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129 Million Americans Can Only Get Internet Service From Companies That Have Violated Net Neutrality (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Based on the Federal Communications Commission's own data, the Institute for Local Self Reliance found that 129 million Americans only have one option for broadband internet service in their area, which equals about 40 percent of the country. Of those who only have one option, roughly 50 million are limited to a company that has violated net neutrality in some way. Of Americans who do have more than one option, 50 million of them are left choosing between two companies that have both got shady behavior on their records, from blocking certain access to actively campaigning against net neutrality.
Aside from being a non-ideal situation for consumers like me, this lack of competition is another dock against the FCC's plan to repeal net neutrality rules later this week. In arguing against net neutrality rules, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has repeatedly cited a free market as just as capable of ensuring internet freedom as government regulations. "All we are simply doing is putting engineers and entrepreneurs, instead of bureaucrats and lawyers, back in charge of the internet," Pai said on Fox News's "Fox & Friends," in November. "What we wanted to do is return to the free market consensus that started in the Clinton administration and that served the internet economy in America very well for many years." But how can market competition regulate an industry when more than a third of the market has no competition at all, and even those that do have to choose between options that don't uphold net neutrality?
Aside from being a non-ideal situation for consumers like me, this lack of competition is another dock against the FCC's plan to repeal net neutrality rules later this week. In arguing against net neutrality rules, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has repeatedly cited a free market as just as capable of ensuring internet freedom as government regulations. "All we are simply doing is putting engineers and entrepreneurs, instead of bureaucrats and lawyers, back in charge of the internet," Pai said on Fox News's "Fox & Friends," in November. "What we wanted to do is return to the free market consensus that started in the Clinton administration and that served the internet economy in America very well for many years." But how can market competition regulate an industry when more than a third of the market has no competition at all, and even those that do have to choose between options that don't uphold net neutrality?
All they have to do is stop promising to uphold Net Neutrality precepts, and then they're totally in the clear.
The important thing here is that Trump's rich friends will milk some more money from the not-rich in return for degraded services; this is good for the average person somehow.
Where we live and in most municipalities, I believe, broadband is regulated by the city. In the city where we live, when Comcast wanted to move in, city council wouldn't let them until another provider could also move in.
Want to fix the problem in rural areas? The federal government owns more than half of the available RF spectrum. Free up some so we can get wireless broadband going.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
If BeauHD is being a decent editor, that should be irrelevant.
Of course, this being Slashdot you first have to figure out what's profitable for Slashdot and look at the editorial slant that likely implies.
Also, don't use Slashdot as a trustworthy source of unbiased news, since it doesn't even pretend to be a serious news organization - it's a social networking site based on mod-and-user filtered news feed aggregation.
It's not that hard a concept to grasp: Free market capitalism is fundamentally and inherently anti-democratic. Corporations and oligarchs will do what they've always done... if we let them.
Broadband internet is what's known as a natural monopoly. It doesn't make sense for multiple companies to duplicate efforts and build the infrastructure multiple times; it will only increase everyone's costs since the cost of the infrastructure will need to be paid for by fewer customers. What typically happens in these situations is companies will start going out of business because they cannot pay the bills until only one is left. You're better off planning it up front as a regulated, natural monopoly and avoid the wasted and inefficient use of capital from companies starting up and then folding. Competition is not the ideal system for this type of service; see your local electric company or water company as an example of this.
So, 129 million have only one ISP available.
40% of them have, as their one ISP, a company that has violated net neutrality.
Another 50 million have two choices for ISP, both of which have done things that violated net neutrality.
So, given that information from the summary, why is the headline "129 million Americans can only get Internet Services from Companies that have violated net neutrality"?
I mean, it's not all that hard to add the 50 million from the first paragraph to the 50 million from the second. And it's not like /.'ers are innumerate...Oh, wait. Never mind....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What is meant by a "violation"?
It's the government that blocks other companies from competing.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Citizens of capitalist country are unimpressed when companies' profit motive usurps the well being of its citizens.
All we are simply doing is putting engineers and entrepreneurs, instead of bureaucrats and lawyers, back in charge of the internet...
In the first place, how many engineers are "in charge" of the Internet? The vast, vast majority of them answer to the MBA's and other assorted bankster wonks who ultimately answer to the CEO, who ultimately answers to the board and the shareholders. Secondly, calling the likes of AT+T, Verizon, etc. "entrepreneurs" tells me that you are either a liar, (which I already knew), or stupid, (which I've long suspected). While you're busy metaphorically sucking the metaphorical dicks of the evil men who own your soul, please at least try to disengage your vocal cords and refrain from making stupid noises about how all is well. Piss off mate - nobody believes your bullshit.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Comcast: 2014 worst company in America
How Comcast is Shortchanging Customers In Vermont
What and end slashdot status as king of the clickbait?
