Agree completely legislation is the better path if NN is going to happen. Respectfully disagree it's correct on the technical merits. But in any event, why are you bullish that it passes both houses? I'm not seeing the collective appetite for that but may be missing something.
If it's a simple majority I think Ajit Pai is going to have his ass handed to him by Congress, and rightly so.
Even if the Senate Dems were to vote in lockstep, which is less than clear, this would have to pass in the House as well, then survive a presidential veto. That's not going to happen, and TFA says as much. This is nothing but political posturing on Schumer's part.
Using the term "Restore Internet freedom" is the dead give away that this is bad news for regular folks. Very much along the lines of terms "PATRIOT Act" and "Homeland Security".
Yeah, but I bet a lot of the people with giant glasses aren't actively engaging in "oenophilia", they're just people trying to signal their sophistication.
Oh, there are plenty of pretentious thirty thousandaires out there drinking subpar wines with famous big-box labels out of fancy glasses just because that's what they're s'posed to do, don't get me wrong. But they do the same thing with food, clothes, houses, cars, and any other normal life experience they can twist into a status symbol.
Kit Carson Telecom has run fiber all over their service area around Taos, New Mexico - much of it rural, and with numerous geographical obstacles (mountains, national forest land, pueblo land).
Um, looking at the coverage maps on Kit Carson's website, they've only run fiber to a handful of their service areas. I'll take a wild guess that most if not all of these are in more densely populated areas.
Rural fiber isn't hard at all if you have a good relationship with the incumbent electric utility and the lines are above ground.
Agree wholeheartedly. Layer a high-deductible policy on top of that (true "health insurance" for big, unexpected problems rather than the make-my-office-visits-and-pills-a-bit-cheaper system we have today), and the vast majority of people would be set.
I'm in a restaurant and I think my wine glass is a reaction chamber for a chemistry experiment.
It is. Wine tends to improve (sometimes significantly) with short-term exposure to oxygen. The more surface area of the wine you expose, the faster those favorable reactions happen. This is the reason for decanters, and, yes, one of the reasons for larger glasses. The increased surface area in the glass also releases more aroma.
To call it "snobbery" seems a bit off -- these are well-recognized scientific principles that hold true for wine at pretty much any price point. If you're going to spend money on wine in the first place, why would you not take reasonable and simple steps to maximize your experience?
This has got to be intentional as these companies are salivating at the thought of making our internet like cell phones before 2007 where you had to pay a monthly fee for each service such as adding a ringtone or a map program. Net Neutrality now is the only force holding them back.
Yeah, because that's exactly what we all had to do between 2007 and 2015. I'd suggest decaf.
You clearly follow this stuff pretty closely. I've frankly not run into many people on the other side of the NN debate that seem to want to do much beyond swilling beer and extolling the virtues of "freedom" through increased governmental regulation. Though I suspect ultimately we're not going to see eye to eye on everything, I appreciate you taking the time to discuss. A couple of thoughts/questions:
Following Comcast's bad behavior in 2008, the 2010 ruling stated that the FCC was incorrect in its legal analysis and that they lacked the authority to enforce neutrality with the current rules they had in place, essentially opening a massive hole in policy that was never intended by any administration.
Congress has had seven years, under two different administrations and under control of both parties (four of those years prior to Wheeler's NN rules), to legislatively change that. They didn't. IMO that facially makes "never intended" a bit thin. Do you have more specifics on why they took no action on this if it was so blazingly contrary to what they wanted?
The FCC of today is actively working to open holes that were never intended to exist, despite bipartisan attempts by the three previous administrations to keep them closed
Help me out with that. As I understand it, Pai is replacing Wheeler's set of regulations with another set of regulations. How is that not at a minimum equally restrictive as what existed pre-Wheeler? What holes is today's FCC actively trying to open?
Were the market in a healthy condition, I'd agree that there are sufficient checks and balances in place to (generally) ensure good behavior, but with the state of the market as it is . . . I feel that there is simply no choice but to maintain the existing regulations until the market is once again healthy.
