I thought this "cut off your internet" thing had died circa 2007 with the draconian, yet endearingly-condescending "three-strikes-you're-out" push from the record industry. In a world where internet access has long since become a basic requirement to function in civil society, how is this still a conversation?
DRM lobby and control freaks never sleep. So be vigilant - they'll always try to find ways to sneak in nasty police state style laws anywhere they can. You can't assume this won't come up any time again in the future.
It happened to me in 2010 for a TV torrent. Had to call my ISP and promise to delete the file. The ISP shut it off due to a request from Universal. Weird experience.
I am baffled by this also. It doesn't even make sense that industry is STILL trying to stop file sharing. I literally forgot about this argument until recently; It's hard to imagine something less important to worry about. Yes, I would download a car.
I literally can't switch. I live in one of the biggest cities in the world, and the ISP's here have carved it up into neighborhood level monopolies. I have one option.
I much prefer the UK model. BT Openreach wire up the infrastructure and take care of the telephone exchanges, and then ISPs compete to provide their services on the lines. To be fair, they have been slow rolling out fibre into rural areas, but most exchanges now have a choice of 10+ ISPs for prices equivalent to $25 a month.
Why aren't you all protesting about being tied into such oligopolies? America is supposed to be about free markets and open choice.
Key words "supposed to be" but in reality there's at least as much regulation creation at the behest of corporate lobby as a barrier to entry against competitors. And notice how the median reliability and performance of the big three is worse than in countries where internet access is treated more like a public utility.
But that's basically what they are, they're natural monopolies but are in some ways more heavily regulated as if they were competitive businesses where anti-competition law would be easier to execute. Notice wherever Google Fiber tries to move in how much better service and performance gets while at the same time the local one or two choices step over themselves in outrage.
If the music industry were saying "punish them! turn off their water!" people would probably better understand just exactly how vindictive they're trying to be.
Unfortunately, getting anything done about the oligopolies - or monopolies - doesn't seem to do anything.
It seems what is basically needed is some investment in infrastructure and some legislation to help remove the barriers to entry. But the US moves slowly to do such things unless there is money to be had. I remember some folks in the late 90's or early 2000's that were just getting home phone service, after all - out west in the mountains. Additionally, the lobbyist for these companies have more money than God. (debatable, but you get the picture). Normal folks making 25,000 a year can't compete with that - their yearly salaries are a drop in the Lobby's bucket.
"America is supopsed to be about free markets and open choice"
And technically, it still is, they say, so long as you can afford to do provide all of the infrastructure and get through all the red tape.
Communications infrastructure naturally tends towards a monopoly - it makes very little sense for thirty different companies to run wires to your house, on the off chance that you'll choose them over a competitor.
The advantage of the Openreach model is that the last-mile infrastructure is treated like a public good. Anyone can lease bits of that infrastructure and everyone pays the same regulated rates. The system ensures that the monopoly is as small as possible, segregating out the stuff that's a natural monopoly from the stuff that naturally supports competition.
Thanks to Openreach, I have a meaningful choice over my internet service. I can choose dirt cheap service from a multinational, or I can pay a premium for specialist service. If my ISP starts doing traffic shaping or has lousy customer support, I can choose from any number of other ISPs.
It is the same model in all of the EU. Some countries do it very well such as France. Other, such as Germany, not great, but better that the USA "open markets" solution. For proof, compare the price of Internet access in Paris and New York.
Exactly. I can get Comcast up to I think 200mbit now (I have 100) or ATT DSL which would require paying for a phone line + the service which would cost the same as Comcast and run at 768k. This is in Silicon Valley. My apartment building doesn't give me any other options (and Comcast is the only "official" one, but ATT claims they can offer me service...never tried).
Having lived through the dial-up modem -> ADSL era, I think that 25/3 too high a bar to call 'broadband'. There was a definite qualitative jump from dial-up to ADSL1, and the qualitative difference between ADSL1 and faster speeds is much less noticeable. Definitely present, but less noticeable.
Perhaps another way of putting how I see it - excluding really heavy traffic like video or (cough) torrenting linux isos (cough), you're rarely saturating your broadband bandwidth with casual internet use. Whereas with dial-up/non-broadband, it didn't matter what you did, you were saturating your bandwidth and always waiting.
