ISPs need to fucken die. Internet should be provided as a social service.
We already paid for the god damn infrastructure ourselves and the invention of the Internet itself through our tax dollars. Why the hell do ISPs get to profit from it infinitely with almost no meaningful regulation to protect you and me (who, again, already paid for this shit several times over).
Fun fact: ISPs have received almost half a TRILLION dollars in kickbacks funded by taxpayer dollars on top of everything else. Regulatory capture is a real problem.
Also, they took billions of government dollars, promising to build out infrastructure, and then…just didn’t. With zero consequences.
Not just billions, hundreds of billions.
ISPs
And because corporations aren’t people, here’s the CEOs that ran things during 2014:
Hans Vestberg (b 1965) Verizon
Randall Lynn Stephenson (b 1960) AT&T
Glen F Post (b 1952) CenturyLink
We let these people act with impunity in our society but it doesn’t need to be this way. Look at how Elon, who thrives on attention, flips out over being tracked and heckled. They stole hundreds of billions from us but we don’t even act like it.
In a rich man’s house there is no place to spit but his face.
-DiogenesOne of the greatest quotes of all time.
If only there was some tool available to the government to hold these companies accountable to an agreement. Like some way to document what needs to be done in exchange for the money and be able to receive the money back if that isn’t performed. Oh well.
That’s rank communism and I’m going to report this because our poor mistreated billionaires shouldn’t have to read it from their mother ship Yacht!
(Can I have free Internet now please Daddy?)
its a base requirement, like water. it should be regulated as such. zero profit motive, ubiquitous access.
Don’t compare it to water. Nestle will want a cut.
And they will fucking kill you and your whole village if they don’t get it
Let’s add healthcare to this list
Throw it on the pile of “things Americans will never get socialized.”
never is a very, very long time
Just until America ceases existing. Could be 1000 more years, could be next January. The future is full of possibilities!
Internet is not a base requirement like water. Without food, water, shelter, you die. Without internet and electricity you are left behind, you don’t die. It should be regulated like electricity
Internet is not a base requirement like water. Without food, water, shelter, you die. Without internet and electricity you are left behind, you don’t die. It should be regulated like electricity
Yes because being homeless and without power will definitely ensure you can stay alive. This whole argument doesn’t make sense. Electricity doesn’t need to be regulated like water because for the most part, there can’t be tainted electricity. But you can still get your water cut off just like power so clearly the government doesn’t ensure you have ready access to it.
Oh and shelter is a base requirement but we still let people die in the streets. And for those people we aren’t supplying them with water: they can drink from what few public fountains exist in parks…if the cops don’t beat them for “loitering”.
No, internet should be a requirement to be provided to everyone like we regulate water and electricity and (used to) telephone service.
If I don’t have internet, I can’t do my job, therefore I can’t get money I need to spend on food, water and shelter, which I need to live.
Adding to this, we aren’t being charged separately for using the bathroom, livingroom, or garage. The internet should not be divided as such.
Are you hinting at net neutrality?
Yes
Given what I was paying last summer for electricity in Rhode Island, I am not sure I can endorse your sentiment
No thanks, power companies get away with an absolutely insane amount of bullshit. They should absolutely be more strictly regulated and held accountable.
You can survive without running water. You can survive without Internet.
Lack of Internet will make survival harder, just like lack of running water (if not to the same degree)
Keep in mind, if you fall behind too far people will kick you out of your house, disrupt any attempts to make a shelter, significantly increases rates of death for a variety of causes
A man wandering the desert doesn’t turn up at the edge of town asking for the WiFi password. :-)
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In my town it is a city utility like electricity and water. Gigabit fiber up/down for $70 with net neutrality
Just think. In Article 1 of the US Constitution, the same article that creates Congress, also creates a federal post office system. Remote communication was so important that’s where it was described using the latest technology of the time.
There are so many systems today that need similar treatment. Internet. Medical. Education. Job Training.
And no, I don’t mean fed government enforced monopoly. I mean, UPS exists and competes with the USPS. But there is a minimum level of service in operation.
Just think. In Article 1 of the US Constitution, the same article that creates Congress, also creates a federal post office system.
We’ve spent the last 40 years trying to privatize the function of the Post Office and dismantle it as a federal agency.
there’s a pretty good fucking argument that mail - paper mail, not packages - should simply be all email or at the worst, scanned and transmitted electronically.
LOL @ the downvotes - you think they can’t look at your mail already?
HOW FUCKING DUMB ARE YOU CHILDREN? bwhahahaah
Sure, if you want to make it easy to digitally surveil
you don’t think they’re able to peep into your mail if they want to already?
and that the slight level of ‘security’ the service provides isn’t outweighed by the enormous savings in fuel burned as the silly truck visits every house every weekday simply to deliver a flyer from the grocery?
pffft
you don’t think they’re able to peep into your mail if they want to already?
