Cable lobby and Ted Cruz are disappointed as FCC bans digital discrimination

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 346 points – Cable lobby and Ted Cruz are disappointed as FCC bans digital discrimination
arstechnica.com

Cable lobby and Ted Cruz are disappointed as FCC bans digital discrimination::FCC will investigate ISP practices that discriminate by income level or race.

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if they are going to fight regulation this bad, maybe we just need to declare it a utility and strip the profit motive from these profits-over-humanity asssssssholes

Maybe? It is a damn utility. Just another key national resource trapped behind the claws of capitalist scum, just like medical and the like

I gave old people the benefit of the doubt before. If you're not of working age you may have missed the internet transitioning from a novelty to an essential way of life over the last 20 years. But post-Covid it should be clear to everyone how essential it is.

My mom retired from teaching but her last year was spent teaching kids remotely. In a rural area it's tough to get an internet connection that can handle a video call, and for poor families it's a luxury they can't afford. Students without a good internet connection fell way behind. Is it even possible to find a job these days without using the internet? At least one that pays above poverty wages?

It definitely should be a utility. It's yet another way the government allows private companies to extract wealth for an essential service while ISP's spend their profits lobbying the government to ban municipal community owned fiber.

Is Internet access in the US this bad? I come from a very rural area in Germany and we got upgraded from 100KBit/s to 100MBit/s about a decade ago. Not that 100MBit/s is anything to write home about.

It truly, truly, truly depends where you live.

In my neck of the woods, I can get 1.5 gigs for $85usd a month. In the same state, in my "small" home town (population 10k), you'd be lucky to find 30mbs for less than $135 a month.

If you live in town, even in a very rural area you typically going to have at least one, maybe two options for decent internet even if the cost might be absurd compared to areas with more competition. The further you stray out of town though, your options might disappear entirely leaving you with options like satellite internet or mobile hotspots.

When my mom was teaching through Covid she had at least 2 or 3 students in class (class size varying between 15-25 students) that either had no internet at home or their internet was not sufficient to handle a video call.

Actually in cities, due to government-instituted monopolies on infrastructure, it can sometimes be worse. Until recently, in my city there was only one option for wired broadband.

Can we declare Healthcare a utility?

Happened mostly everywhere else in the world. Problem is, they now try to errode that as well.

This is happening. By the people who are going to be the only ones with access to care when they're successfull

I highly recommend checking out this video on American healthcare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1TaL7OhveM

It really opened my eyes to the situation.

I don't expect Americans to have public healthcare at the federal level without states doing it on their own first.

Man, that is a such a good idea....it will never happen. Because it's a good idea.

I think there was some effort, back in like 2010, to try to get the government to go into the market like a business, and just out compete the actual cable companies. Obviously, nothing ever came of that on a national level, but there are some local governments doing it. My grandpa is the township commissioner for a little township in northern Michigan, and he's been working on getting it for his township for a while. I think they just started rolling it out recently

Been trying for twenty years. The Internet is still pretty fly by night for most people. Flash in the pan, nobody will ever use it for anything important.

"(this decision) is not compatible with the fundamental concept of free market capitalism" Sounds to me like they're admitting that free market capitalism is bad for the people.

tbh, capitalism isn't intended to be good for the people. It's working as designed.

Free market capitalism only works when supported by regulatory efforts to establish an equitable marketplace that serves societal intersts

I'd say "fuck Ted Cruz" but that's something nobody should ever do.

Brendan Carr complained that the order empowers the FCC "to regulate each and every ISP's network infrastructure deployment, network reliability, network upgrades, network maintenance, customer premise equipment, installation, speeds, capacity, latency, data caps, throttling, pricing, promotional rates, late fees, opportunity for equipment rental, installation time, contract renewal terms, service termination fees," and more.

Awesome!

Of course, given this statement, the one thing we can be sure of about these new rules is that they do not do this.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

"Under these rules, the FCC can protect consumers by directly addressing companies' policies and practices if they differentially impact consumers' access to broadband Internet access service or are intended to do so, and by applying these protections to ensure communities see equitable broadband deployment, network upgrades, and maintenance," an FCC announcement today said.

ISPs, including Comcast, Charter, AT&T, and Verizon, recently held a flurry of meetings with FCC officials and commissioners in which they argued that the rules are too broad and exceed the authority granted by Congress.

ISPs urged the commission to drop the plan's proposal to require that prices charged to consumers be non-discriminatory.

But while the final order is not yet public, it apparently will include the pricing rules and other requirements that ISPs and Republicans oppose.

Carr previously referred to the rules as "President Biden's plan to give the administrative state effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US," claiming it "is motivated by an ideology of government control that is not compatible with the fundamental precepts of free market capitalism."

In 2021, Congress required the Federal Communications Commission to issue rules "preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin" within two years.

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