U.S. exec order directs agencies to pursue net neutrality, antitrust action, ISP competition and right to repair

LOL… I have at times wondered about my own endeavors, “is this relentless tenacity or insanity?” It’s difficult to tell the difference while you are in the throes of the experience.

2 Likes

While in college a few years ago, I lived only a couple short blocks away from the university. As you can guess, it was a high density area with a lot of apartments and duplexes for rent. I lived in one of the sort of run down smaller apartment units. I was lucky at the time as an elderly retired gentleman owned the two four-unit two-story apartments. Which means he never came around unless he had to. One day I got an idea to resell my own internet to help pay for it. I cam up with the idea seeing person’s house behind my unit having an unused tripod from an old SatTV install. Looking it up, I see they sold for $50. At the time, $50 was quite a bit for me. Then one day I see the owner is doing roof replacement. I asked about the tripod, and he gave to me.

With that, I got started. $10 2 1/4 inch conduit 10 feet in length, used Ubiquti Bullet I found for $25, but had to order the antenna for about $20. I happen to have one of those popular Linksys WRT54G routers from the 2000s everyone was using.

Using all that I found a billing provider and set up an account with them, and flashed the router with their special DD-WRT with some Hotspot capability to connect to their service.

I stuck the tripod, conduit, Bullet, and antenna on the roof connected by 50 feet of ethernet cable. My antennae was now higher than a telephone pole. On the SSID, I put “Public_Access.” With no advertising, I had 10 customers in a week.

Seeing how easy that was, I looked more into it. Turns out there is a Backbone provider in the area which takes up a whole floor in a office tower which means windows. And they let you put directional antennas in those windows for an additional fee because rooftop access is a fortune. With the office tower covering the region, I could possible have a potential of over one million customers in the area.

Problem was money. You can get a whole server rack at places in the Bay Area for $400 plus low internet fee. The place I was looking at wanted about $3500 a month just to put a single server on site, and connect it to the network.

3 Likes

Awesome story. Thanks for sharing that.

I have co-workers that have ‘shared’ their bandwidth for a fee to help offset the cost of a Gig internet connection.

1 Like

That’s why I am against Net Neutrality. I still have a dream of coming up with this type of service in the future. Companies restricting their bandwidth unless they pay for it give can give the small guy an advantage.

Without Net Neutrality, what’s stopping big marketing companies with deep pockets from controlling bandwidth by paying for ‘preferred treatment’ (think QoS) for their content?

What’s stopping cable companies from blocking NetFlix and Amazon Prime Video in favor of their own video content?

Companies with deep pockets can too easily put the small guys out of business.

1 Like

Think about what net neutrality can protect us from, look at Mr_McBride examples. Now tell me you want to give up ALL that for ALL of us because you have a great business idea ? Pretty selfish to me…

Yeah, wanting to provide a better service, give the small business a chance without business crushing rules , and provide more alternatives is really “selfish”

You realize NetFlix already pays to have their content go over faster connections?

Yes, that was part of the reason for the price increase.

Do you want to have to pay for that as well as other content that YOU consume?

I have worked for several telecom’s and a cable company. If they had their way, we’d be back to paying per hour.

And that’s the reason we need more competition. More regulation means less choice

1 Like

Now there’s a point that we definitely agree on. Yes, competition would be great.

I don’t see how getting rid of Net Neutrality will bring more competition, though. We have competition now, just not enough. Personally, there are two ISPs that currently serve the area I live in. One is much better than the other, but having more would be good.

Without equal access to content for everyone, I fear the end of the internet. Marketing, again IMHO, has already done too much damage to the internet. The internet used to be for information sharing, now it’s become the new shopping mall. I’ve run across sites that run up to 20-30 different scripts, 10+ ad-trackers, 30+ third-party cookies. The internet is dying, I say, being choked out. I want my browser back, I want control of my browsing experience. Did you know there is a FireFox extension that blocks javascript from doing a port-scan against your home network? This shouldn’t even be possible.

Yeah, we do need some regulation in order to get back sane control over the internet.

