How does the idea that the last mile should be a public utility, much like electricity? Here in Sacramento many of us get our electricity from SMUD, a city-owned electrical supplier. When you sign up for Internet - your house is already cabled, you choose from several ISPs.
I also hope for a rule that says either produce content or provide a connection - not both.
Title II had special clause which requires owners of existing infrastructure to lease it to competitors (this was excluding by Wheeler when they reclassified it).
The leasing is what is necessary to enable competition.
We won’t get competition if every ISP that wants to enter the market needs to run fiber to every house separately. It is very expensive, and if it wasn’t, it is very impractical. Even Google with its “unlimited” capital wasn’t able to enter the market. Think about that.
Google isn’t a fair comparison, to be clear. They’ve “failed to enter” a large number of markets they were successful in, just not successful enough to make gobs of money.
They kill successful projects regularly, because the ROI isn’t an obscenely high number.
I think it is fair. They even had a good plan, which would work if antitrust laws weren’t rendered toothless. They started with rural areas that seemed to be forgotten by ISPs. They started providing 1 Gbps at an affordable price.
Suddenly existing ISPs that had 1Mbps services could do 1 Gbps too! And they could do it cheaper too, even under the cost to provide the service. They could do it, because they overcharge their customers everywhere else.
They did that in every city Google Fiber entered.
Not only that, they owned communication wells which Google needed access to to run fiber to customer’s homes and were actively blocking from using them.
Yeah as soon as Google says they were interested in the Portland market, suddenly Comcast had gigabit available and prices went down. Unfortunately, Google gave up after being blocked so much.
I’m pro net neutrality and all for getting it on the books.
But has any company broken net neutrality since it was repealed? I haven’t seen some of the stuff we expected. Maybe they wanted to lay low on it but like Comcast hasn’t restricted Netflix and pushed out 10x for Peacock stream or anything. I’m sure some stuff would go down eventually. But curious if this has happened
The way they have done it is not by restricting other services directly, but by continuing to apply bandwidth/quotas to them while bypassing them for their own services “for free”
It’s mostly because California passed net neutrality law, so it is harder to do it and be compliant there. The politicians also made mistake and did not ban zero rating, which is the current way of doing it (have laughably small data caps and provide unlimited access to affiliated companies)
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