I'm guessing you're not suggesting that the regulations in and of themselves will make the market inherently "healthy" again, since you're predicting Bad Things within a year of them being removed. And if you're talking about the market somehow improving itself over time through competitive behavior, there seems little opportunity for that when any new entrants would be forced to adopt exactly the same model as the incumbents. How do you see this coming about?
Remember when the American ISPs and telecoms were given billions of taxpayer dollars to build out the infrastructure?
Copper? They did.
Fiber? No, I can't say I remember that one on a national scale -- there have been some deals with local municipalities, but of course that's not what you're talking about in a thread about rural coverage, right?
Afford fiber? It's cheaper than copper - it really is.
I'd be fairly surprised if that's true across the board. If you're looking at a densely-populated metro area where the customer base more readily balances out the installation cost, that may well be the case. But in a sparsely-populated rural area, by definition rates are going to have to be higher unless the ISP improbably signs up to take a loss.
And it seems better than losing customers to greater competition from cellular.
A customer whose business likely will never recoup the capex required to keep that customer may not be a customer you want to try to keep.
It would be awesome if people would open their eyes a bit to the overall system of checks and balances we have in this country and not just declare the only two options to be a state-controlled Internet or the wild wild west.
And this is why there is hardly any infrastructure build-out or aggressive replacement of copper with fiber in rural areas.
And certainly not because that build-out would cost millions of dollars in exchange for $5/month margins from the 37 customers that both want and can afford fiber. Nah....
Searching for yourself only draws more attention. Each query is added to the database. Google picks up on those things when they scrape the site. Suddenly your name is everywhere in every search engine.
Um, yeah. They just may have thought of that one. Here's the robots.txt:
The fix is to give choice to the consumer (last mile) via building out infrastructure in such a way that any vendor can deliver their products and services to any user at the end of the last mile.
I agree that sort of approach makes a lot of sense in principle, and that's already the case for telecom copper and fiber. So-called Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs, like Windstream) lease lines from Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs, like AT&T). There's a decent discussion of how that has played out in the fiber world here starting on page 7.
They're ignoring the problems now, what makes you believe they won't ignore the problems to come?
Which "they"? Which problems? Every time I ask this, people finally end up admitting (grudgingly or not) that there are no actual problems right now. Will you be the first to buck the trend?
I mean, we only have history to look at to show what has actually happened in the recent past.
Who knows what specific events you're referring to, but here's the FTC's detailed analysis of the net neutrality debate and ways the FTC could protect consumers if the boogeyman ever actually makes it out from under the bed, including an extensive section on enforcement options under the antitrust law framework. If you have some specific reason you think that's inadequate, I'm happy to discuss details. If not, I would gently suggest you stop making such brash pronouncements about what is and is not going to work.
So yes, I really believe that, and yes, I think you're a fool for not believing it.
First, you've subtly changed what "it" is -- your original post bought into last night's nonsense that companies just have to say the functional equivalent of "you can't tag me -- I'm touching base" and then the FTC can't take action. I take it this means you don't really believe that.
Second, see above. Though I'm not going to stoop to calling you a fool, I do think you're severely overreacting based on a very myopic worldview. We'll see which one of us is right in a few years.
In short, ISPs will be free to do whatever they want -- unless they make specific promises to avoid engaging in specific types of anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior.
Reality check, folks: Do you really, REALLY believe the FTC can only investigate and punish anticompetitive behavior by a company if the company had promised not to be anticompetitive?
"But, but... some tech journalist at Ars Technica said so!"
It's been stunning to me throughout this NN debate to see how quickly and freely people simply abandon their critical thinking skills when someone who (at best) doesn't understand a whit about what they're writing about pens a purely inflammatory article like this.