Not at the scale of petabytes, no.
pfft
I loved it when my local giant ISP kept pushing broadband connections, saying they couldn’t possibly deal with costs associated with Fiber. Then they begged money from the Government to install infrastructure. Queue absolutely no work in my area. Fast forward a few years, a new ISP rolls in with Fiber and like magic my ISP was suddenly able to provide similar services.
As they exist right now, definitely. But making Internet a govermentally run service is also likely to turn out bad. The best method so far, based on what other countries are doing, seems to be public infrastructure, that any ISP can then sell service through. This prevents monopolies and creates competition in the market, which tends to result in better service for the users.
Edit: public as in anybody can use it to provide service, not as in governmentally managed. Just to force a separation to prevent monopolies.
What do we need ISPs competing on if the infrastructure is run by the government? They can’t increase speeds, they can’t increase service availability, they’ll just be getting a profit margin on top of what the government is charging them to use the communications infrastructure. I’d rather just pay the government the pre-profit amount
The infrastructure would be things like fiber cable wired to each house.
But in this scenario, the ISPs would be manning the servers that your connection is routed through. So they’d still have massive influence on the speed and data.
If the government owned the servers, they could block and track down anything against state interest.
Not saying they can’t do that anyways, but at least the third party makes the process more difficult, less seamless, and gives the chance of new competitors.
Maybe I didn’t explain it the best way possible. By public I didn’t mean governmentally run, I just meant that anybody can use the infrastructure. It just forces a separation between the company doing the infrastructure and the ISPs, to prevent monopolies.
So make the internet into a state service for ISPs? It might not be worse but it could be much better.
Imagine if they did this for water pipes.
Maybe I didn’t explain it the best way. By public I didn’t mean governmentally run, I just meant that anybody can use the infrastructure. It just forces a separation between the company doing the infrastructure and the ISPs, to prevent monopolies.
They’re welcome to compete with the government utility. But I want a government utility isp. One I get a say in as a voter, not merely as a customer
Good luck convincing the taxpayers of that fact. It should be regulated and made available as such, but made to run for free by government agencies…I think that will piss absolutely everybody off for a number of reasons.
Pretty well every case I’ve read of municipal owned fiber nets has been a grand success, barring interference by the local carriers. Let the city own the infra and the carriers compete for access. Of course you get the whinging about ‘muh free market/choice’ but that’s the case for any public works really.
The free market cannot solve this because of the requirements for infrastructure both with up front costs and in needing to have easement access on very specific stretches of land. It completely breaks the assumptions economists make to be able to imagine the free market works.
Way different than a federally funded ISP. Note the comment OP is making.
Not so far off, providing infrastructure locally then leaves a lot of the major transit to backbone carriers to make the interconnects. Those providers are largely transparent to the end users. Now nationalizing carriers like that would be a hefty lift, but if we can take the local service out of the ISPs hands it would let the municipal hosts negotiate those peering arrangements in bulk. How many towns are well equipped to handle that might be another matter though.
No. Just have the city run it. Contracted monopolies are still toxic.
Not contracted monopolies or direct city run, but like ‘IAAS’ seems to work. Much like how you see some small cell companies providing unique offers riding on one of the big carriers networks. Often those small carriers provide better deals, particularly when the carriers they ride on are forced to sell wholesale access at reasonable rates.
The city selling wholesale access funds the infrastructure maintenance and the carriers are better able to compete with each other since all they really have to do is set up a router and pay the city’s access rate fees.
I’d only be okay with that if the city provided a basic plan too. The ISPs have fucked around for far too long. It’s time for them to find out. Next up, power companies.
“Waaaaaah! I can’t rip people off as much!”
-ISPs
I cannot upvote this enough
One thing COVID masking made me aware of is that even after brushing, flossing, tongue scraping and mouthwash, the best my breath could smell was stale. Gawd forbid if I jumped up outta bed and immediately went to the grocery store. Now imagine the stink this guy was always breathing. No wonder he had a bad attitude.
How many times do we need to fight these assholes?
The fight against assholery is unending.
the day we stop is the day we lose, so gotta keep on doing it over and over and over and over…
As many times until Congress grows a spine and finally codifies ISPs as being a dumb pipe into law.
Until then, greed will continue.
Life is an endless prisoner’s dilemma.
This court is absolutely raring to go on major questions. In the past, when Congress left things wide open, the High Court usually gave deference to the agency to handle the details. Examples are things like:
- Congress: “Protect endangered animals” - Executive: “I’ve created a list of what I think is endangered.”
- Congress: “Build a highway between Chicago and the Mexican border in Texas” - Executive: “I’ve come up with a way to string already existing roads and upgrade them to create this road.”
- Congress: “Ensure that companies pay the full cost of environmental damage” - Executive: “I’ll will bill them for CO₂ released into the air”
Congress doesn’t list in massive detail every single possible permutation that’s possible in law. That would create thousand page laws. But as EPA vs WV has shown us, the Supreme Court wants incredible detail. So we get the over 300 pages of new law that indicate six gases, fifteen different levels of municipality, and over ten thousand different industries plus all the various ways those three things interact with each other, to address what was “missing” from the original grant of authority for the EPA.
