this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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ISPs need to fucken die. Internet should be provided as a social service.
We already paid for the god damn infrastructure ourselves and the invention of the Internet itself through our tax dollars. Why the hell do ISPs get to profit from it infinitely with almost no meaningful regulation to protect you and me (who, again, already paid for this shit several times over).
Fun fact: ISPs have received almost half a TRILLION dollars in kickbacks funded by taxpayer dollars on top of everything else. Regulatory capture is a real problem.
Also, they took billions of government dollars, promising to build out infrastructure, and then....just didn't. With zero consequences.
Not just billions, hundreds of billions.
ISPs
And because corporations aren't people, here's the CEOs that ran things during 2014:
Hans Vestberg (b 1965) Verizon
Randall Lynn Stephenson (b 1960) AT&T
Glen F Post (b 1952) CenturyLink
We let these people act with impunity in our society but it doesn't need to be this way. Look at how Elon, who thrives on attention, flips out over being tracked and heckled. They stole hundreds of billions from us but we don't even act like it.
One of the greatest quotes of all time.
If only there was some tool available to the government to hold these companies accountable to an agreement. Like some way to document what needs to be done in exchange for the money and be able to receive the money back if that isn't performed. Oh well.
That's rank communism and I'm going to report this because our poor mistreated billionaires shouldn't have to read it from their mother ship Yacht!
(Can I have free Internet now please Daddy?)
its a base requirement, like water. it should be regulated as such. zero profit motive, ubiquitous access.
Don’t compare it to water. Nestle will want a cut.
And they will fucking kill you and your whole village if they don't get it
Let's add healthcare to this list
Throw it on the pile of "things Americans will never get socialized."
never is a very, very long time
Just until America ceases existing. Could be 1000 more years, could be next January. The future is full of possibilities!
In my town it is a city utility like electricity and water. Gigabit fiber up/down for $70 with net neutrality
Just think. In Article 1 of the US Constitution, the same article that creates Congress, also creates a federal post office system. Remote communication was so important that’s where it was described using the latest technology of the time.
There are so many systems today that need similar treatment. Internet. Medical. Education. Job Training.
And no, I don’t mean fed government enforced monopoly. I mean, UPS exists and competes with the USPS. But there is a minimum level of service in operation.
We've spent the last 40 years trying to privatize the function of the Post Office and dismantle it as a federal agency.
there's a pretty good fucking argument that mail - paper mail, not packages - should simply be all email or at the worst, scanned and transmitted electronically.
LOL @ the downvotes - you think they can't look at your mail already?
HOW FUCKING DUMB ARE YOU CHILDREN? bwhahahaah
Sure, if you want to make it easy to digitally surveil
you don't think they're able to peep into your mail if they want to already?
and that the slight level of 'security' the service provides isn't outweighed by the enormous savings in fuel burned as the silly truck visits every house every weekday simply to deliver a flyer from the grocery?
pffft
Not at the scale of petabytes, no.
pfft
I loved it when my local giant ISP kept pushing broadband connections, saying they couldn't possibly deal with costs associated with Fiber. Then they begged money from the Government to install infrastructure. Queue absolutely no work in my area. Fast forward a few years, a new ISP rolls in with Fiber and like magic my ISP was suddenly able to provide similar services.
As they exist right now, definitely. But making Internet a govermentally run service is also likely to turn out bad. The best method so far, based on what other countries are doing, seems to be public infrastructure, that any ISP can then sell service through. This prevents monopolies and creates competition in the market, which tends to result in better service for the users.
Edit: public as in anybody can use it to provide service, not as in governmentally managed. Just to force a separation to prevent monopolies.
What do we need ISPs competing on if the infrastructure is run by the government? They can't increase speeds, they can't increase service availability, they'll just be getting a profit margin on top of what the government is charging them to use the communications infrastructure. I'd rather just pay the government the pre-profit amount
The infrastructure would be things like fiber cable wired to each house.
But in this scenario, the ISPs would be manning the servers that your connection is routed through. So they'd still have massive influence on the speed and data.
If the government owned the servers, they could block and track down anything against state interest.
Not saying they can't do that anyways, but at least the third party makes the process more difficult, less seamless, and gives the chance of new competitors.
Maybe I didn't explain it the best way possible. By public I didn't mean governmentally run, I just meant that anybody can use the infrastructure. It just forces a separation between the company doing the infrastructure and the ISPs, to prevent monopolies.
So make the internet into a state service for ISPs? It might not be worse but it could be much better.
Imagine if they did this for water pipes.
Maybe I didn't explain it the best way. By public I didn't mean governmentally run, I just meant that anybody can use the infrastructure. It just forces a separation between the company doing the infrastructure and the ISPs, to prevent monopolies.
They’re welcome to compete with the government utility. But I want a government utility isp. One I get a say in as a voter, not merely as a customer
Good luck convincing the taxpayers of that fact. It should be regulated and made available as such, but made to run for free by government agencies...I think that will piss absolutely everybody off for a number of reasons.
Pretty well every case I've read of municipal owned fiber nets has been a grand success, barring interference by the local carriers. Let the city own the infra and the carriers compete for access. Of course you get the whinging about 'muh free market/choice' but that's the case for any public works really.
The free market cannot solve this because of the requirements for infrastructure both with up front costs and in needing to have easement access on very specific stretches of land. It completely breaks the assumptions economists make to be able to imagine the free market works.
Way different than a federally funded ISP. Note the comment OP is making.
Not so far off, providing infrastructure locally then leaves a lot of the major transit to backbone carriers to make the interconnects. Those providers are largely transparent to the end users. Now nationalizing carriers like that would be a hefty lift, but if we can take the local service out of the ISPs hands it would let the municipal hosts negotiate those peering arrangements in bulk. How many towns are well equipped to handle that might be another matter though.
No. Just have the city run it. Contracted monopolies are still toxic.
Not contracted monopolies or direct city run, but like 'IAAS' seems to work. Much like how you see some small cell companies providing unique offers riding on one of the big carriers networks. Often those small carriers provide better deals, particularly when the carriers they ride on are forced to sell wholesale access at reasonable rates.
The city selling wholesale access funds the infrastructure maintenance and the carriers are better able to compete with each other since all they really have to do is set up a router and pay the city's access rate fees.
I'd only be okay with that if the city provided a basic plan too. The ISPs have fucked around for far too long. It's time for them to find out. Next up, power companies.