I think it is more likely that this can be attributed to attempting to make the headline more precise by changing the headline from the original 100+ million figure, but did so by misreading or misunderstanding summary and thinking that 100+ million was related to the 129 million number.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I reject "net neutrality" on a federal level, as it does NOTHING to fix the underlying issues. It's a straw man! The underlying issue is that there isn't enough competition in the ISP space to give people a valid choice, and there isn't enough "information" on what is actually happening behind the scenes (throttling, etc) for people to make an informed choice anyway. An ISP will simply not get as much transit/peering/etc related to certain traffic than others to effectively "throttle" it, even if they aren't directly doing so. Also, as more "cord cutters" are being made, prices will go higher... with no other choices while everyone complains that a commercial company isn't charging them a lower price on a government granted monopoly.
Most localities grant monopolies to the incumbent carrier, and make it difficult or impossible for new players to enter the market. My preferred solution is to make it easier for new carriers to enter the market by not allowing monopolies to be granted. However, one size doesn't fit all. There are many small towns of a few thousand people that would have never gotten internet service without that type of agreement. It takes millions of dollars to build out a network to service a small town like that in many cases, and if there is any competition the carrier wouldn't be able to recoup their cost (so they won't build it out in the first place.) Another option is municipal internet, or, as other people have pointed out having the city/town own the 'wires' and lease them to other areas. However, both of those options may not be appropriate for all areas due to the overhead of providing either of those services.
My point here is, stop trying to "fix" the problems on a federal level. Your solution in Iowa may not be appropriate for my area in Massachusetts, but, most people seem to think it is.. and more importantly, stop focusing on "net neutrality" (which as implemented is not what you think it is in many cases) instead of the actual issues!
The problem with Internet Choice, or lack thereof, is not a lack of net neutrality. It is a lack of competition.
Why do we have a lack of competition? It is because the government grants statutory monopolies. Stop granting monopolies and stop using taxpayer money to support monopolistic behavior, and the problem goes away.
"All we are simply doing is putting engineers and entrepreneurs, instead of bureaucrats and lawyers, back in charge of the internet,"
Shut the FUCK up, Pai. Enough of your bullshit already. ISPs took billions in taxpayer-funded government handouts because they bitched, pissed, and moaned they didn't have enough money to build out infrastructure. Greed N. Corruption took those billions, did little to actually expand infrastructure, and handed out huge executive bonuses instead.
Now, Greed has put a corporate whore in charge of the FCC to ensure that petitions to end NN would come to fruition, so that ISPs can once again charge customers/taxpayers internet premium tier pricing in order to rake in billions to pay for infrastructure, which of course those billions will again go right into the pockets of Greed.
We know how the eradication of NN is going to end, because we've fucking seen it before. The shit-stained cherry on top is watching them all collude together with pricing, and eradicate any potential of actual competition in many areas (when Google can't even compete, you know the situation is fucked.)
TL; DR - Drain the Swamp? Yeah right. Greed N. Corruption have never been worse. Get ready for another round of same old, same old.
A bunch of folks with OpenWRT routers, some nice high gain wifi antennas, maybe Tor... just rebuild it from the ground up.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
As someone who has been running a small, independent, ISP since 1996, I have seen the steady anti-competitive lobbying to get congress to legislate us out of business. In 1994 Congress signed the 1994 Telecom Act, that basically assuaged the iLECs pissing and moaning that they need to get into LD in order to make money. The act basically says they can get into LD, but since they claim there is zero profits in local and last-mile services, they must sell wholesale access to their competitors to provision in order to boost options for consumers.
For a while we saw a boom in local CLECs, some more physical, some merely billing and administrative, by buying unbundled circuits like Uni-T1s and Uni-DS3s to their customers that connected back to the CLEC over the iLECs last-mile. Then came the Patriot Act and CALEA. In the interest of political expediency, Congress and the FCC has slowly, but surely, eroded the 1994 telecom act into nearly nothing left to enforce. In order to effectively issue wiretap orders on unsuspecting citizens, the telecoms argued, it makes more sense to engage with only a few players than tens of thousands.
