None of this would be a problem if the government didn’t sell us out for what we already paid for and allowed these vultures into the system. It should have be national from the start. It costs them about nothing to have data run through those lines. All those caps exist purely to garner profit.
Mostly correct take IMO. I don’t blame ISPs for trying. I blame government (and not necessarily just federal) regulations/regulators for allowing it.
I grew up in NY. We paid a boatload in taxes to make fiber happen everywhere. IT. NEVER. HAPPENED.
NY is strongly Democrat. Acting like Republicans are solely the problem is asinine, and nothing stops states from enacting their own laws within the state. If California and NY made it happen. Guess what would basically happen throughout the whole country?
Yeah point to me where I said this was the fault of the Rubes? Because I didn’t say that. This was a joint captilistic operation to severe untold amounts of wealth from the working class. You paid all them taxes and nothing happened because the ISPs decides to pocket the public funds instead of doing anything and the government let them.
Yeah point to me where I said this was the fault of the Rubes? Because I didn’t say that.
I didn’t say you did… But the original article DOES try to paint it all on the Republicans. You know…
FCC Republican opposes regulation of data caps with analogy to coffee refills
I was taking your point and adapting it specifically to my thoughts on the original article.
I would just say, I do blame ISP’s for trying. It’s unethical to try and squeeze every cent out of your customers, community and country. It’s never just “business”. Businesses are operated by people while exploiting people. It’s not a cold hearted machine doing the thinking, it’s normal people making these unethical decisions.
There’s a better idea really. Let the government not take money from the budget on infrastructure. Let it not give that money to companies, whatever the conditions.
Let it just fine to the ground those ISPs who prevent competition in their areas.
You know, sometimes you only need a gun and can do without that kind word.
It’s a profitable business, so if competitive environment is created, there will be infrastructural improvements.
It’s not government’s job to directly finance private businesses.
Naw, last thing I want is the government running our internet. Hell, it would have never kicked off 30 years ago if not for private enterprise. Back then your average Joe knew jack about this new “information superhighway”. Voters would have never agreed to fund it, let alone blow it up as fast as the capitalists did. And yes, we’ve entered the “last stage” of that particular game. Enshitiffication is well under way.
As of 10-years ago or so (thoughts?), internet access is a need. Not as important as power or water, but it should clearly be regulated like a public utility. I’ve worked for a few ISPs, so I know the devil in the details, but:
- ISPs should be mandated to provide for rural customers at the same terms as urban folks.
- Local governments, even states, should be shut out of decisions concerning competition. If a competitor can build new plant, or light up dark fiber, they can go for it.
- Provide base-level service as a welfare benefit. Access is that important. Try finding a job without it.
tl;dr: Government’s role is to dial it in, not take it over.
Where do you think the Internet came from? It was a government project that began as Arpanet. And we would never have had it opened to the public if it wasn’t for Al Gore.
Yeah I can’t agree with that after decades of ISP dick jacking, public theft, and absolute neglect. They may have burned bright but they also burned fast. Internet service is such bullshit now when it could just be a utility bill, and we can’t even get at that cause utilities are fucked private corpos too trying to ratfuck the system so they can continue to charge plebs for energy we have figured out how to capture for free so now we all have to die so some silver spooned diaper can continue to get his.
i currently have one of the few municipal Internet plans in the United States.
best Internet I’ve ever had. gigabit symmetric fiber for a flat $60/mo. no fees, no outages, no data caps.
during the one outage i experienced in the three years I’ve had them i was quickly able to find multiple places to see status updates about the hardware issue they had and it was fixed in under an hour.
they also have a 2.5 gig and a 10 gig option for reasonable prices. I don’t think many other companies even offer anything above 1 gig outside of business packages.
it will be difficult for me to move anywhere else. with the work that i do this has been life-changing. come to Longmont Colorado, we have good Internet, amazing mountain sunsets, and lots of tacos.
i love my government Internet. it’s one of the biggest things keeping me here.
This is a bad take. Several cities in my state banded together to create a municipal fiber network called UTOPIA. The fiber is owned by the cities that bought in and is used by several different ISPs. The ISPs pay UTOPIA for access, and then they have to compete with each other for subscribers based on performance, features, and cost. Like, there’s genuine market competition for internet! If the state owns the infrastructure and then forces the playing field to be level, then everyone benefits. People in the cities with UTOPIA got fast fiber internet waaay faster than anyone else, they have a plethora of choices (want a static IP and a business plan in your residence? There’s an ISP that sells that!) at great prices, ISPs get access to subscribers without having to maintain fiber, and the cities who bought in get to make money from this and attract residents and businesses who benefit from the service.
