Cable lobby vows “years of litigation” to avoid bans on blocking and throttling
FCC sets April 25 vote to restore net neutrality rules repealed under Ajit Pai.
The NCTA has repeatedly stated over the years that net neutrality rules aren't needed because ISPs already follow net neutrality principles. "Internet service providers have always delivered open, unrestricted Internet service. Consumers enjoy the web content and applications of their choosing without any blocking, throttling, or interference," the group said.
Lmao, really? The audacity of these cunts.
Wow. Talk about professional gaslighting. Not enough people are aware that the Obama-era FTC enacted the policy because AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon were all caught throttling Netflix and prioritizing their own competing services.
Thanks Obama
And tethering. Verizon was basically forced to stop blocking tethering apps by the FCC. My complaint was one of the ones which started the enforcement.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Audacity of this Bitch.
I remember when Comcast was caught illegally using Sandvine to throttle people using bittorrent.
Maybe if they didn't sell people more bandwidth than they could provide they wouldn't have to throttle people below the service they paid for to work for everyone.
I would, in theory, be all for allowing companies to prioritize latency to services and protocols that benefit from it. Except they oversell the absolute shit out of their service, and can't be trusted to give you what you pay for if they don't like your traffic.
Failing to provide the full bandwidth they advertised for even one percent of a given month should result in fines that massively exceed what they charged for that month. Selling shit you don't have is not acceptable.
Oh good, if that is all true, you wont have to change anything to be compliant with new laws and should have no issue with them.
Money has no shame. Businesses only have reactionary shame in relation to possible loss of money.
It's funny because wireless ISPs literally advertise that they throttle video to certain resolutions unless you buy a higher tier.
ROFL! Order today and you can get unlimited bandwidth for YouTube and Netflix specifically!
That's incredible.
The cable lobby loves to bring up rural areas but when we gave them millions to build out they just took the money, said fuck it and did jack shit. I'm beginning to think that they prefer to under serve those areas and then use that as a bargaining chip to get everything they want.
I am in New England. Looking to buy a home. The amount of area that is not covered at 100/10 is fucking criminal. Like, they upped my price this year. For what? Transferring packets didn't get more expensive. Did you go e your employees raises? No? Are you expanding your infrastructure? No?
Like what the fuck.
Numerous places I've lived had contracts with Comcast so there was no option but them, and the speed is shit, maybe they needed to raise prices to pay for their forced monopolies.
I almost feel bad for rural people until I realize they're the ones voting for the people who make sure rural people don't get services. Redneck America wants to close the USPS for fuck sakes.
My parents live in butt fuck nowhere and are in a fiber co-op paying like $70/month for unlimited 1gbps up/down.
Meanwhile I live in the (extremely left) Capitol City of my state and pay Comcast $165/month for like 175mbps capped at 1TB, with some absurd overage fee like $10/5GB over until I hit $100 over and then it's "unlimited" but seems throttled.
In Australia we watched American ISPs do exactly that and then we did the exact same thing with the exact same result because our politicians are corrupt pieces of shit with no backbone, integrity or ethics.
The dumbasses that gave them the money should have made it so the companies did the work FIRST, then get reimbursed when they could prove they finished it. Whole thing was stupid.
Comcast for decades have said on their website they support my parent's address but they obviously do not since there are no cables on the poles for Internet. We've tried calling and asking to fix it and we've tried calling to just get someone out so we can prove they don't service it but each time we scheduled an appointment nobody showed up and when calling back they would say they never set one up. So I'm pretty sure you're correct.
So I'm pretty sure you're correct.
I know they are correct:
"By the end of 2014, America will have been charged about $400 billion by the local phone incumbents, Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink, for a fiber optic future that never showed up."
TL;DR: they took billions from the government to build fiber infrastructure then said, "sorry that wasn't enough. Give us more and we swear we'll build it this time." They just pocketed the money.
Eminent domain the final mile and be done with it. These companies have no business holding our national infrastructure hostage.
Taxpayers have already paid them billions for broken promises. It's been long demonstrated the oligopolistic communications industry cannot be trusted to provide what the public needs at fair pricing.
Its time to nationalize ISPs.
Fuck yes. Especially since the government already paid for infrastructure anyway.
Revoke their corporate charter, nationalize their infrastructure, sell it to municipal ISPs.
Nah, just allow communities to build their local infrastructure. Trust me. You don’t need to threaten the status quo, just allow the market to compete.
Every town where local fiber is available, Comcast and Spectrum suddenly have cheaper and more reliable service. It’s magical.
I mean yeah that's what monopolies do. They eliminate competition by either buying it out or lowering their prices/improving service to drive them out of business so they can then raise prices again. Just cause a small company can come in and make things better while they're able to be around doesn't mean we shouldn't go after these monopolies and cut them down so they can't have this power.
I lived in Charlotte, NC when Google announced GFiber was coming. Instantly AT&T started running as much fiber as possible and Charter(spectrum) was trying to get people locked into cheaper 3 year contracts. Ultimately AT&T got fiber first so we went with them, and it was vastly better. Charter was getting 60% packet loss every night from oversold infrastructure they didn't care to fix, as before the announcement the only competition was AT&T uverse in some parts of the city.
