- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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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?)
In my town it is a city utility like electricity and water. Gigabit fiber up/down for $70 with net neutrality
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
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.
“Waaaaaah! I can’t rip people off as much!”
-ISPs
I cannot upvote this enough
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.
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.
Fuck you comcast. I’m sure they are one of the instigators.
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.
