someproteinguy wrote:
To clarify my "" was based on the following things:
1) Since when does mobile internet = broadband?
1) Since when does mobile internet = broadband?
Um... Since the introduction of smartphones and the networks which support them? Broadband simply refers to a "high speed" (which I suppose is relative) "always on" connection. Your smartphone fits that bill. And for it to work, you pay for a subscription to a "mobile broadband provider". I'm not sure why there's confusion at all. That is precisely the correct terminology.
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2) When people are complaining about lack of choice in the marketplace they're usually upset someone like Comcast is the only person who can bring premium high-speed service to their address, with other options such as phone line, satellite, or mobile service only offering lower speeds on data transfers, and forming more of low-quality service option, instead of direct competition.
Sure. Again though, as I've pointed out in numerous NN threads, nothing that's being proposed changes this. The reality is that you have only two types of wiring that goes into your home that is capable of high speed (highest speed?) internet. Your phone line and your cable feed. There will always be one company and only one company licensed by your local town/city/whatever to run and operate each of those lines and thus provide you with internet service (that's the IS in ISP). This means that you're going to only have two high speed options at best. Everything else, somewhat by physical limitations, will fall into the "low quality service option" you mention.
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3) That somehow having the 4 top carriers in the USA (Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T) take up ~75% of the market share is better, as if an oligopoly is going to offer them drastically better service, or not want to harvest their personal data for business use. Your phone isn't exactly a bastion of privacy either for that matter.
Eh. Again, that's somewhat irrelevant. How many providers nationwide is somewhat meaningless. In terms of home network, you're bound by the physical location and the owner/operator of the physical wires coming into your home. Obviously, we do want to make sure there are multiple different companies offering these services across the nation, but it's not like very many people are going to decide to move where they live just to buy a different company's internet service. Having the ability to look over the fence and see the other side is useful from a "I'm going to demand better service" kind of way, but the cable company in area A is not in any way in direct competition with the cable company in area B. They are only in competition with the phone company in area A. And again, that's a physical limitation that we kinda can't get around.
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I doubt search engines, websites, and other misc. internet-based businesses, the government, etc are going to stop tracking browsing history, web traffic information, and gathering misc. personal data just because we eased regulations a bit.
Except we didn't ease regulations on them at all. We undid a regulatory change that didn't affect those internet content providers at all. That's the whole point. The folks you're handing data to when you use a search engine, remote website, or web based business are all not ISPs. The regulation that changed only shifted ISPs (and only ISPs) from being regulated by the FTC to being regulated by the FCC. It did not in any way affect google, or amazon, or facebook, etc. So undoing does not affect those things either.
It, at the very worse, means that your privacy protections are the same as they were a year ago, before the previous changes. And given that the changes did more or less zero to protect your privacy, the new change has more or less zero effect on your privacy. That was the point of the editorial. The biggest vector for your data being collected and used in ways you may not want is via social media and web searches. But the target of the previous changes was specifically the parts of the internet that don't do those things.
It was entirely about using the boogieman of "protecting privacy" as an excuse to do something they've been trying to do for like a decade and a half. Impose government restrictions on bandwidth utilization at the provider level by declaring them to be telecommunications services and thus subject to rules written up to a century ago for phone lines. We can debate who "they" are, and why "they" want to do this (and I have in the past), but the change last year had nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with the same old network neutrality BS. They just changed the name and did it via executive action rather than legislation. Same old same old.
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gbaji wrote:
So I'm not sure why there's massive crying about privacy here, but total silence when the actual harmful regulation was put in place last year.
Fair enough. My explanation is that when things go in the direction the Left wants, very few people in the media make a deal out of it, and they certainly don't write alarming editorials and do news reports on them. But when something goes in the direction the Right wants (or in a direction the Left doesn't want), the media yells and screams, editorials are written, and you hear about them on the evening news (or at least they get tossed into your face online). Which explains why we're hearing about the horrible actions of the GOP repealing the change made last year (and yes, expressed in exactly that way), but heard nearly nothing when the change actually occurred.
It's not like this is a hard pattern to spot.
Edited, Apr 11th 2017 4:48pm by gbaji