ISPs fear wave of state laws after New York’s $15 broadband mandate
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Whoosh.
I'm sorry you failed to pay the extra priority fee on top of your monthly service charge. Please try again when you are willing to pay extra on top of your bills.
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ISP interconnects are generally governed by multi-year contracts that specify all the details. If you would rather pay more so that Facebook, advertisers and scammy clickbait sites can pay less, I guess that's your choice.
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So in your mind either I pay fees on fees, or the government negotiates profitable contracts for private for profit companies.
No thanks. Those are both terrible.
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This is the way, except there's no real reason it should be municipal and not statewide.
Broadband (well, the physical infrastructure) is a natural monopoly, it makes no sense to have anyone but the government running wires to people's homes.
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Hey Brendan Carr, you can fuck right off into another universe. I doubt you will notice all the hate, you are too busy slurping down ISP cock. Yummy! Or, they're slurping down yours. It's all so confusing.
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What are you talking about? The FCC should have stayed out of the dispute between Netflix and the ISP's, instead of putting their thumb on the scale in favor of the content industry. If there was a problem with too much monopoly power, they should have protected consumers with price caps, as NY is doing now, instead of protecting Netflix, Facebook, etc. Your fees would have then gone down as ISP's picked up more revenue from content providers, and ISP would love their heavy consumers, as they would pull in more revenue from the sending side. Heavy senders like Netflix would probably raise prices, but you have a choice whether to give them your business, whereas you don't have much choice in choosing an ISP.
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Wait
Are you implying that the websites and services don't pay for their connection? Google doesn't pay an internet bill? Neither does Netflix? Or Conde Nast/ArsTechnica?
Because that's what you sound like you're saying.
Are you implying that the websites and services don't pay for their connection? Google doesn't pay an internet bill? Neither does Netflix? Or Conde Nast/ArsTechnica?
Because that's what you sound like you're saying.
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"Big content is getting a free ride, we deserve to scam them!" Is a tired decade-old talking point pushed only by corporate PR.
The rest of us like you and I have the basic sense to understand that being owed money takes more than fraudulent demands like ISPs make.
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Stop rewarding people for being poor and punishing companies. People need to be incentivize to work and work harder not live easy cus they refuse to get a dignified job. dirt cheap this, free that, free this. This is why dems lost. They do not live in reality. It's unfair to people who got educated, worked hard, and truly contribute to society. If you cant afford internet which is already cheap everywhere, you dont need to be online wasting time on tiktok crying about capitalism and dumbass trans crap (which are sins according to the Bible btw). Hopefully Trump puts an end to this BS. Enough is enough!
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Ugh.
You clearly do not grasp anything.
What isps wanted to do do was BAD. Not for Netflix or others but for everyone. By creating fast lanes, by requiring fees of certain types of content or product. Or anything similar which is what net neutrality blocked, you end up with websites or content that must then get slowed down or treated as low priority.
Anything like that, especially if allowed by the government, then becomes a barrier that entrenches older and bigger companies who can afford it while penalizing newer companies who now are blocked from competing.
Think of this. Netflix gets to pay for "fast lane" traffic. Now any Netflix competitor is at a service disadvantage to their customer and must also pay for the "fast lane".
And that doesn't include all the horrible problems with double or triple dipping.
I pay for the wire to Netflix. Netflix pays for the wire to me. I pay for the bandwidth to use the connection I pay a monthly fee for. Netflix pays extra to get traffic delivered to me like it's already supposed to.
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We have also have pitted VZW against Comcrap in that area for over a decade, and I'm happy you're able to get that pricing, but the price of the plan you're referring to is $50 a month. I'm also very familiar with how no competition is a big problem in general, especially in that area, because we have another residence where Armstrong is the only option and they are awful. With that being said, Armstrong offers a $35 plan at 35/10 that doesn't require any freebies from the Uncle Sam. Anyone can sign up.
VZW may be advertising 300/300 as their minimal speed for new sign ups, but we and others in our area have been getting 25/25 on Fios. If I got into online gaming or digital downloads for games I would want more. We both can WFH on that without issue.
Our conundrum started where Comcrap can't beat VZW any longer so we don't switch back and forth. Last I checked, VZW won't allow us to switch plans unless we go up in price, which we won't do. Your post will make me call again to try to get that speed for the $50 we pay per their current promotion. I was milking Sprint SERO and now Sprint Kick Start on T-Mobile so I'm no stranger to trying to get and keep the best deal, maybe I need to brush up on my skills or take the one month price increase and then downgrade the plan.
