The Federal Communications Commission’s 3-2 vote to repeal net neutrality rules has many worried that internet service providers will now build the same sort of tiered internet that some other countries have — where individual providers can collude to throttle traffic to certain websites and services in order to shake money from consumers or the companies themselves — or both.
For instance, in Morocco last year, multiple internet service providers worked together to briefly block voice chat services like WhatsApp and Skype, in what was interpreted by some as an attempt to push consumers to subscribe to their phone subscriptions instead.
But Seattle’s Socialist Alternative Council Member Kshama Sawant — the prime mover of the city’s successful bid to enact a $15 an hour minimum wage — has another idea. She wants her city to simply build its own broadband network to compete with the private providers, guaranteeing a free flow of unthrottled information.
It may sound radical but it’s not unheard of. Today, around 185 communities in the United States offer some form of public broadband service. Because these services are controlled by public entities, they are also accountable to the public — a perk that anybody who has tried to get a broadband company on the phone can appreciate. (In November, residents of Fort Collins, Colorado, rejected an industry fear-mongering attempt and voted to authorize the creation of a citywide broadband network.)
In a Facebook post written Thursday night, Sawant urged the state and city to act.
“The FCC is doing the bidding of big business like Comcast, not the voters of either party, because public opinion is clear: 76% favor net neutrality, even including 73% of Republican voters,” she wrote. “Olympia should urgently pass net neutrality legislation in Washington State, and Seattle must invest in building municipal broadband, so no internet corporation has the power to prioritize making money over our democratic rights.” She included this graphic her team made to illustrate the idea:
The concept of Seattle having a municipal broadband network was debated during last year’s city council and mayoral elections. Jenny Durkan, who won the mayoral election, argued that setting up such a network would simply be too expensive. Her opponent Cary Moon was in favor of a municipal system.
But last month, net neutrality was still alive. The FCC’s move gives fresh air to the arguments from municipal broadband proponents that city-run systems are the best way to ensure an affordable and free internet.
Just ask the city of Chattanooga. The Tennessee municipality’s Electric Power Board invested in and started offering a fiber-optic network to city residents in 2010.
“We didn’t rate with Comcast because we were a small market,” Ron Littlefield, Chattanooga’s mayor at that time, told Vice Motherboard, about why the city decided to take the step of offering a city-run broadband network to its residents. “By virtue of that, we had little say over what service we were receiving.”
By 2016, the city was offering 1 gigabit internet service to residents for $70 a month. The cheap city-run internet acted as a sort of subsidy for small businesses, which started flocking to the city and built a vibrant tech and startup culture. “We hired consultants and they came back and told us: Chattanooga didn’t have a bad image, it just had no image. The Gig has restored our luster and given us a new lever to pull that has tied us to the next century, rather than the steam and smoke of the old century,” Littlefield told Motherboard.
The political peril in pursuing public broadband, noted David Segal, head of Demand Progress, which advocates for an open internet, comes with the potential of giving unwarranted credibility to the arguments made by FCC Chair Ajit Pai, that states, cities, and the Federal Trade Commission are best poised to regulated the situation. That’s not at all the case, Segal argued, and public broadband is a good thing in itself, but shouldn’t be seen as a substitute for net neutrality.
It’s no surprise that the telecommunications industry has responded bitterly toward the success of Chattanooga and similar public broadband systems. A number of states — with legislators backed by telecom giants like AT&T — moved to ban cities from establishing their own broadband networks with statewide preemption laws.
If these laws remind you of the preemption laws that prevent cities from raising the minimum wage, well, don’t be surprised: The American Legislative Exchange Council — a lobbying group that is funded and backed by a variety of corporations who want to influence state policy — promotes both laws.
In the aforementioned Colorado, 31 counties have pushed back, voting to exempt themselves from a state law prohibiting municipal broadband services.
Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, has studied the systems that have popped up all over the country. He pointed out to The Intercept that these systems have far greater incentive to maintain net neutrality and that local control has some benefits people may not immediately consider.
“One of the things that we’ve seen with a hundred examples of municipal broadband is not only do people get the benefit of non-discriminatory access, they typically pay less, they have better access, and if something does go wrong, they get much better customer service,” he told The Intercept.
Top photo: Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant speaks at a protest in front of the federal courthouse on Feb. 17, 2017, in Seattle, where an immigration hearing was held.
Municipal broadband is the way to go to elimimdte the corporate bloodsuckers like Verizon and Comcast.
The author of the above article apparently didn’t look at the financial cost of municipal broadband. There are several studies about this problem, including ones done by Penn State and the NY Law School. I have read three, and they agree that it is a “bet the farm” deal for cities, that only 10% are not in the red, with over half in severe financial woes. They start off with grants and big start up costs, or like Chattanooga, also have a huge electric power utility to absorb losses. In my city of Loveland, Colorado, voters were merely asked if they wanted the city to investigate the feasibility of municipal broadband — and now the city council is claiming that was voters approving going ahead. They want to sink $100 million in start up costs (our city is already committed to $1.4 billion in corporate welfare to developers who want to build malls), and if municipal broadband fails financially, for many cities, all utility payers will be stuck with the bill, whether they sign up for broadband services or not. This is insanity. This is not the way to keep the Internet free.
We love our city owned broadband! Cheaper and faster.
https://www.longmontcolorado.gov/departments/departments-e-m/longmont-power-communications/broadband-service
This is tyranny. Kill those in the FCC who go against our freedoms, not enough comcast will kill the FCC regulators or have bribe FCC already !!
and the Federal Trade Commission are best poised to regulate>>>d<<< the situation. That’s not at all the case, Segal argued, and public broadband is a good thing in itself, but shouldn’t be seen as a substitute for net neutrality.
Even if you build your own public broadband network that covers your whole entire, city, county, at some point you are going to have to hook into the rest of the network and guess who controls that? not you !
So, yes, Public Broadband will allow communities to control the service level throughout your own little town and that’s a good thing, but we still need Net Neutrality to keep Verizon or whoever from shutting down far away sites they don’t like or want to charge you for.
The problem is less regulation and more a flaw in the approach to the edge access model; be it vertically integrated and mostly closed or horizontal and mostly open. This is because there is no government mandated sharing nor settlements between actors. The latter are anathema to the “internet crowd” but their value has been well understood in the telecom world for inter-networking and getting to (near) universal service.
Welcome to the tin foil hat club.
Those “really smart” RINOneocons handed the Ultra-Liberal Tech-Midgets the key to throttling off Conservative sites and Bloggers …… or is that what RINOneocons really wanted?
I have commented for a long time on the Intercept but could not get in the new system today
username Fellow Citizen
I am not being sent an email related to help with recovery of a password.
I do not know if I need tore- register in the new system and when I tried it would not let me.
This is a mess and I am spending a lot of time on it.
I give up.
username Fellow Citizen
I am not being sent an email related to help with recovery of a password.
I do not know if I need to register in the new system and when I tried it would not let me.
This is a mess and I am spending a lot of time on it.
I give up
This is tyranny. Kill those in the FCC who go against our freedoms.
I hope my ISP blocks content like this.
Yeah, compare us to a Musaaalem regime where the gobmnt already oppresses the people. The internet was just fine for 20 years until the former president in whatever ill advised move decided it needed to come under the nanny state control.
Enter government; exit innovation. If money can be made, capital will exploit it.
BTW, the $15 wage is already killing employment, so any suggestion from that unicorn should be deep-sixed out of hand.
These people leave their own moth-eaten Hindu-socialist cultures, to come to a more Christian much less socialist, therefore more prosperous, culture. But like the emigres from NY and Cali, (who are changing the cultures of Florida and TEXAS) they try to impose the very things they are fleeing from the results of – if you get my drift!
I do get your drift because you provide no substance or evidence to any of your claims.
Addendum: Dont take my job
It’s funny how you folks who advocate for an open, net-neutral internet don’t say a thing about the mail system. Package carriers, including the much government-subsidized, debt riddled USPS, offer tiered delivery times and rates. Why aren’t you bitching about that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqJDW_s93rc For anyone that thinks Net Neutrality is something that obama created.
TRANSLATION: We want more free stuff…
$70/month is free?
Trade your $70/mo potential gigabit connection for my $100/mo whopping 3mbit.
Many places offer high-speed (fiber optic) for free as we as insane high speed for a cost.