(YMMV - this is just how I see the term 'broadband' as a qualitative label)
Clearly you haven't seen modern websites. The bozos who write them produce blank pages that weigh in at 1MB, and god help you if you want some text there...you'll be downloading 3000 javascript frameworks, 200-300 web fonts, and of course some icon fonts too...
oh, and ads..
I agree that modern websites too often tend towards being bloated messes, but I also agree with vacri's idea that for most uses the jump between dialup and ADSL1 feels much more substantial than further increases.
After a certain point the thing rate limiting you for most network usages (including web browsing) stops being your own connection to the ISP and starts being other things, like the speed of the website you are visiting under whatever load it is currently under, the website's own bandwidth out to the greater world (split up among however many people use it), etc.
I currently have 300/20 service, and though I see a nice set of numbers when I visit speed testing sites, in typical real world web browsing situations it feels no faster than the old 30/5 service I had before this.
> the ISP's here have carved it up into neighborhood level monopolies
This a textbook antitrust violation, at least by US law (specifically, agreeing to partition markets in this way and not compete with each other). In the absence of some exception in federal law (state law would not suffice), I'd love to see someone go after them with an antitrust case.
It can be an option if you have good enough coverage in your area and you don't use much data (i.e., no streaming or system updates). Typically unless you have some grandfathered in plan, you'll either pay per additional chunk of data (I think Verizon charges $10/GB) or be heavily throttled.
If it helps, there are probably wi-fi, mobile broadband, and cellular telephone providers that probably won't ask for your name or address, although you'll probably get gouged for bandwidth.
No need. There's only a handful of providers in most places. Here in Rochester, NY there's really only one unless you want to go with the misery that is Frontier's DSL.
First of all that number is shrinking fast. Secondly, as your articles points out nearly all of those 13% are either seniors. The rest are very likely either unemployed, or living below the poverty line.
Are you seriously trying to say that seniors don't function in a civil society simply because they are uncomfortable with new technology?
The GP was (rightly) calling out the over-the-top assertion that anyone who isn't on the internet is of no value. If that's not condescending and hyperbolic, I don't know what is.
>Are you seriously trying to say that seniors don't function in a civil society simply because they are uncomfortable with new technology?
To a certain extent, yes. Lack of internet access is a serious form of social exclusion, similar to having limited literacy or lacking a bank account. You'll have problems accessing government services and essential information, you'll be unable to find or apply for many jobs, you'll pay a premium for many goods and services.
My town has no brick-and-mortar travel agents or bookstores. Most of the bank branches have closed. Our local housing association only advertises vacancies online. People who don't use the internet are now effectively an underclass; our government is quite rightly working towards 100% internet access.
That wasn't the assertion. The assertion was that internet has become (read: "is considered by most to be") a basic requirement for participating in society. In other words, if you are not on the internet, you are not effectively participating in the function of society, because so much of that activity occurs over the internet.
Literally no one made that assertion. You are deliberately going out of your way to be offended by making things up to be angry about. And frankly, if that's how you live life, you deserve to be miserable.
This law is sort of interesting. I don't think anyone came out particularly happy with it.
If I remember correctly it was sort of pushed upon us by US pressure so the legislators didn't really like it, it added extra work so the ISPs didn't like it, as a result of that the law has a $25 fee for administering a "strike" to someone, which the copyright holders don't like because they can't so blindly send out mass strikes. The strikes also expire after 9 months. And obviously the people don't like it either.
The maximum fine is capped at $15,000NZD (~$11,000USD) and the average fine in practice has apparently been around $500NZD (~$350USD). As of 22 November 2013 17 people had got their three strikes and received their fines[1]. I wonder what the total is now.
Re actually cutting off your Internet access though, I'm not sure. Thing is, that was temporarily in there and was later removed, as Section 92A in the Copyright Act. You can see it marked as [Repealed][2]. But then section 122B seems to say your Internet can still get cut off. Maybe someone can shed some light on that one.
It would seem that the ISPs had a significant compliance cost as well.
