Ajit Pai Is Officially Gone
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It certainly seems the free market was able to deal with it.
One thing I'm really happy with is how the FCC ran the $9.2 billion auction for the RDOF (Rural Digital Opportunity Fund) subsidies. Although I don't have hard numbers, my impression is that the USF (Universal Service Fund) is a typical government boondoggle, and the RDOF auction format was a pretty innovative way to distribute the funds.
For a minute there it looked like they would try to exclude SpaceX from bidding in the high bandwidth / low latency tier, but ultimately they went with taking a chance on their unproven tech and they were able to win $885 million in subsidies.
It is telling how much higher prices are in places where competition has been curtailed by the FCC's failures, and how much higher even prices where two services operate are, than in other countries. The number of states where towns have been forbidden to operate a municipal network also reveals our poor condition.
America is a third-world country in communication, just as it is in infant mortality. It is not accidental. There are reasons that a cable service is the most hated company in the US, more even than Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, or Koch Industries, which might deserve it more.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-informa...
Your state has net neutrality.
https://www.naruc.org/nrri/nrri-activities/net-neutrality-tr...
But with the way the internet actually works, it’s not clear that state-level regulation can be effect in this area, since packets will frequently cross state lines.
This seemed like a good thing, but with the announce of WhatsApp sharing data with Facebook, many people have changed to Telegram or Signal. Some of them will return to WhatsApp because switching actually costs them money.
Like USA, Mexico was unable to stop legislation against net neutrality. The erosion it's just starting.
In any case, it's not a business plan they can enact tomorrow, they have to build out the services first and they would be wise to boil the frog in order to avoid legislative attention.
So yeah, fairly substantial.
All of them? From your link, looks like it's ATT who did that.
Cox, my ISP, instituted a data cap before the repeal. Furthermore, data caps have zero to do with net neutrality. Preferential billing and routing based on source or destination is certainly more possible with a data cap but data caps are net neutral by themselves. Data caps are cancer but they aren't going anywhere unless there's competition. Competition may also make net neutrality, as a political issue, obsolete.
Net neutrality seems like a red herring to keep the telecom regulatory capture off the front page.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/15/europes-top-court-says-net...
Edit to add: I've blown the cap in a 2 week period. It is ridiculous
Often these services are slow even though its the only internet traffic.
Anyone telling you otherwise (Ajit Pai) doesn't care about you.
Are gov't officials allowed to delete their official use Twitter (and any social media) accounts just like that? I would think posts should be archived or put in read only mode for posterity?
I think the journalist has some axe to grind.
Here is a list of harmful nonsense [1] Pai and his FCC did over the last four years:
- Killed net neutrality
- Approved T-Mobile / Sprint merger
- Repeatedly released reports that claimed U.S. broadband is fine
- Defended murder of net neutrality in court
- Flubbed Puerto Rico hurricane disaster response
- Slow-walked and obstructed investigation into telecom company sale of your location data
- Said FTC would protect net neutrality (it didn’t, and couldn’t)
- Falsely claimed killing net neutrality was good for broadband access (it wasn’t)
- Refused to brief Congress about telecom companies’ sale of their customers’ phone location data
- Helped Comcast and other major telecom companies in their pursuit of monopolistic power
- Oversaw America’s falling rank in an annual “Internet Freedom” index
- Allowed Verizon to throttle California firefighters’ data while they were fighting unprecedented wildfires
- Invented a DDoS attack that shut down the FCC’s net neutrality comment system
- Lied to public about that fake DDoS attack that shut down the agency’s net neutrality comment system
- Lied to Congress about that fake DDoS attack
- Didn’t detect that dead people were leaving comments on net neutrality comment system
- Refused to change the definition of ‘broadband’
- Demanded $200 to release emails about his giant mug
- Allowed scammers to submit fake comments about net neutrality under the names of two sitting senators
- Did that dumbass Harlem Shake thing with a pizzagate conspiracy theorist
- Became a rubber stamp for Sinclair Media and
- Tried to kill a broadband assistance program that subsidized internet connections for the economically unstable and poor
- Got a literal gun from the NRA for his “courage” in killing net neutrality
- Was investigated by his own agency for alleged corruption as he pushed to dismantle media consolidation rules
- Published report claiming broadband market was magically fixed by repealing net neutrality
- Ignored 22 million comments supporting net neutrality
- Tried to reclassify cell phone data service as “broadband internet”
- Allowed phone call rates for incarcerated people to skyrocket
I'm not sure that's progress.
As a consumer, one thing that’s been visible to me, without Net Neutrality, is connectivity companies (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc) buying media companies (HBO, Hulu, etc) and then implementing bandwidth caps and then zero rating their traffic to get edges over their competitors who don’t control the networks.
There is some history of it, including links to research, on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
Your average HN user is probably from a state that still has NN.
That was a good thing. Sprint was toast either way. We were going to go from 4 to 3 major carriers.
The only real question was whether we should have the remains of Sprint be used to strengthen T-Mobile, which was the weakest of the remaining major carriers, or let Verizon and/or AT&T get Sprint's goodies.