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FCC Can Define Markets With Only One ISP as 'Competitive', Court Rules (arstechnica.com)
An appeals court has upheld a Federal Communications Commission ruling that broadband markets can be competitive even when there is only one Internet provider. From a report: The FCC "rationally chose which evidence to believe among conflicting evidence," the court ruling said. The FCC voted last year to eliminate price caps imposed on some business broadband providers such as AT&T and Verizon. The FCC decision eliminated caps in any given county if 50 percent of potential customers "are within a half mile of a location served by a competitive provider." This is known as the "competitive market test." Because of this, broadband-using businesses might not benefit from price controls even if they have just one choice of ISP.
Truth isn't truth.
Where are all the Trump/Pai supporters to tell us how this is really a good thing and the invisible hand of the market will make everything all right? Is it possible there is some level of corporate cronyism that even they can't justify?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
The original rule was obvious bullshit. Price controls should be imposed unless 100% of potential customers have at least one competitive provider at each and every location.
Eliminating even the pretense of controlling the monopoly is not better. A new rule should actually control the monopoly. Or better yet, make it untenable to be a monopoly.
Just move...This probably just applies to rural shitholes anyways.
Businesses in rural shitholes are often the type you do NOT want in your city.
Have you ever smelled a chicken coop?
What about a processing plant for animal carcasses?
It is for everyone's benefit that they're in the middle of nowhere.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
These are places were your food is grown.
Despite looking like a painting from the 1800's With fields of produce, and livestock. Modern farms are actually often more High Tech then most Silicon Valley offices. With Robots, Self Driving Vehicles, Big Data analytics, real time market access.... Much of this all done over the farmers phone, when he is taking a 5 minute break from shoving crap.
Affordable High Speed Internet is key for rural areas.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This probably just applies to rural s...holes anyways.
Actually, the price caps remain in rural areas where only one ISP exists and a competitor is more than 1/2 mile away. So it seems to be exactly the opposite to me.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Government can now declare fruit is a vegetable
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Trump appointees continue mission of dismantling their institutions.
So have AT&T and Medicom established a checker-board pattern of non-compete territory all of which is half a mile from the other's guy's territory?
And which telecom do you think Ajit Pai is going to go work for once he's kicked out?
English wasn't my best subject, but doesn't competitive usually imply that 2 or more parties are involved.
How else can something be competitive?
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
These rural places also mostly support this kind of laissez faire approach to regulation. Which means they are either getting what they want or what they deserve. Either they'll like the results, in which case neither they or us have anything to complain about, or if they don't maybe they'll decide there is some value to good regulation.
Wow, you can't bring common sense like that to this type of debate. Come on, man.
Where are all the Trump/Pai supporters to tell us how this is really a good thing and the invisible hand of the market will make everything all right? Is it possible there is some level of corporate cronyism that even they can't justify?
We're right here, and we don't necessarily agree with everything the administration does.
For example, I'm completely in favor of allowing women the ability to choose to have an abortion, with minimal government oversight (regulate the safety, not the right to choose).
But I also know that there are larger issues at hand, the two most obvious ones being the economy and immigration.
I accept that some of the smaller issues won't be handled in the way I think is optimal, but the bigger issues seem to be working out OK. For example, I really like the new economy, and I think illegal immigration needs to be reined in. (Legal immigration, to the tune of 1.1 million a year, is working out just fine - no problems with that.)
It's a question of priorities.
Would you quit a job over issues that you view as relatively minor, if the pay was good and had good benefits?
have been spending so much to win local elections. They've spent the last 30 years stacking the courts. Now it's paid off.
And I know it's not popular to call out one party because there's a bunch of pro-corporate Dems who helped stack those courts. But the Democrats at least have a party wing that refuses corporate & PAC money (they're called Justice Democrats, look 'em up). I know of no such animal for the other side. The Dems seem somewhat redeemable. e.g. the pro-consumer elements might take over at some point in a future I could conceive of. Barring a seismic shift like we got in the 60s after the civil rights movement I don't see that happening to the Republican party. At a certain point it's time to call a spade a spade.
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I don't have a farm, and I live as close to a major city as I can without subjecting my kids to its school system.
