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?
A minor correction: Nobody, and I mean *nobody* is Trump's friend. He does however have associates who tolerate him because there is something in it for them.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Correction accepted, and the only reason I do so reluctantly is because I'm annoyed I missed that point on the first go.
I think it's a one-way issue with Trump, though. He doesn't have friends because he doesn't understand that loyalty means something other than, 'serves the current interests of Donald Trump'.
What's shocking is the number of people willing to jump on the Trump train and take a bullet for him in hopes of being rewarded. You'd think the pile of bodies you have to climb over to get into Trump's circle would clue you in to your odds of success being poor.
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 real problem is not net neutrality (or lack thereof), the problem is that the wonderful power of the free market is being expected to solve a problem that it fundamentally can not solve in an efficient way.
It never makes sense to have competing physical layers of network infrastructure.
In the same way that it would be nonsensical to have competing road networks, or water distribution networks or electrical distribution networks in the same area, it is also stupid to try and have physical data networks competing. The physical media layer for the "last mile" (or however many it is from an exchange) should be in government hands, controlled in the same way that road and water networks are, but with any number of service providers being able to provide service from the end point, with a level playing field for the access to the physical media layer.
The services ON those networks should most definitely be privately held - and also made available on a level playing field.
In the same way that whether you are a country resident or a city resident, you play the same amount of registration and fuel tax, giving you equal access to roads, you should have equal access to the internet too.
If you want a parcel delivered, you have a choice of couriers available - can get FedEX ot DHL or UPS to deliver it, and they all use the same roads, with the same fixed cost for road access, competing with each other.