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3 ISPs Have Spent $572 Million To Kill Net Neutrality Since 2008 (dslreports.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from DSLReports: A study by Maplight indicates that for every one comment submitted to the FCC on net neutrality (and there have been roughly 5 million so far), the telecom industry has spent $100 in lobbying to crush the open internet. The group found that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) have spent $572 million on attempts to influence the FCC and other government agencies since 2008. "The FCC's decision, slated to be announced later this summer, will be a clear indicator of the power of corporate cash in a Trump administration," notes the report. "Public sentiment is on the side of keeping the Obama administration's net neutrality policies, which prevented internet companies from blocking, slowing or giving priority to different websites." Congressional lobbying forms indicate that Comcast alone has spent nearly $4 million on lobbying Congress on net neutrality issues from the end of 2014 through the first quarter of 2017.
For me, what I find most interesting is the amount of attention at least two of those entities have paid to trying to convince people that they're not for gutting the rules, yet are waging huge campaigns with their own money to do exactly that.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
First is that being a mega ISP is certainly a profitable business.
Second is that we really need better regulations of that business because that is money which should have been more difficult for them to spend. ie, Economically speaking there should have been a place within the business where that money would have had a much higher return on investment. eg Competitive infrastructure upgrades, R&D, etc. Lobbying/bribing is a poor investment in a competitive environment. Therefore, the environment isn't competitive enough.
Why not let the market sort it out. These people where bought fair and square. How much have you paid for it? Nothing? Are you a communist or worse, a socialist?
That said, unless there are SERIOUS changes done on a political level, the only thing that will come of it is that the wording will change.
"We have altered Net Neutrality. Hope we won't alter it any further."
I do understand that this is not the fault of your party, but the other ones. Divide and conquer still works, I see.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Geez if they only spent that money on improving their infrastructure.
So where do these ISPs hope to get a return on the ''investment'' in lobbying ? Answer: charging their customers more to access certain services; or having some services pay to get fast access to their customers. Either way this will not be to the advantage of those who the ISPs provide a connection to the Internet.
Oh, and they take action against competition.
I know this is Slashdot but for fucks sake "3 ISPs Have Spent $572 Million To Kill Net Neutrality Since 2008" NO THEY HAVEN'T. They have spent 572 million on lobbying part of which was spent on net neutrality, the amount spent on lobbying is disgusting, but slashdots inability to present basic fakes without twisting them is almost as sickening.
And those people hire well connected people - people who can speak directly with the politician one on one. Wine and dine them, give a nice gift for their daughter's wedding, and so on.
As for us peons, well we've gotta slog through the horseshit - make it a part-time job. Ever try talking to your US Congressman or Senator? You get some flunky who'll "relay" your message. Probably some college intern who drank the party's Kool-Aid. And with my Republican Congressional delegation, I'm sure my message will just get lost.
Couldn't they have just invested the $572M in other companies and projects or a mutual fund and reaped WAY more money that would be achieved by potentially gouging future customers?
These companies are not trying to kill Net Neutrality, They're altering it. They've positioned themselves now to were all outside traffic will come in at the same rate on the same pipe. While their proprietary services are on their intranet and not subject to same rules.
For example: Go90 will not be under the same rules as Netflix, Hulu, or YouTube. Verizon will not have to cap Go90 will not charge data rates for this service. But Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube cannot buy priority access. Over time the external streaming service will degrade and customers will start turning to Go90.
I know its not a popular view but when you make everyone the equal, the services that produce most of the consumed content is punished. So the viewers are also punished.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Comcast is the white man trying to keep the black man down.
So, over 9 years, 4 companies spent about 15 Million a year on lobbying each. Verizon alone makes 120 Billion dollars (with a B) a year and you think that they should not spend a few million to get things to go their way in congress. You are all a bunch of communists. If they didn't spend that money their shareholders should revolt and kick out the management. It's business....sheesh....
Time to end lobbying as a legal practice. Combine that with ending super PACs and serious campaign finance reform would go a long way towards fixing our broken republic. Wake up Democrats and Republicans!
ISPs will forever piss me off. Instead of using the money to improve infrastructure and services to actually become appealing companies, they fucking piss it all into a pot to destroy the very service they're trying to deliver.
The only reason to spend half a billion dollars is if you think you can get more than that in return. Think of it as a way to show much they stand to gain at the public expense if network neutrality is defeated.
I guess I should start a lobbying group
These companies truly do love to invest in America, purely out of the goodness of their hearts!
Generally, regulations HELP big corporations. I'm also suspect that Google and other big corps are lobbying hard on this front too. I trust neither AT&T, Google, nor the U. S. government. That is why, in general, not regulating things helps small businesses and the individual consumers.
