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Charter Hires Net Neutrality Activist To Make Policy
An anonymous reader writes: The Federal Communications Commission has been at loggerheads with many ISPs lately, after the agency pushed through net neutrality rules that have now gone into effect. The defeat of Comcast's attempted acquisition of Time Warner Cable was hailed by many net neutrality activists as a victory, but then came the news that Charter was looking to buy TWC instead — which brought the worries back. But now Charter has taken the unusual step of hiring one of those activists to help develop its policy: Marvin Ammori. He says, "Charter hired me—which, to be honest, took some humility on its part since I have helped lead public campaigns against cable companies like Charter—to advise it in crafting its commitment to network neutrality. After our negotiation, I can say Charter is offering the strongest network neutrality commitments ever offered—in any merger or, to my knowledge, in any nation. In fact, in the end, I personally wrote the commitments." Put briefly, Charter agreed to abide by the interconnection mandates and prohibition of paid prioritization — regardless of the outcome of pending litigation from the ISPs fighting it — for a minimum of three years. The company has also promised no data caps and no usage-based billing.
if they are the first out of the gate they will get the most customers if they actually follow through with their changes. They really have nothing to lose and everything to gain by giving the customer the features that are requested the most.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Alternate "tinfoil hat" explanation:
Once he's in house, sufficiently "re-educated" and compensated, and once the lawmakers have been paid off properly, then he will become a lobbyist to tell us in newspeak that net neutrality is slavery, and that corporations should be able to block competitors and promote their own services as innovation.
I hope this guy is honest and sticks to his guns. But my experience in the world suggests a much darker outcome.
I keep putting more layers, and the world keeps showing me I'm not paranoid enough.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Or their own commitments? Charter's going to do whatever the fuck it wants to do.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Help! We don't know how to spend less money on gear that can't do traffic shaping. Let's hire someone who knows!
What does it say when this is the strongest commitment ever?
"We promise if you consider letting this go through that we won't break the law for at least....um....yeah 3 years sounds good to us, what do you think?"
Are they fucking kidding?
I promise not to beat her for 3 years....
I know it goes totally again the slashdot manifesto to actually like a cable company, but in my area (West Michigan) Charter has been nothing but fantastic for over a decade now. They have been incredibly reliable, very responsive (are happy to bury new cables to your home if your old ones aren't up to the job, for example) to problems, offer an "internet only" package at a (small) discount, are at least 3x as fast as any other company in the area (Comcast and AT&T, both of which completely suck in this area). They have never blocked or throttled any traffic. Their representatives at the local office are even friendly and helpful. I can't wait until Charter finally takes over most of the Comcast network in my area, as many of my clients are on Comcast, which is around 25% the speed of Charter in my area (AT&T's top speed in my area is even worse). Crazy, but true.
When we attempt to impose rules on corporation, first they scream they will not be able to do business anymore and this will destroy whatever is at stake.
But in the end, while there is non zero profit to be made, corporation will cope with the new rules.
About 10 years ago their service was not very good where I am. About 5 years ago that started to change. 2 years ago they called me up and just said, hey, just FYI I know you bought your own modem but we're sending you a new one for free. We just increased everybody to 60mb service (also no extra charge) and the modem you have won't work at those speeds.
Charter + Cable Card + Tivo Roamio has turned into just about the best tv/internet experience I've had. I never thought I'd say that about a cable company, but at least in the Greenville, SC area Charter does a great job.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
That's just an "introductory offer" like they always do - sounds good to get you on board, then they hammer you after that. At least they're consistent!
So... They promise to not fuck people for 3 years, but after that they're good. That's just insulting...
I was actually buying this until the "for a minimum of three years" part. Why only 3 years? Why not 10 years? Why not indefinitely? How can a "Net Neutrality Activist" actually have the nerve to present that to us with a straight face? I certainly think that Charter is better than Comcast, but this looks like a publicity stunt to get their merger approved.
When content providers have a large amount of data to repeat to customers, they move servers to the ISPs data center and we support them getting the content to us faster.... but when websites get locked out, they claim it's a net neutrality problem and we support that.
Uhm, pick a side!
real protests have 50000000 members
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Hiring" (read: bribing) someone perceived as leading the opposition is a common strategy used by corporations to eviscerate community action. It's PR, not "humility".
Charter (and everyone else) has already bypassed Net Neutrality by giving up on everything but basic access and has instead gone to connecting to private content delivery networks.
Packet prioritization was seen as a way to avoid having to build a second (and third and fourth) parallel network to insure quality but net neutrality rules have made that impossible.
Anyone now wanting to compete with the big players can't just buy packet prioritization on an existing network. Instead they now have to buy actual network hardware and the permission to connect it to ISPs.
"for a minimum of 3 years"... oh wow, who does this sell out think he's fooling?
I was also buying into this subject matter http://www.dailymotion.com/vid...
As long as at they are reasonable.
I currently have a 400GB data cap with my ISP (Teksavvy, in Canada), we're 3 people on the network, on average we do 300GB each month, due to a LOT of HD video streaming (be it youtube or netflix), not to mention whenever we buy a new digital game.
3 years ago, on a different ISP, we had a 120GB cap, which we were always going over by a few GB, especially in the last few months where we got 50+GB over the cap each times(at $1,50/GB) which is what prompted us to switch in the first place, we streamed in SD and hardly downloaded anything, we were limiting ourselves to not go above the cap and that was still not enough.
The internet is ever evolving, caps need to go higher as the years go by. These days, it's not rare for a new digital game to be 50+GB, putting a flat, low cap and never increasing it in years, while it will possibly be fine for the first year or two, later on it will become a problem.
Bandwitdh caps are necessary because of the few who completely abuse it, but it also need to be flexible enough for families who have more than 1 person using the internet. Please do not judge every case just by that one family who hardly use the internet, because all they do is use facebook or whatever.
Charter to FCC/FTC - (holding fingers crossed behind their backs) - We pinky-swear to be really, really good if you approve our takeover...
Then in small print that is written in 8 molecule high font ..
For 3 years only.
Working on blocking a few Microsoft sites was a mistake on my part, as they are used to retrieve Certificates (Certs) so had to enable them again, But using Robtex.com to view the addresses, there are Edge servers between them and me; and I imagine all. Edge servers are exempt and can throttling traffic to maintain a server or balance the load, as per the Net Neutrality rules.
Usage-based billing implies a "no servers" policy. Without that, $1/Mbit is almost a fair price for transit, and you don't sell transit at fair prices to random assholes. No one does that. 100MBit/s * 1 month is 30TByte, which costs $2700 from AWS or $2400 from GCP.
Marvin Ammori is considered a "sensible" net neutrality advocate by the lobbyists and regulatory attorneys who represent the Cable & Telecom biz, as a whole, both on the CA state, and Federal levels. An anonymous-remaining legal person at NCTA told me, "he's not a wingnut like most of the rest."