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Cable Lobby Tries To Stop State Investigations Into Slow Broadband (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Broadband industry lobby groups want to stop individual states from investigating the speed claims made by Internet service providers, and they are citing the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules in their effort to hinder the state-level actions. The industry attempt to undercut state investigations comes a few months after New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a lawsuit against Charter and its Time Warner Cable (TWC) subsidiary that claims the ISP defrauded and misled New Yorkers by promising Internet speeds the company knew it could not deliver. NCTA-The Internet & Television Association and USTelecom, lobby groups for the cable and telecom industries, last month petitioned the Federal Communications Commission for a declaratory ruling that would help ISPs defend themselves against state-level investigations. The FCC should declare that advertisements of speeds "up to" a certain level of megabits per second are consistent with federal law as long as ISPs meet their disclosure obligations under the net neutrality rules, the groups said. There should be a national standard enforced by the FCC instead of a state-by-state "patchwork of inconsistent requirements," they argue. Another cable lobby group, the American Cable Association (ACA), asked the FCC to approve the petition in a filing on Friday. An FCC ruling in favor of the petition wouldn't completely prevent states from filing lawsuits, but such a ruling would make it far more difficult for the states to protect consumers from false speed claims.
...we only have dialup. You know the story.
10 Gbps* for only $10/month and $100 hook-up fee
* Up to 10 Gbps
"Hey you promised 10 Gbps and now I've got no internet at all after I paid your hook-up fee."
"Sorry, sir. You should have read the terms more carefully."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
and they are citing the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules
In other words, they fought tooth and nail to stop or rollback net neutrality rules, but now want to cite those very same rules in an effort to force the federal government to take precedent over states.
And they wonder why they are consistently ranked at the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys.
So with Obama net neutrality not only did we not get non-prioritizations of traffic (actually net neutrality), which Verizon, T-Mobile, TWC and Charter still do - I should be more than comfortable streaming YouTube and Netflix on 20Mbps connections, we also didn't get anyone fixing their capacity problems as the lawsuits clearly show and now they get to hide behind the letter of the text AND keep their common carrier status?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The State Government isn't doing what you want them to do, lobbyists, the cure is to write out bigger checks.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Pay me $10 for UPTO 3 Lamborghinis.
Pay me $20 for UPTO ...
You want to advertise the term upto, you better demonstrate that number is a reasonable expectation for what you provide.
Otherwise, you are simply committing fraud.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
There's only one thing that should be allowed in the advertisement.
Minimum Speed... Guaranteed in blood of the officers and majority share-holders of the ISP advertising the minimum speed.
For every bit below that guaranteed minimum, each officer and share-holder must give up 3 drops of blood.
That would force the companies to keep investing in their infrastructure so they can live.
At this stage, we know anything these cable lobbist want is bad for customers. We representatives that just do the opposite of what they ask until they stop asking for stupid things.
That's the easy solution.
I don't care about speed anymore. I want competition. Not duopoly or time-limited monopoly. I'm not even sure I want OTA fixed wireless. I want quantum entanglement broadband that the FCC can't touch.
In commercial circles, the Commited Information Rate (CIR) is (or was) used to specify a transfer rate that the customer could always get. Its commited and not over subscribed. The model with Cable modems (and I guess FIOS etc) is not as easy to assure. Bandwidth is shared and .,. and the aggregate is what the ISP can, well, provide! So .. the CIR promise doesn't work when the service is overcommitted. But.. on super bowl day, will everyone be able to at a few Ultra high Def streams at the same time- or other hot news day for that matter. We all (ISP and users alike) need a new term that includes an expectation for minimal transfer rate, as well as a Peak Burst rate when its available. How about we call it CIR of 10 Mbps and a burst to 100 Mbps? Would that be acceptible to cable/Fios and end users?
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
At one point I worked for a commission which regulated the cable monopoly. We were not horribly funded but vastly out gunned by the cable company. We won maybe 1 lawsuit... probably ever. They actually avoided going to court like crazy and we'd have to force the issue--- the last big one we actually pressured them into suing us so they would have to pay our costs. They eventually gave in and sued us (after a year of pushing them.) I thought for sure we would lose AGAIN-- but amazingly, we won. That was 1 time. It was slam dunk but I thought the relative of a commissioner who was always our lawyer would fuck it up again... (for $300 per hour.) I quietly said all the time "I would lose in court for $200 per hour..."
The reality is, our commission did actually do some of their job right-- but the only REAL power that we had was to pull their ability to be in our cities. It was 1 big massive bluff-- not really much else. They could jerk around everything and usually win and all we really could do is cut off cable for our cities and piss everybody off... who doesn't care enough to boycott. Cable knew this. Before the dot-com we had a 2nd cable company wanting in but then the bubble burst... oh well. The amount of crap on our poles around the cities would have doubled but maybe service would have gotten better.... (nah, those companies avoid over competing -- you need like 3 or 4 to maybe get somewhere. But then because we don't have a shared network like the roads, that huge investment and upkeep tends to discourage them form doing much.)
