Slashdot Mirror
How Comcast is Shortchanging Customers In Vermont (wired.com)
New submitter mirandakatz writes: Comcast is suing Vermont's Public Utility Commission, claiming -- among many other things -- that its First Amendment rights have been violated. But as Susan Crawford argues at Backchannel, there are far too many holes in that argument. Crawford writes that 'Comcast, which Wall Street knows is essentially an unregulated public utility for high-speed internet access in the areas it covers, has unlimited resources to fight off this public-spirited regulator...[And] although there are many efforts in Vermont to provide fiber (including ECFiber), they're still small: Comcast isn't feeling any pressure to upgrade its lines to fiber. And, as [Craig] Moffett has reported, Comcast from now on will be growing through price hikes, not through building new lines. It's done with building new lines. The whole thing is dispiriting.'
They pwned congress. Game over. Maybe a new name is in order. I nominate one of these: Comca$t, ComCaste, ComAssed, Comlast. Someone else can do better, I'm sure.
Is that ECFiber is only building infrastructure to service people who can't get Comcast already. So if you are like me and have Comcast available, then you don't get fiber access, even though fiber backbones are running through Comcast territory all over the state
1) Provide the minimum possible infrastructure and quality of service to save money 2) Beg the government for free money leading to more money 3) Use saved money to buy out competition 4) Use saved money to buy out content providers to save more money on licensing 5) Use saved money to buy out more competition and content 6) Agree with other providers not to compete with them 7) Use saved money to buy out more competition 8) Use saved money to buy out nearly all competition 9) Conglaturations, YOU ARE WINNER!
This is one of the worst Slashdot summaries I've ever seen. It provides almost no information as to what the case is about while slamming the company and complimenting the regulators. What the heck is his about and why is it relevant tech news? What the heck does the first amendment have to do with it?
which Wall Street knows is essentially an unregulated public utility
This statement is simply false, it is a regulated public utility.
I have Comcast with fiber to the house. I donâ(TM)t live in a big city. Itâ(TM)s just that we also have the choice of AT&T with fiber here. In other words competition works and the market is better than fucking stupid government regulation.
Mostly rural, so the lines are long, and low density so subscribers per mile are pretty low outside of the metro areas of Burlington/Montpelier.
The business 'climate' is somewhat less than friendly, though Comcast can make any business climate hostile. Anywhere.
The topology is downright hostile to telecom, with north-south ridges through out the state, making long-haul cabling a serious challenge, and expensive when traversing those ridges. This is not a new problem.
Comcast has plenty of excuses to gouge their Vermont customers. And Vermont will probably just try to legislate the costs out of the equation. Good luck with that.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Got a competing service where I live, and I was able to cut my bill in half and raise my average throughput from 12Mb to 525Mb. When I told Comcast I was cancelling, they didn't even try to dissuade me.
Just junk food for thought...
not really. Short form:
comcast's agreement with vermont's utilities commission is up for renewal, and the utilities commission wants them to continue working on the buildout obligations they picked up when they acquired a local cable company. Comcast doesn't wanna.
Now, having read TFA, it seems even more egregious than that - Comcast doesn't want to fulfill obligations it already agreed to fulfill as a condition of being allowed to acquire the local cable company.
#DeleteChrome
The internet is not an essential item, nor is it a right.
Internet access becomes essential once enough government agencies add a surcharge for filing forms as paper rather than electronically or even eliminate the paper option altogether. This has already started happening, such as with copyright registration at the U.S. Copyright Office.
Says you?
States define by law what is considered a public utility, it is entirely their prerogative to define it however they like. Additionally it is easily arguable that access to the internet is more essential than access to a phone system which has long been defined as a public utility.
Ayn Rand, misguided as she was, did not simply posit that 'greed is good' but it was that self-interest or selfishness was the highest and only moral behavior. That could mean a lot of things to different people. It could mean being greedy as it results in your self-aggrandizement. It could mean being altruistic if that is what you want to do. Regardless of what you do, you do it because YOU want to and not because you were told to do it by someone else.
Sadly, she also seemed to believe that people will perform at their best and that the brightest and best always won out. Even her protagonists would happily work for someone better than they if such a person existed. Rent-seeking or other greedy behaviors like patent-trolling are not likely very Rand-ian because they are not creators of anything and certainly are not doing their best at their job. They don't make (and get paid handsomely for it), they just take, as her antagonists do.
As to the notion that somehow, if the government had never gotten involved, we would be in a better place today, I think you may find yourself misguided as well. It seems quite the culture of the USA that we always want the most return for the least effort. That idea has given us such fun ideas as external cost to business. To maximize profits, I skip the cost of cleanup of my manufacturing process and instead dump waste back into the field. Is it toxic? Who cares, and when someone comes to tell me I need to clean it up, I'll cry bankrupt and move on with my money.
I have no high faith that, even if the government withdrew regulation in the best way possible (or even that hypothetical of never got involved in the first place) that we'd be any further ahead of where we are now. Comcast, in this case, doesn't want to provide the best service possible to all people possible. They're not being told they can't. Comcast is saying they don't want to be told what they have to do, even though they were only being told 'Wherever you see fit, run new lines.'