As much as I believe there should always be a cheaper option for home Internet, I can't get behind forced welfare pricing. Families with children should get vouchers for ISP discounts while they have school age children, but that's it.
Uncle Sam wasn't giving you freebies if you couldn't afford cable in the 80's/90's. Why should Uncle Sam pay for your Tubi access today? Until they take away our airwaves, radio and OTA still exist as free entertainment. Of course that guy is loving his 50/10. He doesn't have to go to the library to do life's 'necessities' or use those awful paper items...what were they called...stamps, checks, and phone books.
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Based on your posting history it looks like you're being sarcastic. I'll be honest though, it's kinda hard to tell at this point.
I'm just happy that the ISPs are finally getting to the FO phase after F-ingA so much in the past.
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Cable TV wasn't required for modern life, like internet is. Banking, government services, etc. all require an internet connection today. It should be heavily regulated in pricing as any other utility is.
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And you believe Netflix was demanding government intervention because they wanted to help smaller competitors unseat them? It's the exact opposite. Bandwidth costs are per user costs. They only become significant when you are operating at large scale, like Netflix, Facebook, etc. Most start ups spend far more on technology development, marketing and content production than bandwidth.
In any case, the large incumbents already have their "fast lanes." They operate their own private networks, or lease capacity on CDN's, to bypass congestion on the general backbones. Those networks then pay ISP's to complete the delivery. This has been going on for decades. Those were the original "fast lanes" and we can be thankful there was no Net Neutrality movement back then to stop them. Instead of consumer ISP's having to bill their own users to enlarge their connections to the Internet, content providers flush with investment capital were eager to cover those costs. And as those businesses became more profitable, they were ready to continue those investments right up to your doorstep.
That's when the established content players cried foul, and began promoting the notion that only the end consumer should be allowed to pay for the last mile. They got what they wanted, so you now pay ~$70/month to subsidize a content and advertising industry that is dominated by a few massive corporations. In fact, the big players still get fast lanes, simply by buying larger capacity connections to the ISP's, as Netflix ultimately did.
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You hacked a straw man.
The question was "why move into an area where there's another player?".
You answered "why not provide services where it's not profitable".
In your example in NYC, these are not homes where the issue was competition. Verizon doesn't want to put FiOS in these homes, full stop.
I didn't say they were.
You said it wasn't about deeper pockets and then described deeper pockets.
If, as you just asserted, the issue is difference in cost; Google could have made it work by absorbing the costs for the years or decades it would take.
So if Google paid you $100/month to switch to their service (which was otherwise free)?
After 100 years, will anyone remember which the incumbent was?
The incumbent has an advantage; but it's not insurmountable. We've watched newcomers take over markets all the time.
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It's not entirely clear why Verizon didn't install into certain addresses. At one point, Verizon claimed that at some locations, supers getting free cable from Charter didn't want to allow in a competitor that may mess with their sweetheart deal, which is technically illegal.
But "why move into an area where there's another player?" and "why not provide services where it's not profitable?" are pretty entertwined with a company providing last-mile service.
Google has deeper pockets. It's not about just who has more money, it's about who has the advantage, and the incumbent has a huge advantage in that it doesn't have to have deeper pockets, because it's barely spending anything, while the newcomer has to spend a lot, with a payoff in terms of decades, and that's if it can get enough people to switch.
Sure, if you assert an absurd situation that causes a company to abandon all business sense and burn money, they could get customers. They then would be in the hole for those customers for decades, especially if the competitor still exists. And why wouldn't it? It still has the wires to everyone's homes and is paying next to nothing for upkeep.
You're talking about companies that can barely look past next quarter. You're basically just proving why businesses, of their own volition, aren't going to waste time and money competing in wired broadband, no collusion necessary.
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People tend to trust their local politicians slightly more than state government.
Considering that an ISP is in a prime spot to snoop on traffic, and even to block traffic (yes, encryption helps, and so do things like VPNs), there are valid concerns with centralizing power over the internet into the hands of too few people.
Devolving the internet infrastructure to cites or counties (for lower pop counties) seems like a good way to limit state level access to the networks, although, I suppose ultimately it doesn't matter because the states could pass legislation changing that at any time if some politician wanted to make a power grab.
