Slashdot Mirror
T-Mobile CFO: Less Regulation, Repeal of Net Neutrality By Trump Would Be 'Positive For My Industry' (tmonews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TmoNews: T-Mobile CFO Braxton Carter spoke at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York City, and he touched a bit on President-elect Donald Trump and what his election could mean for the mobile industry. Carter expects that a Trump presidency will foster an environment that'll be more positive for wireless. "It's hard to imagine, with the way the election turned out, that we're not going to have an environment, from several aspects, that is not going to be more positive for my industry," the CFO said. He went on to explain that there will likely be less regulation, something that he feels "destroys innovation and value creation." Speaking of innovation, Carter also feels that a reversal of net neutrality and the FCC's Open Internet rules would be good for innovation in the industry, saying that it "would provide opportunity for significant innovation and differentiation" and that it'd enable you to "do some very interesting things."
Can you name one thing that your customers actually want that is actually being prevented by network neutrality regulations? Or is this more of the same big business "we'll tell you what you want and you'll like it!" bullshit we've gotten for years and years?
So brave of Mr. Carter to talk about deregulation at a banking conference. I'm sure his notions were vigorously challenged.
As a consumer; however, it would be painful for both my wallet and my rectum. And they don't even have the goddamn common courtesy to give a reach around.
But bad for everyone else. The ISPs control a bottleneck of the usually meshed internet: the last mile. Everywhere else one can route around a bad actor, but there leads only one line to the end users, and it goes through the ISPs.
By that same standard, the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was designed to prevent precisely the same sorts of abuse that Net Neutrality laws prevent, is also an impediment to innovation and doing interesting things, if by interesting things, you mean using bundling to drive your competition out of the market and creating an oligopoly of content providers owned by the same folks who own the pipes (i.e. the exact opposite of what the Internet was intended to be).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Who would have thought?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
... pop quiz:
Which branch of government deals with this shit?
One word or less.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Wells Fargo says the same thing... Well, minus the 'net neutrality' thing...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Definition of innovation (merriam-webster) 1 : the introduction of something new 2 : a new idea, method, or device : novelty So new idea's on how to rip off your customers are technically "innovation," just not the sort of Innovation we are looking for in the field
Like everything else, Trump has been all over the map on related issues. He's hinted about dealing with problems caused by oligopolies keeping out competition, but also talks a lot of about deregulation in general.
Most Federal regulations were put in place because somebody was abusing the system, not out of the sheer euphoria of socialism. The trick is to get rid of or scale back a given regulation without re-inviting the abuse that triggered it.
Table-ized A.I.
Repealing T-mobile would be good for the phone using public. However, some of us are not going to get what we want.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The reason we need regulation like net neutrality is because of regulation preventing new players to enter the market. I am all for deregulation IF you deregulate completely, not selectively. T-Mobile would love deregulation of net neutrality and the current "rules" don't have teeth to them anyway so I don't see why, they're still happily violating it. I would also love deregulation of the entire wireless market and the government to open the lines the tax payer has paid for. Pretty much all copper, fiber and antennae are heavily subsidized if not completely paid for by the tax payer. Sure let's deregulate those usage rights on federally, state and local levels and give them back to the tax payer.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
You're a racist.
... charging people money for something they used to get for free (or a nominal fee).
says it all.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For the Trumpistas to come defend the death of net neutrality, on Slashdot of all places. Why not? Everything they once claimed to stand for can go down the toilet as long as they get to worship their racist stale cheeto lord.
How about we give him exactly what he wants.
And remove the regulations that forbid or make difficult municipal internet & Wifi?
And remove the regulations that make it harder for groups to even attempt to enter the last mile to compete?
I mean, if we're gonna roll back regulations, lets roll them back!
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
Innovating a way to have your phone read your credit card from half-way across your body to charge fees. What a crock of corporate clap-trap, the dude is drooling at the prospect of being able to bone any customer seven ways till Sunday.
