Why does anyone think allowing ISPs to collect and operate on customer information with impunity is a good idea for the general public, who often have no alternatives?
> Telecoms unsurprisingly object to the rules. They feel they're subject to more stringent regulation than many of the websites you visit, and believe that an opt-in requirement hurts their ability to target you with personalized ads.
Silicon Valley would similarly chafe at the idea of opt-in requirements before being able to use customer data. You can raise the competition issue, and that's fair to a degree. But I have more realistic choices for say my cell phone plan than I do the search engine I use. And I have every little choice in, e.g., whether or not I send emails to gmail/yahoo/etc. users.
As for why Republicans take up this particular mantle, there is a cynical take and a charitable one. Telecom companies employ hundreds of thousands of people, and are geographically dispersed. Silicon Valley is highly concentrated and doesn't employ that many people. AT&T, for example, has thousands of employees in Tennessee. Google has a few hundred. Does Facebook have any?
IMHO, everybody making Internet infrastructure should be required to get opt-in consent before using private customer information.
You could encrypt. (Not that that's really a rebuttal, all things considered, I just felt it worth noting...)
If I don't want to use Google because of their tracking, I can use DuckDuckGo.
If I don't want to use Comcast because of their tracking, my other options are Comcast, Comcast, Comcast, and Comcast. I think you're being a bit disingenuous by focusing on cellular carriers and not mentioning wired broadband providers where we have no competition, no consumer choice, and no market solution to abuses by the service provider.
Your criticism of email is somewhat more fair. While there are alternative services available that you could use, the majority of your contacts are going to choose to fork over all of your information to Google. But if you're really concerned about that, you can find other channels to contact them. That's still a better situation than the ISP market that most Americans are stuck with.
Gaming is a slightly smaller niche that rules out satellite on account of the >0.5 second latency.
And that "niche" is still enormous. With very few exceptions, every person playing any realtime online games from an Xbox, PlayStation, other console, or PC is doing it over a wired broadband connection and can't consider other services to switch to.
Google, [small cliff] Bing, [huge cliff] :: Cable, [small cliff] DSL, [huge cliff].
Also, I am skeptical of this focus on wireline. There are 3x as many wireless broadband subscriptions in the U.S. (more than there are people!) than wired broadband. Wired broadband penetration has actually plateaued and is now shrinking.
If I had to guess about data consumed, that single wired connection probably handles more data than four mobile plans put together, thanks to mobile data caps and Netflix.
As far as broadband having "plateaued," it's not too surprising that something with a theoretical cap of 100% penetration would eventually stop growing. There are only so many houses to connect.
I don't have any particular problem with mobile broadband, my LTE connection on T-Mobile is actually faster than my cable. But there are a lot of people who use more than a couple of gigs a month, so cable isn't going away any time soon. And in the meantime, I'm not thrilled with Comcast having free reign to do whatever they want just because "the market will solve everything." It won't.
EDIT: At 20 Mb/s, it'd take me about half an hour to burn through my entire month's 5GB data allowance
Silicon valley companies in general don't have this. If you don't like Google, someone else can come along and make a new search engine. And in fact that's exactly what DuckDuckGo did, and I strongly recommend using them if you care even the slightest bit about the privacy of your online searches.
But if you don't like what Comcast is doing with your data, who can you switch to? In most markets there's no viable competitor, and even if you include things like satellite (which in general isn't actual a good competitor to wired internet), I'd have to imagine the satellite internet companies (I don't actually know who they are) aren't likely to be much better than Comcast when it comes to protecting your privacy.
I think it'd be an interesting exercise to tease apart how much it would cost to build out a new nationwide optical network versus building a competitive search engine.
I agree that it's probably crazy but I think it is possible that large organizations can miss on their core value propositions once a certain time/size has passed.
Generally, cloud stuff is more expensive than running on bare metal: https://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/
If you tried to run an index on GCE it would cost you 5x or 10x what it would to do on servers you own. If you managed to create a viable product with this incredibly onerous constraint, to the point of posing an actual business threat to Google, then they would just shut you down, since all your stuff is on their servers.