Sure, it happens. What I was pointing out is that a desire for municipal ISPs isn’t a cry for “free stuff.”
Let’s not conflate Internet service with the Internet. The Internet is the global network of highways that are owned by many different entities. Internet service is essentially a residential driveway to the Internet. When you add more connections and “driveways” to the Internet (like creating new ISPs), you’re not creating a new Internet. You’re connecting new sub-networks to the larger Internet.
That’s like saying “let’s not confuse access to books as having access to knowledge that promotes capitalism, collaborative information sharing and economy.” You forget, it is the small businesses that keep jobs in the country. It is the small businesses that buy local resources for their business. It is the small businesses that stability communities. When you make corporations who seek to limit ‘public’ resources by having our ‘elected leaders’ whose JOB it is to represent their CONSTITUENTS wishes — not the handful of major campaign donors — you are stating you are fine with the communist mentality where the people get access to what the wealthy and connected want them to have access to and nothing more. Knowledge and communication should NOT be filtered or doled out by the corporations and that is what net neutrality represents — using the sheeple-force way of making people struggle unless they pay more and more and more… As it is now, cable tv is 90% advertising. It was supposed to be free of advertising in exchange for paying for televised programs. It migrated to be something that is a solid block of commercials interrupted by B-rated 50yr old movies that last an hour and are edited to 20minutes of programming to accommodate 40m of commercials. And free, public access TV is now nearly non-existent. We all know how this ends – we end up with a propaganda machine for an internet and it won’t be anything more than a tool to suck money from the consumers/taxpayers who are responsible for funding the research and absorbing all the cost, risk and liability that brought the internet to fruition. Corporations had no part of it. Now they are in charge of who gets access to it?
I’m not sure what you’re arguing against here. My comment was intended to be taken at face-value. I wasn’t angling pro or anti on the net neutrality issue. I was simply pointing out that there is a distinction between the Internet and Internet service. As in, residential ISPs aren’t the Internet any more than your driveway or neighborhood roads are the world.
Ah the old Atlas Shrugged story that some just don’t understand. First of all comparing some collusion between companies in Morocco?? Really? That’s your evidentiary lead into the mega drama of this article?
Typical socialist propaganda to create a TERM that if you say you are against it (knowing nothing about it) you SEEM foolish. “Ah, what could be bad about Net Neutrality?” And then to suggest, seriously it’s getting old, that the big bad corporations are causing WE the people to lose the neutral state of the internet??? The internet is a SERVICE provided by Companies for Access to a Product. This is how our economy works. Once you start taking TAX MONEY to COMPETE with private companies it becomes unconstitutional at worst and a haven for corruption at the least. The U.S. Postal Service dies and withers away in a competitive economy…where you and I and free people get to choose whether we participate in this EXCHANGE for SERVICES. And you (AND GOVERNMENT SOCIALISTS) think these companies owe you something? Why do they owe you something? Because the agencies of government attach taxes and fees to all they provide? And assure they get their share?? This NEUTRALITY on the internet IS REALLY just another way for unelected Government agency and commission bureaucrats to lasso the control of a very powerful tool…TO WHICH THEY HAVE NO RIGHTS.
See article below…and just imagine the NEW tax payer funded U.S. Internet Service…
http://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/
Seattle already has a fiber optic network. In fact, we have 2. One run by SDOT and one run by SCL (Seattle City Light).
And, there is a connection to the Internet backbone owned by the government right there in the university district.
All that is missing is the connecting link to the houses.
The big problem will be getting Comcast to remove all their trash from the houses and the poles (also owned and maintained by Seattle City Light).
You ever notice how the answer always seems to be monopolies? You’re so afraid that corporations by establish monopolies that you willingly run to the only organization that can create monopolies- the government. Natural monopolies are impossible in a free market. It is only when the government regulates the system, engages in price fixing, and builds barriers to marketplace entry that these massive corporations are able to dominate the market, inflate prices, and provide such crappy products. You want cheap, high speed internet available to the masses? Deregulate. Just look at Romania, for example.
https://www.romania-insider.com/romanias-fixed-internet-market-to-be-completely-deregulated/
https://mises.org/blog/bernie-sanders-meets-romanian-internet
I pay 41$ a month for unlimited internet, screw your public broadband
You won’t be paying $41 for much longer.
We have free high speed fiber optic in Gainesville. Much faster than the crap you pay for.
You guys are adorable.
You can run all the municipal fiber you want, but it’s not going to let you talk to anyone but each other without buying transit from an upstream provider, and guess who that is? The companies like Comcast, ATT, etc.
There is no magical “free internet” spigot you can tap into. It’s a giant mesh of large networking companies that will charge you for the bits you send to them. Router ports aren’t free, neither is transit from point A to point B. These companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars a year into their infrastructure, why would they let some municipal broadband company connect for free?
Who’s asking for free connectivity? What I read was that subscribers would still pay monthly fees for service. Am I missing something? It’s true that some of the companies that provide residential service also sell upstream connectivity in bulk, but there are also plenty of upstream providers that sell bandwidth wholesale and couldn’t care less what subscribers on their respective subnets are doing with their bandwidth.
Community mesh internet usually pays to rent their own space at an internet access point, which allows them to tap into the national and global internet. These facilities are the basis of the internet where multiple companies come together to create and tap the internet (versus a local intranet) in each city. The municipality or commoners running the mesh infrastructure would become an equal with the other ISPs. Must of the naysaying commenters here don’t seem to understand that isps do not own the internet or access to it, and communities creating services for their residents is not communist or anti capitalist. As for companies or entities “not letting others access their networks,” that is anathema to the internet and suicide for a website that needs traffic to survive and earn income. It is like a store refusing customers – economically irrational.
The most valuable asset in this situation is an understanding of what the internet really is, rather than the receptive orientation that isps own everything and grace us with access if we can pay. The social imaginary of the network is the basis on which the internet grew in the 90’s. It was populated by academics and techies putting their own content on an open server before it started to be enclosed by companies like compuserve and aol (and later Facebook, YouTube, etc). The “real” internet looks more like websites and message boards than Facebook and instagram because it is the idea of people sharing content in open, free ways using a standard platform outside of controlled environments like social media. In 2017, there is now wireless technology available to serve access to households that is inexpensive and can bypass those ISPs charging higher fees for access.
The hardest part is imagining the alternative…
It amazes me that anyone would think the government can fix anything or make it better.
Subsidies, are just a way to continue making bad decisions even longer, all in the name of good intentions. While having tax dollars wasted.
This is a technology issue – currently you are looking at features/limits of today’s technology. When instead we need to consider what is it you are asking for regardless of the technology.
If you wish for only the government to fix this for a solution expect something like the following scenario;
1. there is a call by some to provide faster communication to everyone
2. this sounds great, but the only service currently available is via private companies and costs money.
3. the call goes out “the government needs to fix this”!!!
4. People and the news grab onto this and create a buzz – something must be done!!
5. Officials are elected on the promise they will fix this
6. debate, study and committees spend vast time and money discussing this.
7. Finally years later the government has an answer and will provide “free” access to faster communication.
8. Decades later the government is ready to provide the SOLUTION!!!
9. Typewriters are sent to every person in the US so they can communicate faster – problem solved. Yet no one makes typewriters anymore so the government signed a contract to produce and ship them to everyone at a cost of only $5000 each. As this is 2016 it only cost taxpayers $1.6 trillion to provide a worthless solution to a problem that technically has not existed for 50 years.
10. Hindsight – define the problem before you look for a technology answer. Debate what the real issue is and what the non-technical answer is before you spend $$ to fix it.
Where was the call for discussion when the Federal Government sold off the broadcast bands?
Government can create an alternative to suppress monopolies.
That is exactly what government supposed to do.
In what world is $70 a month “cheap” for internet service? Of course, if only “the rich” have to pay and the leftist demonRATS get their’s for “free” (like there is really something for “free”) then I can understand why they want “net neutrality”. There was no “net neutrality” until 2015 and the obamler regime came along and started it. Now we are back to where we were since the internet began. Frankly, I never saw any difference between “net neutrality” and no “net neutrality”. The demonRATS are just mad that an obamler regime policy was over turned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqJDW_s93rc Watch this and learn something
Here is a bit of History of how companies were throttling and abusing internet access since you clearly don’t know:
https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-violations-brief-history
NN goes all the way back to 2006 dingus, when they took my job
It was a big deal and internet companies were throttling and limiting access to certain websites, apps and more other because of competition with services being provided. Some of the victims of this were services like Skype, Whatsapp, Vontage, Netflix, etc..
