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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
> How One Little Cable Company Exposed Telecom's Achilles' Heel
Your clickbait mind tricks will never work. The day before I read TFA before I start commenting is the day I turn in my SlashDot ID.
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=-
In the USA, backbone data is cheap, the cable companies are a monopoly with built out networks that are 10+ years old, and they are raking in the cash with no price regulation and minimal oversight. It is high time that laws were passed to:
1. Determine a fair pricing model and require that where there are less than 4 ISPs available. Net neutrality is really about the quality of the product and what exactly you are buying every month. I am surprised no lawsuits over net neutrality have been filed over bait and switch yet.
2. Use anti trust laws to break up cable companies into cable providers and internet providers sharing the same lines owned by a third company that maintains and owns the lines.
3. Protect internet access in the same way that the federal laws currently protect US mail (both privacy and penalty wise) both the privacy of email and browsing.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
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.
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.'"
so dumbfuck - who pays?
Public power is common in America. About 50 million Americans, or about 15%, get their electricity from government owned utilities. They get a monthly bill and pay for their electricity the same way that the other 85% do.
So does "public power" work better? No, not really. But it doesn't seem to be any worse either. It is about the same in terms of both reliability and price. In general, a competitive market is superior to government provision, but since power generation is a natural monopoly anyway, competition isn't really possible, so the government isn't any worse than a regulated utility.
www.publicpower.org