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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.
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
In this case, the FCC is the rulesmaking body that started this particular fight. This makes the answer: Excutive.
Now, the Legislative branch could get involved by writing up a new law outlining the FCC's authority or amending the FCC's charter. But right now, thanks to the Chevron decision and several decisions since this is clearly in the Executive's bailiwick.
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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?
Posting AC for obvious reasons.
Working in the mortgage industry as I do, I wasn't particularly surprised when I heard basically the same thing at a get-together with other mortgage professionals last week. The most fun part was after a few drinks people basically predicted another housing bubble coming out of this administration and suggested to either get in on it and get out fast while the getting is good or to make long-term investments to outlast it.
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?
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
This was called AOHell back in the mid 90s. Or Fraudigy. Or Compu$$$erve. The bad old days are (comming) here again!