My city didn’t buy in. Google Fiber eventually came to town so I was able to kick Comcast out, but I am uneasy about what’ll happen if Google decides to drop their ISP business. If I was in a city with UTOPIA, it would just be one ISP folding and I’d be able to pick a new one and switch over right away.
EDIT: cool, Cory Doctorow wrote a blag post about it: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-16-symmetrical-10gb-for-119-utopia-347e64869977
UTOPIA users have access to 18 different ISPs. I feel like that speaks for itself right there. This is the future we all should have had.
LOL, you get the award for most uninformed and ignorant comment of the day. Did you get your views on and the history of the Internet from Ben Shapiro or something?
I can think of well over 400 billion reasons why private industry control of the internet infrastructure is a bad idea.
Yeah sure, then why is it that my entire bare metal server leased from OVH costs less than my Internet connection, and is fully unmetered access too.
I pay for a data rate and I should be able to use the full amount as I please. If we paid for the amount of data then why are we advertising speeds and paying for speeds?
If you’re fine with living in a datacenter where the direct connections to Internet backbones are available, then sure. It does cost money to install and maintain fiber/copper lines to individual residences. Of course running a new ethernet cable across an existing building designed for running cables is going to be dirt cheap.
Yes but that isn’t changed by the amount of data used. There is no cost to supply per kb supplied, only a cost to maintain the equipment that governs the speed of the connection.
Here’s an analog example. If the city you lived in started charging you more for the water to come into your house faster as well as charging you for the amount of water you use. Obviously you should pay for the amount of a finite resource you use but the speed at which you acquired that resource should be limited only by the physics of the water transportation system.
Data on the other hand, is not a finite resource. There is no limit to the amount of data one can acquire given endless time and energy. So the only way to bill for that becomes the speed at which you acquire the data. You pay for the data speed and that funds the infrastructure to supply that speed indefinitely. End of story. The only reason data caps exist is that they want to charge more money for you to use less bandwidth so they can sell that bandwidth to other people. When what should really happen is, they should invest in higher bandwidth capacity and sell that to their customers to return on that investment.
Either supply me infinite speed and bill me for the amount of data used or supply me infinite data and bill me for the bandwidth. Not both.
I’m not arguing against charging based on bandwidth speeds. You’re right the total data transfered doesn’t really make a difference.
My point is that even just charging per Mbps, internet will always be cheaper within a data center. Just like water utility service is going to be cheaper next to a freshwater river than in the middle of the desert. There’s millions of dollars in equipment you’re effectively renting to get the internet to your house from the nearest datacenter. Your OVH server in comparison only needs maybe 1 extra network switch installed to get it online, and you’re in a WAY bigger pool of customers to split the cost of service to the building.
You have data caps on your broadband connections in the US? Does your phones have rotary dials too?
$190 bucks a month for a limitless connection is insane. I’m too cheap to pay 30€ a month for unlimited fibre connection so I use 4G router which gives me around 40Mbps unlimited connection and it costs me 10€ a month.
It is insane. Even worse is we (taxpayers) gave them money to improve infrastructure and they put it in their pockets instead.
And also you know we INVENTED THE INTERNET AND PAID FOR THEIR CABLES.
What the fuck do they even do? Sell data? Like this should just be a section of the government but everyone is obsessed with the private sector holding shit
A lot of plans do. Especially with the major telecom networks like ATT and Verizon.
Recently had a smaller company come in and install fiber. $85/mo for Gigabit service with no data cap. That’s pretty good compared to what I was paying. ATT only offered 500Mb/s and that was over $110 a month with a data cap, I want to say 800GB.
Do not get reliable enough cell coverage for one of those mobile routers. But they aren’t any cheaper here since those are owned by the major telecoms.
Every place with free coffee refills knows there’s a reasonable upper limit to what one person can consume.
And if they exceed it, it’s coffee. It’s dirt cheap (just like landline data)
The pandemic exposed the lie that ISPs need to cap data because of infrastructure limitations. We all went to WFH with no issues on the infrastructure.
