company, that brought in regular workers at prevailing wages. This not only cost less than using trainees, but provided a lot more consistency in terms of service (which can be very important in terms of proper food handling).
On the other hand, I later got to see what happened with contracting in the Intelligence community. Now, this was a while ago, but the situation still hasn't changed at all. Essentially, the government was/is paying more to bring in contract workers. The supposed advantage was that they were easier to hire/fire, but in practice this rarely seemed to come into play. What was worse was that the vast majority of these people were former government/military personnel, because pretty much the only place to get training/experience in that field is...
I would just like to add that Chris Mitchell who is quoted in this story has been working to protect local internet access and community ownership for many many years and a hat tip to him!
--hongpong.com
What we need is to break the pole & tube monopolies and make it much easier for most businesses who want to run a service to all homes to do so. Make it MUCH easier and cheaper to get Pole & tube access. Easier access to this vital part of infrastructure should help get some healthy competition for Internet (and other) services going. If a Pole/tube is "owned" by a specific company but is not on (or running through) their own land, that company should be required to do one of two things.
1) Open access to the pole/tube to any business that is running services to all homes/businesses in the area.
OR
2) Pay the land owner rent for allowing their pole/tube in/through the owner’s property. Pricing of rent and terms of use to be negotiated with each land owner individually.
Either that pole should be for the public good, or the Company should have to rent the space from the land owner. This will incentivize opening up access since the companies won't want to deal with each individual land owner (and what if the land owner and company cannot agree on terms...would the company want to take the chance of having to reroute everything around that property) End result is it should be easier for "smaller" ISP's (local companies, Google, etc...) to run cable, fiber, etc.. and Consumers/small businesses will benefit from greater competition and better service.
Not so. The laws of economics are laws that govern any exchange, usually economists use it for transactions involving money, but they apply just as well to trade-offs that we make every day, "Should I go to the grocery store today or tomorrow?" And so on.
The laws of supply and demand do not change regardless of how many people are in the market, if it's just yourself, if it's a huge monopoly, or if it's a perfect competition with a vary large number of nearly identical sellers; if we have perfect information or if everyone is as dumb as bricks.
The outcomes in each condition will be different, to be sure (very different and sometimes outright bizarre, in the case of perfect information); but there is no statute that can improve on the basic laws of economics, any more than they could pass a law making a round earth flat.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
The Internet is actually becoming less monopolistic. Decades ago, there was usually only one provider you could go to. Today, the majority of households in the US have a selection of two or more Internet providers.
Furthermore, this ruling wasn't about government-granted monopoly (which is wrong, and presumably still legal), this is about government-run Internet, which frequently turns into a monopoly as a municipality has the advantage of "free" taxpayer money.
Who is standing in the way? Link? If you want to do this, well... go do it. Form an LLC, seek investment for shares of ownership, buy capital, sell Internet. Done.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Who's standing in the way? The issue is that in several states, cable companies, after invited state legislatures out for squab and cigars, have had laws passed with expressly forbid exactly the kind of competition you cite. They love being the only game in town.
We don't know what's buried in their 300+ pages of rules, but have you read Title II? It gives the FCC an enormous amount of power, if the Internet falls under it (it doesn't).
Wonder what the public key field is for?
I will never use a competitor to the Post Office unless I have to. They are BY FAR the cheaper (better) alternative to shipping
Except that is an idealistic definition and also coming from real world examples also wrong. If that was the definition was what was used most people would not have a problem.
The problem with net neutraility as it comes from the FCC is that it could possibly outlaw the following items:
My ISP setting up mail filters for SPAM. Most of the SPAM I currently get blocked would on the look of it be legal, using the definition of net neutrality most people are using the methods to determine it is trash would not be allowed.
Can schools and businesses still block various web sites; since based on definition they are ISPs? From what is known from the FCC ruling that could be a problem unless the site is dealing with illegal operations.
Or how about something like ISPs blocking common ports used for various attacks but not for other types of traffic? The ports are most likely legal ports and the traffic is probably legal, I presume ICMP is still legal, even if is not something someone should be doing out side of their own network?
When was this time of one provider? Decades ago, and by that I mean 1995 at the very latest, most people were on dial-up. We didn't get off it until later, and we're a technophile family. Dial-up had the advantage of hooking up to any provider, and back then a 56K modem was good enough for most purposes.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Around here, librarians have complained about the porn on the library computers, and have been told they can't legally do anything about it. School internet is different.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes