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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.
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.
You were responsible for grunge, and this is your punishment.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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
Lets take a look at the Telco bribes shall we?
https://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2017/03/30/this-is-how-much-money-telecom-companies-paid-ohio-republicans-to-sell-off-your-browser-history
This is JUST Ohio bribes (not even 2% of the bribes they paid out), I can see you're trying to do some weird "Telco good Obama bad" thing there, but if Telco's are innocent, how come they pay so many bribes?
U.S. Sen. Rob Portman
$89,350
U.S. Rep. Bob Latta (5th District, Bluffton)
$91,000
U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson (6th District, Salem)
$56,500
U.S. Rep. Patrick Tiberi (12th District, Worthington)
$53,250
U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci (16th District, Wadsworth)
$48,000
U.S. Rep. Steve Stivers (15th District, Lancaster)
$27,000
U.S. Rep. Steven Chabot (1st District, Cincinnati)
$25,500
U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (4th District, Bucyrus)
$24,750
U.S. Rep. David Joyce (14th District, Russell Township)
$16,500
U.S. Rep. Brad Wenstrup (2nd District, Cincinnati)
$9,400
U.S. Rep. Bob Gibbs (7th District, Ashland)
$8,000
U.S. Rep. Mike Turner (1oth District, Dayton)
$6,000
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
...It is no different that the Auto manufacturers and MPG.. everything touts the maximum unachievable mileage.
Actually, every car I've ever owned I've been able to achieve more than the advertised highway MPG, well before the concept of hypermiling became popular, which I'm fairly certain if I adopted those tactics I could achieve it on a more consistent basis. When compared to ISPs, not even at 3AM could I consistently hit advertised speeds.
So lets make both advertized level with the penalty being the months payment ...
FCC needs to simply enforce a law that all ISPs should advertise a minimum speed and apply an SLA with a refund schedule for breaking the SLA. Maximum or "up to" speeds obviously don't mean jack shit anymore, and enforcing a minimum speed would more mirror how business-class services are enforced. Network congestion cannot be predicted, but enforcing a minimum standard would at least set expectations and force providers to maintain infrastructure to contracted levels.
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 *