Ajit Pai says you’re going to love the death of net neutrality

In fact according to official statistics, even rural areas with zero wired internet options have a great competitive landscape. Let that sink in...

Does anyone have any more info on the meaning and usage of the term "tortured truth."

I've been looking for new, concise ways to refer to a dishonest use of selectively chosen truth to mislead.

I wonder if the rise of "un-Net" could provide an incentive for people to get involved in alternative ways of connecting with one another, such as something like mesh networking.

He lied about the FCC's fake DDoS attack and refuses to investigate all the bots on the FCC's comment site as the NN open commenting period was coming to a close.

He's the Scott Pruitt of the FCC.

In the past few places I've lived (in Seattle and the SF Bay Area), there has been only a single high speed broadband provider (2 of those places had a DSL provider that promised "up to 1.5mbit" speeds), but that's barely enough for standard def streaming, and not nearly enough for HD streaming -- 1.5Mbit DSL was "high speed" 20 years ago.

The information to make an informed choice between service providers is meaningless when most of us in the US have no practical choice.

> [The repeal] will protect consumers and promote better, faster Internet access and more competition

First of all: I think the "competition" in question is along an axis that I'm not interested in; e.g. does this plan give me faster Netflix or unlimited Facebook. So now I have one more thing to worry about when picking a plan, which is very likely going to make me less happy with my choice.

The better/faster internet he's talking about is probably along these lines too, e.g a deal being struck with Netflix to make just Netflix faster.

So, for me as a consumer, I think this is terrible. I'm going to be spend more time thinking about my plan and be less happy it. It will also be worse in the sense that ISPs are spending time and money on a feature that I didn't want in the first place.

I also think this is terrible for new companies, but that's for another post.

A great book on this is The Paradox of Choice

First of all, there is practically no competition to start with. Six ISPs control the majority of the market, and the majority of customers have only one ISP to choose from. Getting rid of net neutrality will not make other companies suddenly appear.

Secondly, one company doing worse does not make a competing company better. It makes it relatively better. That doesn't matter, especially if there isn't another company to begin with.

Put these together, and it's trivial to see that getting rid of net neutrality will not bolster competition. Pai's conclusion is nonsense. In our reality, we are only left with worse options.

This article is ruminating on what might occur, not what actually occurred.

Government is people deciding with their votes, because letting people decide with their dollars means whoever has the most dollars gets to make all the decisions.

Neither of your comparisons is on point. (a) A market like surgical services doesn't have significant barriers to entry. But the need to lay last-mile fiber or cable is a significant barrier to market entry. (b) Japan did not get its digital infrastructure through laissez-faire policies.

Allowing incumbents to abuse their customers does devalue them, making their competitors relatively more valuable. The problem is that there are no competitors!

What we are left with are incumbents who can devalue themselves via customer abuse without consequence, which simply boils down to customer abuse.

I think with the advancement of Wireless last mile reducing deployment costs we will see more competition in the space (if incumbent ISPs do not keep them out with lawsuits). But at the current time most Wireless ISPs can't match the speeds of wired ISPs and the average consumer does not care enough to check every so often if a new competitor enters the ISP market, and probably won't change unless they have a serious problem with their current provider.

So in summary I think that soon we may not need government oversight with enough competition, but in our current market saturated by incumbents we do.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/att-and-comcast-...

Now every search is results from a small hand full of websites, full of top 10 lists you have to click through and one paragraph articles where I learn nothing.

Don't believe me? Try to Google any medical condition.

Nowadays, companies run the internet and own our data.

Let's go back to the old model. Let universities research federated protocols/algorithms and such. Let the government own the fiber. And let companies build the hardware.