And the thing is, Republicans will bemoan these large tomes of text, saying “how can we know what’s in it?” That’s them breaks. If the Supreme Court say “a government agency can not do XYZ because it doesn’t say XYZ in the law” then that means we have to be very detailed about what’s in the law. That’s how we get thousands of pages per law. That’s kind of the reason why prior Courts didn’t harp on this stuff. The President changes every four to eight years, regulation can change at that rate too. Law change very infrequently. So that whole EPA vs WV result, CO₂ regulation was something that basically bounced every time we swapped parties, NOW it’s in law and it’s going to be there for decades.
The ISPs are getting ready to shoot themselves in the foot here. Because if NN is enshrined in law, NN is here to stay. As long as it’s a regulatory process, it can change President to President. But push come to shove, if Congress really wants to, they can enshrine Net Neutrality into law. And it only took the Democratically led Congress in 2021, three weeks after the SCOTUS case to pass the new 300+ page law giving the EPA those new powers explicitly.
That’s the thing, the Republicans in the 118th Congress have shown they can not get anything done. They’ve pass 64 laws so far, most of them are renaming Post Offices and reupping funding to VA hospitals. They’ve spent almost 65% of the time in committee investigating various impeachment hearings. It’s so weird how they’ve had a majority in the House, could have worked on budget related things, and they’ve barely talked about the impending tax increase that’s coming once the tax cut act of 2017 runs out next year. They literally had planned to run on that sole thing back in 2017, that’s why they set it up to expire during an election year, and not a peep from them this year on it.
Meanwhile the Democrats in the 117th Congress passed 362 laws, with bangers like the CHIPs act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the whole turn about is fair play with the whole EPA vs WV case. Because they took the majority they had and got things done.
So ISPs better hope Republicans can keep the mayhem up forever, because if Democrats do get into power in the House/Senate/and President. This whole stunt with the Supreme Court they’re pulling could massively backfire on them. Because if NN gets into law, well then it’s way harder to undo that.
High Court usually gave deference to the agency to handle the details
I believe this is “Chevron Deference?”
The thing Goursich (and I believe previously his mother) wants absolutely dead. :/
Fuck you comcast. I’m sure they are one of the instigators.
There’s a city in Tennessee USA (Chattanooga, I think) whose government started offering fiber internet as a utility. It would be interesting to study them as a case study, and see if it would a viable solution elsewhere.
Look at Saskatchewan, Canada. We’re the only province with a public telecom, SaskTel.
Most people in the cities and even larger towns have fiber, and our cell plans are significantly cheaper than anywhere else in Canada despite being a rural province with a large coverage area to population ratio.
We also have decent electricity rates considering we have no hydro, and the cheapest natural gas in Canada. Thanks to SaskPower and SaskEnergy.
Public utilities are the only way to do it, I’m always shocked to see people defend privatization in any way.
They’ve been lied to by the illusion of freedom of choice. Or they’re rich and don’t care.
Sadly (or not) most of us live a little bit south of Saskatoon
Saskatchewan is such a fucking great case study in why this shit works, because you have literally identical conditions all around them, excerpt in that one detail, and the price differences are enormous.
We have the next best thing here from municipal internet. A local ISP started up and offered to lay fiber in any neighborhood where 40% or more of the population agreeing to sign up.
I know Spectrum is desperate for people in this neighborhood to return because I get a lot of mailings and never see a Spectrum truck anymore, but the cost is about the same, the speed is massively higher (we’re talking max 15 mbps to max 50 mbps on my line and you can pay for a faster speed) and it’s so much more reliable.
If you are a CEO of a major company your address should be where anyone can see it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As expected, broadband industry lobby groups have sued the Federal Communications Commission in an attempt to nullify net neutrality rules that prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.
The industry lost a similar case during the Obama era, but is hoping to win this time because of the Supreme Court’s evolving approach on whether federal agencies can decide “major questions” without explicit instructions from Congress.
"By reclassifying broadband under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, the Commission asserts the power to set prices, dictate terms and conditions, require or prohibit investment or divestment, and more.
The FCC’s net neutrality order reclassified broadband as telecommunications, which makes Internet service subject to common-carrier regulations under Title II.
Despite the industry’s claim that classification is a major question that can only be decided by Congress, a federal appeals court ruled in previous cases that the FCC has authority to classify broadband as either a telecommunications or information service.
“There’s no ‘unheralded power’ that we’re purporting to discover in the annals of an old, dusty statute—we’ve been classifying communications services one way or the other for decades, and the 1996 [Telecommunications] Act expressly codified our ability to continue that practice.”
The original article contains 765 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Someone got so fed up in my town they started their own ISP but I’m too far so I’m getting ripped off by Cablevision
No shit.