I found this part of TFA a bit more illuminating than the summary:
The arrival of bitcoin futures on the CBOE and the CME might have been expected to bring maturity to the market, and to establish a reliable price. But the FT reports that some of the biggest banks including JP Morgan and Citigroup are unwilling to act as market-makers. That is not too surprising. Any market-maker has to hedge its own positions and that looks very hard when the underlying market has such wild swings.
consider the source: . . . Of course, that doesn't mean the analysis is automatically bunk, but it certainly does raise alarms.
Which is one of the reasons I pointed out that the data source is freely downloadable (and has been digested and reposted online by at least one source I've seen in passing). Point being, there are enough eyes on the data behind this highly-charged subject that if any of the multiple reports on this data were fudging anything, I'm confident someone would have quite cheerfully pointed that out a long time ago.
Any meaningful analysis would have to go quite a bit deeper than trusting the address that someone put in.
But once you go there, isn't the only realistic option to just throw out the entire database since there was no validation process in place whatsoever? That actually would be fine with me since, as I've said many times, this wasn't a ballot box, and so which people "voted" which way could by definition have no bearing on the outcome. But to the extent people like OP want to try to draw conclusions from the data, this sort of thing is what the data tells us.
A lot of the spam is from adversarial interests against the general American population, such as ISPs, Russia, etc.
That may have different implications than you think. Per page 13 of this analysis of the comments, there were 444,938 comments submitted from Russia, and 444,925 of them were pro-NN.
Slashdot Mirror
Agree completely legislation is the better path if NN is going to happen. Respectfully disagree it's correct on the technical merits. But in any event, why are you bullish that it passes both houses? I'm not seeing the collective appetite for that but may be missing something.
If it's a simple majority I think Ajit Pai is going to have his ass handed to him by Congress, and rightly so.
Even if the Senate Dems were to vote in lockstep, which is less than clear, this would have to pass in the House as well, then survive a presidential veto. That's not going to happen, and TFA says as much. This is nothing but political posturing on Schumer's part.
that a little birdie told them so. Really compelling stuff.
But who cares -- it's flashy and hugely controversial, and so will generate a yuuuuge number of SlashClicks.
You do realise that engaging in the 'tu quoque' fallacy is admitting your side is wrong, right?
No, but I could definitely see that for making up questionable propositions to try to distract from inescapable irony.
Using the term "Restore Internet freedom" is the dead give away that this is bad news for regular folks. Very much along the lines of terms "PATRIOT Act" and "Homeland Security".
Don't forget the "Affordable Care Act."
Yeah, but I bet a lot of the people with giant glasses aren't actively engaging in "oenophilia", they're just people trying to signal their sophistication.
Oh, there are plenty of pretentious thirty thousandaires out there drinking subpar wines with famous big-box labels out of fancy glasses just because that's what they're s'posed to do, don't get me wrong. But they do the same thing with food, clothes, houses, cars, and any other normal life experience they can twist into a status symbol.
Kit Carson Telecom has run fiber all over their service area around Taos, New Mexico - much of it rural, and with numerous geographical obstacles (mountains, national forest land, pueblo land).
Um, looking at the coverage maps on Kit Carson's website, they've only run fiber to a handful of their service areas. I'll take a wild guess that most if not all of these are in more densely populated areas.
Rural fiber isn't hard at all if you have a good relationship with the incumbent electric utility and the lines are above ground.
And apparently it's even easier if you don't worry too much about customer service, network availability, or the other finer points of being an ISP.
Agree wholeheartedly. Layer a high-deductible policy on top of that (true "health insurance" for big, unexpected problems rather than the make-my-office-visits-and-pills-a-bit-cheaper system we have today), and the vast majority of people would be set.
I'm in a restaurant and I think my wine glass is a reaction chamber for a chemistry experiment.
It is. Wine tends to improve (sometimes significantly) with short-term exposure to oxygen. The more surface area of the wine you expose, the faster those favorable reactions happen. This is the reason for decanters, and, yes, one of the reasons for larger glasses. The increased surface area in the glass also releases more aroma.
To call it "snobbery" seems a bit off -- these are well-recognized scientific principles that hold true for wine at pretty much any price point. If you're going to spend money on wine in the first place, why would you not take reasonable and simple steps to maximize your experience?
