Step by step, the FCC is working to undermine cities' abilities to create municipal fiber networks of any size, while doing everything it can to keep the status quo in place. One of the goals of the FCC’s reversal of net neutrality earlier this year was to broadly block local government from having anything to do with internet access. The commission effectively said it was blocking in advance any local regulatory efforts that could be viewed as in conflict with the FCC’s hands-off approach. (Earlier this month, 20 states filed a brief with the DC Circuit pointing this out.)
This week, the FCC is planning to eliminate local authority over private communications equipment being stuck to public property. As Blair Levin, former FCC chief of staff and former executive director of the National Broadband Plan, puts it, this is a "power grab in which the FCC majority substitutes their judgment of what is best for local communities for the judgment of duly elected local officials." At the same time, paradoxically, FCC chair Ajit Pai himself is very supportive of state laws that block cities from working on municipal fiber initiatives.
Fuck that's nasty. They are trying to stop another Longmont from happening.
Adrian Diaz
This small city near Boulder began connecting its residents to a long-built but underused fiber optic Internet network ringing the city. Area businesses had long been allowed to rent space on the network, which was built in 1997 by the power company the city co-owns with its neighbors.
A law mirrored in 18 other states initially barred Longmont from selling access to that network to its residents. The network is so fast that users can download an entire HD movie in about 30 seconds.
Longmont's elected officials first asked voters to approve Nextlight in 2009 but found themselves bitterly opposed by telecommunications companies, which spent nearly $200,000 to defeat the measure. It was, at the time, the single most expensive election in city history — until 2011, when telecommunication companies poured more than $400,000 to fight the plan a second time.
>spend public money to build network >public can't use it because no fucking reason whatsoever
Jonathan Kelly
>Stopping the government from creating a honeypot and network monopoly >Thinking it won't become shitty like "public" education and "public" healthcare I'd trust the judgement of a poo (Ajit Pai) over a Jew (((Blair Levin))).
Robert Bennett
>private sector businesses spent money to defeat competitors in the same market The system is working as intended. What's the problem?
Adrian Rogers
what system is that? the monopoly system?
Juan Hall
There haven't been monopolies in the telecom industry since they broke up Ma Bell
Brandon Moore
The problem is the network was built in 1997 but it was quashed by telecoms. That same network is all over the front range, just laying in the ground. Longmont finally bucked the cable companies and now has municipal gigabit internet for $70 a month. If the system was working it never would have needed to be voted on.
Gigabit, neutral, civil rights protected internet for $70/month. Why the hell would anyone go with a cox/comcast/whatever the fuck.
Matthew Long
Every city deserves what Longmont has. There is no reason to not do it.
Grayson Ortiz
>deserves Quite the loaded word you picked there. Want to try again?
Jaxson Rogers
Nah, I am good with it. Death to the cable companies.
Chase Gray
capitalism
Henry Edwards
Really? So when a city only has one choice for a broadband internet provider, that isn't a monopoly?
John Mitchell
It's still capitalism in Longmont. It's not like they ran the cable company out of town. They are still there. Though the only people that pay for their shitty over priced service are the people living in apartment buildings that have contracts with the cable company to not allow the municipal gigabit in those buildings. I suspect that will change though as a few buildings complexes do now allow municipal gigabit.
Nolan Brooks
Vince Cerf who invented TCP/IP which you're using right now to bitch about public education went to public schools.
don't give us your qanon alt right govt is bad bullshit you failure redneck or Cambridge analytic shill.
You're an absolute moron if you think b cable conglomerate monopolies are lobbying the govt to end net neutrality because they want to provide a quote priduct you thin skulled window licker.
Xavier Taylor
*Quality product
Nicholas Barnes
This
William Barnes
ALRIGHT You deserve a pic
Nothing prevents the shitty private telecom from providing shitty slow rate for the same price as gigabit and then go out of business because they suck. Dumb telecom shill nigger.
