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No he isn't. He thinks broadband competition in the US is "robust"[1], which is farcical on its face.

Ajit Pai is a decidedly anti-consumer, anti-competition commissioner. His job is to make sure ATT, Verizon, Comcast, et al make as much money as possible. Period.

[1]http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/washington/fccs-pai-br...

Your comment would be much better if you dropped everything but the second sentence (and maybe the first, to orient the reader), since that's where all the substance lies.

I cancelled Comcast but am still long on $CMCSA.

It's horseshit.

But, my upside can be donated to a school.

If you don't think customers matter, you're simply a bad investor, and you won't have any upside. (It really is that simple.)

This isn't a moral statement, just that you are unlikely to have upside. If you want to benefit schools, go ahead and donate, but becoming a stakeholder in a company that hates its customers and vice versa is unlikely to serve your stated goal, in my opinion.

You are absolutely right, but I think there are ways around it that Comcast and friends have figured out. Obviously carving out territories and sticking to your territory is a big one. No competition for what many consider a necessity. Imagine if the electric company did the same thing? What are you going to do? Live without power?

it's one thing to say they'll probably survive, and another thing to completely actively invest in it. I say actively because it's not like gp poster has it in their portfolio due to some mutual fund, etc. They actively bought it as a long position!

I can't believe 3 people downvoted this :) Customers who hate your guts is not a good formula for the medium term. (Long-term, companies can change - customers like Microsoft a lot more these days.)

"Notwithstanding the decline in economic fortunes since 2009" is a rather unsubtle way of attempting to rewrite history and pin the Great Recession of 2007-2009 due to the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 on Obama. So, no, he's not as reasonable and inline with HN folks as you think.

2009 is when the program costs started to increase. The statement is saying that even in light of declining fortunes, 34% of the public is too much.

No, the statement contains one fact and one opinion. The fact is bullshit.

"Notwithstanding the decline in economic fortunes since 2009, [34%] is too many."

Here's US GDP per capita. Notice a "decline in economic fortunes since 2009"?

World Bank: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-per-capita

St. Louis Fed: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA

A stronger case could be made for median income, but even there, we're better off than we were in 2009. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

None of this adds any support to the case that a 160% increase in costs is reasonable or expected. In fact, the data points you've presented further call this into question.

What you're talking about is the opinion. I was talking about the fact cited.

How is the fact that over a third of the US can't afford Internet in 2017 not the story? That's horrible.

I could be wrong, but I believe the issue is not that 34% of households can't afford Internet, but that the eligibility requirements for this problem are so lax that they cover 34% of households, despite the fact that many of them can afford Internet on their own.

From the linked document: "The average annual household income of those eligible for Lifeline support is roughly $38,000. Numerous families with incomes at that level already subscribe to broadband."

$38k to support a whole household sounds pretty poor to me.

I agree, but the question at hand is not whether or not $38k is "poor", but whether $38k is "too poor to afford the internet".

I grew up in a family of 6 on 38k a year, I can guarantee that's too poor, even in the country. That was in the 80's, it must be even worse now.

At those incomes all your financial decisions are about food and housing, and hopefully getting clothing donations. Let alone trying to think about educating your kids to try and get them out.

This is a lifeline to people, and helps educate their children. We should be doing more as a society to help those at the bottom.

$38k in the 80s was a pretty decent wage. Hardly poor. $38,000 in 1985 would be roughly $87,000 today. That's solidly within middle class.

http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/which-income...

I did not intend to imply that my family was poor, only that we struggled with that income in suburban PA.

The reason I posted that is because I find it very difficult to believe that any family of 1 or more children on an income of 40k a year today would have a comfortable life, and affording broadband Internet would be difficult.

I was raised in similar circumstances and I wouldn't even consider it poor, let alone ''too poor''. $38k in 1985 is around $80k today. Sufficient to cover 4 kids in most rural and inland suburban parts of the US. This is Dave Ramsey's middle class, middle America audience. For these families it's not what they make, it's what they spend that determines the outcome.

1985 dollars are not relevant to a 2017 program.

He is responding to someone who claimed that 38k in the 1980s was too poor to raise a family on period, it's a tangent but you're complaining to the wrong person imo

You got it backwards, $38k today is $16k in 1985. Basically poor people.

Actually bluejekyll got it backwards, and nugget provided an accurate response.

No. I didn't get it backwards. Someone raising a family today on 38k is is roughly equivalent to somone making 16k in the 80s.

Which is exactly my point. In the 80s on 38k a year it meant that we could not afford many of the things that others had. New shoes/clothes etc. my parents luckily focused on education, and other quality of life things, rather than spending on frivolous things, like cable. I'd say cable was roughly equivalent to internet today. So that was a choice that they made to go without. And I say Internet would probably have been the same type of decisions.

