Almost All of FCC’s New Advisory Panel Works for Telecoms
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
There is no malice in this, although it's very easy to perceive it as so. It's purely a side product of democracy - our representatives cannot possibly (or feasibly be expected to) represent the professional or personal interests of each and every working person within their constituency without those interests being put forward ahead of time and chased - hence why the questions go out to those that are 'known to know' for advice. It's human nature - if you know someone who has experience in a domain you're unaware of, you go to them for advice. If the representative doesn't know you have this expertise, they're not going to come to you for advice.
We all take for granted that our representatives in government look out for us, however when these initiatives are raised by them, and input is requested, the questions asked are very rarely put to laymen or individuals or groups with a cursory or passing interest. They're usually put to those working in the related industry or those who have a stake in the arena, as this is where the expertise is perceived to live, and will generate the quickest consensus on the issue.
It's all down to exposure - if you are invested in an issue, find a way to get involved (reach out to you representative etc.) and have a voice in the discussions, rather than waiting idly by and demonstrating against the result.
If the experience influencing education has come from those who have been 'through the ringer' at the companies pushing the technology forward, education will always be one step behind corporate influence. Catch-22 unfortunately.
The paradigm I think has shifted (for better or worse) from taking the letter from academia to taking it from those who have advanced these technologies within public perception (with or without fuelling from media influence)
> Sixty-four city and state officials were nominated for the panel, but the agency initially chose only two: Sam Liccardo, mayor of San Jose, California, and Kelleigh Cole from the Utah Governor’s Office, according to documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through a Freedom of Information Act request. Pai later appointed another city official, Andy Huckaba, a member of the Lenexa, Kansas, city council.
3 (initially 2) out of 30 panel positions are people that aren't currently working for the telecom industry.
>But the FCC didn’t choose Carter — or almost any of the other city or state government officials who applied. Sixty-four city and state officials were nominated for the panel, but the agency initially chose only two: Sam Liccardo, mayor of San Jose, California, and Kelleigh Cole from the Utah Governor’s Office, according to documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through a Freedom of Information Act request. Pai later appointed another city official, Andy Huckaba, a member of the Lenexa, Kansas, city council.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig
The data seems to show that simply isn't true. It isn't malice, but only representing the interests of those who finance your campaign and ensure you have a job for the next election, which is entirely not the point of our federal government.
Link to these data?
In my experience, the number of times a phone call of mine explaining an obscure policy flipped someone's view, whether a regulator, legislator or, in one case, mayor, is quite numerous. I'm not a prolific donor. I just called. I am almost always the only person who is not either (a) in the industry being considered or (b) retired who bothered to reach out. Same thing for town halls, canvassing, et cetera.
We do have a problem where popular views aren't effectively translating into policy. But I haven't seen that graph adjusted for civic involvement.
It is like a doctor killing all his patients: And now, no one is sick anymore.
I read a political science study of how lobbying really works. My memory of it is hazy so these details may be off, but they concluded that on the order of 80% of lobbyists, lobbying, and money are for/by big business. The claim of 'special interests', which for some reason includes environmentalists but not big business, having so much influence is wrong; they are badly outgunned by their opponents.
(The book is nowhere near me or I'd share its name.)
And that is completely wrong. You can call for polls, you can look for experts on education institutions, you can look for unions, you can bring some one from the EFF. There is a lot of options if you will.
> There is no malice in this, although it's very easy to perceive it as so.
Their decisions have been proven harmful to the citizens at the same time that benefits economically the elites, that's the very definition of malice in government. That's one of the reasons people emigrated from Europe to America, to fly from a corrupt system of nobility and serfdom.
> It's all down to exposure - if you are invested in an issue, find a way to get involved (reach out to you representative etc.) and have a voice in the discussions, rather than waiting idly by and demonstrating against the result.
I thought that it was about fairness and to represent all citizens, but if it boils down to "exposure" then money can buy that. When did it become 1 dollar 1 vote? And why should we accept it willingly?
Your argument is "this is how it is, so it is good". Status quo is not immutable and has not morality by itself.
Wheeler was pretty consistently pro-consumer. Pai has shown the complete opposite in each decision.
Here's a parallell: https://theintercept.com/2017/06/04/paris-accord-trump-lobby...