It's hard to imagine, with the way the election turned out, that we're not going to have an environment, from several aspects, that is not going to be more positive for my industry
If you read this carefully, you'll see that it says the opposite of what CFO Braxton Carter intended.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It's hard to imagine...that we're not going to have an environment...that is not going to be more positive
The sentence says exactly the opposite of what he meant it to!
It's hard to imagine, with the way the election turned out, that we're not going to have an environment, from several aspects, that is not going to be more positive for my industry,
Let's see:
It's hard to imagine, with the way the election turned out, that we're not going to have an environment
Simplifies to:
We should, with the way the election turned out, have an environment
from several aspects, that is not going to be more positive for my industry,
Simplifies to:
from several aspects, that is going to be more negative for my industry
Aren't you supposed to be a good communicator to be a CEO? Or did the submitter/TFA misinterpret his statement?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I'd rather have a wired POTS phone and no internet than have to deal with these fucking bastards if they got everything their way. We'd be paying by the kilobyte for internet, the rates would be tiered, the gulf between 'advertised' speed and 'actual' speed would be incredibly vast, and they'd make their 'partner sites' the most accessible, and all others nigh-unto inaccessible, unless you wanted to sit for 5 minutes waiting for a page to load.
I hope you all enjoyed the bried Golden Age of the Internet we once had, because it's gone, and it isn't coming back. Corporate America is taking a machete to it, and raising up some 99-Cent Store imitation of it in it's place, where you pay, pay, pay -- and have your privacy raped constantly. Fuck it.
news at 11
"It's a cookbook!"
Are we talking interesting things like Enron? Or interesting things like Fanny Mae?
The only interesting thing I'm sure will NOT come from this is what the FCC were doing until Trump, - adding consumer protections in a geographical monopoly trying to break into a full-on walled garden monopoly.
The US cotton industry claims that a repeal of the abolition -- which destroys innovation and value creation -- will foster an environment that'll be more positive for their business and would be good for innovation in the industry. They went on to say that it "would provide opportunity for significant innovation and differentiation" and that it'd enable you to "do some very interesting things."
Just wait for the position on surveillance related telecom regulation before celebrating the loss of content industry.
"Letting us buttfuck our customers will be super good for business."
So when did Internet freedom supporters become pro-regulation?
There were various plans to sell it, so why not let the government becomes the majority stock holder? In that position, they could just order it to reduce prices and build out its network. It would also help with ISP competitiveness.
I hear the Tin Woodsman did some "very interesting" things with an axe.
He may have been against Net Neutrality, but he has been the victim of a censorship campaign and knows full well that without Net Neutrality, only those censoring websites would remain. The ISPs would literally degrade bandwidth to opposing ideas to the point they are censored as well.
Sounds to me like they have lots of creative ideas when it comes to how to charge customers more for less.
Sorry, but that's not how this works. You are supposed to provide counter facts that demonstrate he is wrong.
They want to be closed worlds, revenue generating from everything you do on their network and with their business partners only.
They want perpetual customer lock-in, because each "carrier's" dog's breakfast of apps and locked-content portals would be so different from other carriers' offerings that it would be too confusing and too much work to ever change the "Carrier-net" (as opposed to Internet) that you belong to.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Would gladly support repeal of net neutrality just as soon as ALL large providers are broken up into separate companies no bigger than 1M subs each, all incumbent protection laws are outlawed and telecom providers forbidden from owning any stake in content creation or delivery.
The whole point of net neutrality is to keep people from sabotaging or blacking companies for faster transmission than "preferred" individuals. Communications love it when you can add fees for "preferred" data rates. Companies were "negotiating" with NetFlix and one if their tactics if I remember correctly was slowing their traffic down. When Netflix caved on an issue I cannot recall, their speed when up. Coincidence, I think not.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Oh, regulations are bad? Great, lets set up a municipal broadband everywhere and...
Oh, I see. By "less regulation" you mean letting private businesses do whatever they want, not anyone else.
They suck just as much as all other Big Business that thinks they should get to do whatever they want and think they can SCREW their customers all the want. BLOW ME!
