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.)

Comments

small ISP worker here

[Revek]

How would having our upstream providers throttling us help? This guy doesn't care about the truth. He is the type to make his truth up as he goes. The net is going to be a huge piece of shit after this.

Only Hope

[jittles]

At this point, the only thing I can hope for is that the RIAA and MPAA start going around suing ISPs after Net Neutrality is abolished. If Net Neutrality doesn't exist then the ISPs are no longer a common carrier under the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Re:no small isps left

[Pikoro]

In Japan we have this thing called FLETS. Basically, one company puts down the infrastructure, and they own it, but once laid, they have to allow anyone to use it, for a fee of course. What this means is that basically, anyone can start an ISP. You negotiate fees on a per customer basis. I set up my ISP for my local community. I pay $20 per customer I sign up back to the infrastructure owner. The infrastructure owner has a database of ISPs that are registered with them. So in the user's modem, it has username@isp.domain. The infrastructure owner looks it up, replies with weather it's a valid ISP or not, then hands off the authentication to the ISP's authentication server. Once the customer is authorized, the ISP hands the routing back to the infrastructure owner and boom. The customer is online, subject to the rules put in place by the ISP on things like bandwidth, traffic shaping, etc. The infrastructure owner isn't allowed to run it's own ISP, so it forks off a subsidiary and competes with the other ISPs using the same method. You may have multiple dozens of ISPs available to choose from, and switching, is a simple matter of changing your login information on the modem once you have a contract in place with the respective ISP. It's simple, it works, and since pretty much all the ISPs charge within a couple dollars per month of each other, they compete on features, like bandwidth, caps, email plans, and whatnot. The infrastructure owner makes their cash off the fees to the providers and the ISPs are free to charge the customers whatever they want on top of that initial fee. Easy peasy. Really wish they would do that in the USA.