Internet companies were doing exactly what everyone is complaining about prior to 2015. Since you clearly don’t know, here is a brief history : https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-violations-brief-history
Why wait for FCC or federal regulation at all why forcing everybody to title 2 if people can do what she just did? This is the proof NN was a joke.
We’ve had net neutrality guidelines since 2005 and enforced rules since 2010. The Title II classification came about because Verizon sued the FCC in 2014, citing that the FCC didn’t have jurisdiction over traffic handling because Internet service wasn’t a common carrier utility. You can thank Verizon for the Title II classification.
ISPs blocking VoIP and P2P traffic in 2008/2009 and Comcast extorting Netflix for access to their customers (using bandwidth that Comcast subscribers had already paid for…among other blocking and throttling shenanigans) are proof that NN was not a joke. We don’t allow private communications or infrastructure providers to stand between businesses and their customer in other mediums, so why is the Internet an exception to those precedents?
Yep. I remember when Vonage’s SIP traffic would get throttled by providers, same with the whole “Sandvine” BitTorrent debacle with Comcast. I imagine it had a lot to do with the rise of VPN services so packet inspection became useless by the upstream providers.
The Internet is already Public. Access to it is not. Broadband just means a fast connection to it. So, are we saying we need ‘free’ fast-access to the internet? Free, as in the government pays for it with our taxes? Or, do we mean we want the government to force what services internet providers offer and what prices they charge? Sounds like Communism, to me.
The internet is NOT public. The networks you are accessing are owned by companies that pay to maintain them. The “public” internet is a very small subset of those networks that connect universities and government sites. But the Internet most people use every day is by no means public.
LOL…..the liberal dogs and their fear mongering…..listen dogs..1…not one prediction of disaster that you ran your mouths about has ever came true including global warming..2…there are laws “ALREADY” against the fear mongering you’re stating here..3… you don’t have even one example here in the U.S. that any company has manipulated the internet the way you’re trying to scare people here…NOT ONE. 4…the internet has worked for years without any government interference and 5..NO ONE gives a flying crap about you fat stupid americans that will believe ANYTHING your criminal politicians, stupid rich sports and movie stars tell you.
No, not one example. Many examples. The Open Internet Order that introduced enforcement of net neutrality guidelines (which were put in place in 2005, the OIO was enacted in 2010) was put in place in response to multiple ISPs blocking VoIP and P2P traffic. In 2014, Verizon sued the FCC, arguing that they didn’t have jurisdiction over traffic handling because Internet service wasn’t a common carrier utility. So, the FCC placed Internet service under Title II in 2015. In the period between the end of the OIO and the Title II classification, Comcast began throttling Netflix to nearly-unusable levels of throughput, insisting that Netflix needed to pay them off to reach their customers, despite Comcast’s customers having already paid for the bandwidth and choosing to use it to access Netflix. Sure, it’s Comcast’s driveway to the Internet that their subscribers are using, but where else do we allow communications providers to stand between businesses and their customers this way? Of course, I’m leaving out many other examples, but these are the most glaring.
Dude you didn’t capitalize words that you thought were more meaningful than others. He can’t even read your response like this. YOU need to capitalize MORE letters so HE can UNDERSTAND your point.
EVERYBODY HAS SOME GOOD POINTS:
Yes please start up city Net Access as a must and hopefully county and state Intranets are not too far behind!.
I would like to make 2 points, these nets should be free as we have that here tho our city experiemented 10 years earlier but then it wasnt a go.
But realizing its -vital need- in Business, Commerce, and Emergency Use as many people in disaster areas were able to use laptops to call for Help when the cell phone towers crashed down sic!.
Our City decided to bite the bullet and have free access availible to all as before that you had to drag a Laptop to the Library to get access.
I urge this as after doing a study for my new book: The Missiles of Fear.
One of the first things to go will be communications and the cell netwerks and towers as some of this infrastructure and bandwidth is used for Military/Police communications and as many know the risk of War is very real now as a pentagon spokesman just said possibly 30 percent chance of War or attack was likely…
So clearly some Internet Use would likely still – Be Possible – unless of course your City or Locality took say a ‘Direct Hit!’…..
Yes I know and understand these things are not pleasent to talk about nor comprehend but if we are wise we need to prepare for trouble so some of these things bear looking at.
C. Edward Royce.
Elites 1; Citizens 0.
You Are Foolish To Think It Has Not Always Been So. It Is Just “Legal” Now…So It Will Be More “In Your Face” Now. Have A Foolish Day.
Here’s a better option than having the government run public internet: The FCC requires that all ISPs offer a neutral option in addition to any custom solutions. People who value the custom options can buy them. People who don’t can buy the neutral service. The neutral service in theory should be the cheapest because it would be the easiest for the ISPs to implement. Problem solved, and we don’t have a government agency running an ISP (nobody wants that surely!)
You Are Idiots If You Think It Hasn’t ALWAYS Been Like That. lol Nothing New Is Coming. It Will Just Be Le3gal Now, So It Will Be More IN YOUR Face! Idiots.
Great idea. Keep looking for more free stuff that the working public pays for. We didn’t have problems before the O admin started interfering…. why anticipate them now.
Why not wait until there’s a problem before we start fixing it?
We know from past experience that without laws guaranteeing net neutrality that providers will act . (This was demonstrated when Verizon blocked Google Wallet in favor of its own financial app.) If (or more likely when) problems arise, the creation of a publicly owned ISP will require both time and significant public investment.
Some think the public would be better served by beginning the process early (so that consumers have options when the problems happen) rather than waiting and finding out you are stuck for months/years waiting for the problem to be fixed.
Personally I think we’d be better off with a private ISPs with proper regulations, but since the current administration seems to want to eliminate regulations, public ISPs may become necessary.
Its summer, and you see a few shingles are missing from your roof. You know, in a month or two, fall is coming, and so is heavy rain (at least in my area).
Do you wait for it to start raining and see if your roof is leaking before calling someone to fix your roof or do you preemptively fix it?
Preventing it like the law was supposed to. You don’t buy a gun to fix your death, you don’t buy a fire extinguisher to fix your pile of ash you call home, you prevent problems from happening when possible. This, just has tons of benefits, on top of preventing a major problem that is now possible. Do you wait until you drown to put on a life jacket? Wait til you see your car crashing to put on the seatbelt?
Are you talking about the problems we had in 2008/2009, or the problems we had in 2014?
Who pays for public broadband? Taxpayers? Who benefits from public broadband? Those that don’t pay or pay little taxes? Hmmmm….
Clearly, the sky is falling.
These leftists want to force tax payers to pay for an alternate Internet.
They claim they’re upset that companies my charge for services. Consumers would be able to choose whether or not to pay and acquire these services.
The leftists’ solution to this is to force people to pay for service – this public Internet, which will be built at tax payer expense.
I would say the interstate system worked out pretty well and continues to work well. I would say FDRs public works programs to built bridges, hydrodrams and tunnels worked out well and continues to work.
Why not a giant public works project for the internet? Not everything public is bad and not everything private is bad either.
That wouldn’t be a public Internet. It would be municipal ISPs (essentially, residential driveways to the Internet just like what is provided by private ISPs), and by all accounts would be paid for by the people that use it in the form of monthly fees…just like private ISPs. I’m personally not a liberal or a Democrat, but like most people that work in tech, I’m pro-net-neutrality. We don’t allow private communications and infrastructure to stand between businesses and their customers in other situations, so why does the Internet represent an exception to these precedents?
Great, put “Gubumunt” in charge! Make everything free for the louse leftists, so we can all enjoy lousy internet service “equally”. Absolutely a great idea. Morons!!!!
All things considered… Imagine the internet running like the DMV.
What we need is to appoint people to these watchdog committees who are not former lobbyists! The FCC, and the FDA, have been infiltrated by special interests and are now just another arm of their lobbying endeavors.
I am a huge advocate for public Internet. An entity that is truly bound to a very few fundamental covenants that make sure that no packet is subject to discrimination and censorship regardless of what content is sent or received. Without these stipulations, special interest will insist that their particular grievances are attended to by blocking specific data and content.
I see the same fear mongering and doomsday predictions on every liberal site about NN.
