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Ajit Pai Offers No Data For Latest Claim That Net Neutrality Hurt Small ISPs (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With days to go before his repeal of net neutrality rules, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai issued a press release about five small ISPs that he says were harmed by the rules. Pai "held a series of telephone calls with small Internet service providers across the country -- from Oklahoma to Ohio, from Montana to Minnesota," his press release said. On these calls, "one constant theme I heard was how Title II had slowed investment," Pai said. But Pai's announcement offered no data to support this assertion. So advocacy group Free Press looked at the FCC's broadband deployment data for these companies and found that four of them had expanded into new territory. The fifth didn't expand into new areas but it did start offering gigabit Internet service. These expansions happened after the FCC imposed its Title II net neutrality rules. (Title II is the statute that the FCC uses to enforce net neutrality rules and regulate common carriers.)
Shocker.
What small ISPs? The only people who are "small" are resellers as nobody can access the last mile.
Plain and simple.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There is no doubt that allowing telcoms, who are losing money due to cord cutters jettisoning their overpriced premium services, to install toll booths on the Information Highway will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in profit through artificial scarcity. Pai is only concerned with the investment returns of the telcoms and could care less about the rights of the American public, the people he is supposed to serve and protect.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
Yes! We regularly had trouble with certain protocols due to a upstream provider throttling them. So yes, it was a piece of shit for us. The day they took those rules off of us was a good day indeed. We lost 20 seconds of latency also. This is simply a way for the jerks to squeeze more money out of the same resources.
I think him joking about it signals something even worse. Two possibilities 1: He's drinking his own koolaid and genuinely believes at this point Comcast's interests are the interests of the nation and the notion that he could be wrong about this is funny because it's so alien. This type of religious belief in the corporate masters is as dangerous as any other religion running government. Or 2: He is so sold out that he has no decency or shame about the crime he's committing. He's aware that the climate of the Trump administration is so brazenly corrupt that this is acceptable behavior now.
Doesn't change the current question of "is he biased" or "Is he working for the best interest of the consumer." That's obvious. The problem though is the forces that led him to this action, the GOPs religious belief in the gospel of deregulation, and/or blatant corruption, those forces are still at work across all government levels.
Estate taxes are bad. Whether you're a farmer or a multi-billionaire the principal remains the same. You earned it. Paid income tax on what you earned. Paid taxes on all your assets year after year. Why should your children not be able to inherit that when you die without the government sticking their grubby hands in the pie? Especially when they perpetually waste money like it grows on trees? They can't appropriately manage what they have why should I give them more? Now I'm not disputing your stance on net neutrality. I think Ajit is absolutely sold out to the telcom industry and his analogy about mom and pop ISPs is bogus. But that has nothing to do with estate taxes.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
I'll give you the reason Thomas Jefferson gave when he first proposed an estate tax: to protect America from the tendency of society to develop aristocracies.
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