How ISPs Collude To Offer Poor Service 207
alexander_686 writes "Bloomberg is running a series of articles from Susan Crawford about the stagnation of internet access in the U.S., and why consumers in America pay more for slower service. Quoting: 'The two kinds of Internet-access carriers, wired and wireless, have found they can operate without competing with each other. The cable industry and AT&T-Verizon have divided up the world much as Comcast and Time Warner did; only instead of, "You take Philadelphia, I'll take Minneapolis," it's, "You take wired, I'll take wireless." At the end of 2011, the two industries even agreed to market each other’s services.' I am a free market type of guy. I do recognize the abuse that can come from natural monopolies that utilities tend to have, but I have never considered this type of collusion before. To fix the situation, Crawford recommends that the U.S. 'move to a utility model, based on the assumption that all Americans require fiber-optic Internet access at reasonable prices.'"
Interesting theory (Score:5, Insightful)
Crawford recommends that the U.S. 'move to a utility model, based on the assumption that all Americans require fiber-optic Internet access at reasonable prices.
This all sees well and good. Too bad it's not capable of happening, since the USA is run by corporations, and it'll be a cold day in hell before they shoot themselves in the foot.
If you want not retarded internet, your single only option is to move out off the continent.
Completely unforeseen! (Score:5, Insightful)
What, you never possibly considered that collusion happens because nobody wants to stop the gravy train? AT&T and Verizon and everyone else there have got it good, their train will chug along with minimum investment and massive profits for as long as none of the people aboard says "Stop the train! I want to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure investments and charge less to compete with you head on!"
Re:Interesting theory (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want fiber-optic Internet access at much lower prices than we have today, you'll have to convince millions of others.
There are millions of people on 1.5Mbps or less DSL who see no need to pay even $1 more.
There are millions of people on dialup who don't need to stream anything at all.
There are millions of people who don't know what all the fuss over this Internet thing is about.
But you want those millions of people to buy you a pony!
Make them operate like utilities. (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll Get There (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting theory (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely. Step 1 is figuring out if the statement "all Americans require fiber-optic Internet access" is true. So far, it isn't by a long shot and the assumption that it is true is one of the big problems.
If Internet access is needed by everyone, then maybe a utility model would work - everyone pays and everyone gets service. However, if it isn't true then moving to that kind of model would impact a huge number of people in very negative ways, especially in the pocketbook.
Another aspect that should be considered is if the Internet is ready for everyone to need it. What would happen if the entire US had unlimited fiber access? Well, my guess is that spam would increase (ha!) and that scammers would get a lot richer. Most of the people that do not have access today wouldn't know what to do with it if they had it and would certainly believe that a Nigerian prince was holding millions of dollars for them, if they only send $125 to him today.
Does this sound like a good idea?
Google Fiber (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this why Google created Google Fiber?
The primary purpose of Google Fiber is to give the industry a kick in the arse.
Re:Interesting theory (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on what you mean by "require". Not everyone "needs" electricity, gas, telecommunication lines or water either. Hell, why don't we all go back to the days where everyone lives in cottages on a ranch with maybe a well and some farmland?
The point is, Internet access has an infrastructure dependency and provides a service which fits perfectly with the utility service model, so it makes no sense that we use a better model for gas and electricity and not for Internet. This is Economics 101, here, but the wikipedia page provides a good explanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilities [wikipedia.org]
Re:Google Fiber (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and no.
The ability to mine it for information is a plus to them, but their primary motivation was to FORCE the local providers to get off their bum ass and do their jobs.
I honestly hope google spreads and actually becomes a major player that the local providers have to compete against on a national scale so they have to upgrade and give us decent service instead of this 1 meg up 45kb/s down they want to give us now in some areas.
Google is offering what the other guys should have ALREADY been offering but refused to do so and for that, I thank them. Do I like the fact they are mining my information online when/if I use them? I am not particularly thrilled about it but it is their entire core industry and they do not hide that fact now what they do with it so I honestly have no issues with it with how they are currently doing it and just follow the rule of "Never put online what you don't want the world to know" and for the other stuff, encryption is your friend.
My biggest issue with google is not standing up to the US government on requests enough. As far as I am concerned, the government shouldn't be able to ask for information without a warrant period unless in emergency life or death situations and even then, that would be a 90 second phone call to get a warrant.
Re:Interesting theory (Score:5, Insightful)
As a dialup user, I still have a smartphone if I want to stream anything video.
The main problem with dialup these days isn't even the slower connection speed (I have seen as slow as 21600 bps) or the host-based softmodems (HSP or HSF modems). The main problems are: bloated oversized page graphical elements, websites using tons of JQuery and/or Yahoo API and/or Google API and/or Facebook API. Many of those sites use additional scripts just for user tracking and that's even before addressing the ad-serving scripts on the page. Watch that modem process and process sometimes for well over 10 minutes before the site finally loads--IF something doesn't time out and cause a Page Cannot Be Displayed error to be generated by the browser.
Turn off scripts, and see how fast the actual HTML-only content of the page actually loads over dialup. But, then the page is still mostly broken because buttons and even hyperlinks on some pages are dependent on client-side scripting.
In summary, it's shitty web design all over "Web 2.0" that designs every page as a dancing and singing application in a web browser instead of a mostly static page with a few optional active elements. I would welcome a throwback to the earliest days of web pages where they would still load over 14400 bps and used mostly HTML-only elements for the page, graphical content was minimal and any graphics used as small of a size as possible balancing quality with loading speed. Either that, or stop using my client-side bandwidth for page control processing, user tracking, and ad serving--do all that shit on the server-side and give me a quick-loading client-side page that will actually respond on click--not a few seconds later.
Re:Interesting theory (Score:5, Insightful)
The pony was bought and paid for. The telcos have accepted money over the years, from the government, purportedly for the purpose of getting broadband internet out to the "last mile".
We're not asking for another pony. We just want to ride the frigging pony we've been promised. The pony that we paid for already.
I would agree with this mockery you make, except, just across the water in Europe, everyone has the pony. Fast ponies. They have pony races, just to see how fast they can go. We can't even climb on a broken down old circus pony to be led around a little rope corral.
Obviously, we're doing something wrong on this side of the pond.
Re:Interesting theory (Score:5, Insightful)
To clarify.... Not everyone needs internet just like not everyone needs roads... What? Not everyone needs roads? Correct. Some people don't go anywhere, or go places on foot and on bikes, which could be mountain bikes, and using dirt footpaths. They don't need roads...
But they DO need roads.... they want a pizza delivered. They want the ambulance to show up when their kid biffs hard on his bike. They want their neighbors to be able to get to work 40 miles away and come home in time for the neighborhood bbq.
Sure.. you don't need internet to have fun, or maybe for your own personal choices. But you need internet for the businesses around you to keep their prices lower with digital age technology. You need your government to have communications tech so they can protect you from the various nutjobs around the world that are angry for debatable reasons. I could go on with a million examples of how you passively take benefit from the internet --- so much so that your current state of life, even without you personally using it, NEEDS the internet.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interesting theory (Score:5, Insightful)
and yet my comcast gives me 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up.
They just don't want me to use it. They'd rather I downloaded from their networks with services like hulu and any other video services which require a cable subscription to be viewed on the Internet. ISPs should not be in the content business as well.
Re:Interesting theory (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to care about users like you--on dial up, or huge latency, etc.
Use to. Until I realized that my ad revenue from you is basically zero.
Welcome to the capitalist web.
Re:Google Fiber (Score:4, Insightful)