The net survived without NN before 2015 and it will survive after. You have been lulled into an argument of false dichotomies when, in reality, there are far better ways to regulate ISP’s (assuming they even need it).
The city of Austin tried this after a successful experiment with it during SXSW one year. We were promptly shut down by the great state of Texas. Meanwhile, I hear Chattanooga, TN has been very successful with municipal broadband. Any large city that pulls this off could reap huge benefits over the course of a generation. Basically, we in Texas, like most of the USA, are in thrall to faux libertarians opposed to any infrastructure projects that would benefit small business at the expense of oligopolistic corporations – whom they naively, pathetically, believe will somehow improve things through competition. (They missed the part about oligopolies becoming oligopolies because they hate competition.) If we had the current political climate in 1993-94, we never would have had the Internet.
Like water sewer and roads, once installed, public internet is a fact of life. Fiber is replacing copper.
A number of states have already sued the FCC over Idjit Piehole’s decision. As expected, most of them are in the northeast and west coast. It looks as though the knuckle-draggers in the south and midwest enjoy being backwards.
I live in Texas. My internet runs at the same speed as yours.
How is that “backwards?”
Of course you sorry demonRATS think that you are supposed to run things whether you are in office or not. Remember, your king obamler said “elections have consequences and we won”. Well, WE WON and took our Country back in November 2016 and YOU demonRATS LOST!!! Get over it!!!
Like the 9th Circuit, which keeps trying to override the Trump travel bans, only to have the SCOTUS rescind them?
“Net Neutrality” was just a bad decision. There’s no reason a company pushing smaller packets over the network (like simple JSON data in an REST API) should be paying as much as a company like YouTube or Netflix which is pushing large video content. I know the leftists want to get their porn on the cheap, but that doesn’t make it fair.
The FCC is absolutely not the entity that should be handling this though. An un-elected group of 5 should not be responsible for decisions like this. If Congress wants to act, so be it.
And yes, if a community wants to bypass the big evil corporate players, they are free to go the way of Chattanooga and setup their own local co-op. If the city council is in the back pocket of the big evil corporate players, run against them and defeat them. If you can’t get on a city council by promising fast, cheap, locally owned and operated broadband, then you’ve got problems.
That’s one of the big net neutrality misunderstandings, Ted. Companies pushing content are already paying for their share of the infrastructure in the form of the (enormously expensive) connectivity on their end used to reach thousands or millions of consumers. The bandwidth that residential ISPs mess with is the downstream bandwidth that their subscribers have already paid for. If I pay for 80 Mb/s downstream bandwidth and 1TB of monthly data transfer from my ISP, and I choose to use the bandwidth I’ve paid for to watch Netflix videos, how is that not covered by the product that I’ve paid my ISP for? The amount of bandwidth that a given content provider is pushing to subscribers is irrelevant. The subscriber has paid for it. I can’t exceed the amount of bandwidth that I’ve paid for, and if I exceed my monthly data transfer, my ISP will charge me an overage fee (a rather large one, at that). Can you explain to me how the amount a data that a given content provider is pushing matters when subscribers are paying for the bandwidth and data transfer to use however they wish?
We get disasters like Flint because you demand that everyone trust government tap water.
We get Flint because they were trying to save money and divert the source water to an untested water source. This all boils down to the bottom line, blaming government is stupid because this will repeat with idiots in control.
Actually, the Flint tragedy was caused by a corrupt Republican politician seeking to cut costs, thinking no one would notice.
The internet has been a corporately owned commodity for over five years.
Nothing that happens therein is not commodified (or otherwise dismissed as useless or suspicious) by the powers that be.
Do the new rules prevent companies like Google and Amazon from becoming ISPs? My understanding was that based on what Michael Powell et al put in back in 2001, competition cannot enter nilly-willy, which was why Google did not have much success in becoming an ISP. Is this story right? Thanks.
There is no federal law or regulation that prevents these entities from selling broadband services. Google already offers broadband services in many cities across the United States.
https://fiber.google.com/newcities/
Facebook, Amazon (and others) are more likely to become ISPs now that the FCC will not regulate the business as a regulated utility.
Except Google announced last year that they’re putting most of their plans to expand to more cities on hold indefinitely. Their expansion was already flagging before Title II classification in 2015, so I don’t think that has anything to do with it. I know that in a couple of areas, they cited problems with regional “red tape.” My understanding is that regional ordinances, fees, etc. are the biggest reason that many areas have so few ISP choices. This makes sense. It isn’t like there was an army of new ISPs on the cusp of breaking into the market in 2015 that were suddenly sunk by the Title II classification. These regional monopolies existed before that happened – which, by the way, was the result of Verizon v. the FCC, in which Verizon argued that the FCC didn’t have the power to enact the OIO in 2010 because Internet service wasn’t a common carrier utility. Had Verizon not done that, it’s likely that we’d still have had the OIO instead of Title II classification, which was much better and less heavy-handed, IMO.
In my city Scranton, Pa our beloved city council under cover of you know what signed a 15 contract with Comcast. No control on price which is left in the hand of Comcast. As an ex newsman in town I know a lot of the officers holders and sadly I meet some of the at one of the local coffee shops. They must come and talk and after a very few second I ask about their signing the contract with Comcast. As soon as it uttered they have to go to a
You were a newsman, so you wrote?
to a…? Meeting, bathroom, whore house?
Me thinks your handle of ‘hjl’ is short for ‘he just left’
How about a user-owned internet. A peer routed mesh where everyone has basic speed access for free, where all one has to do to join the net is put up an antenna and network with ones neighbors.
Since most of our WiFi routers already have multiple radios, multiple antennas, and even multicore cpu’s, and can even increase their power output through software, why not up the output power a little and connect them all on an ipv6 subnet? We have a whole internets worth of isolated WLAN islands just one software update away from connecting to each other.
The time has come to #DecentralizeTheInternet!
Realistically we could have done this years ago. Decades of cries for increased security instead of increased connectivity, however well founded they may once have been, have blinded us to the possibility of a “totally connected” network architecture. We’ve been sold instead a network where we node is tethered to a propriatary corporate-owned infrastructure. An architecture where even if we are next door neighbors our traffic must first travel to a centralized location downtown before it can return a few milliseconds later to the house next door. Why should this be the only option for connectivity?
And yet “total connectivity” is just another name for same paradigm the “Internet of Things” is supposed to usher in. The same advances in addressing, routing, naming, and security that are prerequisite for the “Internet of Things” will just as easily enable total, free, peer-routed radio connectivity at “best effort” speeds.
In a world of total connectivity, applications like web, email, instant messaging, and games continue to work seamlessly, but can now scale to community size without involving an ISP. One imagines volunteers, small businesses, local governments, and hackerspaces might provide the intermediate backhaul connections. The network can exist “logically” in ipv6 address-space before it is fully deployed physically, making up for gaps in implementation by routing back through the existing ipv4 internet. The ipv4 internet already plays host to a ridiculous amount of corporate “telemetry” and various peer routed overlay “darknets” from skype to tor to i2p so theres no reason it couldn’t be used to fill in the gaps while we citizens build a free radio “outernet” to match the now fully commercialized “internet.”
None of this makes commercial ISP’s in any way obsolete. This is merely a very logical next step as to how we can best future-proof our connectivity against any attempts to limit or censor. People will still want to pay for faster speeds, for the “internet fast lane” spoken of in net neutrality debates.
As the FCC chops up the remaining spectrum from the switch from NTSC/PAL to HDTV and auctions it, we should be lobbying the FCC to give a few hundred megahertz of “UHF” in the 400-800mhz range for the purposes of civilian WiFi use at increased power to establish a truly free-to-join wide area radio “outernet”.
City-wide municipal internet is a wonderful idea. An even better idea would be state-wide internet since the most under served access to the internet is rural. We need a Rural Internet Access project like the Rural Electrification project. Comcast isn’t interested, let’s get quality internet for everyone.
You want to pay for it? Great! I don’t. Tough…
70 bucks a month for internet is not “cheap”. I live on 2-4 hundred bucks a month. I need internet to get my artwork and poetry out there, and for research. Though broadband may be quality internet, and a good deal for normal commerce, not so for many of us. 20 bucks a month would be more doable for those of us at the bottom of the barrel, and the barrel is more and more heavy at the bottom, my friend.