What matters is the effect of what you're doing.
How do you find people who are highly knowledgeable about he telecom industry but who haven't on the payroll of a telecom company and don't hope to be?
Now the tougher question, what can we do about it?
The best solution is to simply eliminate the agency.
Instead, the problem in broadband right now is state and local governments. Why does Silicon Valley have such limited broadband options while Austin, Atlanta, even exurban Maryland have multiple fiber options? The answer is that the same NIMBY local governments that stand in the way of transit development and new housing development also stand in the way of broadband deployment. See, e.g. San Francisco's opposition to fiber deployment: https://sf.curbed.com/2011/4/25/10470790/at-t-you-want-to-pu....
Obviously, the FCC needs to prevent abuse. I think it could do a lot more in terms of preempting state/local laws against municipal broadband, or things like the West Virginia law that makes pole attachments harder. But for better or worse, U.S. policy at almost all levels is to have broadband infrastructure built with private rather than public capital. As long as that's true, pushing for increased antagonism from the regulator might feel good, but it's probably going to hurt, not help.
Virgin Media is £45 for 100mbit DOCSIS.
I have hyperoptic in my apartment, which is about £55/month for uncapped 1gig up/down.
Keep in mind European prices include all taxes in their prices.
Consider a 100 mbps cable connection with a classic comcast 250 GiB cap. Now obviously home internet is designed and sold to be bursty. But if you do the math, this is only 6 hours of max-speed traffic, for an entire month. Or look at it from the other extreme, no bursting - it's less than 1 mbps spread over an entire month.
Frankly, 100 mbps is overkill, I'd be happy with a solid symmetric 40 mbps. The reason the numbers are so high is people who aren't network engineers think "hmm my internet is still not enough somehow, I should get more" but the rated speed is not the problem. In fact I recently switched from 200mbps/20mpbs cable to 100mbps/100mpbs fios, for the significantly faster and more consistent upload speed. I don't miss the extra 100mbps download speed at all.
Summary: speed matters less the higher you go. The caps matter more.
VM in the UK has caps only on the upstream between 6pm-11pm, where it slows your upstream down by 50% if you upload a lot in that time slot.
Hardly comparable?
Moreover, the FCC actually has little to do with broadband deployment, whether or not it is "captured." It's the local governments that are in charge of almost all the relevant roadblocks to deployment: franchising, pole attachments, etc.
Speculum comunications charges $95/mo. for a (theoretical) 20/1Mb connection and they're the only game in town. This is normal for most of the country.
https://www.bahnhof.se/stockholm/familjebostader-svenska-bos...
$76 for 1Gbps/1Gbps (house plan, apartment plans are usually cheaper because of scale)
The difference is that fiber is widely available in Sweden. You can usually pay ~$2000 to have it installed in your house in major cities, if it's not already, and subsidized ~$500 in rural towns. Most houses built in the last 10-15 years already has it installed. And it's installed in most apartment complexes longer than that.
And then you have a choice of 5+ ISPs.
I got it installed in my dads old house, but even before that you could get 100/100 through cable for ~$45.
As far as I know concerns people have with the telecommunications act of 1996 are very serious but they concern primarily media/press consolidation, and allowing for vertical integration, since it provides dangerous incentives for companies to violate net neutrality. And of course people have problems in general with massive consolidation of private power over critical communication infrastructure (see previous paragraph) but I didn't realize there was any worry that it would make things much worse when it comes to "what kind of service can the consumer buy" efficiency related issues.
I see the same thing in play here - the airwaves are being treated like tracts of land, and those who currently own the larger tracts don't want anyone using the smaller plots of no-man's land on their borders, in case there are accidental (or otherwise) trespasses onto 'owned territory', so to speak.
I'm not advocating one way or another (if you own something, it's yours, clean and fair), but it's interesting to see how an invisible physical space is being monetized so aggressively.
The purpose of a regulatory committee is to be the creature of a specific industry.
Kolko gives a history of the regulatory movement and it's role in "The Triumph of the New Conservatism".
It is a must-read foranyone dealing with a regulatory body.
The official GOP stance is that industry can police itself, right?
Seems pretty simple.
I don't know how intentional this is, but I suspect they want to be able to drum up support next election far more than they want change.