With that said, my uncle does have a farm. He's a leftover hippie, so would not exactly qualify for your stereotype. But even he is completely disgusted by regulations on farms. The amount of paperwork, licensing, etc he needed to carry out some vermiculture and composting was insane. Farmers don't necessarily object to all regulations - especially the anti-monopoly sort we're talking about here. What farmers hate is when city politicians with absolutely no experience with farming whatsoever enact laws that impact the viability of farming.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The people may politically vote that way, and talk the talk, but in reality they are very dependent on regulations. You will often see many exceptions on "anti-socialism" bills that seem to target farmers.
Just because you may disagree with their politics, it doesn't mean they shouldn't benefit from regulations just because they didn't vote for it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
These areas have only one ISP because local governments awarded a monopoly, and prohibit competition. These ISPs are not natural monopolies created by the market. There is no invisible hand of the market at work here because government regulation eliminated market forces.
The only areas free of the problem are the ones where government got out of the way and allowed multiple ISPs to compete.
(*) Much better economy, end of ISIS, getting our allies to pay more for their own defense, renegotiating trade deals with EU and Mexico (with Canada and China coming up), defunding terrorism by defunding Iran, tax rebates, the list goes on...)
US should stick solely to their own hemisphere. Only reason ISIS even appeared is that US and Britain toppled all more or less sane governments in middle east just so they could get a better deal on oil.
But there is need for a chicken coop to have a competitively priced web presence.
Just because it's not a market that you're in doesn't mean it's irrelevent. I had a contract for a cotton futures trading company recently. It's not something I'd even heard of before... but I wear cotton shirts and I eat chicken. For the people that make those things possible and profitable: they need to run their businesses well.
As I understand it, The rule is that if there is a competitor with 1/2 of a mile, they can rule that the market has competition. But if there are no competitors, then the price controls apply.
So I think the headline is a bit misleading here.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Yea, rural shitholes like Los Angeles.
Sounds like the incumbent is being tricked into raising their prices until the nearby competitor pulls their cables into the area. Then your lawyer better find a reason to sue the incumbent when they bring their prices down to undercut you.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
50 percent of potential customers "are within a half mile of a location served by a competitive provider."
WTF? Has the government been proceeding with their ears plugged for the past decade?
The whole issue is The last mile problem
A competing provider is not going to travel Half a Mile to try and grab another provider's customers ---- buildout is so extremely expensive that typically there is a tacit agreement between so-called "competitors" that they will stay away from other providers' turf.
Just TRY and get a cable company to service you whose nearest line is 1/2 a mile away.
Extending service by 1/2 mile of thickline is something like $30,000+ in a suburban/rural area, and potentially half a million or more in build costs to run the additional cable in an urban area ---- thus they aren't inclined to build, especially when the consequence is violating a de-facto unwritten informal but anti-competitive agreement b/w neighboring providers that risks causing revenue loss from losing other customers.
"Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'competitive' that I wasn't previously aware of."
Food? No. That would be if you fed them to pigs, which is totally legal and would not run afoul of the regulations. He was raising worms, not food. Unless you eat them, in which case I'll bring my own food for dinner.
I'd need a couple of hours of your time to explain the complex machinations (which I don't completely understand myself), but tl/dr is that because he WASN'T selling the worms as food, he became a "waste processing facility" by some definitions but not others. Under some code, the worms were livestock. He needed some of the permitting and zoning for waste processing AND some of the permitting and zoning for livestock. The entities that saw his operation differently had to be made to see eye-to-eye, which took quite a bit of doing. It took him the better part of a year to get all sorted out, and then he still had to deal with a certain big US company that is almost as bad, bureaucracy wise. Because even though he was a one-man operation who was hauling away their cafeteria waste, he was a "vendor" and had to go through the same processes as someone providing photolithography equipment. Oops, tangent.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Most of those regulations are free market regulations, the gov isn't always the bad guy.
Cheap storage VM.
Not to mention agriculture is a HUGE use of drone surveillance - often to measure irrigation, weeds, and other properties, as well as satellite imagery.
Except when receiving tons of farm subsidies. You want to know why Trump is harping on Canadian dairy? It's because in the US and Europe, dairy prices have crashed. They are making so much of it that if it wasn't for farm subsidies, they'd be out of business because the price is lower than the price of production.
Thus they see the higher prices for dairy in Canada as a savior, but then again, it'll likely collapse the prices and more farmers are out of business.
There's no reason to cram everyone into a dense urban center if so many people can work remotely from the comfort of home with no resource-wasting commutes.
You're the one with the backward way of thinking and this is a huge reason why rural broadband is so important.