Jessica Rosenworcel is a champ. She has been fighting this fight for years. The week Ajit Pai (Ashit Pie) ended net neutrality using falsified public comments, a group gathered in front of the FCC to protest the change. I went down there for a few hours and Jessica came to the window and waved to us.
Haha oh man it's weird to see this mentioned so many years later.
I helped organize that protest. Thanks for coming down with us!
Thanks for organizing!
“heavy-handed regulation will not just hobble network investment and innovation, it will also seriously jeopardize our nation’s collective efforts to build and sustain reliable broadband in rural and unserved communities”
They said exactly the same thing when the first net neutrality laws were getting put in place, then after the laws went into effect the companies went on to invest record amounts in innovation and infrastructure. Funny how their words are completely meaningless.
Yaknow what does hobble investment and innovation?
It rhymes with “shmonopolies”.
"Innovation" just means ways to milk people these days .
Innovation is part of the executive buzzword bingo board for all announcements.
It doesn't actually mean anything to these people. The only thing that has weight is what will enrich the wealth of the ownership class (shareholders.)
You mean like "innovating" faster connections speeds that they've been withholding from us for decades, but can suddenly flip a switch and advertise faster speeds when another provider competes with them? Yeah, I wouldn't know anything about that... ;-)
Why can't you just be decent people?
money corrupts. its always money. humans are weak
This can only be true in a system that actively rewards greed. For most of the Homo Sapiens history money didn't even exist.
Money doesn't corrupt, money just allows people to let loose on a lot of the stuff they weren't able to do. As the saying now goes: "money doesn't corrupt, money reveals".
Can't wait until my liberal city finishes our city owned isp. You can't trust business to be in control of essential services
There was an academic paper put out a long time ago that basically argued for essential services like food, water, etc to be given non-profit status so corpo's couldn't do this sort of thing.
Mentioning "liberal" here is a bit stupid. I've seen many conservative areas have unmetered gig fiber.
Hell... where I live now is very conservative and I have 8gb uncapped.
Every piece of shit greedy corporation can't hide from their lies when they say things are too expensive to implement correctly or pay people appropriately when they are simultaneously posting profits measured in billions...
Those last couple paragraphs with the quotes from ISPs…make no fucking sense. They’re saying it will “restrict access for rural customers.” How? They say it’ll slow internet down across the nation. How? How can ARST.com just run those quotes and not even explain how they’re bullshit or even just call into question their reasoning? Shoddy journalism if you ask me.
Eat the rich. Fucking cunts.
A threat like that should disqualify them from even trying to do it.
You hear that, law school students? Job security! Because lawyers are the ones who really win in situations like this.
Fuck Ajit Pai. And fuck conservatives. They did this.
Not just conservatives but Trump.
'We know we're the bad guys so we're going to announce our intentions like a comic book villain....'
"And we also know that there's nothing you can ever do about it."
Let me plug Counter Points, a favorite political show of mine.
They recently talked about FTC Chair Lina Khan and Apple's monopoly, the government's anti-trust lawsuit against Apple, and monopolies in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMyChnACLKQ
It's tangential, but it came to mind.
If the cable companies want lawsuits, let's give them what they want in the form of anti-trust lawsuits and break them up.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=rMyChnACLKQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good, let them use their money on litigation instead of lobbying.
Yup, I'm all for it. Put it in a ballot and we'll vote to enshrine it into law.
One of my general rules of thumb is: if cable companies are for it, it must suck.
These people forget that they have to exist physically alongside us "citizens". Your layers of obfuscation won't save your reputation forever. Eventually people will be so tired of everything be stacked against us we'll just riot and take from these corpos.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Federal Communications Commission has scheduled an April 25 vote to restore net neutrality rules similar to the ones introduced during the Obama era and repealed under former President Trump.
"A return to the FCC's overwhelmingly popular and court-approved standard of net neutrality will allow the agency to serve once again as a strong consumer advocate of an open Internet."
In October 2023, the FCC voted 3–2 along party lines to seek public comment on restoring net neutrality rules and common-carrier regulation of Internet service providers under Title II of the Communications Act.
While there hasn't been a national standard since then-Chairman Ajit Pai led a repeal in 2017, Internet service providers still have to follow net neutrality rules because California and other states impose their own similar regulations.
"Reimposing heavy-handed regulation will not just hobble network investment and innovation, it will also seriously jeopardize our nation's collective efforts to build and sustain reliable broadband in rural and unserved communities," cable lobbyist Michael Powell said today.
The cable group argues that restoring net neutrality rules will interfere with the Biden administration plan to expand broadband access with a $42.45 billion grant program that will distribute public money to ISPs.
The original article contains 521 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
When companies protest against regulation while claiming that they already adhere to the same rules, then something is clearly off, and one better gets regulation through, because they plan to ditch that adherence as soon as the governmental regulations are off the table.
how are so many of Joe Brandon's appointees so good?
