FTC Seeks to Examine the Privacy Practices of U.S. Broadband Providers

If you think it's so very important that there be more than one already-installed terrestrial or directional radio broadband provider in the middle of nowhere; you are perfectly welcome to find out what that will tend to cost, and start a charity to subsidize it.

The government can not force private individuals or businesses to provide new services to any random location in the United States that anyone could technically choose to live. That's a good thing, in my view.

As somebody who intends to live further away from urban centers, and knows what distance does to the cost of providing telecommunications services, it is my responsibility to entice others to do business with me, not anyone else's.

If somebody is actively conspiring to prevent new business in this sector, that's one thing; but if the local government, geographic, and economic situation of some place is just such that it's not worth extending ISP services there, that's not in the FTCs purview.

#1 is the universal coverage requirement — anyone receiving a local monopoly from a municipality has to agree to make service available in the entire city. Many poor or low-density neighborhoods are not profitable for even a single company to serve, much less multiple companies. Overbuilders have no such requirement to even provide the potential of service in low-income areas, so none do. A side effect of this is that overbuilders can’t approach the level of efficiency that the monopolists can (see #4) and none can be much more than a nuisance to the incumbents as long as they remain overbuilders.

#2 is that in the wealthier / denser areas of a city that can support more than one provider, there are typically 2-5 providers offering speeds of 100+ mbit. The local monopolists therefore rely on the profits from the wealthy areas to cover the losses from the poor areas.

#3 is that it’s really hard to get investment to overbuild unless it’s a wealthy area. Telecom rollouts are expensive and require taking on significant debt. For every additional overbuilder serving an area, your ratio of [households served] / [households subscribed] and the amount of overhead you have to recoup for each customer goes up. Investors will not loan you money if they think you won’t make it back.

#4 is that telecom services are a scale business where you need vertical integration to be viable. TimeWarner Cable had their backbone network with TimeWarner Telecom. That was fine until both companies split and the infrastructure was owned by two different companies. TimeWarner Cable then had to build their own backbone — which lowered their credit rating, which made every subsequent debt offering more expensive. They were trapped in a cycle where they needed to invest badly, their network was slow so they couldn’t raise prices much, but borrowing was so expensive for them it turned into a death spiral. And that’s how the #4 cable provider in the country was able to buy the #2 provider — Charter was simply more vertically integrated through Liberty Media and had a better balance sheet.

The “take rate” (how many households of the total subscribe to broadband internet — directly correlated with household income) of a neighborhood largely determines how many companies serve the area. The overall take rate of the wealthiest cities is sufficient to support at most 3 broadband providers serving a given household; in the poorest cities the government has to subsidize access for even a single company to serve the area.

Capitalism and abuse of position go hand-in-hand. I would argue that abuse of position is the fundamental driving force behind capitalism.

(These rules largely do not apply to wireless.)

They are no different then Comcast, ATT or other biggies who abuse their power.

Edit: Both CenturyLink and Cox were also exluded.

learning about those vulnerabilities can be done by watching public CCC and other similar conference talks

WTF?

You may not realize how many there are total because most of them are regional. Things like Spectrum or Charter or Verizon or Cox or CenturyLink are all broadband carriers that were never available where I am, so I only heard about them through others online. Meanwhile, neither you nor this announcement mentioned my ISP.

As many of those are not part of this inquiry, presumably the FTC is not worried about the privacy practices of those ISPs at this time, and just targeting ones it has specific concerns about.

What other companies get such hate? (excluding: Tobacco, Big Pharma, and Oracle)

The removal of net neutrality took oversight from the FCC where it was Title II and essentially a utility, over to the FTC where it cannot be seen as a utility.

This action is just the FTC making it look like they are challenging them to try to defeat the net neutrality push and act like the FTC would do something about abusive ISPs regarding net neutrality and private data protections which were both removed in 2017 and put under the FTC from the FCC.

When the bill is defeated in the Senate, some members will mention that the FTC right now it looking into the ISPs/telcos but that is just for show.

Ultimately the FTC is a worse place to put net neutrality oversight since at the FCC it is a utility and the liabilities are greater for the ISPs, plus they can't throttle data or sell ads/private data as easy.

Both net neutrality and privacy protections [2][3] were removed at the FCC and put on the FTC which is only now suddenly doing something for show due to the movement of the new net neutrality push.

Jeff Flake initially pushed the removal of privacy protections [2] and it led to the net neutrality bill and both move oversight from FCC under Title II to the FTC under where all there are are fines and less liability after abuse.

> Under the FTC’s stewardship, our internet economy has become the envy of the world. The FTC helped by establishing clear standards and robust enforcement mechanisms that protect our sensitive information while remaining flexible enough to respond to our preferences as consumers.

> When it comes to federal regulations, to borrow a phrase from back on the ranch, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Unfortunately, the previous administration decided to search for a problem when we already had the solution.

> In February 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) undertook a unilateral power-grab by asserting jurisdiction over ISPs. This bureaucratic turf battle stripped ISPs of their traditional regulator, and could have thrown the entire internet ecosystem into flux. But it went virtually unnoticed by the media and activists who care about privacy.

> After more than a year of ad-hoc privacy regulation, the FCC decided to adopt its own rules. Instead of basing the rules on proven regulatory framework that applies throughout the rest of the internet, the FCC pushed through new rules on a party-line vote in the waning days of the previous administration.

...

> Now the FCC and the FTC can work hand-in-hand to enforce a uniform privacy framework for ISPs and the rest of the Internet. In an early sign of how successful this model can be, the major broadband providers have already updated their privacy policies to make it clear how consumers can opt out of targeted advertising.

The reason ISPs want to keep the FTC in charge is net neutrality and privacy protections can be broken and smaller fines can be paid if they are ever challenged. With the FCC they were liable under different Title II / utility protections that both actually prevented abuse and made harsher penalties for breaking it for ISPs.

This is quite a good show by the ISPs and FTC though.

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvyqvm/bill-that-...

[2] https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/arizona-senator-jeff-fl...

[3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/congress-repealing-our...

if anything people are clamoring for censorship by wrapping it up under the mantra of fake news all the while ignoring the fact what someone declares as fake may not be truly fake, merely what they don't want you to believe.

industry moves best when regulations are light but the oversight is vigilant