251–260 of 284 posts
edit: not vs.* but 2 different entities with similar names.
For those who cut the cord, some things that may come out of this: 1. AT&T announced they were launching an entertainment only live streaming service for $15 (or free to AT&T subscribers) which will compete with Philo. 2. They will continue to give away free or cheap HBO to AT&T or DIRECTV NOW customers 3. Comcast will more aggressively bid for FOX which means either Disney or Comcast will become the majority stakeho…
HBO is currently $5/mo for DirecTV Now customers, which is well below the regular price. Also FWIW, it was free for the first year to early subscribers of DirecTV Now.
Cognitive dissonance is interesting. For example, tech folks generally love Japan and Hong Kong's railroads. But those systems work so well because of the exact sort of vertical integration techies get apoplectic about when it comes to the Internet: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-inf... . JR and MTR not only are private companies that own and operate the railroads, they own a ton of the land…
Lots of trolly transportation systems were built in the US with the same model. Build a line out to the cheep farmland you own near a city/town, charge low fairs (not nearly enough to cover your capital costs and running costs), but now you can sell lots for housing at 10x or 20x the price you bought the land for. Once all the lots are sold, having the trolly pay for itself is difficult, especially after people can b…
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> Big California cities have Big California impediments to broadband deployment. What have they done, relative to other cities, to impede broadband deployment?
E.g. http://stopthecap.com/2011/06/29/san-francisco-still-in-stal...
And it's an issue that was also raised in other non-California cities, including places like NC, CT, IL, DC, etc. See your article, links from it, and [0].
Come on man, you know this does not support your initial assertion.
[0] http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-Takes-Heat-for-Hu...
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How is it that the executive branch is acting in a more principled and competent manner than the judicial, in this case? I suppose it could be good for the economy and general welfare of the nation that the price of good TV will go up, if it means people will be watching less of it.
Which parts of the 200-page opinion did you find unprincipled or incompetent?
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This was probably the most frustrating part of this entire process- they had so many other arguments they could have pulled out of a bag and instead CNN was the one issue that the executive branch had?
That's the one issue that would most likely rally his base.
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> And this one has the inherent conflicts of interest you get when a distributor buys out a producer. I'm not sure I understand the conflicts. Isn't Netflix essentially doing the same thing? Consolidating production and distribution?
Netflix isn't your ISP. Netflix doesn't control the means of delivery/distribution. They rely on Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc to deliver their data. Netflix can't just decide that they don't want to compete with Hulu and therefore throttle or block Hulu from their customers. We know that controlling the means of production and the means of distribution is highly anti-competitive. All you have to do is look at rockefel…
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I should point out that this doesn't really change the broadband ISP landscape. Time Warner Cable is not apart of Time Warner anymore. All this does is give AT&T a better chance at entering the "original content" space and to take advantage of the fact that streaming providers like Youtube TV and Netflix would need to now pay AT&T for their content. Honestly I don't think this is all that bad of a move. I'd rather AT…
It's catastrophic. Companies should be allowed to either own the pipe or what flows through the pipe. Any attempts to own both need to be stopped and punished. The pipes must remain neutral so that small competitors can come up and disrupt and slay the big players once they get moribund.
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Netflix isn't your ISP. Netflix doesn't control the means of delivery/distribution. They rely on Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc to deliver their data. Netflix can't just decide that they don't want to compete with Hulu and therefore throttle or block Hulu from their customers. We know that controlling the means of production and the means of distribution is highly anti-competitive. All you have to do is look at rockefel…
> But this is the overall direction of the internet and social media the past few years. Less freedom, less openness and a move towards more of a corporate tv/news format. So when are we nerds getting together to make a new internet?
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Is it? I’ve got two fiber lines into my house in a Maryland county where most people are on septic and well. Unsurprisingly, Big California cities have Big California impediments to broadband deployment.
The biggest impediment is corrupt corporate capital not investing in their infrastructure. Some have taken government subsidies and threw elaborate parties and went on luxury cruises while not building anything. There's court cases about it, such as https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151022/09232532594/fcc-h... The companies take that money and do things like buy multi-billion dollar companies with it instead. The m…
This is easily disprovable. Broadband providers invest tens of billions a year in infrastructure. The fastest cable or wireless connection available to you is probably 10x faster than it was a decade ago. By comparison, your Intel laptop is maybe 3-4 times faster, maybe less. That cost gobs of money--building cell towers, pushing fiber deeper into the cable network, reducing users per HFC node by a factor of 10, etc. This is all incredibly labor intensive and expensive; it's not just a matter of downloading "DOCSIS 3.1" onto some head ends and calling it a day.
> Some have taken government subsidies and threw elaborate parties and went on luxury cruises while not building anything.
Note also that the "government subsidies" are anything but. The article you link to is talking about Universal Service Fund money, which is actually taken from ISPs and given to other ISPs. It doesn't come out of general tax dollars.
> leads to California's and the US's subpar system.
According to Akamai, U.S. broadband is among the fastest in the world, faster than all the large EU countries: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t.... We're in the top 10, right after Denmark, and ahead of the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy, etc. (the countries comprising 70% of the EU population).
> And it stays that way because hoards of people either apologize for it or just refuse to see what it is regardless of the evidence
Exactly the opposite is true. The actual evidence shows that the 1996 deregulation has been a monumental success in terms of amount of money invested and actual broadband speeds achieved. Proponents of heavy regulation have to deny the actual evidence (dollars spent, speeds achieved) because it suggests a shocking result: even deregulation that resulted in much less competition than anticipated is still better than the prior, heavily-regulated system. (I'm writing this as my awesome government-funded train system is stuck between Annapolis and D.C. for no apparent reason.)
What's holding us back from being even better (and which is why I have fiber but much of Silicon Valley does not) is state & local broadband regulation. Red tape that makes it hard to string up fiber (or forces you to bury it, at much higher cost), hard to create an "minimal viable ISP," etc. When I lived in Baltimore, for example, Verizon wanted to come in and compete with Comcast. The city literally wouldn't let them do it, and pleaded with Google to come build Fiber instead. Which Google wouldn't do, because, quite reasonably, Google only builds Fiber in places where cities are willing to waive requirements municipalities uniformly require for other providers: https://crosscut.com/2014/12/google-fiber-never-come-seattle....