This has got to be intentional as these companies are salivating at the thought of making our internet like cell phones before 2007 where you had to pay a monthly fee for each service such as adding a ringtone or a map program. Net Neutrality now is the only force holding them back.
Yeah, because that's exactly what we all had to do between 2007 and 2015. I'd suggest decaf.
You clearly follow this stuff pretty closely. I've frankly not run into many people on the other side of the NN debate that seem to want to do much beyond swilling beer and extolling the virtues of "freedom" through increased governmental regulation. Though I suspect ultimately we're not going to see eye to eye on everything, I appreciate you taking the time to discuss. A couple of thoughts/questions:
Following Comcast's bad behavior in 2008, the 2010 ruling stated that the FCC was incorrect in its legal analysis and that they lacked the authority to enforce neutrality with the current rules they had in place, essentially opening a massive hole in policy that was never intended by any administration.
Congress has had seven years, under two different administrations and under control of both parties (four of those years prior to Wheeler's NN rules), to legislatively change that. They didn't. IMO that facially makes "never intended" a bit thin. Do you have more specifics on why they took no action on this if it was so blazingly contrary to what they wanted?
The FCC of today is actively working to open holes that were never intended to exist, despite bipartisan attempts by the three previous administrations to keep them closed
Help me out with that. As I understand it, Pai is replacing Wheeler's set of regulations with another set of regulations. How is that not at a minimum equally restrictive as what existed pre-Wheeler? What holes is today's FCC actively trying to open?
Were the market in a healthy condition, I'd agree that there are sufficient checks and balances in place to (generally) ensure good behavior, but with the state of the market as it is . . . I feel that there is simply no choice but to maintain the existing regulations until the market is once again healthy.
I'm guessing you're not suggesting that the regulations in and of themselves will make the market inherently "healthy" again, since you're predicting Bad Things within a year of them being removed. And if you're talking about the market somehow improving itself over time through competitive behavior, there seems little opportunity for that when any new entrants would be forced to adopt exactly the same model as the incumbents. How do you see this coming about?
Remember when the American ISPs and telecoms were given billions of taxpayer dollars to build out the infrastructure?
Copper? They did.
Fiber? No, I can't say I remember that one on a national scale -- there have been some deals with local municipalities, but of course that's not what you're talking about in a thread about rural coverage, right?
Afford fiber? It's cheaper than copper - it really is.
I'd be fairly surprised if that's true across the board. If you're looking at a densely-populated metro area where the customer base more readily balances out the installation cost, that may well be the case. But in a sparsely-populated rural area, by definition rates are going to have to be higher unless the ISP improbably signs up to take a loss.
And it seems better than losing customers to greater competition from cellular.
A customer whose business likely will never recoup the capex required to keep that customer may not be a customer you want to try to keep.
We had court rulings that permitted ISPs to block BitTorrent (see the results of Comcast v. FCC)
Of course, Comcast had already stopped blocking BitTorrent about two years before that ruling, due at least in part to a class-action lawsuit filed in the same general timeframe as the FCC investigation. And who knows what the FTC would have done had Comcast not folded.
It would be awesome if people would open their eyes a bit to the overall system of checks and balances we have in this country and not just declare the only two options to be a state-controlled Internet or the wild wild west.
And this is why there is hardly any infrastructure build-out or aggressive replacement of copper with fiber in rural areas.
And certainly not because that build-out would cost millions of dollars in exchange for $5/month margins from the 37 customers that both want and can afford fiber. Nah....
Searching for yourself only draws more attention. Each query is added to the database. Google picks up on those things when they scrape the site. Suddenly your name is everywhere in every search engine.
Um, yeah. They just may have thought of that one. Here's the robots.txt:
User-agent: * /Account/* /account/* /Verify/* /verify/* /HowFastIsAzureTableStorage/* /DomainSearch/* /DomainSearch/$
Sitemap: https://haveibeenpwned.com/sit...
