FCC supremo slams big cable in gridiron Robin Hood metaphor mash-up Tom Wheeler, the chairman of US broadband regulator the FCC, fresh from no fewer than four Congressional grillings, has given a spirited defense of his radical net neutrality rules. And by spirited defense, we mean, slamming big cable for trying to control the internet. In a keynote at his alma mater, Ohio State University, …
I really don't like the clunky new interface the Register has these days. I don't like the slow loading and I don't like that drop down box that they must have leased from Windows ME
I think I will take a look at Wired or one of the other sites. Pity. I remember when this was a UK based magazine.
Ah well cet la progresse.
I use NoScript. I can now move my cursor to the top of the page and be able to read everything I could before it got there. Don't know about the clunky interface---I can still read what I want, easily.
Hey, Register---get rid of the box, I'll turn it back on. I want to see the ads, but not that much.
I have no idea how bad things can be in the US, I don't live there; but if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by it can be a bit of a lottery as to whether or not you have a decent broadband connection.
If ISPs were given the freedom to fully control their bandwidth as they like it may well become even more chancy.
I think that the FCC is in a difficult position between the telcos and the likes of Google and Facebook. They all want to have the playing field tilted in their favour and as they have pots of money and can afford to deploy lots of lawyers they are going to fight like mad to keep as much of an advantage as they can. With that sort of battle going on the only people that will lose out are the consumers, those poor saps who in the end actually pay for all of this.
I think that Kieron McCarthy is wrong in his analysis. The FCC needs to hold the balance between two camps of money hungry would-be monopolists and try and ensure that the customers are given the choice and service that they deserve.
Capitalism is said to be the least bad way of running an economy but if left unchecked it can and will turn very nasty as it becomes a case of "Take what you can, give nothing back."
I'm not sure what McCarthy's point here is, other than what appears to be a bit of random ridicule of the FCC.
And for what? Wheeler's remarks, as quoted in the article, were as coherent and sensible a description of the "net neutrality" crusade as I've seen.
A sample of US internet service: I've lived in two US places, Cleveland, Ohio (Cox) and Salt Lake City, Utah (Comcast). Both places, the service, although arguably a bit pricey, was/is nearly always at least the "up to" speed for the contract. Cox was a bit more reliably so, and suffered fewer unplanned interruptions (1 in 10 years vs 2 (but shorter ones) in 2 years); all were fairly brief. Cox had one major problem with their email servers, in which I believe some users lost messages; I did not, maybe due to downloading every few minutes. Cox upgraded their network, and speed, and maintained equal or lower prices over the period. My Comcast experience is too short to judge that.
I am sure that service is poorer, and speedier connections costlier in less urban areas, but I can't see that the recent FCC action offers much to solve the problem of covering costlier facilities with lower payments by fewer customers.
The matter of monopolistic ISPs was being addressed already. I had the option in Cleveland of at&t and Cox. I sampled at&t, found it wanting (but still decent), and reverted to Cox. In the Salt Lake valley there are offerings from Comcast, CenturyLink, UTOPIA (a home-grown municipal consortium), a local radio based provider, and in the future, Google. Not all are available in all cities, but my impression is that all or most subscribers have the option of at least two offerings of 50 megabits or more.
The order seems to a significant degree to be the result of successful rent seeking by certain large users, abetted by stirring up considerable popular alarm based on the threat of possibilities that, for the most part, do not seem to exist. The two I can remember are Comcast ditching torrent connections and, more recently, Comcast throttling of Netflix to pressure them to collocate some servers. The first was found out fairly quickly and they were shamed out of it; it seems unlikely that something like that will be repeated any time soon. The second was resolved sensibly by a commercial arrangement, which resulted in a small rise in my Netflix rate. I don't consider that outcome unreasonable: the customers (and government subsidies, presently lacking) need to cover the operating and maintenance costs of the infrastructure, and it strikes me as fairer to allocate the marginal cost of supporting intensive users like Netflix to their customers rather than to the ISP subscriber base as a whole.
I have no idea how bad things can be in the US, I don't live there;
Oh, just terrible. That's why so many people here emigrate to Bangladesh and North Korea every year.
My point, of course, is that slow Internet access rates rather low as a cause of human misery. And so, I would claim, does "net neutrality", whatever chimera is meant by it at the moment. And perhaps people who find it such a consuming issue do so in part because it is a useful distraction from things that matter a bit more.
but if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by it can be a bit of a lottery as to whether or not you have a decent broadband connection.
Gosh, a great big place with a lot of large, rural, sparsely-populated areas doesn't have universal high-speed Internet access? Mysterious.
Of course, much depends on what you mean by "decent". 1 Mb/s would suffice for my needs. Wouldn't go down well with the rest of the family, though, I suppose. (As it is, we currently get around 15 down, 2 up.)
"The Commission’s Open Internet Order rests on a basic choice - whether those who build the networks should make the rules by themselves or whether there should be a basic set of rules and a referee on the field to throw the flag if they are violated."
Put that way, I am inclined to side with those who risked their money, built, and are operating the infrastructure, and conclude that the FCC might be on the wrong side. The ISPs have commercial agreements with their customers, and if the government wants to insist that broadband service is a right or necessity, it may be that they should put up some serious money and subsidize or provide it rather than fiddling the rules to compel "good behavior", however that may come to be defined as the rules are further elucidated and refined.
The best thing in the order may be the attempt, possibly illegal, to prevent states from overruling municipal ISPs.
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