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How One Little Cable Company Exposed Telecom's Achilles' Heel (backchannel.com)
Reader mirandakatz writes: Forget net neutrality -- the real fight is over controlling price-gouging monopolies. As Susan Crawford writes at Backchannel, a little-known cable company, Cable One, just exposed the telecommunications industry's Achilles' heel: regulation. Cable One has been raising its data transmission prices quickly, and it's making cable giants very, very nervous. If people begin noticing that there's no competition, that Americans are paying too much for too little, and that the entire country is suffering as a result, that's a big problem for Big Cable. As Crawford writes, 'don't fixate on net neutrality... Even though the state of internet access is an issue that touches the bank accounts and opportunities of hundreds of millions of Americans and gazillions of businesses, very few people understand what's actually going on. Now you are among them. Do something about it.'
Building networks is actually quite cheap, in comparison with the profit margins of major telecommunication companies. This is how many less developed countries are able to offer higher speed internet access to residents for far less money, using the same commodity networking equipment.
No, NOT their pipes! Our tax money has paid for and subsidised much of the infrastructure of the Internet. The reason that laws have been bought in many states that forbid municipal internet is that the big ISPs don't want competition, so that they can keep up the extreme price gouging that is going on today! Oh, and Data caps are a punitive measure to try to keep people from dropping cable TV and going with streaming services instead!!