11–20 of 284 posts
So no, they should not become ISPs, but they can help independent ISPs break current sick oligopolies.
Working anti-trust would simply forbid ISPs from owning media businesses.
Lobbying the government to restore net neutrality is far cheaper than building out an ISP. Also, 5G is coming by the end of this year with at least two providers (Verizon and T-Mobile) and once that happens, ATT and Comcast won't have as much stranglehold on the ISP market, so NN may not matter anymore.
This the end of innovation in online videos: "When companies like Netflix, which today closed with a market cap of almost $158 billion, can’t necessarily get enough negotiating power to ensure that consumers have direct access to them, no startup can ever hope to compete. America may believe in its entrepreneurs, but its competition laws have done nothing to keep the terrain open for them. Those implications are just…
i can't help but wonder what kinds of workarounds consumers will invent (against all regulations and attempts to defeat them) to pass that content around.
consumers might embrace Netflix's old-school disk-mailing tactics. or maybe Netflix will re-embrace that.
or some sort of illegal low power local extended WiFi networks?
dunno.
People have made endless points about how ISPs and last-mile providers will hurt the consumer and the small video startup. I don't dispute those. But, IMHO, independent of that, the behavior of Alphabet has been less and less charitable to the little guy over the last few years too, especially in the area of android app development. (e.g. they recently eliminated their "free-forever" policy on the use of android map/…
Sounds like healthy competition?
it's unhealthy in the sense that the little player is basically locked out.
it's also unhealthy in the sense that the big players will be incentivized to unite in an unholy alliance against the masses for the sake of increased profitability.
Lobbying the government to restore net neutrality is far cheaper than building out an ISP. Also, 5G is coming by the end of this year with at least two providers (Verizon and T-Mobile) and once that happens, ATT and Comcast won't have as much stranglehold on the ISP market, so NN may not matter anymore.
I don't see how 5G changes anything. Wireless providers were exempt from net neutrality even when it was in force and have a long history of tiered usage and throttling.
Lobbying the government to restore net neutrality is far cheaper than building out an ISP. Also, 5G is coming by the end of this year with at least two providers (Verizon and T-Mobile) and once that happens, ATT and Comcast won't have as much stranglehold on the ISP market, so NN may not matter anymore.
Also, I suspect that state-level legislative initiatives are going to be much easier to win than trying to sue executive agencies.
Or better yet, we can work toward a future (no later than 2021, I hope) when net neutrality can be brought back into force just as it was from 2015-2017 by FCC action or perhaps with more staying power via legislative action. Ground taken once can be taken twice. If we resign ourselves to the current legal landscape we hand a victory to these corrupt players. That said I'm sure the tech giants will want to hedge thei…
Lobbying the government to restore net neutrality is far cheaper than building out an ISP. Also, 5G is coming by the end of this year with at least two providers (Verizon and T-Mobile) and once that happens, ATT and Comcast won't have as much stranglehold on the ISP market, so NN may not matter anymore.
I don't see how 5G changes anything. Wireless providers were exempt from net neutrality even when it was in force and have a long history of tiered usage and throttling.
Of course, most actual counterexamples to net neutrality are seen as positives (free Netflix or Hulu with usage not counted towards a data cap) rather than negatives, so it might not work out.
This the end of innovation in online videos: "When companies like Netflix, which today closed with a market cap of almost $158 billion, can’t necessarily get enough negotiating power to ensure that consumers have direct access to them, no startup can ever hope to compete. America may believe in its entrepreneurs, but its competition laws have done nothing to keep the terrain open for them. Those implications are just…
To me this is just a temporary setback, and a reminder why we need to focus on developing new technologies, like a "truly decentralized internet", blockchain, cryptography, and more.
It almost feels like a the death throws of a monster that will do a lot of damage is it goes down, but will ultimately be overthrown by the better forces in the world.
Edit:
"Truly decentralized internet" is a loaded phrase, so I'll expand a bit. The fact that we see small companies and municipalities beginning to develop their own ISPs is a positive trend in the right direction.
Mesh networking has the potential to happen. Most WiFi chipsets in theory support short range mesh, and the gear from Ubiquity and others, not to mention SDR also have this potential. In fact, I'd hypothesis that the basebands in most cell phones have the hardware capability to participate in mesh typologies. The right software could enable some very interesting things. I could be totally wrong here about the HW capabilities. Anyone care to chime in?
Layer proper digital identities, and something like TOR as a first class citizen, and you start to get a pretty nice picture.