Gov report bizarrely claims net neutrality repeal raised incomes $50B a year

Because the industry executives are as dumb as the politicians and had no other ideas to move the needle on what is essentially a static commodity like the electricity grid in a plateauing market.

Doesn't mean it was ever a practical idea.

I've always said we can make laws when or if it actually happens. Because in the meantime we've all been getting upset and wasting time over highly impractical scenarios... and net neutrality has had a serious force and backing, which is good. But in regards to the FCC there's so many more important things to be spending our hacker concern-resources on IMO. For example the FCC (or FTC) should be looking into the millions of Indian (et al) call scammers which are wrecking havoc across the western world - which is an obvious and very real epidemic of fraud that is happening right now and very few western gov are doing anything about the millions of older people getting scammed every day. Much of which transits through legit American infrastructure and web services.

Then wake me up when a single ISP or mobile operator does anything close to what people have been claiming they will do.

They are going to, but they need "5G" to be complete for them to do so.

They are absolutely moving forward with similar plans under the banner of "5G." 5G is nothing but a big Trojan Horse. I am amazed that more tech people have not caught onto this yet.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03085...

I've been to Mexico so many times all over the country and they have cheaper access to mobile networks than any western country I've been to. That alone makes it a terrible example for western developed countries which was always the context of my comment. Not to mention I'd love to see the penetration and market ROI numbers for what you claim is a legitimate service offering we should be worried about in Mexico alone.

The idea that moving from <1mbps-10mbps to basically decent quality fiber speeds on your phone will result in reduced access to networks (via finely controlled interception and inspection) sounds stupid to me. And as I said it only makes sense in the developing world where there are actually customers who would buy such a thing, and even then only a tiny niche. But in the western world, to expect the entire market to be so anti-consumer and roll backwards like that, that still sounds like a fantasy to me.

I'm not dumb enough to say that giant oligopolies won't try but I highly doubt it will go beyond speculation let alone ever become anything close to 0.1% of the marketshare within the country, let alone globally. It's not a serious threat that can't be dealt with by existing means, even those that roll out well before it ruins anything real.

Meanwhile Indian scammers, who for a significant number we already have the addresses and names of and who use American phone services (as shown in the sublinked video) make hundreds of millions off westerners and literally nothing is being done by the US to a real and active anti-consumer threat that exists today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le71yVPh4uk

I will be concerned about US net neutrality when and/or if it actually becomes anything close to a real threat and I mean that (ie, companies proposing a serious rollout with pricing and other specifics instead of very broad speculation that they need it to capture more value from the market, which some dumb politician buys into).

Because it's a democracy with a very well established bureaucratic epidermis that stretches from federal to local level. It's a vast and complex entity that operates on defined rules.

Until trump, the infection of fickle, cynical politics never made it very deep because the folks operating in that bureaucratic layer were career people with operational ethics (and frankly were quite boring-- by design), not nominated people. The sycophants are purging those people now. The rot is making its way deeper into the inner workings of the country like a cancer.

Now they're not afraid of lying because that's what their rulers want them to do. Do whatever it takes to make the boss look good or suffer the consequences. That's the kind of behavior you expect from North Korea. Not the USA.

It's just like other countries, but the cost of corruption is in US dollars (more expensive).

Traditionally the press has been the checks-and-balances solution.

I wonder whether we will be better off now (with ubiquitous cheap communication) or worse (with big journalism disappearing).