1 Like

It reminds me of how roads used to be mostly privately owned in the UK so there was lots of competition over road quality and plenty of ways for an entrepreneur get going using tolls. Building bridges was also a popular way for a lord to advertise their prestige so they were usually kept in immaculate condition.

Of course the devil’s in the details and as the population grew so did a veritable rats nest of roads and tolls. This substantially raised the costs of any entrepreneurial pursuit that needed a road, especially if someone lacked the money or clout to create special toll arrangements so entrepreneurs could easily be priced out of the market by something like a guild.

Public roads were created at an expense to entrepreneurialism and the crown lost the tax revenue generated by the tolls but it created a boon for orders of magnitude more entrepreneurial pursuits that couldn’t compete without a level playing field. To me that’s what net neutrality is and the Internet is about as critical as roads are.

Very interesting history lesson. I can see how that could get out of control.

There are many tolls roads in the US. They are usually put in to pay a specific amount, but once that amount has been realized, the tolls roads remain. However, here in Atlanta, there was a toll road where the toll booths were removed once the ‘toll’ had been paid. Now, we have this very greedy ‘adjustable’ toll lane where the toll amount is raised as traffic becomes more congested.

There has to be some incentives to be competition. Someone sees a problem in the market, and creates a solution. Having Net Neutrality just means those two same companies are offering basically nearly identical services. What could a third small fry offer? They could just lower their prices in the area you are trying to get into, and you would soon be out of business just to get you out.

Look in this particular case from this article:

Now that is an incentive to start up competition.

In the case of no Net Neutrality, let’s say I started an ISP and teamed up with Netflix so that they would pay no access fee, but would be able to offer my customers discounted, or free Netflix due to the savings passed on for Netflix not having to pay a fee to be sending data through my networks.

More regulation means more paperwork, and legal experts you have to use/consult with to make sure you are in compliance. This adds more costs, making it harder to get into that business.

That is not a very good analogy. In the case of roads, there is only so much land available. Sort of like why electricity companies get a monopoly exemption. You can’t have 50 sets of cables running through the streets. At least with the internet, there is alternative to running a cable.

I’d agree comparing anything to the Internet is pretty tricky.

It’s just intended to be an example of how the opportunity cost of no regulation can net far more harm to entrepreneurs than what’s gained. A lot of the gov’t red tape protects the vast majority of entrepreneurs who aren’t trying to be an ISP.

I’d imagine this’d be a fraction of all the ways a company could make itself a superior choice to a buyer. Customer support is usually the first thing small businesses advertise and there’s enumerable things an ISP can offer such as free VPNs, malicious or unusual activity scanning, routers that don’t suck, ect.

I’m not saying I agree with all the red tape, just some thoughts on why Net Neutrality might be worth it.

My parents have a similar situation. I think they only have ONE option however (at least, “high speed” option) and it’s a small local ISP that started up to serve their rural area. They have a network of towers wherever they can put them (the land owner gets free or very cheap internet) and then they mount a directional antenna on your house pointed at the nearest tower. It would have been a real shame if regulation had kept them out of the market.

On the other hand, a bigger company just bought that ISP, and I think at the end of the day a lot of the competition will get swallowed up leaving us with a lack of competition again.

To be clear, the “World Wide Web” is burned. The internet is fine and Gemini is testament to that.

1 Like

I need to do a how-to on Gemini.

1 Like

In the example you gave you’re still making money out of it so coming with an altruistic point of view is kind of cynical to me. And you still did not address all the drawbacks we mentioned. There’s a lot of implications for a lot of people around the world and you narrow the topic to just that business hence the “selfish” point of view.

I agree comparisons with the internet are sketchy but history show clearly that unregulated markets tends to monopolistic positions and customer abuse.

It is that so-called “selfishness” which brought you many things you are using now. Cell phones, electricity computers, graphics cards for gaming which are approaching near photo realistic quality, and more.

People gotta eat, and have shelter. You cannot eat those things you create. Even non-profit organizations have to pay some staff and make money to keep running it