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You are correct, I checked my bill last night and it is indeed $49 a month, but we do get very nearly full 300/300 at all times of the day (usually my router speedtest is around 275/250 in the middle of the work day). We are closer to the city in a decent suburb so that may play into why we get the advertised speeds (we have in all the apartments we have leased in the last 10 years as well for what its worth though). I will note that it is not VZW, but Verizon FiOS (so not wireless, but actual FttH). VZW home internet or Verizon copper DSL plans are likely much more limited on speeds and bandwidth.
I won't comment on the clear trolling (or perhaps stark ignorance) of thinking the internet is only for entertainment, or is only a necessity for those with kids.
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I'd have to re-read; but I'm pretty sure that the addresses in question lacked access to broadband, which is why this was an issue. The state certainly has no compelling interest in getting contracts for Verizon to add service to people already served.
Google made the business decision to not use those deeper pockets.
But they do, in fact, collude. TWC and Comcast ,for example agreed to non-competition. I believe Comcast even cited the lack of competition when they petitioned to merge.
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Exactly. Google, the one with the deeper pockets, tried competing, and figured out after a while it wasn't worth it, from a business standpoint. Incumbency wins over deep pockets, due to the nature of last-mile infrastructure.
Do you have a link to any evidence for this agreement?
Pointing out a lack of competition doesn't mean admitting to colluding to not compete.
To be clear "collusion" has a very specific definition, especially within the law, where two parties communicate directly with each other and come to an agreement. Due to the nature of natural monopolies, the lack of competition is often due to all the businesses arriving at the same conclusion on their own via market forces and the physical realities, that competition via encroaching into an already served market won't benefit them. Like, for ISPs, they know just how much work it is to set up, and they know what levers they can pull if someone tried to enter one of their service areas to compete, and how they can make life miserable for that competitor, if not make their competing business completely untenable. Why wouldn't they consider that all the other ISPs know the same things, and would respond in kind?
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No. The incumbent has an advantage (can win cheaper).
Again: we see examples of the opposite where Walmart comes in and drives out local competition.
Been a while... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/deny-the-merger-the-collu_b_5562362 ?
We've seen municipal and local broadband step up for gaps and then get sued; with the former getting literally outlawed in many cases.
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This kind of policy is typical of NYS (resident). Residents who don't qualify (the middle class and up) will face costlier bills. This is true of EVERYTHING in NYS, roll the tape, the state will loose in the long run - and maybe sooner the that (since already loosing). Going a bit deeper.... All the ISPs are dead money, a loosing investment proposition. New ones arrive (in my place, it's ArchTop displacing Spectrum), but they will make a paltry return I expect. I am close to believing the least-bad solution is for municipalities/counties to take over the fiber, and lease it to the lowest-cost provider. The crystal ball is murky - how do new technologies topple this system (hint, they do not)? In the long run, the market should deliver, but it's a complicated (regulated, tolled, capital-intensive) market, so maybe it won' deliver in the time-scale we want or demand (but of course - almost certainly - neither will socialization).
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This is America. The land of free enterprise, the free and the brave. If a company can't make money, no matter what the mandate, the company leaves the state. Leave it to competition to work the pricing out.
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You're assuming the $15/month doesn't cover the costs of the service, and will need to be subsidized by billing other customers more. However, there's no reason to think that, as broadband is actually really low cost once the wires are run, and those were run decades ago for some of these services. It's just that the ISPs won't see the crazy profit margins that they see on their other plans.
Plus, it's not like broadband costs didn't go up constantly anyway before this mandate was introduced. Maybe some ISPs will use it as another excuse to raise rates, but that's all it is: a fake excuse to do what they want to do anyway, and have done repeatedly before.
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In Spain anybody can have (without subsidies) 300MB symmetric fiber in your home by only 10 euros.
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I'm not trolling. It is a passionate debate but I believe I'm right. I don't know how my relatives who are 80 years and older just get by? How do they do it? It must be magic....
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My grandmother who passed in her 90s a few years ago mostly "got by" because her children did all the internet required tasks for her. Like banking. It's not magic. It's other people. The social security administration quit sending paper checks and everything is electronic now. Healthcare? Also requires the internet to manage. Insurance policies are only online, paper copies not offered.
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ahem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeline_(FCC_program)
Bolding mine.