First to disappear were the unbundled T1 and DS3 circuits. Now if you wanted to provision T1/PRI to a customer you were forced to buy your own unbundled copper. Then, in a surprise move, the FCC and Congress agreed with a Verizon case, that "New Technologies" should be exempt from equal-access provision of the 1994 Telecom Act. This effectively allowed Verizon to deny all competition to their Fiber circuit. Since the telcos, cable, and power companies have exclusive rights to last-mile access to telephone poles, no CLEC has the ability to just roll out their own last-mile to the customer except in some extremely densely populated cities where puttting a fiber shelf and mux in the bottom of a 500 suite building paid for itself. The biggest example of this anti-competitive behavior was when Verizon engaged in the practice of ripping out ever inch of copper to a customer once they bought into Fios service. Now the customer has a choice of Fios or Fios. No competitor even has left over copper available to be ordered to the customers premises.
Next up was project PRISM installed in MAE-East and MAE-West. In order to ensure all traffic traversed through the prisms for cloning (yes actual prisms were used to split the fiber stream), they had to reduce the number of carriers and peer points that could bypass these points of capture. By allowing the largest LECs to build monopolies, they LECs sold your souls to the devil, in exchange for running CLECs out of town via new regulations and 'understandings' of legislature.
It is no surprise that no anti-trust suits have ever been brought to claim against these LECs. Its FAR easier to spy on everyone when only 5 companies control traffic versus thousands of others.
as a ISP, I cant even get people the same DSL that the Telco's offer. 12mb ADSL2+ is the best I can get even though the LEC does SHDSL, VDSL, and 20Mb ADSL2+. They will also not let us get naked DSL (no $60 phone line charge in addition to DSL) or do G.Bond (two copper pair to double the throughput). We are stuck with wireless, and that has real world issues form lightening, wind, and other weather.
The U.S. government is corrupt.
FTFY
#DeleteFacebook
Obvious troll is obvious but I have to reply anyway: companies almost never invest in the countryside because the cost of infrastructures is way too high vs the potential number of subscribers.
#DeleteFacebook
"129 million" is a pretty huge market just waiting to be taken over by a pro-neutrality company
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Maybe this is a good thing? Maybe it will accelerate the development of open source networking, grid networks, smaller wireless ISPs. What little control the government has, they will lose. They want a free market, give them a free market.
If "[w]e are barely a blip on the radar", then what's this "Slashdot effect" that I used to hear about? What factors have caused traffic referred from Slashdot to become less effective at overwhelming web server resources? And how would the end of net neutrality regulation affect these factors?
Interoperable communications networks with sufficient bandwidth to meet demand are a public good and increasingly have become a public necessity. The FCC should play its role in making sure there are at least minimum standards of connectivity and bandwidth between Internet provider networks. And if they are going to hand off business aspects of the regulation, then they should work hand in hand with the FTC to ensure that paid prioritization and peering agreements between companies are in the best interest of a free market.
We need a robust, resilient and reliable communications network that creates a well regulated free market to maximize consumer choice.
We may not own the Verizon, Comcast, AT&T etc networks, but we do collectively own much of the land their wires cross and the wireless spectrum they also rely on. The US, the states, and localities each have a right to impose conditions for the use of public lands. Those conditions should be as simple as possible and targeted so they create a free market.
And more importantly the US has a responsibility to ensure that we have a robust, resilient and reliable communications network necessary for our national security. National Security isn't just about military communications, but about having a society that has infrastructure that works to keep us strong. A strong military is pointless if critical communication infrastructure becomes so fragmented that it becomes too expensive or fragmented to keep us unified.
A well regulated free market is the most valuable tool for ensuring the most efficient allocation of resources in a free society, where competition and consumer choice create a dynamic marketplace that gives us more and better choices, but without sensible regulations there is no free market. A free market is only free as long as there are plentiful choices and transparency about those choices.
The natural tendencies of monopoly, fraud, theft and coercion all need to be regulated in a free market. The government has a clear role in what kinds of contracts we as a society are willing to enforce... property rights have limits because we as a society are the ones tasked with using force to settle disputes.
I agree that there are good reasons to allow companies to have some paid prioritization and that strict net neutrality is probably counterproductive when introducing newer and better networks that give people more bandwidth at lower latency, but that doesn't mean that we want to go back to walled off networks like AOL and BBN or continue to be dominated by services like Facetime where people can only communicate when they are on the same network or buy into the same devices...
At the very least, the FCC should be looking to make sure that network providers are providing sufficient connections to the networks that their customers are accessing. That is very much a free market regulation. Looking for the bottlenecks is a traditional FCC regulatory role... no different in principle than making sure that companies that license spectrum are using it efficiently and effectively and not interfering with other spectrum uses. These Internet providers are making use of a limited public resource in providing their services.
