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I'm really surprised at the number of people on the side of the telecoms here. I think it's reasonable to want consistent pricing and quality of service, parti

• zmgsabst 3y ago
  People are objecting to racializing business decisions: that’s a reasonable and laudable goal. If we want to address “underserved populations that can't get better internet”, we can do that directly without adding racism.
  • kayodelycaon 3y ago
    “Protected classes” already exist and have been tested in courts. It’s a lot easier to use that than to come up with completely different criteria businesses will find loopholes in or create loopholes through lobbying. Personally I don’t like that our best option is to use protected classes to enforce better behavior. But most of the time it’s a good equivalent, and it’s a good example of those nasty compromises that allow democracies to work effectively.
    • appleskeptic 3y ago
      There's a big difference between banning discrimination against protected classes and mandating discrimination in their favor, which is what this basically does, see the comment and discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304639
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • kayodelycaon 3y ago
        Correct. Protected classes is being used as a proxy for all economic situations. It prevents a telecom from under-serving poor neighbors. It has significant historical precedence: https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service
  • aaomidi 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • tbrownaw 3y ago
      > What are you on about? How is this adding _racism_? It is mandating that race be a factor in decisions. Declining to build out faster service in a particular poor area would be either allowed or not allowed based on what race the people there happen to be.
  • icehawk 3y ago
    So the FCC found no evidence of racism, but they're 'racializing' it anyway? That makes no sense.
    • tbrownaw 3y ago
      Politics often makes no sense.
  • SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
    I’m really confused by arguing this is “adding racism”. If I just so happen not to build a ramp into my building aren’t I de facto discriminating against the disabled? It might be economically beneficial to me to save on the cost of ramp building, and I may not be like “fuck wheelchairs”, but I’m still discriminating against the disabled. Also, I don’t understand why it’s unreasonable to consider race in any broad societal inequality where it just so happens the inequality is concentrated on race. I consider slavery to be a form of societal tech debt of the United States where this discussion is happening: the United States literally enslaved a race of people for over a century and then fought tooth and nail in every level of government against ever giving blacks anything. Within living memory blacks weren’t allowed to vote because of their blackness in that country. Black adults now had to be sent to white schools with national guard protection because the United States populace was going to be violent to children just for going to a non-black school. In this context how the hell can anyone dissociate race from anything in that country? Race was practically in every government policy, drove their only civil war, was part of every subsidy and even in their constitution.
• psxdude 3y ago
  That's kind of what EPB did in Tennessee. There should be a federal law that stops telecom companies from getting cities to give them a monopoly in exchange for service and allow cities and counties to create their own ISPs as well. Ideally there would be fiber to every home and then allow any ISPs to come in and provide service similar to DSL back in the day.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• golemotron 3y ago
  I miss the days when Congress passed laws rather than delegating decision making to agencies that get to change rules on whim.
  • crazygringo 3y ago
    Most stuff is best done by agencies staffed by experts that are set up by Congress in the first place -- not by Congress full of non-experts micromanaging things. Congressional lawmaking is for the big-picture, long-term stuff. Agencies are supposed to have the ability to set rules as needed and respond quickly. This is a feature, not a bug. And if Congress starts to see a pattern of a particular agency going way too far in some direction, then it can pass a law to further clarify the scope/limits of that agency whenever it wants. Congress hasn't given up any of its power. If it's not doing that, it's because it doesn't want to.
    • macinjosh 3y ago
      I disagree. Ask a panel of expert JS developers how something should be done and you'll get as many opinions as their are seats on the panel. In regulation it's the same but the decisions affect human lives and businesses that employ people. Experts aren't unbiased either. It is nice when the experts you like are in power but what happens when someone else comes in?
      • crazygringo 3y ago
        So to continue the analogy, you'd rather have the board of the company, consisting of MBA CEO's, making decisions about a company's JavaScript standards? Experts may disagree, but it's still a whole lot better than non-experts disagreeing.
  • sigspec 3y ago
    You mean delegating a task to people whose actual JOB is to complete that task? You'd rather this be decided by a failed football coach?
• hibikir 3y ago
  I don't think it's a matter of telcos or not, but about how the problem, as is, makes discrimination a natural result one has to actively fight against, in ways that are often economically detrimental to everyone. The shape of American cities and towns makes all infrastructure very expensive: more miles of fiber per customer than basically anywhere else. More cell towers per phone too, if you are looking at 5G. This spread is also massively segregated economically and racially. I look at,say, any demographic map of St. Louis, and no matter whether we look at economic indicators, education, labor participation, wealth, race... you see the very same lines. So when a company just expands first where there will be more subscribers per mile of infrastructure built, they different racial outcomes are guaranteed. Given that deploying everywhere at once is physically impossible, every move to put someone ahead of the queue puts a different subdivision further back on the queue. Since fiber deployments will go on for decades, we might even see situations where a place becomes more desirable, and therefore makes different people try to buy it, just by giving it fiber 20 years later than it would have received it if we went just by subscribers per mile of infra. Municipal broadband might choose different winners, but with the same total build capacity, there is always winners... and I bet rich voters that would really use the broadband would get really mad if they are near the end of the 20+ years timeline, instead of year 3. Everyone wants a more equitable distribution of resources when it's not them losing massively The low density suburb is what makes this malaise so bad. Americans do not want to tackle this though, because its costs are so well hidden, and often distributed to other people. The richer your neighbors, the more likely you get more attention for purely political reasons anyway. See how many rich and progressive neighborhoods, suddenly turn to NIMBY land when they think they have topay high costs. The problem forces people to choose, and, as usual, those with less political clout will be last, just because everyone else pushes to be further ahead than the average, and someone has to be in the back. If the deployment was cheaper, and therefore faster, this would be far less of a problem, but the easiest time to fix it was 90 years ago.
