[opendtv] Re: Comments to the FCC
- From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2017 23:02:03 -0400
On Apr 29, 2017, at 7:28 PM, Manfredi, Albert E
<albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Absurd! So, you think that elections should work that way too?
This is not an election Bert. It is a comment period on very specific
regulations. It is not the job of the FCC to make a "popular decision;" it is
their job to analyze the comments and adjust the order to reflect meaningful
comments.
When they are inundated with 800,000 letters that all say the same thing,
somebody has to process all of those documents. In the end that somebody is
going to tell the commissioners that there were 800,000 identical comments
saying...
Furthermore, any form of comment that simply says I am for or against the order
are mostly useless, unless they provide meaningful comments.
Pai needs to see the millions of people who are pissed off by his attempt to
let special interests control their Internet access.
And he needs to see the comments from the millions of people who were pissed
off about changing Congressional intent, when the FCC decided to regulate ISPs
as common carriers.
Clue: the nation is fairly evenly divided on topics like Net Neutrality. There
are very high visibility groups on both sides who have the ability to sway
public opinion. Just look at the headlines over the past few weeks.
The big Internet companies that are favored by the Title II decision, and the
trade press that supports them, are making a ton of noise about this. And the
political media is acting as an echo chamber.
On the other side there are millions of people who are fed up with crony
capitalism and regulations that make everything more expensive. And there are
many companies ready to make major investments in broadband infrastructure that
have been sitting on the sidelines.
And then there is the minor reality that NOTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE in any
material way with respect to giving bad actors the ability to violate the
fundamental concepts that guided the Internet successfully through two decades
of dramatic growth.
Bottom line, this is just politics as usual.
His arguments seem to completely ignore the fact that people's Internet
access, certainly at home, is completely under the control of one or two
companies at best.
Give it up Bert. That is NOT TRUE.
We've been over this too many times recently. You don't agree, but classifying
ISP service as a common carrier DISCOURAGES competition and inevitably leads to
higher rates and new regulations that can interfere with Net Neutrality.
This is not idle conjecture. The Wheeler FCC was already starting to regulate
ISPs with the privacy regulations, and was considering very complex rules to
"open" up the market for set top boxes.
This is from a recent Forbes article that is well worth reading:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2017/01/24/why-is-the-media-smearing-new-fcc-chair-ajit-pai-as-the-enemy-of-net-neutrality/#7a442362438e
In the final months of the Wheeler FCC, the Commission rushed through orders
re-regulating rates for enterprise data services, subjecting ISPs (and only
ISPs) to a highly-restrictive privacy regime that upends the model of
ad-supported free content, and flirted with banning free and sponsored mobile
data services that consumers actually want.
And this paragraph about one of the major proponents of TItle II regulation:
The campaign is no secret. As the Ford Foundation, which supports all of
these groups regardless of their names, freely acknowledged in a celebratory
blog post after the public utility order was passed, the goal of its Internet
Freedom campaign has been to use net neutrality as a populist wedge to push
for public utility treatment for the Internet—if not outright nationalization
of private broadband infrastructure.
And you have zero evidence that anyone did such a thing.
There is plenty of evidence Bert:
You can analyze the comments yourself here:
https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/blog/2014/10/22/fcc-releases-open-internet-reply-comments-public
And here is a NYTime article about the comments:
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/18/net-neutrality-comments-to-f-c-c-overwhelmingly-one-sided-study-says/?_r=0
On the other hand, what *is* truly underhanded is the way Chairman Pai is
trying to ramrod this idea of his through an FCC with only three sitting
commissioners, knowing full well that the outcome is predetermined. The
honest thing to do, at the very least, is to put off the vote until all five
commissioners are on the job.
No vote has been set Bert. The comment period is open until July 17th; the
reply comment period extends to August 16th.
Perhaps by then those empty seats will be filled. I agree that it probably
won't make a difference. And it is clear that whatever the FCC does it will be
challenged in court.
NOTHING was stoping Verizon, AT&T et al, from deploying FTTH systems;
Nonsense. You need to read up on this stuff first. Verizon stopped deploying
FTTH for the same reason Google did. It's too expensive.
Duh.
It was expensive for the cable systems to upgrade to digital, implement DOCSIS,
and continue to upgrade their systems to support higher broadband bit rates.
The real reason that the Telcos stopped deploying FTTH was it only made
economic sense if they competed with triple play bundles. AND they know that
wireless technology is going to allow them to compete for fixed broadband
EVERYWHERE by the end of this decade,
If there is an incumbent broadband provider, they didn't see the return on
investment that they had expected. So, just like Google and AT&T, they are
counting on fixed 5G to change that equation. And EVEN THEN, we're still only
talking at most two providers in neighborhoods, due to the cost of the
backhaul networks. I posted a couple of articles that explained how Verizon
and Google are planning to use the same fiber backhaul network that they had
started to deploy for FTTH, for the fixed 5G service.
Yup. But you are wrong about the cost of deploying backhaul networks. In fact
in many cities - as I pointed out - there are three or four backhaul networks
in place today.
Why don't you finally admit that you WANT just one or to regulated providers to
offer fixed ISP service Bert?
With Title II there is far less incentive to compete.
That's the current reality. The libertarian lunatic rhetoric goes out the
window, if adequate competition doesn't exist. Nothing works right, without
competition, and none of the slogans make any sense. It's just as bad to have
one's Internet access under the control of an authoritarian government as it
is to have it under the control of overly greedy special interests.
YOUR special interests won Bert. And the FCC immediately started to give them
lucrative protections...
Let the competition begin!
Regards
Craig
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