"On 23 July 2012, despite the policy intent of making the issuance of copyright infringement notices under the legislation inexpensive, Telecom New Zealand revealed that under the new regime, it had cost them $534,416 to issue only 1,238 notices - or approximately $438 per notice, although this cost figure is not evidenced by any audited breakdown. The copyright holders are required to pay a fee of $25 to have the notices issued"[1]
I feel like Telecom may have been boosting the numbers a bit there to try and make the law seem extra bad for them; all they should really have to do is forward a letter.
If they didn't already have a database in place of which IPs assigned to which customers during which times, they'd need to set that up. Software dev isn't cheap. Maintenance isn't cheap. They need to write up a procedure on how to handle these notices. They have to verify they're valid (i.e. not just a prank or malicious action).
Well said. These things, especially at the government/enterprise level, aren't just a quick and dirty forwarding rule on your mailserver. It's got to be written up, vetted by legal, documented so knowledge transfers through staff transfer, so on and so forth. The action is simple, but implementation is not.
This happened to myself and my housemate recently, this draconian practice is still alive and well in the USA. We have Service Electric, who uses PenTeleData as their provider, and I can honestly say they are the worst service imaginable.. I'd rather have Comcast.
Neither of us use torrents, we prefer streaming services that have everything we need. Regardless, our internet was turned off without notice two months ago. The most frustrating part was that they didn't tell us, it just went off.. so it took us nearly a day to figure out what was even going on. This included a dozen calls to the ISP trying to figure out what was going on, and the surprising part is that they didn't know! There's more to the story including absolutely most incompetent tech support I've ever seen, but a little over a day later we had it turned back on. We asked what we could do to avoid this in the future, and were told not to torrent.
Fast forward to a few weeks back, our internet turns off again. I call and find out that our internet has been cut off for 72 hours due to torrenting, which turned out to be a TV show. A TV show neither of us watches, so the circumstances are suspect.
When I questioned the operator about this, she flat out called me a liar, with no evidence to support her argument. When I suggested that we might cancel our service because of the poor treatment, she said go ahead. Of course, she knew that there are no other ISPs where we live (out in the woods).
So here we are again, our internet may get turned off permanently and without warning for no wrongdoing on our part. Rather strange times we're living in where scumbag companies can get away with this, ruining peoples lives so they can increase their own profits by 3.2%
Burn in hell, PenTeleData, I'm sure you're monitoring this as well.
Oh I'd forgot to mention that were were charged a $10 re-connection fee each time, in addition to being charged for the days when service was not available.
Basically any time they want they can take extra money from you and you have no recourse.
Content production and content storage have always had a intertwined relationship because they are co-dependent. Hollywood can't produce content with out means to distribute and media platform creators have nothing to distribute without content.
It's not exactly the same but has similarities - news. Things gets particularly interesting with AI writing content. All the blurring of lines etc. This seems to be limited to things like stock market news and earnings reports at this time, though someone may correct me on this.
It will be interesting to see the impact of AI on news. I would love it if bots could parse out all the fluff and spin and just relay facts. That's all I need from the news. I'm smart enough to draw my own conclusions once I have all the information but nowadays that requires trips to websites all over the political spectrum to figure out what really happened. That being said, algorithmic based AI news could potentially end up being worse than human created fake news.
(Imagine Amazon Suggestions applied to news. One obscure google search and suddenly that's all the news you hear about for the next week)
Um...no. If RIAA thinks you did something wrong, even with flimsy evidence, they can still come after you. Should be easier to convince Comcrap to shut off your Internet than get a judge to agree.
That's not how the real world of this sort of thing works. Often the firms hired to do this sort of thing are just catching any/all IPs on a tracker without any analysis. Meaning that said IPs can be spoofed, part of a botnet, and so on which makes the accusations based purely on those IPs as purely speculative. It's why certain federal circuits throw them out since the firms are sometimes found to be outright fabricating the logs in question. And more obviously, that an IP address itself isn't evidence that the user was at the device in question or that the device in question was assigned that IP address at the time recorded. Simply put, it's 99% bullshit hearsay worse than that of your office gossiper.