I don't know how It works in burgerstan but here public schools and hospitals are still better then private ones even after decades of destruction by the liberists
Leo Sullivan
>Vince Cerf who invented TCP/IP which you're using right now to bitch about public education went to public schools. Cool. That doesn't change the fact that they're still shit, and they got worse over time.
>don't give us your qanon alt right govt is bad bullshit you failure redneck or Cambridge analytic shill. Qanon is an internet troll, and has nothing to do with the alt right. I'm not a "failure redneck" or Cambridge analytic shill either. That being said, do have an actual argument against the idea that the government is bad?
Andrew Brooks
>You're an absolute moron if you think b cable conglomerate monopolies are lobbying the govt to end net neutrality because they want to provide a quote priduct you thin skulled window licker. Yet a month after NN was repealed, my ISP started gigabit service. There's actual verifiable progress being shown here. Not only that, but if you're going to call someone names to imply they're less intelligent than you on the internet, you should probably try doing things like spelling words correctly, or proper use of capitalization. These are things you would have learned had the public "education" "system" you bootlick for actually did their fucking job and wasn't a bunch of useless paper pushing bureaucrats.
John Sanchez
>Why would the FCC fuck with municipal fiber networks? GEEZ I DON'T KNOW
>make government shitty >claim government can't do anything right >privatize everything so rich investors can take their cut These people are going to end up with their heads on pikes at this rate.
Luke Price
>He thinks anyone here in 2018 was around decades ago to prevent the situation we're in >He thinks people can't analyze history to any degree
this has been an issue for the past decade~ or so, and telcos actually sued in my state saying states offering broadband was unfair because they couldn't compete with "at cost" or something along those lines, fuck the FCC and fuck the obongo administration for siding with lobbyists from the cable industry.
Aiden Evans
Watch as r/thedonald tries to twist this into a good thing
John Long
Give the government and a growing corrupt SJW influence power over information or give a bunch of rich corrupted fucks that power. The no win situation. I say we all build a darknet of drones flying around cities
Nolan Garcia
yes, doctorow is a known alt-right drumphy russiabot
William White
In Romania they have like 15 ISP per city so they can have gigabit for 5€ That's what competition should be
Josiah Bailey
Net neutrality isn't what you think it is. Its weasel worded white from corporate stooges (telco lobbyist Tom Wheeler) that basically enshrines the exact opposite of net newtuality as perfectly appropriate using ambiguous terms like "reasonable bandwidth management" You might not be getting cable-like packages of ISP approved websites (It was never in the cards either way) but you will still be getting capped, metered, throttled, third-world dialup tier internet marketed as "high speed/unlimited" nonetheless. Rethuglicans have a point that regulations are harmful to consumers, because your average consumer is an idiot that will always pick the worst of all possible options because it is cheap, convenient, or well marketed (but the consumer is always right :^)) their lawmakers have correctly observed that monopolies are good for consumers because ey offer better prices, and have moved to strip away legislation against it (that is to say, pro-competition). In particular, americans will undoubtedly love paid-prioritization because all they do online is Netflix and porn.
I have always been consistent in my arguments against net neutrality - that it is an mendacious poison pill that pulls us deeper into the quagmire that is an corporate, monopolistic internet. There is no completion between websites - you are stuck with them for better or worse, net neutrality does nothing. We have in Europe, net neutrality, but we also have the censorship of "hate speech," the "right to be forgotten" and now the new "link tax" and intellectual property prohibiting memes. The situation in California is hardly better. "Obscenity" is recognized as a restriction on your first amendment, and it is the origin of the cancerous intellectual property proposals that get exported to the rest of the world though American NGOs. Yet you fools always pretend your government is sacrosanct and would never do anything harmful to your interests.
Ian Evans
>correlation = causation
Evan Reed
How do you make this long a fucking post and still not have an argument? Nobody claimed the government was perfect.