"would provide opportunity for significant monetization and differentiation"
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
Can you name one thing that your customers actually want that is actually being prevented by network neutrality regulations?
Glitchless streaming.
Streaming (things like audio, video, phone calls) requires relatively small and constant bandwidth (though compression adds variability) but isn't good at tolerating dropouts or variations in transit time. When it does get dropouts it's better to NOT send a retry correction (and have the retry packet risk delaying and/or forcing the drop of another packet).
TCP connections (things like big file transfers) error check and retry, fixing dropouts and errors so the data arrives intact, though with no guarantee exactly when. But they achieve high bandwidth and evenly divide the bandwidth at a bottleneck by deliberately speeding up until they super-saturate the bottleneck and force dropouts. The dropouts tell them they've hit the limit, so they slow down and track the bleeding edge.
Put them both on a link and treat the packets equally and TCP causes streaming to break up, stutter, etc. Overbuilding the net helps, but if the data to be tranferred is big enough TCP will ALWAYS saturate a link somewhere along the way.
Identify the traffic type and treat their packets differently - giving higher priority to stream packets (up to a limit, so applications can't gain by cheating, claiming to be a stream when they're not) - and then they play together just fine. Stream packets zip through, up to an allocation limit at some fraction of the available bandwidth, and TCP transfers evenly divide what's left - including the unused part of the streams' allocation.
But the tools for doing this also enable the ISPs to do other, not so good for customers, things. Provided they chose to do so, of course.
IMHO the bad behavior can be dealt with best, not by attempting to enforce "Network Neutrality" as a technical hack at an FCC regulation level, but as a consumer protection issue, by an agency like the FTC. Some high points:
- Break up the vertical integration of ISPs into "content provider" conglomerates, so there's no incentive to penalize the packets of competitors to the mother-ship's services.
- Treat things like throttling high-volume users and high-bandwidth services as consumer fraud: "You sold 'internet service'". Internet service doesn't work that way. Ditto "pay for better treatment of your packets" (but not "pay to sublet a fixed fraction of the pipe").
- Extra scrutiny for possible monopolistic behavior anywhere there are less than four viable broadband competitors, making it impractical for customers to "vote with their feet".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Dear Braxton Carter,
I'm afraid you do not understand what industry you are in. You are a public utility. As a public utility consumers do not want you to "innovate". The Public, yes with a capital P synonymous with People in "We the People...", have a vested interest in you serving as a public utility and that means not "innovating". Innovation that is simply creative ways of charging people more money for less utility is not in the Public interest. What is good for T-Mobile is not necessarily good for the Public. Net Neutrality even in it's current watered down version was a huge step forward for consumers. No, it did not benefit T-Mobile, but it was one small step forward for the Public and your industry.
This was called AOHell back in the mid 90s. Or Fraudigy. Or Compu$$$erve. The bad old days are (comming) here again!
T-Mobile CFO: Less Regulation, Repeal of Net Neutrality ... Would Be 'Positive For My Industry'
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Is it just me or is every f*cking aspect of life these days some form of shakedown to extract as much cash as possible from my pocket to put in some rich persons pocket? Is that it? Is that all that modern life has boiled down to now?
It's hard to imagine, with the way the election turned out, that we're not going to have an environment, from several aspects, that is not going to be more positive for my industry
I could easily imagine how two dozen people, now homeless, huddling over a burning barrel in a Trumpville, all sharing the same cell phone, would cut wireless provider revenues.
Someone had to do it.
And what freedom you get if there isn;t any government regulation to stop you being killed for not toeing the line? You require laws to protect your freedom of speech because otherwise you could be silenced by anyone with deeper pockets or better connections (or just a lack of morality and access to paid muscle).
Since when did regulation become automatically, and without any need for identifying what the specific case is, anti-freedom???
I hope Donald Trump reads /.
but this is what we get for abandoning the blue collar working class. I can't tell you the number of techies who laughed and derided the blue collar guys for not retraining when their factory jobs were shipped to Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. A lot of those folks went to the poll for Trump and a lot who didn't stayed home instead of throwing in for Hilary....