“By 2016, the city was offering 1 gigabit internet service to residents for $70 a month. The cheap city-run internet…”
Well, Comcast is pricing its Gigabit service at $105/mo (not to mention its sneaky fees) and it’s not even symmetric (as it relies on older Docsis over coax, instead of true fiber).
So $70/mo is “substantially cheaper” than offerings from regional cable monopolies. “Cheap”? Maybe not. “Substantially cheaper”? Hell yeah!
You are correct on it not being cheap(est). The lowest tier that EPBfi (Chattanooga) offers is $60/mo for 100mbit access. Comcast offers “up to” 10mbit (note: actually around 3-4mbit) for $30/mo.
If you have access to LifeLine programs (free school lunch, etc.), aka “Obamaphone” … well, Comcast will give you that 3-4mbit for $10/mo. EPBfi? – 100mbit, same $10/mo. And BTW, it is “true” 100mbit – 80-90mbit/sec all the time, every time.
Just FYI for who is actually serving the community here, and who locks apartment complexes etc. (esp. Sec8) into exclusive agreements for crappy products :-)
get a real job …
“70 bucks a month for internet is not “cheap”. I live on 2-4 hundred bucks a month. I need internet to get my artwork and poetry out there, and for research. ”
Probably time to grow up and get a real job.
Dude, 1 gigabit for $70 is a great deal, I’d snap that up in a heartbeat. I do understand that it’s not affordable on your budget. If they can provide 300 megabits for $20 that would be leaps and bounds better than what most of us are getting. Hopefully you can convince the city to create a tier system.
You’re city is going in the right direction.
AT&T is forcing us to pay $55 for 3 megabits down and giving us a limit of 150 gigabytes of data per month and I’m in the city. My apartment complex has a contract with AT&T and there’s a better service providing 60 gigabits down for $70 which is better but nothing compared to the offer you have.
Sorry Ken, but just because you subsist on less than $5k/year, that doesn’t make you entitled to fast internet on the cheap.
Your local public library offers fast internet for free. Well, almost free. They’ll make you wash before you come inside.
You may not be aware of it but you are saying that since you chose a field that pays very little ($200-400 month by your own admission) the government (AKA taxpayers) should have to subsidize, i.e someone else pay for it, your internet because you can’t afford it based on the life CHOICES that YOU made. Am I understanding this correctly?? “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” MT
“Public” is too vague a term.
Let’s be clear here — we aren’t, or shouldn’t be, arguing just about Internet here. When access to a market is uncompetitive, should we allow a few totalitarian corporations to control what happens, or establish another kind of entity. And if so — what?
EPB is not precisely “the government”. They are a corporation owned by the government, set up with an independent board nearly a century ago. I think that this has something to do with their willingness to guarantee net neutrality and consumer privacy. If the state legislature were making appropriations and the governor was constantly calling his appointee in charge on the phone, would they have resisted the temptation to, say, block porn sites and add ads for local companies to people’s email feeds? I wonder.
So by all means, celebrate success stories like EPB. But don’t expect anyone who says “public blah blah” and enacts something you didn’t read to get the same outcome. EPB is an example to be studied and applied, not just to Internet, but to other areas of the economy. “Capitalism” as we know it today is a radical and untested experiment that differs from previous centuries, based on ideas that often seem deeply unfair, known for obvious abuses. But socialism by a centralized state doesn’t have a stellar record either. We need something new! We need to think, philosophize, learn, and implement the best of what we have to work with, and chart a new course.
Neither Capitalism, nor Communism, nor Socialism work as a system; it takes some of all three to be successful. Since we already have Capitalism well ensconced, what the USA needs is a lot more Communism and Socialism to balance the others out.
We’d do well to START with the Public Charter for corporations. We must explicitly end “corporate-personhood” and ALL that follows from that. We need to enforce LABOR participation in all corporate boards of publicly held corporations. … These simple changes alone would go a LONG way toward lessening the ills we suffer today.
Nothing that has ever involved socialism or communism has worked…you must be a millenial
Corporations may charge too much for service people don’t have to buy. Your leftist solution is to force people to buy a service – public Internet – at whatever price the government decides is right. The tax payers will pay for any “free” public Internet.
The only difference is this: with a “free public” Internet, people won’t have a choice not to pay for it.
I have Chattanooga’s EPBFI and it is WONDERFUL.
They have customer service beyond reproach.
Rarely do you need to call and when you do, it’s polite and you never spend more than a minute on hold.
The speed is incredible. 10 gig per second is available.
I have had the pleasure of watching EPB (Electric Power Board) slay Comcast over the last decade.
They have taken 60% of their market share.
Comcast tried every trick to stop EPB and they lost big time.
EPBFI has brought in a ton of business startups.
If you can’t get a job in Chattanooga, you didn’t look.
Every City should imitate this.
Local Control is the only way to go.
Not only do we get the best internet in the world we also have some of the cheapest electricity in the nation from EPB.
We aren’t sending our money to share holders either. All of the profits stay here in the City.
No corporations can gobble it up either.
When the decision to abort Net Neutrality was announced, EPB replied that they don’t play that shit. All of our lanes will remain fast lanes.
https://epb.com/about-epb/news/articles/epb-fiber-optics-re-affirms-commitment-to-uphold-net-neutrality-standards-for-customers
In the petri dish of city experiments, EPBFI is a great success.
I hope the rest of America follows suit and tears down that antiquated coaxial nightmare.
This sounds great. Perhaps I should move to Chattanooga.
Not ever city can – a lot of cities are not the electric company like EPB is. Also EPB built this network with primarily federal grant money which greatly helps them with the ROI and thus the low rates. This is not going to be easy to replicate all over the country.
” In November 2009, in the wake of the deep recession of 2007-2008, EPB received a federal stimulus matching grant in the amount of $111.6 million from the Department of Energy to expedite the build-out and implementation of the fiber infrastructure and Smart Grid. The fiber optic division was set up as an asset of the electric division of the
utility and leases the fiber optic infrastructure from the electric division.” http://ftpcontent2.worldnow.com/wrcb/pdf/091515EPBFiberStudy.pdf
Delusional optimistic Democrats. He won because Roy Moore was too way out there even for libertarians.
Learn how Doug wil be looking for new work in Alabama in 2020 if he votes with Democrats for any length of time.
Moron, this article is not about Roy Moore or Doug, it is about your having opportunity to write your stupid comment like the one I’m responding to; it is about alternative means of keeping the internet free and connected. You might want to visit a doctor to check out your brain waves if you think everything is about Democrats vs Republicans.
Open heart, closed mind
Sometimes you have to lose a major battle in order to arouse widespread concern, which brings about a unity of purpose and a battle plan that works. Such a battle may have just been lost, which will unite the masses against the greed of psychopaths that have taken control of everything
1. How were you adersely affected by network carriers before 2015?
2. Why do you want a broadcast governing body (the FCC) staking a claim over every layer, including the content layer, of the Internet? Why do you suppose globalists do?
For the love of God, no one even understands what your nonsensical rants are intended to mean.
what open hearted jade is suggesting is that the globalists are increasing censorship and it is only getting worse.
I’ve had some time to decipher, and I think what she was actually implying is that “globalists” are in favor of the Title II regulation – which is bullshit on its face – and that, somehow, it opens the door to government control – also bullshit. If you read her other comments, they all obsess over the latter idea, and she clearly has no understanding whatsoever of the regulation and what it accomplishes.
In this way, I maintain that her comments are nonsensical rants, and your projection of a different meaning, only tangentially related, supports my point that they are not comprehensible.
FCC net neutrality process ‘corrupted’ by fake comments and vanishing consumer complaints, officials say:
“…It was particularly chilling to see these spam comments all in one place, as they are exactly the type of policy arguments and language you expect to see in industry comments on the proposed repeal,” said Jeff Kao, a data scientist who published a study of the pro-repeal comments Thursday, in a blog post.
Like Schneiderman, Kao performed his own analysis of the net neutrality comment record. Using an algorithm to sort out duplicate entries, Kao said he was then able to apply another algorithm to identify the remaining comments that could be considered “unique.” Further analysis revealed that even some of the unique submissions shared common language and syntax, suggesting they weren’t unique at all but perhaps written by a computer program to appear superficially different. In total, Kao estimates more than a million comments, supporting Pai’s effort to repeal net neutrality, may have been faked…”
1. It takes a 30 second Google search to answer this question. Comcast throttling Netflix to extort money (which would raise Netflix prices, prompting subscribers to effectively pay for the same bandwidth twice) is just one of many examples.
