And the pendulum swings.
Title II had special clause which requires owners of existing infrastructure to lease it to competitors (this was excluding by Wheeler when they reclassified it).
The leasing is what is necessary to enable competition.
We won’t get competition if every ISP that wants to enter the market needs to run fiber to every house separately. It is very expensive, and if it wasn’t, it is very impractical. Even Google with its “unlimited” capital wasn’t able to enter the market. Think about that.
Google isn’t a fair comparison, to be clear. They’ve “failed to enter” a large number of markets they were successful in, just not successful enough to make gobs of money.
They kill successful projects regularly, because the ROI isn’t an obscenely high number.
I think it is fair. They even had a good plan, which would work if antitrust laws weren’t rendered toothless. They started with rural areas that seemed to be forgotten by ISPs. They started providing 1 Gbps at an affordable price.
Suddenly existing ISPs that had 1Mbps services could do 1 Gbps too! And they could do it cheaper too, even under the cost to provide the service. They could do it, because they overcharge their customers everywhere else.
They did that in every city Google Fiber entered.
Not only that, they owned communication wells which Google needed access to to run fiber to customer’s homes and were actively blocking from using them.
Google tried different ways, around it and it failed spectacularly, for example: https://gizmodo.com/google-fiber-will-pay-3-8-million-to-fix-roads-marred-1834074398
Yeah as soon as Google says they were interested in the Portland market, suddenly Comcast had gigabit available and prices went down. Unfortunately, Google gave up after being blocked so much.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON, Sept 25 (Reuters) - U.S. Federal Communications Commission chair Jessica Rosenworcel plans to begin an effort to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules rescinded under then-President Donald Trump, sources briefed on the matter said Monday.
The move comes after Democrats took majority control of the five-member FCC on Monday for the first time since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021 when new FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez was sworn in.
The FCC is set to take an initial vote on the net neutrality proposal in October, the sources added.
In July 2021, Biden signed an executive order encouraging the FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules adopted under Democratic then-President Barack Obama in 2015.
Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 3-0 that the 2017 decision by the FCC to reverse federal net neutrality protections could not bar state action, rejecting a challenge from telecom and broad industry groups to block California’s net neutrality law.
Days after Biden took office, the U.S. Justice Department withdrew its Trump-era legal challenge to California’s state net neutrality law.
The original article contains 327 words, the summary contains 173 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Thanks that was helpful. (ik thats a bot)
I don’t know what joyless husk downvoted you, but they should realize that the summary doesn’t prevent anyone from reading the article. People who were going to read it still do, and people who weren’t are now better informed.
Additionally, we all have a thousand things calling our attention at any given moment. It’s fair not to have the bandwidth to read every article.
I’m pro net neutrality and all for getting it on the books.
But has any company broken net neutrality since it was repealed? I haven’t seen some of the stuff we expected. Maybe they wanted to lay low on it but like Comcast hasn’t restricted Netflix and pushed out 10x for Peacock stream or anything. I’m sure some stuff would go down eventually. But curious if this has happened
The way they have done it is not by restricting other services directly, but by continuing to apply bandwidth/quotas to them while bypassing them for their own services “for free”
It’s mostly because California passed net neutrality law, so it is harder to do it and be compliant there. The politicians also made mistake and did not ban zero rating, which is the current way of doing it (have laughably small data caps and provide unlimited access to affiliated companies)
How does the idea that the last mile should be a public utility, much like electricity? Here in Sacramento many of us get our electricity from SMUD, a city-owned electrical supplier. When you sign up for Internet - your house is already cabled, you choose from several ISPs.
I also hope for a rule that says either produce content or provide a connection - not both.