How come we never hear any Democrat candidates harp on this issue?
How many votes would it get them? Or a Republican candidate, for that matter? Probably only a rounding error, especially since this ruling just happened and it's going to take some time for these ISPs to exploit the situation enough to attract attention.
So instead of campaigning on this narrow issue that isn't upsetting many people (yet), make it broader like repealing the laws banning municipal broadband and/or going after companies like Verizon that failed to live up to their service commitments.
Much better economy
Except it isn't much better. It's a continuation of the recovery from 2008. You'll notice there's been no inflection points you can point to where a trend reversed. Also, you're ignoring the problem we've had for the last 20 years - the vast majority of voters aren't benefiting from that better economy. Wages are flat or down depending on industry, so run-of-the-mill voters aren't particularly excited that investment bankers are making more money.
end of ISIS
They're actually still around....and not being attacked by US or US-backed forces. Assad and the Russians are the ones fighting them. We aren't talking about them because it's not US bombs falling on them.
getting our allies to pay more for their own defense
They're continuing to follow the commitments they made to George W Bush. There has been no change.
renegotiating trade deals with EU and Mexico
There's no trade deal with the EU.
The deal with Mexico is actually a US-Canada-Mexico deal, so it's not done yet either.....also nothing has been announced about that not-quite-deal that is an improvement over NAFTA, so I'm not sure why you're celebrating NAFTA version 1.2. Oooh! Now we renegotiate every 6 years instead of renegotiating whenever we want to.....hurray!!
defunding terrorism by defunding Iran
The branches of Islamic terrorism that attacked the US is funded by the Saudis, and Trump is giving the Saudis more money and guns.
tax rebates
No tax rebates have been passed. There's a massive tax cut, but it's insignificant to the vast majority of taxpayers.....and it also should result in everyone laughing at Republicans when they start crying about the deficit again.
It's almost like you guys have a media environment designed to misinform you.....
To be fair, those governments weren't terribly sane. They were brutal dictators. ....who were in power because the French and British drew more-or-less random borders in the former Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI, creating countries that were utterly ungovernable by anyone other than brutal dictators.
If Kavanaugh gets put on the Supreme Court, ISPs like Verizon/ATT/Comcast will be given free reign to rape and pillage users as they see fit.
If one ISP is considered a "competitive market", then what's a little throttling and price gouging among friends?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I don't know enough about the business to have an opinion on that article - but yes, that is very much the sentiment I was trying to express. There are good regulations and bad regulations. Farmers (in my limited experience) aren't anti-regulation, they are anti-bad-regulation.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Government can now declare fruit is a vegetable
Intelligence is knowing that the tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put one in a fruit salad.
Truth isn't truth.
Contradictions aren't contradictions?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Those worm farms can be mighty hazardous.
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When population density gets beyond a few 10s per km^2, this starts to seem pretty delusional. Can't wait for the ISP service area gerrymandering to start, if it hasn't already.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
In the U.S., if you do that, telecomms companies, even ones that were asked and explicitly refused to serve an area come out of the woodwork and sue for any stupid excuse they can find.
By that logic, you could argue that even if we only had one ISP in the whole USA, it would still be competitive based on comparative rates with international ISPs, right? Also have you ever lived in rural Indiana? I'm from there and I can tell you that service in those areas is nowhere near as good as the larger cities. To be competitive you have to have comparable services. Quality rural service is an afterthought to these companies because they know there are no other options.
Also, if they cared about competition, they wouldn't lobby against municipal ISPs with such vigor. They don't WANT to be competitive. When used by telecomms companies, words like "competitive" and "unlimited" are just buzz words.
I fail to see how this is even remotely possible. In the past decade milk has gone from $2/gal to $6+/gal.
Where the hell do you live?
Milk is currently $1.89 per gallon at my local big box grocery store. Even the boutique dairy in the next county is only $3.00 per gallon.
7/11 is $2.75
if any of this is going to change how anyone votes? Even a little. I realize this might not be a big enough issue to make the "single issue voter" grade, but so far as I can tell while it annoys people it's not something that even registers with even the most tech savvy voter. And so long as the FCC knows they can get away with it why stop? Especially when the gravy train of sweet post FCC cush jobs awaits.
I wouldn't mind seeing corruption be a bigger issue for Americans. They claim it is, but when it's time to vote they won't make it an issue. Not in any practical way.