2. How is the FCC a “broadcast governing body?” The FCC was created in 1934 to ensure fair handling of access and communications for the telegraph and telephone services. The Internet falls squarely in line with what the FCC was created to regulate from the beginning.
I share your optimism.
Could a municipality offer fiber to homes that would allow multiple ISP’s to lease access to the fiber at a flat rate per customer to offer internet services to to each customer allowing for competition so customers could have multiple ISP’s from which to choose?
The pro net neutrality fight was so anemic this time around that even democracynow didn’t cover it. People have given up resistance to the corporate coup d’etat.
Yeah, because Internet carriers were so unfair to you before Obama’s FCC staked a content-layer claim in 2015.
If you tried using Netflix in 2014 while using Comcast, you definitely felt Comcast was unfair. They held Netflix hostage until Netflix agreed to pay them for access the Comcast customers.
Netflix pays Comcast to this day. If you search the Net you will find a graph that shows the exact date the first check cleared from Netflix and download speeds for Netflix returned to normal.
Sure, Obama was staking a content-layer claim. It definitely didn’t have anything to do with the pitched battle the FCC had with ISPs for 10 years. It’s hilarious how people will ignore huge swaths of history to force reality to fit their narrative. Honestly, the FCC tried to make rules for fair traffic handling by last-mile providers without classifying Internet service under Title II for 10 years, all the while being repeatedly beaten over the head with the fact that Internet service wasn’t classified as a common carrier utility in court. When Verizon used that fact to win their case in 2014 it was the last straw, and the FCC finally gave up and classified Internet service under Title II again (as it had been prior to 2002). If you actually look at the sequence of events that led up to the 2015 reclassification, it’s painfully obvious that it was the direct result of a decade of battling ISPs and losing because there were no Title II protections. Not a power grab.
Yeah, DemocracyNow never covered it. It’s only still on their front page.
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/13/fcc_set_to_roll_back_digital
Good catch!
Thanks for the first good laugh of the morning – I’m still laughing at larry!
US States have the right of Eminent Domain. We can simply seize the infrastructure that was built with public subsidies, pay the existing owners based on the last tax assessment and turn them into co-ops or public property.
It’s done all the time for roads, bridges, drainage, etc.
All these techies getting excited about the internet. Get a real life, guys.
Considering the inordinate amount of time you apparently waste on the internet blowing your hot air throughout these comment sections, I’m not sure it’s other people’s lives with which you should concern yourself.
Great comment! Thanks for my SECOND good laugh this AM!
Finally we now know whatmakes you laugh. You had created an image of a very angry man.
Be happy man.
That is exactly the problem with cheap and fast internet…..you get people like me disturbing intellectual superior beings like you.
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How will I get the cable television stations I like on a municipal broadband network? Is is an internet pipe only? Will cable networks deal with these pipes?
Let’s be honest: the ‘net is clearly hostile to all users from the top down. Our whole planet’s fiberoptics are tapped by people and machines supposedly tasked with protecting their presumed adversaries – us.
The current members of the FCC were mostly appointed by Obama.
Trump made Ajit Pai the chair, but Obama put him on the
commission (after Pai worked for Verizon)
based upon a recommendation from Mitch McConnell.
The Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Act, and the Sherman Act all provided a regulatory framework to keep the internet free and open prior to the Obama administration reaching to claim the content layer in 2015 in the name of the FCC, which regulates broadcasters.
As if you needed any more proof that Obama was not a Progressive but rather is a fascist.
The FCC has always been a bipartisan commission with 3 members of the majority party and 2 members of the minority party. How is it any way Obamas fault? The chair he chose was a Democrat in favor of protecting net neutrality, while Pai was McConnells choice, and Trump reappointed him and then made him chairman. You are quite misinformed, friend.
I was giving Clark too much credit, and assuming he was right, it supports the assertion you replied to.
Seems to me we’re both correct; Obama’s still a fascist, just not as pure of one as the likes of Shrub or The Donald.
A double sin.
Not only do you slander Obama with a thoughtless slur, (and I did not vote for him in 2012), you trivialize the term of “fascist”.
Fascism is a political movement designed to freeze the privileges of ruling capitalists. In power, as a matter of necessity and inclination, fascism rescinds and abrogates democracy and democratic values. In Spain it led to civil war, in Italy it led to Black Shirts and military expansionism, in Germany, fascism led directly to the Holocaust and tens of millions of deaths in WW2.
If you think Obama is remotely resembles Franco, Mussolini or Hitler, you’re just purely ignorant or childishly naive.
Worse, with an actual fascist currently occupying the White House, you dismiss and trivialize the greatest threat to America since the British burned the capitol. The storm gathers on the horizon.
You’d be wise to distinguish your friends from your enemies.
Oh, the irony of Pai’s actions! As Assange(?) pointed out, the big money from WaPo, NYT and CNN are all against the Donald. His supporters throng to smaller sites such as Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit and the bigger Breitbart and the really big Drudge Report. While Drudge and Breitbart may survive the coming shakedown from ISPs, the smaller websites can easily find themselves shit out of luck. This after being shills for Pai’s actions. The end result will be that the easily accessible information will be anti-Donald and those who want to listen to pro-Donald stories may find themselves looking at slowly loading web pages. So the fascism, as you put it, will be drowned out by capitalism. Obviously, the days of somebody just setting up a website and writing whatever came to his mind are over.
Fascism is the confluence or merger of state and business power however achieved.
All our presidents since Carter have been fascists to one degree or another; all have supported the massive shift in power to corporations and the ultra-rich since Carter’s time, and all have lessened the power of the state – it’s called “deregulation” and “regulatory capture”.
Per the structure of the FCC within our two-party system, the party that controls the White House gets to appoint three commissioners (one of which being the chairperson), and the party that does not gets to “recommend” two commissioners. Anything short of that structure would result in immediate gridlock.
The Obama-appointed Wheeler was the chairman who initiated the 2015 NN regulations.
Yes, Obama nominated him as an FCC Commissioner. But (and it’s a big but) his hands were tied – the partisan makeup of the FCC Commissioners is prescribed by law. Two Rs, Two Ds, plus the Chair. Obama nominated Pai to fill a Republican slot after consulting with Mitch McConnell to see who he would allow. So, the responsibility for Pai rests squarely on Republican shoulders.
Ending net neutrality seems like an incredible betrayal of the American people.
Or an unabashed power grab.
It’s both.
The only power grab is the one Obama made in 2015 when he asserted that set of so-called ‘Net Neutrality’ controls over the Internet by his administration.
You were humming along just fine before it. Must be awful for you to no longer have that two-year span of time in which a socialist, collectivist administration had potential control over the content layer.
What are you, a paid propagandist? Or, just a seriously deluded propaganda victim?
Your assertion is utterly false.
I’ve been using the internet since 1977, and I personally helped create some of the protocols used on it today. Net Neutrality has been a part of the internet since its inception as the Arpa-Net (some say ARPANET) which later became the Internet we’re using right now.
Obama had nothing to do with it, though he MAY have helped preserve it.
You’re not getting that Obama’s assertion of FCC control over each protocol layer didn’t exist before 2015.
You’re not distinguish ing between net neutrality and Net Neutrality. The latter was a Trojan horse designed by globalists–and imposed by their employee, Obama–to claim government control via the FCC over the content layer.
The latter is just a phrase like Affordable Care. How gullible can you be?
“Obama’s assertion of FCC control over each protocol layer didn’t exist before 2015.”
Never heard of that. Citation please – and NOT fucking Fox; they’re not credible about anything.
Art, what do you think a claim staked by an (approving administration’s) FCC–a body that regulates content, among other things, for broadcasters–can potentially mean for political communication.
That was the whole argument these past several years, dunce.
There was no reason for its involvement. You admit yourself in this thread that net neutrality principles have always been an aspect of the network before the FCC tried to assert oversight authority.
Your argument is completely nonsensical – perhaps you’re just a really shitty writer, but I bet no, it’s your argument. Aim for coherence in any given post, will ya?
So, BTW, what you MEAN TO SAY is that Obama has helped gut the internet. Your incompetent writing made it sound like he created NN and that’s a bad thing; learn to write better.