I'm also wondering why the rush on this. The pro net neutrality guy at work says that there was once one such example but, according to slashdot, even that would not have fell within the new rules.
I found this interesting: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai: Why He's Rejecting Net Neutrality
It seems to me, that since these bozos are against net neutrality, Google et al should give them a taste of their own medicine. They could feed Comcast and AT&T employees shitty search results, like "12 reasons why net neutrality is a good thing; number 7 will shock you!" Or just a bunch of links to the FSF donation page.
3 ISPs Have Spent $572 Million to Kill Net Neutrality Since 2008
Well shit, that sounds scary. But "net neutrality" as we know it know wasn't around til 2013. How could they have been spending money lobbying to kill net neutrality since 2008?
Three of the largest internet service providers and the cable television industry’s primary trade association have spent more than a half-billion dollars lobbying the federal government during the past decade on issues that include net neutrality, according to a MapLight analysis. (emphasis is mine)
Ah. There it is. Had to go to the tertiary source to find it. This includes the lobbying money spent on everything that the cable companies want to bend a congress-critter's ear about, not just net neutrality. Nice work on bending MapLight's reasonably less click-bait-y headline.
If your interested, my google-fu on net neutrality history came up with this article from c-net: https://www.cnet.com/news/net-...
If the internet is analogous to a network of roads, can't the road owners install toll booths to collect toll for certain (high-speed) lanes?
They can but when substantial numbers of roads become toll roads it hurts the economy badly. Roads are a public good. Read up on what that means. Same thing applies to internet delivery. When companies are allowed to discriminate between traffic for their own interest rather that that of the end consumer that is not a good thing.
Comcast, AT&T, Verizon... and, oh, by the way, the itty bitty National Cable & Telecommunications Association.
NCTA – The Internet & Television Association (formerly the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and commonly known as the NCTA) is the principal trade association for the U.S. broadband and pay television industries, representing more than 90% of the U.S. cable market,[2] more than 200 cable networks, and equipment suppliers and providers of other services to the cable industry.
So 3 ISPs and 200+ other companies together spent $572 million over 10 years. That's less than $300k per company per year.
But the truth wouldn't be good for nearly as many clicks, would it?
The FCC asks in the laughably titled "Restoring Internet Freedom" if Title II regulation has impacted investment in broadband. Maybe they should have asked how much money was invested in lobbying by the ISPs?
Citation needed.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
At the same time, should require that all monopolies WRT networking, by state and feds be dropped. No federal, state, or local law shall be allowed to force a network monopoly. IOW, it is time to allow real competition to take hold.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Let's move over to "advisors".
Then we can still have cash changing hands, except it won't be out in the open.
Brilliant idea.
.. consider what grotesque plans they must have in store to recoup those costs, shoudl they win the day.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
The next questions to research is: who owns these companies lobbying against neutrality and what's their real end game? It can't be to maximize profit. The Internet they're pushing is akin to promoting a full command economy which was an epic failure. We know the best systems that produce wealth for all are:
-free markets,
-free movement of goods and services,
-opportunity for all and the freedom required to enact it,
-reasonable labor laws that don't constrain but empower economic actors with choices,
-environmental standards so your economic actors aren't slowed by a poor quality of life nor by the erosion of the planet's ecosystem, and
-free and fair trade which we don't have completely yet and we're suffering because of it.
Each economic component has their analogous counterpart in Internet standards and activity. You don't want to control the Internet just as you don't want to control world economic activity which is now several factors larger than government budgets. For example, Canada has a reasonably large welfare state with a universal healthcare system. Combined Federal and Provincial budgets only account for one third of our economic activity.
It vexes me that this even works. I mean, I have no expectation that we'll ever get the few thousand people in the country for whom this is not a thing into office, but the concept that, "this guy will buy me x nice thing so I'll vote that way instead of how I should otherwise vote" seems like it should be illegal.
If network companies are spending $0.5B to argue against net-neutrality than they expect to make much more than that if successful. Therefore net-neutrality laws will save consumers significantly more than $0.5B.
Think of all the internets they could've provided with that money...
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
You think there's no competition in the ISP business? Look at the Title II business world for competition. Where have you seen competition for POTS lines? Ever? No, this is veery, very clearly a monopoly lock-in. The objections by the big companies is that they can't expand, not that they can't keep raping you.
And oh,.by the way, the easy and blatantly legal way to prioritize internal traffic under the Obama "net neutrality" rules is merely to class your service as something different. "DTV rebroadcast" is different that "TCP traffic" and therefore should have a different priority. Easy, legal, and demonstrates the deliberate loophole in network neutrality.