Alexander Brooks
(cunt.) You forget Snowden and the NSA spying revelations. Private isps may rubber stamp requests from local PD to spy on people, but they at least have to be asked for it. Municipal means all your browsing history is public data, including all the degenerate Japanese porn you torrented. I distrust municipal internet, but I love them. Its one more provider, so its one more competitor. It doesn't compare to splitting up the unholy behemoths that corporate mergers have been building up since Reagan gutted antitrust, but its a start. So basically I'm ok if other people are buying. FUD or not, the major reason I'm against NN is that its a bandaid, stopgap measure that legitimized a foul, noncompetive ISP market and makes it worse, by giving people comfortable delusions of having won some kind of important victory, ignoring all the far worse problems by focusing on some irrelevant detail about cable package subscriptions. I love competition. I love it more than "regulations" - but I'm not above using regulation to force competition. Break up the monopolies. Break them up. Tear the isps to shreds, like the did to bell in the 80s Don't stop there, break up Google, Facebook, Twitter, papypal, uber, and all her rest of this cancerous trash that enslaved our digital lives for sheckels. When you've got a hammer every problem looks like a nail, so break them up. Net neutrality isn't better than competition is. North Dakota (not California) is the only state with actual completion for isps. So why doesn't California copy them? Could it be undue influence from sillion valley lobbying? Impossible. Net neutrality all the way baby Even in the worst paid prioritization nightmare scenario you could just take a moral stance and use slow trottled and unpopular websites, or go for the premium uncensor and unexpugated internet, or even use tor/run your own proxy to escape the sandbox, or depend on the free proxies like people have done for blocks on the pirate bay.
Anthony Johnson
About 85 miles south, here in Colorado Springs, you get to "choose" between Cuckcast with decent download speeds, 1 TB data cap, and 10Mbps upload, or CenturyLink, aptly named because it would take you about a century to download anything over their 10Mbps DSL.
The market doesn't work when your two choices are useable with data cap, and unusable with data cap.
Elijah Allen
>Why would the FCC fuck with municipal fiber networks? Because the agency is run by a literal corporate shill who does whatever his masters tell him to? Of course they're going to fear municipal broadband, since the goal of the government run solution won't be to gape consumers for every cent they can milk out of them.
Cooper Reyes
(last part) Even with fears about surveillance, you could mitigate it. Paid prioritization was some kind of singular calamity like everyone pretended it was. It was just making something at was already horribly bad a little worse. So you could learn to live with it, circumvent it, maybe even develop Stockholm syndom and come to love it cause much cheap Netflix billls! And everybody would be happy. But like I've said before, and I feel is worth reiterating, why stop at this particular opinion the ride, why make this a big fucking red line while ignoring all the shit that came before it. Why not do something more fundamental, like my pet solution of breaking up the companies, or otherfpwise forcing or incentizing competition.
Why not build a better internet, with blackjack, hookers, something decentralized and more anonymous and resistant to censorship? Why entrench this shitty centralized internet more firmly into our lives by this bulls hit placebo you can placate the normalfag sheeple with?
Austin Gutierrez
>telco puppets try to make sure telcos stay profitable gee I wonder why
Nicholas Cruz
>Jow Forumsentooman is unstuck in time >Just dicks around at radioshack We're saved guys!
Colton Kelly
Man that sucks. Reminds me though, another awesome thing about Longmont's NextLight is no data caps.
Justin Anderson
internet was built with public funds, no? internet is like a utility i think internet would be public like a utility but private corps can provide services but they'll have to be competitive or focus niche markets
Zachary Lee
So ideally you'd have local loop bundling, which is where the government runs fiber from everyone's house to a central office. Then, for an ISP to service that area, they just need to put their router in that office. This makes the barrier to entry extremely low compared to today, where a prospective ISP has to run their own cable to every house.
Users would be able to change ISPs with a simple phone call, where their house would just be patched into a different ISP's router. Then real competition would finally be enabled, because as it stands, not even a company the size of Google was able to make a sizeable dent in the deployment of Google Fiber.