And, also, quit being such a dick. You can make a point without being an asshole, you know. It’s completely unnecessary and telegraphs to everyone just who the hell you are.
Oops!
Sorry, I confused you with open hearted jade – you both sound a lot alike.
No, I take back that “oops”; now that I’ve read all your comments here, it’s clear that you’re not “just as bad”, you’re worse, spouting outright lies, just like OHJ.
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.
HAH – “socialist, collectivist administration”. For the 0.1% – 1% bracket, you mean? Net neutrality was one of the few good things Obama’s appointee Wheeler was forced by the people to do against their will.
ISPs have already been caught throttling services and data rates, so really not “humming along just fine before it”. Cases brought against the ISPs led directly to FCC decisions that led to net neutrality Title 2 consumer protections being set in the first place!
Your hated of all things Obama in this instance is being used to manipulate you into siding with Comcast – literally the most hated company in the USA. Good show.
My usage is throttled for the remainder of a billing period if I use too much bandwidth without paying more already, as it should be.
It’s called a Service Agreement for data volume I otherwise couldn’t dream of for the price.
That’s NOT “the internet”, that’s just your connection point. There’s some debate about what possibly multiple roles cell phone carriers have and therfore what policies should apply, but ALL ISPs have been able to charge whatever the market will bear for connection to the internet and various speed / throughput offerings.
In other words, that’s not directly related to Net Neutrality.
Art, there is no Internet for you without carriers who are ISPs who all collectively comprise the network. Her connection point is the only place where a maker of macrame owls would recognize being singled out for unwarranted reduction in service. There is no corporate or state authority or gremlin that maintains some interstate backbone in Timbuktu that throttles your medium on the way from point A to point B.
Obama’s administration supported the FCC (a broadcast regulator) decision to make a power play that affects the content layer where we detractors argue it has no business being. The network and your access to it as a businessman, a publisher or otherwise or a reader was never adversely affected before that power grab supported by Obama.
You’re only too happy to blame our president today for your baseless worries. Again, there were already regulatory mechanisms to handle any claims of malfeasance over the past decades where your service accelerated by orders of magnitude.
I’m not very familiar with the regulation you cite but I can tell you Net Neutrality was in the agreements organizations needed to buy into in order to be able to handle internet traffic since at least the early 1990s. Most likely, the change you cite would have served to strengthen the regulatory power to enforce the rule.
You’re still not understanding the difference between extant net neutrality and a Trojan horse assertion of FCC oversight that came gift-wrapped with “Net Neutrality” embossed on it.
I often wonder about statements like this.
I wonder if you get paid to be so disinformational or if you actually live in the fantasyland you promote.
Government is — in theory, by design, and in performance — a “socialist, collectivist” enterprise.
The entire Constitution, beginning with the words, “We the people …” makes it clear that laws apply equally to all and only those things which promote the common good are the proper exercise of State authority. Indeed, the Bill of Rights, specifies those rights that the State cannot remove.
In a very direct way, your freedom depends upon people of good will — the collectivists and socialists you revile. Imagine, for instance, a city without proper water treatment. Instead of writing your uniformed (or disinforming) spews on a website, you would have to chase down potable water that wouldn’t harm yourself or your children.
We get disasters like Flint exactlybecause of your incredibly stupid promotion of commercial interests over the good of the whole. By giving corporations the ability to meter internet usage as a means of collecting revenue, you guarantee yourself less freedom by allowing accountants — rather than socialists and collectivists — to make your decisions for you.
You argue against your own freedom while arguing for people who would bankrupt you without hesitation or thought if they thought they could add another point to their stock price.
So I’m curious. Do you truly not see how socialist, collectivist regulations give you more rather than less freedom?
Or do you get paid to oppose your own best interests?
.
“No public education for me, you jackbooted thugs with your socialism and collectivism. I want MY FREEDOM!!!!!!!”
Let Ajit Pai tell you in his own words:
http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/12/15/net-neutrality-repeal-jimmy-kimmel-fcc-chairman-ajit-pai-feud
Your internet access speeds didn’t quite slow down in the two decades before Obama’s power grab over it.
“Obama’s power grab over”… WHAT, exactly? Net Neutrality?!
WTF does that even mean? And hell no, I’m not going to Fox for any reason.
And besides, in the last two decades, most people who have it now first got internet access, so how could it have slowed down? AND, even more importantly, Moore’s Law dictates that performance doubles for the same price – or the price halves – at a frenetic pace; you should be angry your network speeds haven’t gone up by an order of magnitude in these two decades while costing less.
Net Neutrality? You mean like Affordable Care?
You don’t get that a communist can label a (mercifully short, two year) government assertion of power over the content layer anything he or she wants.
WTF are you babbling on about? You’re either drunk or attempting to be a propagandist. All we can discern about you so far is that you hate Obama and know nothing about the internet.
Wilfully ignorant leftism doesn’t surprise anyone.
You claim to be a Trump supporter – but here you are lobbying on behalf of Comcast, who owns MSNBC.
Really, who do you think you’re fooling? You’re just doing what Verizon – TimeWarner – Comcast – Google Fiber wants. As is Trump, and his little tool, Pai.
PR monkey on the Internets. . . Who hasn’t seen that before?
I’m advocating for everyone’s right to be heard, dim, including Comcast’s MSNBC. You’d be loath to do the same.
“Yeahhh, I admit I voted for her too, and it was the worst decision.” –any progressive leftist two years later if Hillary had won in 2016
Showing your ignorance again: Progressives weren’t for Hillary. Those were Liberals.
The only distinction exists in your head when you respond to a disapproving public.
Everyone’s right to be heard? That’s exactly what undoing net neutrality will eliminate – except for interests like NewsCorp and TimeWarner and Comcast. This fraudulent nonsense is the kind of drivel FOX serves up to the public – although I see CNN is doing the exact same thing.
Fuck off.
Remember folks, the federal government has unlimited dollars. Your state has limited dollars.
The federal government can easily pay for the cost of this key, necessary infrastructure and undeniable public good.
Federal taxes do not fund federal spending meaning this would cost taxpayers $0.
The federal government creates every dollar it needs out of thin air whenever it pays a bill. Every monetarily sovereign nation operates in the same way, differing only in how willing they are to use this power to benefit the masses.
Hyperinflation is caused by of a shortage of actual resources, not too much currency creation. Zimbabwe, Weimar, etc: all debunked.
Monetary policy in this country and globally is controlled by those with great power, status, wealth for the benefit of those with great power, status, wealth. Learn the true nature of money, free yourself from your chains. Money is a tool to provide you with survival needs and public goods, a tool to help the community, a tool that is currently being misused.
Keep this simple truth in mind: If you allow those with great power, status, wealth to dictate the terms of “reality” you will always be disadvantaged, most certainly doomed to failure.
Keep that in mind should well-meaning (or not so well-intentioned) individuals attempt to poke holes in this clear and simple explanation. They are doing nothing but acting as your prison guards, whether they intend to or not matters not.
OK, you keep spamming the same repetitive message, despite having the flaws in your reasoning pointed out to you. . .
So why didn’t your strategy work in Venezuela? Why can’t the Venezuelan government “create money out of thin air”? Why, if they try to do that, does their currency end up devalued and the people there are resorting to using bitcoin instead?
The answer is that unlike Venezuela, the U.S. maintains a global financial and military empire that serves to prop up the value of the dollar. This generally goes by the title of ‘petrodollar hegemony’ or perhaps more accurately, ‘monetary imperialism’. And if you think the people who run empires give a damn about the economic security of the middle class, or will take any real actions to help them out, then you are, well, an idiot. That is simply not their mentality; if it was they wouldn’t be propping up most of the worst dictatorships on the planet just to make a buck, now would they?
Go spam somewhere else, it’s tedious and repetitive.
I wouldn’t go so far.
Their first point about an internet is certainly true. The cost of building a brand new internet for the entire USA is a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to what we already spend on interstate highways. Your argument / criticism is about “how money is created” and I see that as a secondary point.
By the way, they’re not entirely wrong about how money is created, but they make it about bill paying – and it’s not – and they leave out the part about how the federal reserve gets the benefit, not the taxpayers but we COULD cure that.