The working class has lost solidarity. And without that we're getting picked apart.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Right. Less regulation so you can screw the customers with false charges, less bandwidth, conspiracy, etc.
My technophobe sister spends a lot of time on the bus, does not have a landline or internet at apartment, and watches lots of online video. She doesn't want to hear tech talk from me, in spite of money. So, yeah T mobile. Satisfy my technophobe sister's demand for video!
As a businessman, Trump hated regulation, so everyone hopes he'll do a Bush Junior and tell the corporations that breaking laws is okay, he won't punish them.
Trump's priority as president is the banks and the military and he pisses-off the voters at his own risk. Bush junior did it and still got re-elected but those days of hiding everything under national security are gone. This is why corporations bribe, sorry lobby politicians: So the president can't enforce the policies he creates.
And if you take 1000 dollars from this and that guy and give them to me it would be positive for my ass.
Duh.
(OTOH I'm always a bit astonished at the sense of entitlement those C*Os have. Do they really know what's positive for their industry? Really? Lehmans? Chrysler? VW? C'm on. Perhaps we should re-introduce circuses and lions -- but only for big shareholders and C*Os)
There is honestly nothing in your post that is factual.
So elect him president...oh, never mind.
I love bitching about the fall of network neutrality as much as the next guy... but what can we do to stop this madness?
What I would like to see is all these vendors with critical web services band together. What if Netflix, Microsoft, Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, etc formed a sort of NATO organization? If you attack one of us we all respond? Say Verizon slows or degrades Netflix in some way? What if then Google and the other members blocked their site\services for all Verizon customers? I know it sounds bad, but what if Verizon customers got a page stating that Verizon was breaking certain services and here is a list of alternative ISPs in your area? Crap, I think they should get together and preemptively attack the ISPs. What if Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Reddit got together a told ISPs if you want to continue to provide access to our service you NEED TO PAY US? That would change their opinion of Net Neutrality QUICKLY! What would internet service from Verizon look like if it didn't include Google services? I think they have the upper hand if they want to play hardball....
I have no doubt that it would be great for your industry, there, Braxton. That means it will be bad for consumers. No. We absolutely do not trust that you will be a responsible steward of your portion of the Internet. We expect that you will squeeze as much profit out of it as possible. That's your job. Furthermore, it is the legal responsibility of the corporation you work for to make profit for it's shareholders. I have no problem with that. But I will do everything in my power to convince my elected representatives to understand the difference and to support regulation that sees to my interests first. Yeah, I know. Probably a pipe dream, but if enough of us are loud enough, maybe someone will finally hear it.
Wasn't softbank going to buy tmo, and the govt denied?
I guess the deal is back on the table.
When carriers such as T-Mobile are cozying up to Trump and Trump policies, that may not exactly be the political positive that Trump wants. Carriers have neutral to negative overall support from their customers. T-Mobile has one of the better reputations AFAIK, but that's still damning with faint praise.
IIRC, Binge On was strictly based on protocols... was it identifiable as video and did it respond to commands to downgrade to 240p
That is, anyone can do it. Although there was paperwork you had to fill out saying that you abided by those limitations, so possibly it was de facto non-neutral even though it was expressed as a neutral policy.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Humorously I somewhat agree with this guy. The problem is the government sold entitlements to a limited resource rather than mandate open access for all under equal terms which would open up competition. We really need more competition, not net neutrality and honesty in advertising. A company that prioritizes access isn't providing "internet access". If I open up an "internet" provider and then only let sites that my company sets up and those that pay me is that really the internet? Of course not. This is exactly what these companies are doing by prioritizing the traffic of those companies that pay them for a "fast lane". It's fraud and they should be prosecuted under laws regarding fraud.
Since when does the telecom industry "innovate" and "create value"? Oh yeah... innovative ways to overcharge, and creating value to the shareholders.Gotta protect that right? Let's remove these regulations that promote the free flow of information and affordable access to it. Only dangerous people want that.