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Trump's FCC Votes To Allow Broadband Rate Hikes Will Deprive More Public Schools From Getting Internet Access (theoutline.com)
The FCC voted on Thursday to approve a controversial plan to deregulate the $45 billion market for business-to-business broadband, also known as Business Data Services (BDS), by eliminating price caps that make internet access more affordable for thousands of small businesses, schools, libraries and hospitals. The Outline adds: The price caps were designed to keep phone and, later, broadband, access cheap for community institutions like schools, hospitals, libraries, and small businesses. Now, there will be no limit. A spokesperson for the trade association Incompas, which advocates for competition among communications providers, told The Outline that the increase is expected to be at least 25 percent across the board. Low-income schools already don't have enough money; according to a report last year in The Atlantic, schools in high-poverty districts, where the property taxes are lower, spend 15.6 percent less per student than schools in low-poverty districts. If internet costs go up by 25 percent, it may make more sense to cut that budget item, or, for schools that still don't have internet, never add it at all. Add it to the list of things that well-funded schools in already-rich neighborhoods get that schools in low-income neighborhoods don't. New textbooks. Gyms. Advanced Placement classes that let students earn college credits. Computers. Internet access.
Trump is not paying one bit of attention to the FCC. Pai is an out control representative of Verizon, not voters. The question is, will Pai's utter corruption have consequences at the polls causing Trump/Congress to start paying attention?
The other part of this -- rate relief is generally provided when the vendors are unable to make a profit. Most of the B2B lines already carry profit margins exceeding 90%. This is just simple corruption - remove the price caps so that monopoly vendors can gouge until the customer can no longer pay. Removing net neutrality is also just another way to gouge companies like Google, Netflix, Facebook. The ISPs are hugely profitable, they just want even more.
What's driving this? Verizon paid $130B for Vodaphone. The have to make the money to pay off that $130B somewhere, and US customers are the target. Of course we are getting nothing in exchange for being gouged to pay off their Vodaphone purchase.
So. Price caps are a "Good Thing." Wage and Price freezes have been tried many times from Roman Times, to the Soviet Union, to the US and it doesn't work.
Can you find examples of it helping? Yes. But does it work for the economy as a whole?
I'll let you figure that out.
How's it working in Venezuela?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Holy Shit! You have choices?! I have Charter and uhhh every now and then ATT sends me a letter saying i may qualify for dsl or u-verse only to say Oops, our bad, when i call about it. I guess i can get 10GB/month on Satellite or maybe dial up services if those count?
However, your example does not apply to the issue because it is too broad with lots of competitors. Most areas in the U.S. only have ONE broad band provider in each area. Then the provider would do whatever it can to get itself to be the ONLY one in the area; thus, there is NO competition. Allowing no price cap in this case actually opens a can of worm. The no-limit cap could work if and only if there is a competition.
It seems to me that the imposition of price caps acts as a barrier to new competitors. It's just another form of rent control. With the pricing cap gone, prices would almost certainly rise in the short term, and this would lure new providers into the marketplace. This is exactly what happened to American oil producers when world oil prices rose sharply a couple years ago.