In places with an entrenched monopoly, you won’t get one without the other.
The problem is that telecomms infrastructure, like electricity, water and gas, has to either go over government land or private property to everybody’s house. You couldn’t install it in the first place without government interference. The point is that, instead of allowing just one company to own that wire, the government can insist that they sell space on the wire to a competitor. Then if one of the companies violates net neutrality, anybody who doesn’t like it can switch. That’s how markets are meant to actually operate.
If they won’t share the cable, maybe the solution is to get your internet from space: Starlink - Wikipedia
Yes and no. Comcast, AT&T, et al. have successfully lobbied for laws that ensure their monopoly in various states. Small ISPs get squashed and in my home state, Colorado, there is a law on the books which prevents cities from setting up their own ISP without putting a vote on the ballot. Longmont, where I’m from, had a vote to build our own ISP and authorized a fiber optic ring around the city. A “few” million dollars later, the ring was built and we were all set up to connect every home in the city to a gigabit bi-symmetrical fiber optic network, but the aforementioned law courtesy of our corporate overlords required us to put it to another vote. The 2012 ballot rolls around and wouldn’t you know it, Comcast spends hundreds of thousands of dollars campaigning against it. They actually managed to convince people to vote NO. In 2014, it was again put to a vote and despite Comcast spending even more money on their smear campaign, we voted YES to creating NextLight. Three years later, rollout has been effectively completed and citizens are enjoying gigabit speeds at a very low price. NextLight remains one of the fastest consumer internet services available and we’ve been a model for other municipalities wanting to launch their own ISPs. Not surprisingly, the once dismal service that Comcast and CenturyLink provided has improved considerably as well. Also note that as a municipal ISP, it’s democratically accountable and has no profit motive to violate net neutrality.
My point here is that boiling the issue down to just one, simple term isn’t going to address the cause of, or solution to, the problem Americans face. We should be thinking about whether state power is being used for or against the citizens. NextLight and net neutrality were clearly in favor of our rights as citizens. The FCC’s decision, just like the laws preventing cities from creating ISPs, are government interference in favor of a few corporate interests.
a disaster. imagine a corporation being able to control what content is or is not available. The internet is a utility, just like water and electricity. Couple it with the silencing of dissent by the current administration and it’s efforts to extort private enterprise? (NFL), poof, instant dictatorship.
kudos to your municipality! We should all be aspiring to replace the ISPs with locally owned and grown versions…
Was just reading vice motherboard’s article about similar:
One upon a time, very independent and relatively self sufficient farmers used to pool resources into co-op stores and share resources to help the community exist communally. Somehow we’ve all been convinced that the profit motive will drive productivity that will be trickled down to the consumer… and so we’ve abandoned that model for one where corporations provide…
That idea of co-ops might have been true when we lived in a culture that had more expectations of community involvement and sharing, but I haven’t noticed it as the norm (since the 80’s shifted this idea that profit is good).
There’s tons of good info out there in the innovation and entrepreneurial realms that suggest while corporations were the ideal mechanism to organize and centralize resources, and motive employees in the last 100 years, that with the advent of information/resource sharing and open-source projects that their advantage is waning.
Hopefully this is the death rattle of that old bloated model of business.
Yeah, our country really is fucked up. This is totally unrelated but it’s interesting to grow up hearing we are the greatest country in the world, just to have to unlearn all of that shit as an adult. I’m embarrassed to be an American on most days, but all I can do is try to fight back on issues I think are wrong.
It may not be the end of the world, but when ~85% of a country’s citizens believe all websites deserve equal access, it’s a huge problem. It’s one of the very, VERY few things that most people agree on here, regardless of political stance. And yet a group of three people decided that that’s not what we ~really~ want.
There really isn’t a lot of choices. Some people think this means that providers won’t totally screw us, because they’ll want to retain their customers, but I think the exact opposite will happen. It will be just like how cable costs so much.
From a business standpoint, as a buyer of private line services from telcos to provide connectivity from my customers to my backend servers this may be good news for me. Instead of buying expensive physical circuits and then all the expensive switch ports and optical transceivers I am hoping in the near future just to order a differentiated service through my internet connection. But, that is up to the telcos and ISPs because they will have to create and “productize” these differentiated internet services. Since they are not known for their agile practices I suspect I won’t see any benefits for a long while.
From a consumer standpoint, I will have to wait and see how things evolve.
I’m proud to be an American, and I don’t think these are things that somehow make us an embarrassment to the world. The way I look at it, net neutrality is a good principle, but lack of goverment control is also a good thing. Usually goverment regulations do more harm than good. If providers do start slowing down traffic, in a capitalistic country another provider will come along and provide better services. I highly doubt this ruling will “destroy the internet” or hurt its progress. The internet was doing just fine before the rules were put in place in 2016, why shouldn’t it keep doing fine? With the great tax cuts and looser rulings, I wouldn’t be surprised if the internet ends up better than ever before.
It will be interesting to see what happens. The internet is a product of innovation from across the globe. People will keep innovating. While the ruling may initially seem upsetting and unfair, I don’t think anyone will notice any harmful effects over the long run.
While ISPs can now legally do bad things, I think they’ll just add dedicated networking for partners. They don’t want upset customers. The media used fear mongering to get massive political action, now everyone is panicked and making irrational decisions.
This is totally unrelated but it’s interesting to grow up hearing we are the greatest country in the world, just to have to unlearn all of that shit as an adult. I’m embarrassed to be an American on most days, but all I can do is try to fight back on issues I think are wrong. 