Net Neutrality is a concept older than the internet itself - one which the internet has always embraced since its creation. Obama had nothing to do with it, other than the fact he was president when the FCC was forced to start enforcing NN policies because the big ISPs decided they no longer had to follow NN principles.
If investors sue that the money used on lobbying against Network Neutrality is poorly spent, then the counter-arguments made by management showing how they can monetize lack of Network Neutrality are exactly the arguments for why we need Network Neutrality regulations.
Greed and stupidity will ring America down it is not to big to fail.
These guys are so profitable that they can afford to spend $500 million yet they can not provide broadband access to large swaths of the country. African countries do better than this. China does better than this. Why can't we?
The issue is not net neutrality, but that the Obama administration had to have the Internet declared a regulated utility to give the FCC the power to impose net neutrality rules. Prior to the 1984 judicial breakup of the ATT monopoly, our long distance and local phone systems were owned and operated by ATT and its seven regional operating companies and were considered regulated public utilities. New product innovation and non-analog voice use of phone lines and connected devices were restricted and controlled by ATT, the FCC and state utility boards. Phone calls out of one's local area were very expensive. It is doubtful we would have the Internet, VOIP, etc., that we have today if ATT and government regulators still controlled the phone system. Prior to the breakup, it was illegal to link many consumer third party devices (think modem, routers, etc.) to the phone lines, unless approved by ATT and often with an expensive extra fee. In NYC in the late 1970's, when one picked up their landline phone, they were unable to complete a call because there had not been not enough available working telephone infrastructure to complete a call. Without the old ATT monopoly, we might have had some form of the public non-university Internet much sooner. Obama's government-controlled version of the Internet, under the guise of Net Neutrality, will stop Internet innovation, investment and price competition as it did previously under the old ATT publicly regulated utility concept. Let the Internet be free of public utility, government control regulation and in 10 to 20 years, today’s Internet will look as old fashion as rotary telephones and telephone copper land lines do today. Allow the Internet to continue to be an Obama government-regulated public utility under the smoke and mirrors of net neutrality and in 10-20 years it will be more expensive, unchanged, underfunded and deteriorating like most government controlled infrastructure and like the old monopolistic ATT public utility model.
No we had rules in place when we had Obama as president:
Trump got elected, pai was put in charge and now they want the death of NN.
You do the math.
When Obama was president == NN
When trump became president == no NN
US ISPs have region monopolies. They have been bribing officials since cable first offered something better than dial-up services. The consumer has a choice of 1. By paying politicians to keep the status quo, they are permitting said ISPs to created a tiered system where other services (like Netflix) can be charged at different rates (excluding CDN deals), and if they don't cough up, the ISP can cause network issues by overloading routes. With no competition, the consumer is fscked and will default to blaming the service and not the ISP, "because other sites work fine."
For ISPs that own the cable the higher your percentage coverage in an area the lower your cost per customer, driving the efficiency of any local monopoly higher that even technically superior rivals. This means that no matter how fair your start point any slight imbalance will snowball, forming local monopolies which overrule the technical advantages of any small rival. The regional monopoly structure has extra baking in America due to stupid laws but they only make a bad situation worse, the same layouts appear even without such laws. Thus keeping a fair competitive market is hard and requires lots of regulation and direct government interference, or mandates to split the base networks from the ISPs. This is true for gas, water, internet, phones, trains, anything with similar infrastructure layout issues and high instructive costs.
You don't have competition without complex government interference, removing it blindly regardless of the reason will in the end allow competition to die. "Solving" bad government interference by eliminating regulations in general is like solving invasive species by attacking the whole ecosystem, when the invasive species are hardier and more vigorous. It would seem more efficient to reduce the power of lobbyists, then you may not even need to fight this battle.
All of the big ISPs in America also sell pay TV in various forms (AT&T has U-Verse TV and now DirecTV, Verizon has FiOS TV and all the cable companies sell Cable TV). They are seeing their highly profitable pay TV business disappear as people get their content from the Internet (legally or otherwise) and drop their pay TV plan (or drop expensive extra packages from their plan).
That's why they are spending the big bucks to shut down any competition as well (since the competition like Google or local government isn't going to be stopping people getting to all that nice online content and bypassing pay TV completly)
These companies are sorely myopic. If they tighten down the Internet for customers, it (a) devalues the service they offer, leading consumers to seek other options, and (b) will create incentive to compete against them. An ISP that doesn't spy or throttle and doesn't charge tolls for content-makers will have an easy time marketing and gaining customers.
The problem is municipal monopolies. Our economics have proven time and time again that monopolies poison markets. There shouldn't be a monopoly on a damned thing. If individuals have to change to meet market conditions, then a business should, too. Change, or become irrelevant as a competitor eats your market.