The internet combined what used to be separate 1-one and 2-way communication streams, but people still need access to a 2-way communication method, and POTS doesn't cut it anymore. Remember during COVID-19 when schools went remote and classes moved to Zoom? Children without home broadband suffered, and projects had to be established to provide them service.
https://meincmagazine.com/information...e-wheels-on-the-bus-increasingly-bring-wi-fi/
https://meincmagazine.com/tech-policy...counts-available-starting-today-via-825-isps/
It's odd you think people 80+ years old never use the internet. But they're likely not in school, nor employed or looking for employment.
Many places nowadays only offer online job applications. You can't apply if you can't do it via the Internet:
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-tha...-when-it-has-all-these-technical-difficulties
And more and more jobs rely on the Internet for work. I already talked about schools.
There's a few things you can still "get by" with wholly offline, but they're getting further and far between, and restricted to essentials, like utility bills. And older methods get phased out eventually. When I started working retail, we still took checks. Now, the company I currently work for hasn't taken checks at the register in over a decade, likely longer.
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Our 90-year-old matriarch got by with never owning a computer to this day.
... because she relied on her children having to handle all that for her.
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Did you even read my original post? Probably not...which is the problem with the Ars Bandwagoners. I said when dealing with school poor families should get vouchers. But it should stop there. And I know people 80+ can use the Internet. The people I know still live their life doing everything without it. Taxes already go to Libraries with glorious Internet. Go use it there until you can pay for it normal price. I just made T-Mobile out of spite go back to giving me a paper bill because they took away the discount for credit card auto pay. Everyone needs to quit trying to advocate for welfare Internet. Grow up.
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I took care of my grandparents. It wasn't easy. They sure as heck did not like when their social security check was direct deposited. Not seeing that check she didn't believe the money would be placed there. When she didn't want to wait to see it in the monthly bank statement, she would call in to check her balance. That change didn't involve anything with the Internet. I don't know why you mention it. Grandma also didn't like to pay $2 for a monthly statement near the end when the bank started charging for a paper statement, but she did. When she would fill out her bills when they quit driving, if I didn't take the bills when visiting, this amazing person called a mailman (or lady) would pick up her mail at the time the mail was delivered. Included in that mail pick up was her secondary Athem insurance payment. In 10 years of Anthem helping to write checks, we never needed the Internet. She enjoyed the Cleveland Indians to the very end...on cable TV.
When beloved elderly need care, you're right, it's people, not magic, and if you want the Internet to make it easier on you, that's up to you, but no, the elderly do not need it to get by.
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That's not all you wrote. You also said people weren't getting subsidies for home connections in the 80s/90s, which the Lifeline program shows is false. Since you didn't respond to that, I'm taking that as you conceding you were wrong about that point.
You didn't respond to the part I said about people needing it for employment and seeking employment.
It can take time and money to reach a library, and their hours aren't 24/7. Many people work, and need to do tasks after their work. You're wanting to make poor people's life more difficult so that ISPs can continue to reap insane profits instead of offering a reasonable level of service at a decent price.
But bottom line, if your point is it's not impossible to live life right now without the internet, that's technically true. Just like how it was technically true before universal phone service that people could, technically, do everything without a phone, either in person or via mail. But it's a lot harder, and there's situations where it makes it worse in very impactful ways. Like, sure, no phone means you can't call 911 in an emergency, but you can always drive yourself to the hospital, or maybe wait until a neighbor comes to check on you and finds your dead body.
Aside from maybe having some human compassion and think, gee, maybe we should make poor people's lives a tiny bit more tolerable and give them an opportunity to save time/money and be able to better themselves, there's a real economic benefit to having everyone connected. This was why there was universal phone service, and why that transitioned to aiming for universal broadband service.
https://itif.org/publications/2023/...-why-universal-broadband-access-rates-matter/
https://www.forbes.com/councils/for...broadband-access-is-more-important-than-ever/
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review...peed-internet-access-could-be-worth-trillions
This is very much a "rising tide lifts all boats" situation. Universal broadband would benefit you personally, even if you're not eligible for it or any other discounts, via societal and economic benefits. Stop thinking of how people "got by" before, and think how much better everything can be with universal access to new technologies. Because, otherwise, you should be living in the woods without anything, not even fire, since humans, at one point "got by" without it.
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People in the 80's / 90's were NOT getting subsidies for free cable TV.
People can seek all the employment they want from the library.
I have plenty of human compassion but unlike heat, electric, water, necessities to survive, for all the reasons you listed, wouldn't be what the common public would use for internet for 90% of the time. Sort of like how liberals and the poor fight back when talk of removing certain foods from EBT. A compassionate society does not let people starve, but they also do not get to drink Gatorade and eat chips on the middle classes dime.