  • gumby 3y ago
    Well we discriminate (as in pick and choose, not in the sense of redlining) as to where we want the cost to lie. Typically core reticulated infrastructure is socialized: roads down to city level are typically funded at a high level (fed/state/county etc), mail delivery pricing is not destination-dependent et al. This makes sense as there are two parties and both benefit if the infrastructure is there. The local details (actual roads in the towns) are then a local matter. Conversely some decisions are not socialized: if you live remotely your insurance rate reflects your distance from a fire station or even hydrant, or your proximity to forest fires etc; an urban dweller is likely to pay less as the expected loss is lower. Anyway, telecom seems like an important universal service, as a human right; for the same reason roads are; and because it's in everybody's interest if people who want to vote have an opportunity to learn, both about "the issues" and be educated in other ways.
• robomartin 3y ago
  > There are underserved populations that can't get better internet, even if they want it. Isn't fixing that a reasonable policy goal? Sure. Yet, looking at problems as if they are single-variable cause-effect issues is to reduce complex multivariate issues (they all are) to ridiculous fantasy models. The government should not force businesses to make unprofitable decisions or contort their decisions into bullshit racism implications. The solution is very simple: If the FCC thinks these communities are not served well enough, they are free to trench the streets, install fiber to every home and provide them with amazing government run service at low cost or zero cost. And yet, that would be a terrible solution. We need to pull back from the micro level and look at it from a broader perspective. The federal government is burning $1.7 billion PER YEAR maintaining empty buildings for decades: "The 132-year-old brick structure is sitting on prime real estate six blocks from the White House. It was once a school, but it's been vacant for almost three decades." https://www.npr.org/2014/03/12/287349831/governments-empty-buildings-are-costing-taxpayers-billions https://www.npr.org/2014/03/12/287349831/governments-empty-b... That money is being burned...every year. What would happen if they just got rid of those properties and shifted just one third of that budget to subsidize such things as internet access to various underserved areas? That's over $500 billion PER YEAR. Charter Communications, one of the largest companies in the sector, has a gross annual revenue of approximately $50 billion per year. Give them $50 billion of the money being wasted and stipulate that money has to go towards delivering outstanding internet connectivity in designated areas. Heck, with $50 billion of free money they could probably get 1 Gigabit fiber to every single one of our homes, including less profitable areas. Do that with nine other companies. The result would be unbelievable. And here's the best part: It's a one-time cost. We would be saving $1.7 billion per year and spending $500 billion one time. Even if the actual cost is double that, it's still a deal. The point is that it is easy to get lost in the feelings and outrage of our sad victim society while ignoring the absolute fact that we could be doing a lot better for everyone if we demanded better results from our government. Here we are, discussing the financially-microscopic problem of relatively few underserved communities while not making the connection with government waste and incompetence --in the trillions-- that could do magical things for every single person in this nation if brought under control. A trillion dollars is a massive amount of money. If put to good use most of the problems in this country would evaporate, from housing to healthcare and internet access so everyone can be on Tik Tok all day. Perspective is important. We have already done enough damage to our industrial and commercial business sectors. Before we achieve total internal destruction, we might just want to consider that getting our government under financial control (at all levels) would have the effect of injecting trillions of dollars into the economy, which would be nothing less than magical. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/18/heres-how-the-federal-government-wastes-tax-money.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/18/heres-how-the-federal-govern...
• tbrownaw 3y ago
  > I'm really surprised at the number of people on the side of the telecoms here. Yes, I too would have expected a non-zero number of libertarians to be here saying that any amount of regulation is bad. But the closest I see to that is a couple saying that the government forgot to include appropriate strings on previous handouts.
• stronglikedan 3y ago
  I'm on the telecoms side because I believe it's yet another power grab disguised as a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, and no one has convinced me otherwise.
  • smoldesu 3y ago
    Why even comment, then? What do you stand to gain from espousing an opinion you admit is too ridiculous to contend with serious criticism?
• YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  Regulations adds costs because of added operations and red tape and the costs could only come from consumers in the long term. This would mean a proportion of poor can't afford them and become offline. So regulation should be used only when required. Now if this is the case where the regulation is required is upto debate but the fact is that FCC isn't correcting any of the things ISP are doing currently but only few things that ISP could do in the future which would hurt consumers. And so this only feels like a political decision as "net neutrality" is a good sounding term and government which forces big companies to provide it is good.
• bigbillheck 3y ago
  > I'm really surprised at the number of people on the side of the telecoms here I'm not, and most of the pro-telecom people here would have been equally opposed to rural electrification and phone service.
• derbOac 3y ago
  This is all basically what was intended by the establishment of the USPS. The only reason why the internet isn't mentioned in the US constitution is because the technology wasn't available, wasn't even something they could envision. But if it had been they would have included it. If you read the original correspondence about the Postal Clause, the point was not to establish paper mail delivery and postal roads per se, but to establish a system of information conveyance between the federal and state governments and citizens: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/tocs/a1_8_7.html http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/tocs/a1_8_7.html It's always been puzzling to me that people have been so focused on paper mail as the boundaries of the USPS when it was really about information conveyance. Having a narrow mandate to physical mail is sort of holding the US Constitution to an arbitrary limit based on year or era. All of this should be handled in the same way as mail. If people want to build out private internet, fine, but the US government should be building out a public system as well. These issues were all discussed in the 18th century but just with different mediums as a frame of reference.
  • ixwt 3y ago
    > Having a narrow mandate to physical mail is sort of holding the US Constitution to an arbitrary limit based on year or era. Welcome to the current Supreme Court era of Historical Jurisprudence. If the founders didn't believe it (in their American Mythological head canon), then it's unconstitutional. Disregard the fact that many of the founders perceived the Constitution as a living document that would change with the times.