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Allow:
There's always a literalist in the crowd. This is probably just two alliterative pairings.
The fix is to give choice to the consumer (last mile) via building out infrastructure in such a way that any vendor can deliver their products and services to any user at the end of the last mile.
I agree that sort of approach makes a lot of sense in principle, and that's already the case for telecom copper and fiber. So-called Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs, like Windstream) lease lines from Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs, like AT&T). There's a decent discussion of how that has played out in the fiber world here starting on page 7.
They're ignoring the problems now, what makes you believe they won't ignore the problems to come?
Which "they"? Which problems? Every time I ask this, people finally end up admitting (grudgingly or not) that there are no actual problems right now. Will you be the first to buck the trend?
I mean, we only have history to look at to show what has actually happened in the recent past.
Who knows what specific events you're referring to, but here's the FTC's detailed analysis of the net neutrality debate and ways the FTC could protect consumers if the boogeyman ever actually makes it out from under the bed, including an extensive section on enforcement options under the antitrust law framework. If you have some specific reason you think that's inadequate, I'm happy to discuss details. If not, I would gently suggest you stop making such brash pronouncements about what is and is not going to work.
So yes, I really believe that, and yes, I think you're a fool for not believing it.
First, you've subtly changed what "it" is -- your original post bought into last night's nonsense that companies just have to say the functional equivalent of "you can't tag me -- I'm touching base" and then the FTC can't take action. I take it this means you don't really believe that.
Second, see above. Though I'm not going to stoop to calling you a fool, I do think you're severely overreacting based on a very myopic worldview. We'll see which one of us is right in a few years.
All they have to do is stop promising to uphold Net Neutrality precepts, and then they're totally in the clear.
And with that, the latest silly meme has officially jumped threads. Do you really, REALLY believe that?
In short, ISPs will be free to do whatever they want -- unless they make specific promises to avoid engaging in specific types of anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior.
Reality check, folks: Do you really, REALLY believe the FTC can only investigate and punish anticompetitive behavior by a company if the company had promised not to be anticompetitive?
"But, but... some tech journalist at Ars Technica said so!"
It's been stunning to me throughout this NN debate to see how quickly and freely people simply abandon their critical thinking skills when someone who (at best) doesn't understand a whit about what they're writing about pens a purely inflammatory article like this.
It's not phrased in legal terms, therefore Pai will ignore it.
Sarcasm aside, if you actually take a look at the submission it's pretty clear it was written by lawyers.
I found this part of TFA a bit more illuminating than the summary:
The arrival of bitcoin futures on the CBOE and the CME might have been expected to bring maturity to the market, and to establish a reliable price. But the FT reports that some of the biggest banks including JP Morgan and Citigroup are unwilling to act as market-makers. That is not too surprising. Any market-maker has to hedge its own positions and that looks very hard when the underlying market has such wild swings.
consider the source: . . . Of course, that doesn't mean the analysis is automatically bunk, but it certainly does raise alarms.
Which is one of the reasons I pointed out that the data source is freely downloadable (and has been digested and reposted online by at least one source I've seen in passing). Point being, there are enough eyes on the data behind this highly-charged subject that if any of the multiple reports on this data were fudging anything, I'm confident someone would have quite cheerfully pointed that out a long time ago.
Any meaningful analysis would have to go quite a bit deeper than trusting the address that someone put in.
But once you go there, isn't the only realistic option to just throw out the entire database since there was no validation process in place whatsoever? That actually would be fine with me since, as I've said many times, this wasn't a ballot box, and so which people "voted" which way could by definition have no bearing on the outcome. But to the extent people like OP want to try to draw conclusions from the data, this sort of thing is what the data tells us.
A lot of the spam is from adversarial interests against the general American population, such as ISPs, Russia, etc.
That may have different implications than you think. Per page 13 of this analysis of the comments, there were 444,938 comments submitted from Russia, and 444,925 of them were pro-NN.
The entire comment database is freely available for download if you'd like to check for yourself.