So while 80k today may be equivalent to 40k from the 80s, I would say 80k for a family of 4 kids would be hard, 40k would be exponentially harder.

I think your parents may have made a conscious choice to keep cable out of the home for other, non-financial reasons (as did mine).

By the mid 1980s only about half of households had basic cable.[1] In Chicago, there were complaints about a price hike to $13/month.[2]

Housing costs are the problem. The move to dual-income households, the drop in interest rates, and the population boom caused certain real estate markets to appreciate at a level far above incomes and inflation. The coastal home my parents purchased in the early 1980s has appreciated 10x in value. A similar home in the mid-western state capital of their youth has appreciated 3x over the same period. This is why I called the scenario with 4 kids doable in some (most) parts of the country, but certainly not all.

[1] http://www.tvhistory.tv/Cable_Households_77-99.JPG [2] http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1985/12/30/page/15/articl...

> average

~half of those households earn more

Sorry for nitpicking, but "~half of those households earn more" would have been true if they were talking about median income, not average income.

While many of the commonly seen distributions have median==average, income usually follows a more exponential distribution with the average exceeding the median due to a "heavy tail".

There's two ways to become eligible.

A. Program based (enrolled in Medi-cal, SSI, Food stamp program. (These programs are not easy to qualify for.)

B. Income based (1-2 household: can't make more than 25,900. That includes all income, including gifts. If you have 10 family members you can make $74,900.

I don't think it's "so lax".

They credit a little under $10 bucks a month. So it's a landline, or a lousy cell phone. You still end up paying the rest of the bill. It's not free. (The cell phone providers take the subsidy hoping/praying the customer will go over their credit. "Then we can bill the lousey service!"

I can't imagine a internet provider service for that less than $10 credit. (There must be a catch?)

People complain about the free phones some poor poeople get. It's a horrid cell phone. If you qualify, get the landline, and it's only for local calls.

These days government programs know a lot about households. The Internet has stopped a lot of the fraud. People are very poor, but so many Americans believe the poor are cheating in some way? Those days are kinda over. Big brother knows everything--yea! The Rebublicans stil believe the slackers are cheating the system. Sad.

> That includes all income, including gifts.

Many who make claims of poverty can be disengenuous. Income generally excludes non-cash payments from other government programs. You "make" 25,900 a year and get to keep claiming poverty after free healthcare, free housing, free food, free daycare, free internet, free bus transit, etc.

It is the way it calculated, but most of these "poor" live very good lives significantly in excess of their paper poverty. Sometimes far better lives than those making just enough to not qualify for government assistance at all.

This happens in my midwest suburb commonly. It is an unfortunate side effect, more for the middle class than for the poor.

I've been so poor I had to try out that "free healthcare" and it nearly killed me. It may be free in the sense of little or no monetary cost but if anyone has a mental image of gleaming hospitals full of doctors waiting to serve patients they are sadly mistaken. Patients are forced to trade time instead of money for their healthcare, assuming they can get it all.

When you are forced into the bottom tier of the medical system you're competing with every other patient with a complaint from constipation to gunshot wounds. These hospitals do not have unlimited resources and triage patients based on need.

The result is someone like me who had an upper respiratory infection slowly getting worse and turning into pneumonia can sit for a day or two in the emergency room waiting for a shot.

I don't know if you're ever had a full blown case of pneumonia but as someone who did and still has scarring in their lungs it's no joke. You slowly drown from the buildup in your lungs and there's nothing you can do but hope the antibiotics outrace the infection before you can no longer breathe.

Does sitting around Ben Taub Hospital in a plastic chair for more than a day sound like "living a pretty good life" to you? I assure you, it is not.

I think you think I was making an argument I didnt make.

I am not claiming free healthcare is of equal quality to any other healthcare, and I am sorry your experience was so shitty.

There are some folks cheating the system like those right-wing militia ranchers who “adopt” dozens of orphaned children and then make them do hard labor, while collecting state support for it.

This sounds about as real as the "welfare queens driving Cadillacs" myth.

e.g. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/get-the-government-s-han...

Obviously this isn’t a widespread problem though, and should be dealt with on a case by case basis.

Basically this program has NO budget so costs have spiraled "From 2008 to 2012, Lifeline spending grew from $821 million to over $2.1 billion, an increase of over 160%."

Sounds like a very successful program that many in need are benefiting from. I'm glad the USF I pay every month is being put to good use.