It required ISPs to stop deliberately slowing down Netflix and Youtube unless they could double charge.
Which is why telco's spent $20 million buying Congressmen and Senators in this election cycle to kill it. They spent $20 million, because they can recoup that from their customers by selling access to them (which would simply be added to their bills indirectly).
I guess there's an election on because you're doing Obama talking points. I notice world leaders meeting Obama, and pushing back Trump meetings to afternoons, and all the Republicans obsessing about Obama.
IMHO, they should obsess over their own guy. He's not loyal to the USA, he won't think twice about screwing over them.
They have shown themselves to be grifting assholes, for years. Never a redeeming moment; they live off tax breaks and subsidies. I wish we could jail every one of their senior executive corps, as they are ACTIVELY hindering the advancement of the American economy, education, etc. they are SCUM!
If a grocery store advertised 1kg of apples for say $2, but then when you bought some you discovered that you'd only been given 900g of apples, you would be within your rights to claim false advertising. If you could show that the same store consistently under-filled their bags of apples such that not one bag contained the advertised 1kg of fruit, that would be (close to) racketeering.
Yet telcos seem to think that because "complex stuff" [which isn't remotely complex, by the way], that this somehow exempts them from the obligation to advertise and charge fairly for their services.
It doesn't. They are crooks. They already use contention ratios of anything up to 50:1 to squeeze more revenue out of their existing cable infrastructure and now they want to hide what they are doing by being legally allowed to throttle bandwidth.
Crooks
I'm starting to get tired of being right all the time.
"The corporations want it to be a federal issue. Wile they may disagree about what the federal rules should be, they can all agree that duping you suckers into demanding it to be a federal issue is a great idea."
This is a test of Republican's corruption. Republicans want to give power to the states. Will money compel them to take power from the states?
they are lobbying to get rid of net neutrality.
The next day they are trying to use net neutrality as a shield against state-level laws.
This is corporate lobbying in a nutshell - they will both use and lobby against the exact same regulations depending on what is, today, most suitable to them.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You think it would be really easy.... Instead of this "up to" BS that essentially means you will get periodic bursts of speed that technically meet their advertisement. Just force them to use their services average speed for something chunky like a 1+GB download and not the 1MB download they would inevitably shoot for. I'm really tempted to say at least 10+GB because that seems to be a pretty standard download size for games these days, so it isn't an unreasonable file size for a common user to encounter.
Cause then that little burst of speed at the start isn't going to mean anything over the average speed of a large download. When they are forced to use their Average speed in advertisements.
is not illegal in USA.
https://www.wired.com/2008/12/apple-says-cust/
You thought, even for a moment, that a government legislation affecting the market would actually hurt big business? Why? Is that what you think usually happens?
Of course they fought it. It takes work and money to re-structure your company to compensate for new rules like that. However, in the end, any time you make more laws that restrict the freedom of buyers and sellers to freely exchange capital, somebody is going to try to use those rules to their advantage, and the winner will likely be the group with most capital and interest in directing that system. At the very least, the laws will create a further barrier to entry into the market, thus preventing competition, which is the one tool that would cause them to cater to their customers.
Expect to see more of this. At some point, people will get mad and they'll try to make more laws to stop this, and then these companies will re-structure to take advantage of those laws. At some point, people will get mad, and they'll convince the government to declare internet as a utility, and then these companies will gain government funding and become completely immune to customer complaints. What does customer satisfaction matter when there's no competition?
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
The origin of the Baker's Dozen
For example, in ancient Egypt, should a baker be found to cheat someone, they would have their ear nailed to the door of their bakery. In Babylon, if a baker was found to have sold a “light loaf” to someone, the baker would have his hand chopped off.
As it wasn’t that hard to accidentally cheat a customer, given making a loaf of bread with exacting attributes is nearly impossible by hand without modern day tools, bakers began giving more than what the statute outlined to make sure they went over and never under.
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/09/why-a-bakers-dozen-is-13-instead-of-12/
Seems that Cable Co.s are likely to get off easy compared to ancient bakers.
"The big companies want the FCC to regulate them." Oh, is that why we watched them struggle for years to argue that internet service isn't the FCC's jurisdiction? Comcast demanding that netflix specifically pay up for potential Level 3 cdn traffic, on top of wanting a "fast lane" as it's called, is absolutely the sort of shit that is within scope of concern for net neutrality.
if it's not enforced.
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Enforce a rule that they cannot advertise theoretical maximums any more. The new figure should be the guaranteed minimum speed. A far more useful figure. They can whine all they want, they deserve it due to their deceptive behavior.
Hope it feels good knowing that you're performing for free the shilling that telecos pay losers to perform on sites like this.