Chief cable lobbyist: data caps were never about network congestion, always about profit

[bwv812]

It’s pretty clear we disagree about the value of citations. While including citations may appear to place the onus on the opponent for actually looking at them, including no citations certainly does something very similar but with the additional burden of finding citations. Bad citations may not strengthen arguments, but at it least it gives others an idea of where one gets one’s information and their biases.

@Dave_Baxter

No one has given you grief for anything, though we have argued against your declarations. But you have given grief to others about lack of citations when it wasn’t a topic of contention yet.

I’m not sure how citations become an item of contention without one bringing the issue up. If this is “giving grief,” then I’m sorry.

@Dave_Baxter

It suggests that people believe what the telecos have publicly stated as their beliefs. No one has to “be in the pocket” of anyone to believe anything or accept certain talking points as evidence. I’m not in the pocket of consumer activist groups, but I’m generally convinced by many things they’ve reported. The point here is that what the telecos have reported leaves out a central and critial element - it says subsidies in the US for broadband don’t exist.

If you’re simply saying that confirmation bias exists, then I don’t think anyone will disagree. But I’m not sure why that is specific to telcos—as your comment suggested—or why you seem to think that people who share some beliefs with the telcos also believe that there were no subsidies. Agreeing with some points doesn’t mean you have the exact same opinion on everything.

@Dave_Baxter

Virtually every government action on earth lowers input costs for some businesses somewhere. Why is one create an “artificial” price and another not?

As I said in the unquoted portion of my reply, all government regulations and laws affect the market. The subsidies that exist in many markets (from cars to broadband) create artificial prices where the price being charged by retailers do not fully encapsulate the actual cost of the good or service. In your terms, the actual price does not reflect the natural price. One doesn’t need to completely describe the affect of government incentives on every good and service in the market in order to identify one product as being artificially priced.

@Dave_Baxter

This sounds like we’re in agreement here, but the tone is one of contesting, so I can’t really tell if you think we’re not. I already acknowledged the infrastructure part, and that price and bandwidth is not linear. So…?

This arose from your claim that telcos have done nothing but raise prices since the '90s, with the implication that service quality has not also increased in that time.

@Dave_Baxter

I’m not sure why you think the telecom market is competitive today - competition has gone DOWN since the 90’s as telecoms has consolidated heavily after the deregulation of the market. This you can just Google plainly.

During the time period concerned with that amicus brief, Verizon (nee New Jersey Bell) had something in excess of a 90% share of the NJ phone market and it appears the bill in question was written specifically for Verizon. This is not a competitive market.

@Dave_Baxter

But no one does claim that roads being build creates artificially low prices for any business that would have to build the roads themselves otherwise.

Sure they do. Why have Americans preferred large cars that consume a lot of gas while other nations prefer small, efficient cars? Government policy, and not the “natural price” of petrol, road costs, parking, etc., is a large determinant of where the market ends up.

@Dave_Baxter

Whoever is buying any commodity are the consumers of that commodity, so yes. The reason Apple doesn’t return jobs to the states is because they know they can’t raise the price to adjust for the increased costs while retaining profit margin.

You said earlier that when there are fewer consumers who can afford a product that the price of that product will fall. Has this happened with gold? Or with iPhones?

Also, Apple could probably return assembly of phones to the US, but doing so would mean reduced labour flexibility, extended supply chains and inventory, and less market responsiveness. Hate to include this linkbait, but look here.

@Dave_Baxter

“So I make arguments and support them with links which you can follow or not. And it’s OK when you claim to follow the links and claim that they don’t provide information, when in fact they do.”

Lol, no. they. don’t. I’ve already covered this, and you keep saying “yes they do”. They give what they give, and it’s obviously incomplete and useless for the purpose of this argument.

Yeah, they give what they give, and that’s what I cite them for (in the exchange above, the report did cite sources for the quoted claim that European telcos make four times more profit than US ones). They may not provide the information you would like to cite them for, but that’s not why I cited them.