If by "great", you mean "a podcast by a lobbying organization that is strongly against net neutrality, etc", then yeah, it's "great".

https://techpolicycorner.org/trumps-opportunities-on-tech-po...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/09/05...

These are the folks behind "don't break the net", which some folks may remember (http://dontbreakthe.net/)

and in case, you want to engage substantively, it's funny who benefits by shutting down lifeline:

Those "spiraling, out of control costs" are paid for by the universal service fund.

Where would that money otherwise go: https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service-fund

"High Cost Support Mechanism - provides support to certain qualifying telephone companies that serve high cost areas, thereby making phone service affordable for the residents of these regions. "

So - right into the hands of the telecom companies.

Which is precisely why they (and techfreedom!) lobbied to kill Lifeline. It cuts into the money they get from USF.

Where they take it to claim they need it to serve rural areas, while simultaneously, wait for it, lobbying states and others to pass laws banning those municipalities from serving themselves. Because then they'd be free of this crap. Meanwhile, strangely, rural broadband penetration and speed still sucks for real, and the telecoms (and again, techfreedom!) strongly oppose things like "defining broadband as 10mbps" or anything that would demonstrate this. Additionally, the dollars not going to subsidize lifeline go back to them double, because they also get the money from the higher telephone bills. Kind of a neat racket, if you can get it.

In case you want to argue that there are other programs that are getting the money anyway, the one i cited gets billions in funding given to phone companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund#Connect...

That's the one of the famous ones that has pretty much given phone companies billions and gotten us nothing actually in return.

Personally, i'm fine with that money all going to anyone but a telecom company, even if they aren't "low enough income" for you or whatever.

BTW, USF is an example of rural welfare that Republican voters pretend does not exist.

Why is Lifeline eligible to be funded from the USF?

is there such a thing as neutral on this? you're either for or against net neutrality. the only neutral people are those people who are not involved/don't care. and I don't really care to hear from those people.

also the universal service fund is paid for by you and me. the rate we pay is calculated based on what they need to spend and not vice versa. so if we don't pay for 1/3rd of us households we will pay less tax and the fund will be smaller

"is there such a thing as neutral on this? you're either for or against net neutrality. the only neutral people are those people who are not involved/don't care. and I don't really care to hear from those people. "

You kind of answered your own question. There is such a thing as neutral on this, you just don't like to hear from them :) Actually, i'm pretty neutral, surprisingly, and i don't really care that much, so i'd fall into your latter category. I only commented because of how much bs the original comment was. Personally, i don't care mainly because neither side actually gives a crap about me. Only their bottom line. That isn't going to change anytime soon. It's certainly not going to change while the FCC is literally appointed by two parties.

"also the universal service fund is paid for by you and me. the rate we pay is calculated based on what they need to spend and not vice versa. so if we don't pay for 1/3rd of us households we will pay less tax and the fund will be smaller"

This isn't quite true due to how the forecasting is done, but sure, it's lose enough But we could also stop paying the billions to the telecoms and instead, pay for 1/3rd of the households, for the same price. :)

But you are also saying that 1/3rd of households fall into this category:

"Establishes a National Eligibility Verifier to verify eligible Lifeline subscribers. Eligibility will be based on participation in SNAP, Medicaid, SSI, Federal Public Housing Assistance, the Veterans *Pension benefit program, current Tribal qualifying programs, or those who can demonstrate income of less than 135 percent of the federal poverty guidelines."

If 34% of america falls into that category, then we pretty much better do something anyway!

> is there such a thing as neutral on this? you're either for or against net neutrality. the only neutral people are those people who are not involved/don't care.

You could say that about anything -- anyone who cares about something has an opinion on it.

What matters isn't a lack of interest, it's objectivity, which is what you apply to each side's argument to figure out who is wrong.

And notice that really all of the arguments against network neutrality take the form "if you don't let ISPs leverage their wire monopoly to monopolize over-the-top services too then they won't upgrade the wires."

And we know how to prevent that from happening. Keep network neutrality, and authorize a bond issue to fund municipal fiber in any location where the incumbent doesn't offer high speed service within a fixed amount of time.

That makes the truth or falsity of their argument irrelevant -- if it's false then they'll make the upgrades anyway, if it's true then we'll build municipal networks, and in either case the result is fast neutral networks.

Their way is to destroy over-the-top competition and then in many cases they still won't upgrade.

I'm neutral on net neutrality - I think legislating it is just treating the symptom rather than the real problem - a lack of competition. I live outside the US and in the places I've lived, I've never once worried about net neutrality since I can trivially change between many providers. I'd prefer they target the actual problem of local infrastructure monopolies rather than patching the symptoms, but I guess doing what they can is better than nothing...