What we really need is more guys like these who refuse corporate & PAC money. We should make refusing bribes a litmus test for all politicians. No refusal means no vote in the primary.
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We've always been in a trade war with Canada.
Welcome to the new world where one choice is competitive. Newspeak brought to you by the GOP.
For all the good things coming out of this administration (and admit it, lots of people see the things coming out of the administration as good*)
Yep, there's a lot of worthless fucking fascists in this country that are stupider than ratshit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Well to be fair, he can't really see anything while he's down on his knees in front of dipshit Trump, so he just has to listen to the dipshits lying to him from Fauxnews.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Probably Canada
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Yes, let's. It won't take long for them to decide bullets are more important than internet this month.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
So Maine with its state vegetable, the watermelon, has no intelligence?
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
so I don't really care where the quote came from.
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Having grown up in a rural area, my take is that generally farmers think they are anti-bad-regulation, but really they just end up being anti-whatever-their-lobby-tells-them regulation. They are kinda like small business owners, specialists with enough prestige that they tend to suck at knowing their limits and are easily suckered into voting against their best interests.
They weren't worse than Napoleon or Robespierre and were products of society of their countries. Also, black PR is part of arsenal of those imperialist powers, so we shouldn't take anything related to middle east at face value, including that statement that they were "brutal dictators". Only actions and outcomes matter, and practice shows that everyone who isn't blatantly incompetent "islamic" fanatic gets targeted by coups and assassinations. This must stop for there to be any chance of recovery.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Organic-Vitamin-D-Milk-1-Gallon/44391006
Shows as $5.68/gal here in Dallas. The non-organic is $1.49 but it expires in a week or less whereas this has an expiration date over a month out. Milk you'd want to give a human like Fairlife is more.
You really need to stop using that excuse. It's not relevant. If there is a road and a phone line, there can be fiber. A fiber connection is going to cost what it's going to cost, but that doesn't mean you can't do it yourself if nobody else will do it for you.
Well, in that case they should definitely let people who live in the city and have no idea how to farm tell them how to manage their land :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
if you're a corrupt politician you want the dollars from the cable companies. If you're not corrupt, well, this matters but you've got much bigger things to worry about. Healthcare for one. 45,000 people die in America every year from preventable diseases. Then there's the 8 wars we're in right now. Or our crumbling infrastructure. Or the fact that we're seeing more kids with food insecurity due to plummeting wages.
Even if you're a white knight who wants NN there's only so much you can do. That's certainly the vibe I get from Bernie. He did a bit of talking on NN but he's too busy with Medicare for All, the student loan crisis and getting wages raised. There's only so much time in the day and so much space in his constituents minds.
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Feminism is the push for gender equality.
Education is knowing that tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put on in a fruit salad again. Intelligence is having the ability to anticipate putting one in a fruit salad wouldn't be a good plan then trying it anyway.
Charisma is being able to sell a tomato-based fruit salad as, "salsa." (Yes, I'm familiar with this meme.)
I can't decide if this post is interesting, funny, insightful, or flamebait.
Well yes. Those 'people in cities' spend decades developing specialized skills that give them knowledge and insight farmers do not have the time or reason to learn. The majority of the skills that go into that high level management and planning are completely useless when it comes to everyday operation of running an agribusiness, and vice versa.
Correct - and I say this as one of those city folk - that's why there is such a disconnect... there is just such a huge difference in point of view between city and rural. And not just on farm regulations.... pick an issue! Find me a rural vegan. Gun control is fairly pointless in rural areas as they have little problem with gun homicides. Environmentalism is viewed very differently by people who live and work with nature vs. people who don't see why anyone should need or want to "defile" it. For that matter, while you'll have no problem finding people in the city who support recycling food waste, they have no interest in making it cost effective to do so even though they hold all the reins of power.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Intelligence is knowing that the tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put one in a fruit salad.
Charisma is selling someone a tomato salad.
Yes and no. We have a baby so reviewed milk prices not too far back (3-4 months). Anywhere from $2-3 gallon for the non-organic was the norm. If anything the drop is more extreme.
That doesn't make it competitive. I'm from rural Illinois which is basically the same animal as rural Indiana and the same service at the same price is not competitive. In a place where the quality of internet service is third world and $30,000-$50,000 makes you one of the distinguished high earning professionals in the surrounding 100 mile radius paying what you'd pay in LA is highway robbery.