Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
I live in a rural area several miles outside of a town of about 2500 people. Two different cable companies have fiber optic service at my address and the phone company has a fiber-fed DSLAM about 2 houses down so I could get good DSL if I really wanted to.
One of the cable companies is a national brand, and the other is a local company that has designs and funding lined up and ready to go for every city and town in the area that they aren't already in. Every winter they convince another town or two to ditch the monopoly, and every summer they build a brand new cable plant or two from scratch, right alongside the incumbent's wires.
The monopoly franchise may have been necessary once upon a time, which I really doubt, but I can say with absolute certainty that it is not necessary today. If anyone has only one option, their problem is local, either the city is granting a monopoly, or their state is making it impossible for startups to operate.
I agree 100% that people need to fix their local problems instead of demanding that the federal government punish the rest of us so that they can keep being lazy.
One thing that I think should have abundant federal regulation is municipal ISPs. If the people of a city want to form one, I think they should be able to, and I also think that there needs to be strong rules to keep the local government from abusing their monopoly. For example, they should not be able to use taxpayer funds.
See that "Preview" button?