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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
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.
" But I'm going to add that usually the desperate ones are desperate because they are discovering they are wrong and that they are losing the fight because of it."
I guess you think the Native Americans 'discovered they were wrong' and THAT explains their desperation on the Trail of Tears? Try again with your dumb over generalization buddy. This one flies as well as lead balloon.
"...held a series of telephone calls with small Internet service providers across the country -- from Oklahoma to Ohio, from Montana to Minnesota..."
Just FYI, for those without a map handy, that covers 8 out of 50 states, all in the midwest:
Montana to Minnesota = Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota.
Oklahoma to Ohio = Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
Again...just FYI.
Where is this competition you speak of? I didn't have a choice when I lived in Chicago, I don't have any choice in Los Angeles (TWC) or Boulder (Comcast). I guess I could get a DSL line or satellite if you consider that competition, but neither of those are acceptable for my needs. I had hoped fiber might some day come to the rescue, but it has never been an option in any building I've lived in. My only hope is if Boulder pushes out municipal fiber. If we really had any competition, I'd believe in the possibility of the market to resolve these issues, but I've yet to see any competition in this space.
However, this logic:
they are wrong and that they are losing the fight because of it
Doesn't hold. You are being far too optimistic if you think that being right and winning are related.
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.
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.
Unless your farmer has >$5M in assets, the estate tax does not apply to him. And the reason behind the estate tax is to avoid the increasing accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few. Whether or not the government is incompetent at handling the cash is besides the point.
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
Everybody's tired of this, it's not just you. A lot of the outrage here stems from the fact that most of us thought this bullshit was over two years ago.
Ah quite... So you are now realizing that a government that rules though this kind of regulation is a danger to all. Rules should not be made this way, with faceless nameless "administrators" who are not elected make (or unmake) such significant rules.
Only NOW you are upset? Yea, cry me a river. It was good enough when you where getting your way, but now it's a corrupt system? Please.
This is the "I have a phone and a pen" legacy, which is getting rolled back the very way it was created, behind the scenes by unnamed unelected bureaucrats that are accountable to their appointers, but not the people. This kind of government and the rules it has created should go away. Congress should undo this mess they have made.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
IKR. We never got to see the raw data that the EPA was trying to use for their power grab, either.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
This is the true downside of Trump as President: it's not HIM, it's all his cronies who have come to power to help themselves to the levers of power to suit themselves and their greedy pals.
It will take some time to undo all the damage that they are doing at many levels and across many disciplines.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Who's crying.. I'm getting my way here.. ;)
I'm just not naïve enough to not understand that what goes around, comes around. Someday the shoe will be on the other party who can have it their way too. I want this fixed, permanently, and that takes congressional action, so this is fixed and takes more than another party appointing new commissioners to get their way again.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *