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There's No Evidence Comcast's New 'Network Investment' Is Because of Net Neutrality Repeal or Tax Cuts (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Comcast issued a statement last week claiming that the government's new tax plan and the end of net neutrality will directly result in a dramatic spike in Comcast's network investment and job creation plans. If you look at Comcast's capital investments over the past 12 months and calculate continued investment growth at current rates -- you'll find that Comcast was already on pace to spend more than $50 billion on investment over the next five years.
Journalists that could be bothered to take a closer look at Comcast's earnings discovered that the company's promise of $50 billion in investment over five years is something that would have occurred regardless of the net neutrality repeal or Comcast's shiny new tax cut. "In Q3 2017, the most recent quarter, Comcast's capital expenditures were $2.4 billion," noted Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin. "Continuing to spend at that rate, even if Comcast doesn't increase spending to account for inflation, would push Comcast to $9.6 billion a year or $48 billion over the next five years." Indeed; if you look at Comcast's capital investments over the past 12 months and calculate continued investment growth at current rates -- you'll find that Comcast was already on pace to spend more than $50 billion on investment over the next five years.
Journalists that could be bothered to take a closer look at Comcast's earnings discovered that the company's promise of $50 billion in investment over five years is something that would have occurred regardless of the net neutrality repeal or Comcast's shiny new tax cut. "In Q3 2017, the most recent quarter, Comcast's capital expenditures were $2.4 billion," noted Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin. "Continuing to spend at that rate, even if Comcast doesn't increase spending to account for inflation, would push Comcast to $9.6 billion a year or $48 billion over the next five years." Indeed; if you look at Comcast's capital investments over the past 12 months and calculate continued investment growth at current rates -- you'll find that Comcast was already on pace to spend more than $50 billion on investment over the next five years.
I'm a conservative, and I hate Comcast, support net neutrality. However I also support tax cuts for corps. I don't have any illusion that all their tax saving will help the CEO's more than the employee's or their customers. But the bottom line is that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. If you want to compete we need to lower that.
The USA ranks number 1 in prison incarceration, debt, and taxes. This is not a good thing.
I notice you were quick to snipe on Conservatives, but were you able to criticize your buddy Obama when he gave a huge bone to the corporate CEO's of the insurance companies under the pretense that he was helping poor people. The honest to god truth is there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. they all support their corporate campaign donors. Conservatives and Liberals need to ban together, find common ground and stop supporting the party oligarchs.
is AT&T is going around telling everyone the bonuses they're giving out are due to their tax cut. Turns out the Union fought for a pay raise, lost, and took a one time bonus in lieu of a raise. The amount of gall on display there is stunning. It's a lie up there with Orwell's chocolate rations.
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Conventional Slashdot wisdom dictates that Comcast, and all monopoly internet ISPs, have not, do not, and will not invest money in infrastructure upgrades. The monopoly status means they can coast in a non-competitive environment with current network technology while nickel and diming everyone to death. So obviously wherever they got their information that Comcast is spending money on infrastructure is complete BS. It just doesn't fit the narrative.
Keyword being monopoly. Comcast has always done upgrades....in areas where they don't have a monopoly. I've got 3 choices for cable providers, and comcast has always done a good job of providing upgrades to have the fastest speed options available. But the problem is when they DO have a monopoly. I remember one of the stories that was here on slashdot years ago. Some town only had Comcast as an option, but Comcast wouldn't upgrade them beyond 10Mbps (this was a while ago, and I don't recall the exact numbers, so forgive me if it's off). Then the town decided to setup a community ISP with 100Mbps service and.....oh, what's that? Comcast is now busting ass to offer 100Mbps service in that area much sooner than the community ISP can be up and running? Wow, what a surprise!!!!!!
You have to pay for all that military spending somehow. Did you think the money grew on trees? It comes from taxes and deficit spending.
Yeah, Comcast is generally a lame company, but to say an official announcement by the decision maker about the reasons for a particular decision equals "no evidence" is quite a biased stretch, especially when the counter evidence is a guess by someone who wasn't involved in the decision.
So sure, Comcast was going to spend some money on infrastructure anyway. The article stretches to get $48 Billion and the press release says "spend well in excess of $50 billion" with more announcements coming in their January earnings report, so even at the most generous, there is still a gap there. The part of the same press release they skipped over of course was that Comcast also announced "special $1,000 bonuses to more than one hundred thousand eligible frontline and non-executive employees." in the same press release. If you read the press release, that's the part most specifically attributed to the tax cuts and the FCC rule change. The infrastructure plans read as an add-on, so this is mostly much ado about nothing. But hey, these "reporters" will do just about anything to be able to publish something they can cast into an anti-Trump narrative of some sort.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
The person you replied to appeared to have their own brain. Why are you spouting off standard partisan talking points? Perhaps they aren't in favor of military spending? After all, it's not a fiscally conservative thing to do.
Doesn't help with they sensationalize many things that they should just shut up about.
Are you sure that's not why they get flak in the first place? They make Fox News look like a fair and balanced media source - and they literally have shows with talking heads ranting about things.
I'm a conservative, and I hate Comcast, support net neutrality. However I also support tax cuts for corps. I don't have any illusion that all their tax saving will help the CEO's more than the employee's or their customers. But the bottom line is that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. If you want to compete we need to lower that.
The USA ranks number 1 in prison incarceration, debt, and taxes. This is not a good thing.
I notice you were quick to snipe on Conservatives, but were you able to criticize your buddy Obama when he gave a huge bone to the corporate CEO's of the insurance companies under the pretense that he was helping poor people. The honest to god truth is there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. they all support their corporate campaign donors. Conservatives and Liberals need to ban together, find common ground and stop supporting the party oligarchs.
I've never understood the Conservative stance on the US's place in the world regarding taxes.. We're told socialism is teh evil, because high taxes.. but by your constant harping Democratic Capitalism has led to the highest taxes in the world. Yet most socialist countries seem to have universal health care and a pretty enviable quality of life in exchange for their high taxes compared to the US where we get more prisons, economic serfdom to a new Oligarchy and a forever war. And before anyone tosses out Venezuela or another failed dictatorship that cloaked itself in socialism, there's plenty of failed democracy's to pair that against, so don't even bother.
As for the tax breaks for insurance companies, nobody liked it then either, but it was the only way to get wide spread health care without the Republican nuclear explosion that expanding Medicare universally and having single payer would have done, so we accepted it as an at the time necessary mess. Thank a deity of your choice that Republicans are saving us from that, by doing even more to destroy health care accessibility and likely imploding Medicare at the same time, to pay for their cuts to the wealthy.
They were also simultaneously suing the community ISP to delay their build out while they were rushing to put in their own wire.
Large tax breaks to corporations generally equate to those companies spending between 10 and 20% of the initial take on employees wages and bonus's. This is already known. The larger portion goes to dividends for stock holders and the rest is company cash assets. The fact that Comcast is claiming that the investment they have already been making is now due to the end of net neutrality is absurd at any level. I can claim that I'll pay my electric bill for the rest of the year because of net neutrality, so what.
you simply can't be that naive. Nobody is. The bonuses were already decided on long before the tax bill (which was surprisingly uncertain, but in the end passed because the Republican's donors made it clear that if it didn't they weren't getting any more money). They'll use the $1.5 trillion in new debt as an excuse for entitlement 'reform', meaning they'll pocket our social security and medicare money. We got sold out. All of us. Unless you've got a silver spoon in your mouth you're in for a rude, rude awakening when you're 65 and dying of a completely preventable disease.
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You're, of course, getting it exactly backwards. Companies like Comcast (which you're oddly confusing with being a "monopoly" ... despite the fact that are only one provider of such services out of multiple) - especially the big ones like them, Verizon, etc - LIKED Obama's rule. Because it made things harder on smaller, competing providers. Stop pretending you actually believe the crap you're spewing, and stop being a phony troll who's actually shilling for companies like Comcast. They wanted the more complex regulator environment in place, not stripped away. And you know that, and are simply lying with your childish-sounding theatrics.
No, you have it backwards. When Comcast is the only cable provider and high speed internet provider in your county/state, they are a monopoly. It doesn't matter that people in the next county/state have Cox. Multiple providers in the country isn't competition if they don't actually compete for each other's customers. Also they don't want a complex regulatory environment. A regulatory environment gets reviewed by experts in the field and can be changed fairly rapidly in response to abuses. They want laws with plenty of loopholes written by themselves and handed to Congress as a fait accompli instead because getting one of those changed after the fact takes monumental effort.
They also lacked specifics as to how Obama's NN rules made things worse.
Case in point... Comcast's bandwidth cap. 1 terabyte. You go over and you pay quite a bit for overages. Or for $50/month (at least in my area) more, you can have the cap removed. Already paying for the faster 'blast' speed tier? That just means you will hit the cap faster than those who don't.
Worse, this cap actually creates an environment beneficial to them and hostile to non Comcast streaming services... despite the rules.
Remember, the rules only covered internet traffic, on which Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, YouTube all traverse. The dirty little secret of the latest generation of Comcast boxes, is that they are pretty simple boxes with a cable modem inside which streams all but live shows. Even the latest generation of DVRs don't have a hard drive inside, they just stream from a private cloud. While your binge watching of something on Netflix traverses the public internet and counts against your bandwidth cap... you binge watching something via the X1 platform and your Comcast provided set top box doesn't. Sure, both use DOCSIS to communicate to the head office... one exits to the public internet, the other remains on a private network.
This means that as data usage increases due to higher degrees of consumption, cord cutting, or 4k video from streaming services, your use of Comcast's services is essentially 'free', while you only have a limited capacity for the external providers.
Welcome to the world which NN created.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The consent decree imposed on Comcast for the NBCUniversal merger is set to expire soon. However, there is a lot of risk the federal government may extend it. Since Trump seems susceptible to flattery/buttering up, giving him credit for things seems a cheap way to curry favor.
Certainly, their statement should be taken with a grain of salt.
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Fascinating... the fake news is coming just as the Trump's Department of Justice is deciding if Comcast lived up to the negotiated antitrust terms it agreed to when it purchased NBCUniversal.
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"Lowering taxes" isn't going to do anything
That's not quite true. Lowering the nominal tax rate will reduce the differential in actual rate between companies that engage in active tax avoidance and those that don't. That may end up making smaller businesses (that can't afford armies of accountants and lawyers to figure out the loopholes) slightly more competitive.
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Yeah, Comcast is generally a lame company, but to say an official announcement by the decision maker about the reasons for a particular decision equals "no evidence" is quite a biased stretch,
No, it is not even a short stretch. Only a compleat idiot (look it up) would believe something because there was a press release about it. The rest of your comment is thus utterly invalidated by simple common sense, and not just that you shouldn't listen to anything said by anyone who just said something so blatantly false, but that the rest of it is predicated upon trusting the words of corporate PR flacks and officers. Lying to you is literally part of their jobs. Looks like it's working brilliantly on you.
If you read the press release, that's the part most specifically attributed to the tax cuts and the FCC rule change.
AT&T says the same thing, while cutting 2,000 jobs. I wonder how many jobs Comcast will cut? And I further wonder how many employees will actually get those bonuses. Comcast is literally known for not keeping their word.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So no actual evidence, just holding your hands over your ears and shouting "I don't believe you!"
It is literally the opposite. There is no actual evidence that these corporations will do what they say they will, and ample [historical] evidence that they will not. In fact, the available evidence says that when they say they will do something, they will do something else. You know, like when we paid them hundreds of millions of dollars to build out the last mile, and they gave the money to their executives as bonuses instead.
Seems pretty desperate, there.
You seem pretty desperate to support their narrative. Shareholder, or employee?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How in the world did you manage to confuse the BBC with CNN?
Payroll expenses are exempt from corporate taxes and investments are tax-deductible over an extended period of time. So explain to me how exactly do tax cuts help you pay for something that's tax-deductible anyway?
Why is it rational? Repeal of the NN means that they actually don’t need to invest more, as they can extract bigger profit from existing infrastructure.
What amazes me is how long we are already fighting this. And once it is gone, we will never be able to get it back.
Here an article about it : https://www.dailykos.com/story...
Not so much the content is interesting, but the date. December 26th, 2010. twothousand-fucking-ten. And even if it won't happen now and the next two precidency terms are Dems, the one after that will be Rep again and they will go for it again. They only need to succeed once. We can never fail.
So I am actually a bit happy to see those articles. It means there is still a bit of hope.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Large tax breaks to corporations generally equate to those companies spending between 10 and 20% of the initial take on employees wages and bonus's. This is already known.
[citation needed]
Large tax breaks to corporations generally equate to those companies spending between 10 and 20% of the initial take on employees wages and bonus's. This is already known.
[citation needed]
Correct, nowhere near 10-20% of large tax breaks goes to employees. Of the $300 billion companies saved from the 2004 Homeland Investment Act, about 92% of it went to shareholders in the form of share buybacks and dividends. The top 15 companies, who accounted for half of the repatriated money, cut 20,000 net jobs in the three years following the tax break.
But the remaining 8% didn't even all go to employees. I couldn't find exact figures, but some of that also went to capital purchases. At best you could say 5%-10% of large tax breaks go to employees, but even that is probably a bit high.
There is no honest debate on whether this tax bill will meaningfully boost the economy and help American workers. It won't. It will boost the stock market (or more likely already has) and create the illusion that the economy has improved, but that is about it.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
How so? Because Net Neutrailty set pricing structures?
Net Neutrality was sure a magical, all encompassing piece of regulation. Everything bad that happens from now to the end of time can be blamed on it being repealed and nothing good can be credited to it..
Businesses aim to maximize profit. They do not set a profit cap and then try to extract it in the easiest way.
Corporate taxes are designed to encourage reinvesting profits (tax deductible) instead of shoveling them straight to the shareholders (not tax deductible). Lowering the corporate tax rate will result in less profit reinvesting and more shoveling to shareholders. But at least until the 2018 elections, there will be lots of PR hot air about investments, otherwise the GOP tax scam might get repealed before it even takes effect.
There is no honest debate on whether this tax bill will meaningfully boost the economy and help American workers. It won't. It will boost the stock market (or more likely already has) and create the illusion that the economy has improved, but that is about it.
So, you are saying that it will only boost the stock market. Which based on my last 12 months, my 401(k) and my separate stock account has grown by 21%. That's basically all the money I have saved over my lifetime is now 21% bigger, and the "only" thing it will do is increase it (assuming the same rate or better than last year) another 21%?
I think your logic here is pretty flawed because I'm an American worker, and I can tell you without a doubt that another 21% growth in my 401(k) and stock market accounts will meaningfully help me prepare for retirement someday, add to my rainy day cushion fund, and a not insignificant portion of it has already and will likely continue to go back into the economy.
In the past 3 months, I've bought a new house (which I haven't done in 25 years), upgraded all the fire detectors/carbon monoxide detectors with nest protects, replaced the thermostat with a nest thermostat, replaced (some) lighting with Philips Hue lights and replaced (some) CFLs with LEDs, bought 6 echo/echo dots, bought two bedroom sets, one couch, remodeled a bathroom, paid off my car loan in full, hired a contractor for some misc stuff, etc etc. So while I can't speak for everyone, I can definitely tell you that from my personal perspective you are dead wrong.
one exits to the public internet, the other remains on a private network.
One is an internet service, one is not. Sorry, but I have Comcast, and their video services are broadcast on the same old channels that the analog TV signals were carried on. I've got ATSC tuners on that cable and they can still pull off the few unencrypted channels there, while showing me the existence all of the encrypted ones. I can't watch them, but I can get the channel and stream numbers and names for them all. My Homerun devices can even tell me the frequencies for the channels.
But in any case, what you've just said means that Comcast does not sum up your bandwidth on their private network that you pay for in one lump on your cable TV bill, but does sum up the bandwidth that goes across the public internet and through their border gateways where it costs them money to expand. I'm not surprised at that, and find little reason to be excited either way. They can't charge or cap your TV service -- they can tell what you are watching through the STB backchannel (but not for a DTA that has none) and the data is there 24/7 whether you watch it or not.
your use of Comcast's services is essentially 'free',
Excuse me? Shall I show you my cable bill and the list of channels I am paying to get, all with a monthly charge? You don't get nothin' from Comcast for free, essentially or not. You pay quite a bit for the availability of certain channels 24/7, and your use of them does not change the signals on the wire in any way.
while you only have a limited capacity for the external providers.
Which exists for all "external providers" irrespective of source. That's net neutral. Yes, you can compare two different delivery systems for two different sources of data, but that's apples and oranges. The "private network" of cable TV is not slowing down the public network of Netflix; there is no prioritization of one over the other. There is no relation between the two.