cross-posted from: https://vlemmy.net/post/152995
Alternative published title: AT&T/Verizon lobby group pushes for payments from Big Tech
Or maybe we should hold ISPs accountable for the $400 Billion they pocketed instead of laying fiber in the late 90s.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394
Yeah I’m surprised they’re saying anything about this since it immediately made me remember that garbage they pulled.
Retired telecom worker here:
Every single time your telecommunications provider goes to DC to lobby against their taxes they promise “Please oh please please if you’ll just lower our taxes we pinky swear to expand broadband. We’re going to expand the reach of DSL, we’re gonna lay cable for Uverse internet, we’re invented this thing where high speed internet goes over your electrical grid. We promise you we can do the thing if only you’ll cut our taxes.”
So DC does and guess what happens? Job cuts. Cut back on techs needed to actually do the work. The money is used for stock buy backs, to buy a company or two (bought at a high price then sold at a loss of course) and the CEO bails with a golden parachute:
Omfg this
Where is the bill to take all infrastructure made using this public money and give the infrastructure to the public?
Maybe they figured we had all forgotten about that by now lol
ISPs: “Fine. We’ll build fiber now. And this time, we’ll do it for only $350 billion. Such a bargain!”
They surely do love that corporate socialism when daddy sam is paying but “free markets” where they are a monopoly when they are raising my bill every year.
I wish. I also wish I could be connected to the fiber that is literally 1 mile away from my house.
I have fiber but my town is building muni fiber that will be $25/mo cheaper for the same speeds. They just finished another segment. It stops 200 ft south of my property. They’ll be back to finish the area in about 18 months after they do most of the north side of town first.
Jealous they actually plan to expand your side better than not knowing at least!
Yeah, ISP’s were given a considerable amount of money to improve internet infrastructure 30 years ago and they did not. Classify them as a utility. Heck, we should nationalize the utilities anyway.
A national regulatory body could be good but I’d rather see them under local control personally.
Funny, when Google started building fiber, ISPs threw a fit and tried to make it illegal in a lot of places for big tech to build broadband networks.
So uh, which is it guys?
This is like Godzilla and Mothra arguing about who should pay to rebuild downtown Tokyo after one of their brawls. Meanwhile, the citizens don’t care who pick up the tab. They just want it done.
Hmmmm…wonder whose fault it is that many municipalities won’t approve new line construction by upstart ISPs 🤔
It couldn’t have anything to do with lobbying by monopolistic ISPs.
This is like building a toll road then not only charging the people driving on it but also charging their destinations too. Hilarious.
We need municipal and public utility broadband.
We sure do but the ISP lobby does not permit it and instead they are able to funnel taxpayer money into executive and shareholder pockets. See comment above.
That’s like asking Whirlpool and Kenmore to pay for water and sewer expansion.
Or car manufacturers to build more oil rigs
The Biden administration last month urged the EU to reject the forced payments proposed by European ISPs, saying the plan “could give operators a new bottleneck over customers, raise costs for end users, and alter incentives for CAPs/LTGs [content and application providers and large traffic generators] to make efficient decisions regarding network investment and interconnection.”
The Biden administration also said payments from tech firms may violate net neutrality principles, saying that it “is difficult to understand how a system of mandatory payments imposed on only a subset of content providers could be enforced without undermining net neutrality.”
So… did someone from the administration even bother writing this themselves, or did they just copy/paste what Meta sent them?
Even if it was written by Meta, it still isn’t wrong.
