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Ajit Pai Thanks Congress For Helping Him Kill Net Neutrality Rules (arstechnica.com)
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai today thanked Congress for preventing the U.S. government from enforcing net neutrality rules. "The Pai-led Federal Communications Commission repealed Obama-era net neutrality rules, but the repeal could have been reversed by Congress if it acted before the end of its session," reports Ars Technica. "Democrats won a vote to reverse the repeal in the Senate but weren't able to get enough votes in the House of Representatives before time ran out." From the report: "I'm pleased that a strong bipartisan majority of the U.S. House of Representatives declined to reinstate heavy-handed Internet regulation," Pai said in a statement marking the deadline passage today. Pai claimed that broadband speed improvements and new fiber deployments in 2018 occurred because of his net neutrality repeal -- although speeds and fiber deployment also went in the right direction while net neutrality rules were in place. "Over the past year, the Internet has remained free and open," Pai said, adding that "the FCC's light-touch approach is working." Pai didn't mention a recent case in which CenturyLink temporarily blocked its customers' Internet access in order to show an ad or a recent research report accusing Sprint of throttling Skype (which Sprint denies).
The only thing I want to hear about that piece of crap is when he has been tossed in jail. I don't think it will happen, but Ajit Pai lied under oath in court and that is a criminal offense.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
he was really thanking congress for helping him secure an extremely high paying job for when he leaves government service.
The actual result was 35.8%. The previous year it was 22%. The interesting aspect of that is it's based upon speed results by a company that measures speed tests. That alone makes it biased since people who upgrade their connection are more likely to run a speedtest vs those who don't upgrade to not running said test. Of course people who are new to broadband will also be more likely to run a speedtest, but the number of people new to broadband may not be increasing rapidly. Finally, speedtests are precisely the sort of thing that net neutrality rules would be designed to prevent being gamed by granting them higher priority to create the appearance of improved performance vs actual average performance.
In short, I'd like to see a more systematic measure of speed from a variety of metrics that in aggregate could be used to measure actual broadband penetration, speed, etc. It's not enough to read a news article linking to one website's numbers and accept it as fact any more than I'd trust Steam statistics as fact.