23,000 posts...unreal...you have to be in the Ars top 95%. I commend your thoroughness. In the end, I would agree with you if the cheap / reduced internet blocked VPN access, blocked access to streaming services, ALL forms of entertainment EXCEPT paying bills, education, etc to do the things that are a necessity, but then you would probably come up with some excuse that the poor benefit from being able to relax and enjoy things like Tubi....on the tax payer's dime.
You do know that the poor in this country can actually get Amazon Prime for 50% off! If that doesn't say enough about how good the poor have it, I don't know what will convince you.
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Yes, you use a false example to argue your point. The internet is 2-way communication, like telephone, no 1-way communication like cable TV.
Why do you list electricity as a necessity to survive? After all, people "got by" without it for millennia, and there's still people that live without. And people used to get by with getting buckets of water from a well, no need for running water.
"The poor can only get a benefit if they suffer in some way for it." It's not a great argument. Why would any of that be necessary, since the connection is going to cost the same, whether or not those forms of entertainment are blocked? The connection cost is based on bandwidth, not content.
Also, taxes don't pay for it. In NY's case, the ISPs have to provide it, in exchange for the privilege of
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You're twisting history to create a false narrative. Netflix doesn't generate traffic, it serves requests. So the overloading of interconnects/circuits were caused by the ISPs users requesting more traffic than the circuits could handle. Netflix responded by offering to install additional interconnects to increase capacity but ISPs refused to allow it and used the degraded service to lobby the public that they should be paid for both ends of the pipe.
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Just because someone wants to watch you on Zoom doesn't mean you don't have to pay for your Internet connection. Both ends pay.
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Both ends DO pay. You pay for your connection to the Internet, and Netflix pays for theirs. But the ISPs didn't want to allow that much Netflix traffic over their "transit" connections, and so didn't upgrade their transit links when their users requested more traffic, which congested them, affecting streaming services the most. Netflix offered a cheaper alternative to transit, and the ISPs were like, "forget cheaper connection for the traffic our users request, forget FREE connections, we want the companies our users are requesting data from to PAY us."
https://www.ipxo.com/blog/what-is-ip-transit/
Exactly. They sell it to you as "X Mbsp down," but then when users went to USE that, they went "oh, you want a reliable Netflix connection? Sorry, not going to happen unless Netflix (which already pays for their side of the transit connection to the Internet), pays us to provide you with the speeds you already paid for."
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It is not the ISP's obligation to pay for transit links or to carry unlimited volumes of Netflix traffic for free. Putting Netflix servers in the ISP does not make it any cheaper for the ISP to deliver that data, which is the ISP's main expense. Some of that cost is born by content providers in the form of interconnect fees that ISP's collect from transit providers and CDN's, whenever the inbound volume is too much in excess of the outbound volume.
In the early days of the Internet, ISP's had to pay about half the long distance transit cost, via their connection to one of the backbones, and those costs had to be passed on to their subscribers. Then, well-funded content providers began bypassing the congested backbones and delivering data directly to the ISP's via their own transit or CDN providers, reducing the cost for end consumers. Fortunately, there were no Net Neutrality notions back then to block the advantage they obtained for their business this way.
They would have gone on investing right up to your doorstep, were it not for the big content providers and advertising engines recognizing that shifting more of the cost to the sender side would threaten their dominance. Bandwidth is a per user cost, so is negligible for startups and other small operations. It only become significant when you are operating at large scale like Facebook, Google or Netflix, or for spammy business models that depending on hitting millions of eyeballs to pick up a few pennies. They want as much of that cost as possible to be picked up by the ISP via access fees.
Just because Netflix has paid for a connection "to the Internet" does not mean they have paid enough to complete delivery to end users. Netflix bought transit from Cogent who themselves did not have enough capacity into Comcast to complete the final delivery. So, if Netflix had a beef, it was with Cogent who sold them more capacity than they had. But there was no beef there, because Netflix knew exactly what they were buying, and did so to save money. Then, they tried to deflect criticism onto the ISP's to avoid alienating their subscribers and to help negotiate better interconnect terms.
Here is a good place to learn more about how the Internet works, and Netflix in particular.
https://www.streamingmediablog.com/...etflix-comcast-deal-getting-basics-wrong.html
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