Well, the federal government is never going to do this. The FCC decision, that’s a clear example of regulatory capture, in which a corporation takes over the agency that’s supposed to be regulating it and makes decisions that are designed to inflate corporate profits rather than serve the public interest. The monetary policy of the United States, run largely by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the US Treasury, is also in thrall to the Wall Street financial industry, and acts to protect their profits as well. Since Wall Street has large investments in the likes of Comcast, TimeWarner, Verizon, Google Fiber, etc. they’ll never support the replacement of the investor-owned telecom model with the public broadband model.
This is why the public broadband model is being promoted by cities; states are under pressure not to adopt it; and the federal government today is entirely in the pocket of the telecoms. Hence, unless we have a political revolution and get an FDR-style federal policy, there’s no chance at all of federal programs to expand public broadband – not on the Republican nor the Democratic side.
For that, we’d need something like the FDR-era Rural Electrification Act.
I agree with all of that – never said a word otherwise in any argument, here or elsewhere!
I remember when Obama got elected, saying, “We needed FDR and we got [at best] Lincoln.”
Nonsense.
Either the State regulates commerce or commerce regulates the State.
Public utilities built and managed by the State is NOT “not unheard of” but quite common. Consider mass transit, fire departments, trash removal, city water/sewage systems, police and a thousand other services we don’t pay much attention to from zoning to parks.
This is exactly what government should be doing.
Unfortunately since the days of Reagan, commercial interests have been buying legislatures and legislators, city, county and state administrators to advance one single agenda — privatization of State services.
The State cannot heal itself while citizens continue to be misinformed, manipulated and mismanaged.
As long as people vote for this corporate agenda, the substitution of private commercial interests for the public good, this malignant trend will continue.
It is NOT the norm except in this very twisted world of corporate plutocracy.
Terrible idea. Not worth discussing for so many reasons. Just repeal the FCC decision.
Of course, we wont because this is a war against middle class and they are so divided and confused the war is almost over in a complete defeat for them.
Call it fascism or corporatism as Mussolini did but its all over. The individual is nothing more than a serf or wage slave, at least those who work, and the rest will find life expectancy dropping rapidly, faster than you can imagine.
Its a runaway train going downhill. So far its been running 100 years but never so fast.
Well, I guess we can count you out…
Many fixed-mindset people once believed (and not too long ago) that cannabis would NEVER be legal.
Thankfully, growth-mindset prevails in nearly every circumstance (pun intended – after the fact).
Why were you unhappy with the internet as it was before 2015?
What changed in 2015 aside from Title II classification? We’ve had net neutrality guidelines since 2005 and enforced rules since 2010. The Title II classification came about because Verizon sued the FCC in 2014, citing that the FCC didn’t have jurisdiction over traffic handling because Internet service wasn’t a common carrier utility. In the period between the OIO and the Title II classification, Netflix was being shaken down by Comcast to pay again for bandwidth that Comcast subscribers were already paying for.
If you liked the Internet before 2015, then you should be in favor of net neutrality, because we’ve had it since 2010.
That actually exists nowhere in the historical record.
The quote is not perfectly attributed, but that’s an exact quote from Mussolini. At least argue facts.
Cite where Mussolini ever remotely even paraphrased something like the comment attributed to him about corporatism and fascism. It’s a progressive leftist urban myth.
The most simple web search will yield your answer.
Lets pull a Trump, and make COMCAST pay for the wall, ah I mean new cable system..They took $400 Billion in service fees to build a new network and never did…They already owe us enough to pay for that entire system.. Comcast is going to bleed out the NOSE for this…
Digital flow of information is like water, electricity, gas and should be treated as a utility. We the People funded the startup of the Internet for many years before it caught on… It is ours.
The oligarchs / fascists are trying to steal it.
All of those utilities charge by the unit of service that they deliver. Is that what you want from your “flow of information” provider?
Those who view Netflix or other relatively heavy content in large quantities will be paying MORE than they do now when they get their $/MB charges. Currently, low bandwidth users are subsidizing the heavier users. There is no free lunch!
Here is a link to a 2009 Seattle report on municipal broadband (FTTP).
http://www.seattle.gov/documents/departments/broadband/2009-09-11seattlefttnbenefits_091109.pdf
I live in San Francisco, allegedly a tech city. Just wish my computer was in Chattanooga because at home we have slow, slow internet. This is because the copper wires for DSL are owned and operated by AT&T and they have no interest in sustaining rapid data over these wires. The choice for us is this very slow DSL or Comcast, with the latter having a terrible reputation and high cost after the initial offer. We clearly need a municipal internet as discussed here as an alternative; otherwise we will not move into the residential 21st century. Municipal broadband is a very attractive answer and also can help alleviate the digital divide that excludes the poor.
Spot on, RWP. We invented the internet and yet are in the backwaters today.
Because Obama handed IANA stewardship functions to a globalist international body last year–he didn’t need to–before leaving office. So whose fault is that, Art?
I live in Berkeley and a company called Sonic is offering fiber optic 1 gig service in about a year for about 60% of what I’m paying the Deathstar Company, er, I mean AT&T, for much slower service. Sonic is placing fiber optic cables on utility poles; see if Sonic is going to place them and offer service in your area.
Tommy: it is either public ownership and control of the internet or corporate control.
The difference is that the first can be made to serve the public interest in a democracy. The second is bound to serve the short term interests of its controlling shareholders.
Nothing comes without a price: the price of a free internet, with unbiassed search engines, is that citizens must be critical and committed to freedom of discussion and thought. As to the economics nothing costs more than the products of capitalists seeking profit.
Check out the Pentagon budget.
Build out the infrastructure via land value tax and then hire companies via competitive bidding to service the infrastructure.
You want to live with China’s internet? Where If you say the wrong thing online you are immediately censored and monitored? Just give the congress control of broadband. You’ll have their system in no time.
The internet was regulated according to the principles of Net Neutrality from its inception until this week. Your suggestion of enhanced surveillance or repression is ludicrous in this regard.
And municipalities are pretty unlikely to have the power or inclination to do so, especially since they are more accountable to voters.
Wrong. Net Neutrality is a set of 2015 Obama regs that is being reversed.
That’s a flat-out lie.
I know, “I was there.” I helped build the internet LONG before you were likely even born.
You’re still not getting the difference between extant net neutrality and 2015’s Net Neutrality. You’re still not getting the difference between an affordable care act and 2010’s Affordable Care Act.
Yeak okay Al.
I get the difference. We had loose net neutrality guidelines in 2005, which ISPs did not follow. This caused an escalation, leading to the Open Internet Order in 2010, which was a lot like the loose guidelines, but more specific and enforceable. Verizon sued the FCC in 2014, their primary argument being specifically that the FCC didn’t have jurisdiction over traffic handling because Internet service wasn’t a common carrier utility. This caused an escalation, which led to the FCC reclassifying Internet service as a common carrier utility in 2015 under the new Net Neutrality legislation. If you look at the sequence of events, and the details surrounding the changes over the years, it would appear that the 2015 Title II reclassification is the direct result of ISPs bucking against more lightweight net neutrality rules.
OK let me explain as I was there as well.
Net neutrality in the classic sense was an ideal contrived by the internet founding fathers to make all content available to all. This unfortunately has fallen flat on it’s face no thanks to internet giants like Google Twitter and YouTube..
2015 Net neutrality was a stopgap measure to eliminate the throttling of certain provider companies in preference of their ISP proffered services.
From 2015 till this moment giant internet corporations have censored the living shit out of what is view-able, and those not following a like mindset of their politico agenda of choice have had accounts suspended and or perma banned for simply speaking their minds.
Current neutrality legislation has absolutely NOTHING to do with free speech, which has been under constant attack on the internet before and since the Obama era Net Neutrality legislation which has everything to do with financial gain.
Got news for you, you’re already being monitored. It’s called project Prism.
And for those on the Watchlist, like myself and my spouse, you get the additional benefit of occasionally being denied services such as booking airline tickets in the airport you want. Instead, you get routed/offered to airports 100 miles away that are larger.
The traction on public broadband has been from municipalities, not states or the federal government. However for the sake of argument, the First Amendment wards off any threat of a Chinese situation
One of the largest points of confusion – or perhaps propaganda – in modern western political discourse is the inability to distinguish between the power wielded by a representative and constitutional state vs. the power wielded by an authoritarian one. It’s typically paired with the absurd implied position that private power is totally harmless and beneficial to all, so there is no need for any kind of public power to counter-balance it.
Hear, Hear