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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.'
"Forget net neutrality - "
No. Paying attention to ANYTHING else does not justify forgetting net neutrality. Net neutrality SHOULD be a positive for anyone's political stance - it just means however imperfect the companies involved in providing services, they should have to treat content as just bytes, regardless of the source. That shouldn't be controversial, nor should it be forgotten, even 'for the sake of argument'.
Ryan Fenton
That's just another good reason why the network - the data center, the cables in the road etc. should be a public service like water pipes and electricity.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Trying to co-opt public outrage over net neutrality to a related, yet still entirely separate issue, is despicable. Net neutrality is absolutely one of the "real" fights. The idea that there can be only one is absurd. Who the hell is this woman? "Forget net neutrality?" No, fuck you. I will fixate on net neutrality as much as I damn well feel like it. She's actively hurting the case for her issue by spreading this nonsense, and that's a shame, since it is an important issue as well. Most U.S. Americans have absolutely no clue just how much more we pay for so much less than the rest of the civilised (and often, even uncivilised!) world.
That's just another good reason why the network - the data center, the cables in the road etc. should be a public service like water pipes and electricity.
Not the datacenter. Just a termination facility for the last mile that any ISP can hook into. The last mile, specifically, is what needs to be a public utility. That's where the natural monopoly is. The rest the market really could sort out, as the barrier to entry would be small.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So, my datacenter that I have built and put together myself should be a public service for everyone to use without compensating me for things like startup costs and growing pains? I don't think so.
No. In this simile in which the internets are like roads (which is relatively apt, it's better than tubes anyway) your data center is analogous to a shopping center. People do retain certain rights which people expect in a public place when they enter a shopping center, like photography, or not having your car towed away unexpectedly. People retain certain rights in your data center, like privacy. But they don't get space in your data center for free. They get access to the digital network used to get to your data center for free, just as they get access to the road network used to get to a shopping center for free.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually the summary was so incomprehensible that I was successfully fooled into reading the article. Well played, OP!
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