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

Telecom shill Ajit Pai tells yet another NN lie

[fafalone]

Shocker.

Re:Telecom shill Ajit Pai tells yet another NN lie

[interkin3tic]

Republican too. "Data" is sinful and gets in the way of truthiness.

no small isps left

[starblazer]

What small ISPs? The only people who are "small" are resellers as nobody can access the last mile.

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.

That's because he's Lying

[WillAffleckUW]

Plain and simple.

Artificial Scarcity

[nickmalthus]

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.

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.

Re:small ISP worker here

[Revek]

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.

"...across the country..."

[DaveM753]

"...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.

Re:Neutrality hah!

[interkin3tic]

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.

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:Kinda like the death-tax hurts farmer lie

[bajan_on_ice]

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.

Re: Kinda like the death-tax hurts farmer lie

[silentcoder]

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.