Argh, ya ninja! ; -)
Thus spake The Wheeler: “You can’t say, ‘I want to follow the explicit instructions of Congress to remove barriers to infrastructure investment,’ but endorse barriers on infrastructure investment. You can’t say you’re for competition but deny local elected officials the right to offer competitive choices.”
But, of course, the GOP commissioners voted for just that.
Yep. Here’s hoping that opens the door for Google Fiber to spread like wildfire.
The government never listens to anything the people have to say so you’re all just wasting your time. I know I’m not going to lift a finger to help with this worthless, useless act of frivolous, self-congratulatory “activism”. You people signing petitions, raising concerns and sharing information with each other all over the place are very naive. Nothing ever changes because you people get together in your naive SJW circlejerks and…
edit: I’m already seeing the naysayers (who simply can’t help themselves) running around naysaying this had nothing to do with the public, etc. and it was simply because pro-NN corporations like Google supposedly spent more money than anti-NN entities – and… that’s a crock of naysayer bullshit.
The anti-net neutrality faction devoted more lobbying attention to the issue and consistently had a much larger lobbying footprint on the issue for many years.
Consistently, the anti-NN groups outspent the pro-NN groups by a margin of more than 5-to-1 for many years. It only narrowed in more recent times to about 3-to-1 after Google finally increased its lobbying presence after public pressure (you know, that public that naysayers squeal that no one listens to?).
The anti-NN groups vastly outspent the pro-NN groups. Now what, naysayers?
Now what folks need to do is make sure this ruling does not become a Trojan Horse for exactly the kind of abuses everyone was trying to prevent.
Yeah…sigh
I’m not sure what the colors on that map are exactly, but from my home in Somerville, MA, it’s even more depressing than it looks, since it appears that all of eastern Mass is covered, but in fact, it’s just a few rich suburbs.
handraise
With Fox and other ultra conservative sites going on about how this is ‘obamacare for the internet’ how do I give a proper dopeslap counter that doesn’t sound condescending and is easy to understand for my relatives?
Well, this is, at least potentially, a really good thing. Unfortunately it’s a good 15 years too late.
Back when there were literally thousands of independent ISPs across the country, of all sizes and with all kinds of different specializations and niches, this decision would have had a huge impact.
Back then, it would have meant that the level of choice and competition people once had for dial-up Internet providers would have rapidly extended to broadband providers. If you wanted dead-cheap absolutely basic service with no service guarantees and no customer support, you could have that. If you wanted high-end guaranteed service with knowledgeable support staff, you could have that. If you wanted some sort of special niche service for high-quality video, or gaming, or special security guarantees, or whatever, you could probably have that too.
It was as obvious in 1995 as it is now that Internet access was essentially a Title II telecommunications service - but back then the FCC literally took it to the Supreme Court to get a ruling that 1) they didn’t have to follow the law and classify it that way, and 2) they could shut down any municipalities that tried to require open access to cable or DSL internet. That slowly killed off virtually all the independent ISPs - who were dying to invest in broadband - and created this national oligopoly of fatass cable and telco Internet services who’ve mostly sat on their hands, raked in the profits, and gotten greedier and greedier.
We saw the writing on the wall back in 1999 and though I didn’t personally bail out of the ISP business until 2005, we could see which way it was headed. The local phone company could price bare DSL lines to the ISPs at a higher price than they charged consumers for DSL + Internet service, and that was the best-case scenario. Cable network access? Forget it. Pole access to run our own physical media? Forget it. As dial-up died, all the ISPs were choked out.
So the big question that this decision leaves is who’s going to jump in and genuinely invest in broadband now? They’re going to need awfully deep pockets, they’re going to have to fight the telcos and cable companies every inch of the way when it comes to technical issues and interconnection - and they’re going to be gambling their entire investment that the next change of FCC commissioners won’t turn around and reverse this, leaving them screwed.
I’m hopeful that some will turn up but there are only a few potential sources for that kind of investment - Google, Microsoft, etc. - so at best we’re likely to be saddled with all of their baggage.
Making it about common carrier is a good thing for a lot of reasons, but understanding that isn’t even needed to combat ISPs claims.
Ask your relatives how much they pay monthly for broadband.
Ask them what the bandwidth is that they are paying for from their ISP.
Ask them why Netflix has to pay to put stuff INTO the pipe at a speed far LESS than what they are ALREADY paying for.
If that doesn’t work, you could tell them that in the 20 years since Slick Willie Clinton signed the telco deregulation act, they PERSONALLY have paid more than $500 in tax incentives and rate increases to the companies fighting net neutrality which was supposed to pay for them running 90MB/s fiber to their house. Ask them how that’s worked out for them.
Not sure how true that is. Tacoma Washington has had municipal broadband for 15 years our so. Initially it had at least a dozen isps. I think it’s down to about 4 now. The scaling factors are probably just such that there wouldn’t be all that many in the end.
However it’s still way cheap to get broadband in Tacoma.
FUCK YEAH!!!
Eat shit, vile corporate filth.
Are you sure about that? Have you seen it do something conscious?
I understand it talks.
But it don’t sing and dance and it don’t walk.
Well, I don’t dance too, sing off-key a bit and walk only if I cannot avoid it, so there…
Oh good.
Maybe one of these days my choices will be better than
or
Sigh.
Wait, you have your choice of internet providers that isn’t one of three major providers (if at all)? You lucky bastard!
Barely. Sonic uses AT&T’s lines, so I can at least choose to give my money to them, but it’s not like it gains me anything other than moral satisfaction.
(When I first moved into my building, Comcast strung me along for months with unreliable service until they finally admitted they’d never been given permission to re-wire the building by the owner, and the capacity on the existing pipe was sufficient for maybe 4-6 of the 29 units total. So I shelled out to AT&T until I cut the cable TV cord, and then finally got brave enough to try Sonic.net.)
Well, that’s a relief. I mean, thankfully we don’t just have one provider that divides up the map, it’s multiple providers that don’t interfere with each other to create competition. I’d hate to see a monopoly.