It is about making sure that the technical aspect of the regulatory role of the FCC is fulfilled without stepping on the role of the FTC in regulating against anti-competitive anti-free market business practices. Something that I hope will come back into balance.
Would those missing 29 million be Americans with three or more choices, all of which have violated net neutrality?
One example is blocking traffic to a particular server, as various cellular ISPs have done with the servers of Apple FaceTime video chat. Another is intentionally routing traffic to a particular server over a chronically congested link, as Comcast did with its Tata link a few years back. A third is making high-speed Internet available only to subscribers to the same company's traditional multichannel pay television service.
Competition requires action by a government in the first place to establish rights of way. Otherwise, non-subscribing landowners could block providers from crossing subscribers' land with their copper or fiber by asserting the exclusive right that essentially all industrialized countries' governments recognize in land.
Maybe they'll start doing that again now that they can no longer free ride on everyone else's infrastructure.
I do not believe that ISPs are violation of Net Neutrality by supporting restoring regulations that had been in place.The smaller ISPs I work with are holding back on build-out due to regulatory concerns associated with Title 2. It adds burdens to them, and is squishy and open to interpretation that changes with each questionable bureaucrat. Leaving Title 2 regulation in place is actually helping the large ISPs by motivating smaller ISPs to stop growth, sell out, or shutter completely. Title 2 does make it easier for the government to access your Internet traffic, though. It's almost like politicians are calling it a repeal of Net Neutrality to get people worked up to keep that easier access in place - but they wouldn't do that, would they?
Particularly on the wired side. I can choose from either Cox Communications or Verizon -- Cox is just slightly less odious than Verizon. And the pricing is pretty much the same.
Now for wireless we have T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, et al. They just beat each other up on a regular basis regards pricing. Right now I pay $85 a month for two phones. So that works out to $42.50 per phone. Not too much but $30 would be better.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I only vote for people who want to decentralize or remove power from government. The problem is, that is self defeating, and very few people like voting for losers, even if they are better off doing so.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This is the fact that most ppl have a hard time accepting.
Government is the longest running conjob on the planet.
It promises many things to many ppl, but delivers on few,
and what it does deliver on usually costs more, and is
not as "marketed/propagandized".
Government is just another conjob, thou perhaps the largest and
oldest one except perhaps religion.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Citation. This is why Net Neutrality is a non-starter. If we want Americans to care about these kinds of 'freedom' issues we need to take care of their economic problems first.
I'd like us to start with Single Payer health care so we can compete effectively with first world nations that already have it (Canada I'm looking at you) and end medical bankruptcy. From there how about making public University Tuition free of charge and fixing our infrastructure with the money we'd save by not sending their sons and daughters off to war.
What I'm saying is, if we don't have real policy that helps these people they're going to keep turning to populists who promise them those policies. Guys like Trump. And those guys are never going to be friends of Net Neutrality and the like.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Anarchy is so much better.
They are over-saturating us with these stories.
My response has gone from "oh no!" to "not another fucking story saying almost the same thing."
Kudos for at least telling this story from a slightly different angle (same viewpoint, of course.)
Ajit Pai is like that fat guy in the (original) Total Recall who stood there sweating, hoping against hope Arnie fell for it. Then he'd go collect a hundred million dollar salary in telecom somewhere later on.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If BeauHD is being a decent editor
Clearly not impartial. Look at this:
choosing between two companies that have both got shady behavior on their records, ... actively campaigning against net neutrality.
So, actively campaigning for something that you stand for is "shady behavior". Really?
I had good hopes that someone finally figured out the real problem here: the lack of competition.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
If you don't mind the -20F cold in Winter, move to Bemidji, MN. I have family near Blackduck, MN and all the farms are wired with fiber by the telephone co-op ( http://www.paulbunyan.net/ ). They offer a 1Gb/s (up/down) tier.
If I wanted nothing but pro "Net Neutrality" (Title II FCC regulation) posts from every conceivable angle, I'd go to Reddit.
"What we wanted to do is return to the free market consensus that started in the Clinton administration and that served the internet economy in America very well for many years."
During the Clinton administration, nearly all home internet access was via dial up, and the majority of home internet users had a choice of multiple ISPs, all of whom provided competitive bandwidth and latency.
Chairman Pai, what is your plan for encouraging comparable competitive broadband internet service to the entire US, and why not delay the easing of net neutrality rules until such is achieved?
"129 million" is a pretty huge market just waiting to be taken over by a pro-neutrality company
If only that outcome was in the realm of the possible.
100% Correct. :)
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I like my free education and healthcare thank you very much.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat