Sheet, those guys at Wired are catching up!
The article misses the point on why everyone hates the cable companies. It’s their insufferable nasty customer service.
That’s just because they’re given local monopolies. It’s easy to ignore customer service when the customers have no other choices.
This article is backwards. The cable companies come around and wave money in the face of the thugs they helped install and then want to point the finger at the organizations those liars hide behind. Seems to me cable company profit is to blame. And when AT&T Comcast do get the money they lobby for SOPA/CISPA/PIPA/TPP and fully cooperate with efforts PRISM. They are also part of ALEC which lets them write legislation in secret that sell out puppet governors have agreed to fast track rubber stamp.
I think the article does not paint the whole picture. I have personal experience where there is a local fiber company that has grown in small cities around my US state. They have been unable to break into the larger cities because of The City Council (government) are lobbied and lied too.
I have a family member who was on the city council for around a decade. When they first started they had Comcast and Century Link tell them they would easily have “speeds beyond fiber” with infrastructure already in place. Well it is partly the council’s fault for dealing with the devil, but they were also considering the cost to the citizens in building a fiber network.
10 years after I first talked to them about this, most people have the same speeds and the areas of the cities seem almost like they have been split up between Comcast (cable) and Century link (DSL); depending on where you live you get a lot of marketing for one ISP or the other.
It seems satellite and mesh networks seems to be the best way around these problems.
That’s the nail on the head. The Govt are trying to/supposed to represent the interests of the public but members of govt are variously corrupted, bribed. lobbied,lied to etc by Big Business, on top of which the Big Banks/Finance have Govt by the balls.
This highlights the issue, it reminds me of the ripping off of pension funds by way of duping much less savvy fund managers into various “schemes”.
This is the side of the story not told when labelling Govt as the enemy or totally bad - there are good and bad aspects - we want to keep the good.
The main issue with Govt is it’s centralised nature and the various ways in which it has been subverted by Big Corps/Finance.
Democracy has been hijacked and Govts now represent the interests of the Corporations, rather than the people …trust has been lost and the Capitalist system is broken.
So we need to de-centalise Govt, Finance and business, give power back to the individual and put trust back into the system - a Safe new World, so to speak…which is how I came to be typing this…
The main issue with Govt that gives it these characteristics is that it is based upon coercion.
And I agree with @MrAnderson that mesh and other such solutions are the ultimate way around the nonsense. The tech enabling these is ramping up pretty quickly.
Government is based on Democracy, not coercion - this is plain wrong. Attacking Democracy in this way is the Corporation line. Big business want small Govt and small tax - hence all the mis-direction. Govt is being coerced itself, by Big Business - the fundamental idea of a Democratic Govt representing the will of the electorate is not the problem; the problem is that the system has been hijacked by the Corporations/Banks. There is a lot of distortion, specious arguments and mis-apportioning of blame out there - false advertising, bought and paid for by the Corporations.
All this coercion talk is ridiculously overblown. You were coerced from your Mother’s womb…from birth…it’s part of life, something you want the least possible of, but not something you can avoid completely…
Same here…
They must all be masochists because they prefer to remain coerced until the very last moment in the office.
I don’t think that they’re coerced with pain… $$$$ is a big motivator, you know… 
Additionally, I do want to highlight the rare example of things going right in America’s internet connectivity space-- US Internet, a company in Minneapolis, Minnesota (a city with no major claim to fame other than a very strange accent) is selling 10GBPS “raw” fiber for $400/mo.
Yes, comcast is actively complicit in a scheme to censor the people-- it started with asymmetric connections folks. The Internet WAS a fully 2-way medium at one point not too long ago… Back when we actually used phone lines to connect it began innocently enough-- 56kbps down & 33.6 up, clampoing down the upload speed so that people could download faster. Today, there is no technical justification for the way that these networks operate, and no economic justification, either.
Apply Occam’s razor and…
Folks let’s get real here. Wired has it (likely intentionally) wrong, like nearly every mass media outlet does. It’s not Gov’t OR overgrown MNCs in cahoots against people’s unfettered access to information! It is so very obviously government AND overgrown MNCs. They go hand in hand with one another to such an extent that it’s difficult for anyone to say where one ends and the other begins. Likewise, one would be far less powerful in a world without the other.
Meshes are great, but TBH, I suggest another course of action. Get up off your asses, and pull some fiber. To where? Does it really matter? Work from the neighborhood level upwards. Coordinate with your fellow man and woman and make damn certain that these bloodthirsty sons of bitches don’t get what they so clearly desire.
True, and the fact that the biggest technical problem at the time seemed to be how to download Pam Anderson photos, I really was only concerned about the “download” side of the equation!
It’s local governments and big cable. Blame them all. Stop making excuses for big anything because they aren’t a democracy are they? Network neutrality is important specifically because of the risk of throttling.
10Gbs is the kind of speed you would need to really benefit from SAFE Network. When you’ve got that kind of speed SAFE Network will be plenty fast.
But right now at $400 a month not a lot of people can afford it. If it were $100 a month or $40 a month then we could see SAFE Network scale up quickly.
Regulatory capture is the norm.
Just a few things on this topic. It’s one that gets me deeply fired up.
Gov’t & (especially) Multi-national and Local Monopoly corps
They work entirely hand-in-glove. It doesn’t matter which is which because the end result is a gloved fist holding a baton, waiting for you to step out of line.
The state of the Internet in all places without 10gbps service for the low, low price of $400/mo
Show me an man, woman, or teen who cannot make an extra $400/mo as a result of having a 10gbps unrestricted (yes they specifically say-- host whatever the hell you’d like on it, as long as it is not illegal) internet connection, and I’ll show you someone who:
A) Doesn’t get the web
B) Is a lazy jerk
C) Doesn’t believe in their ability to change the world in positive ways
If you live in one of these areas and have/could get the 10gbps service, please call me or send a message. I will gladly pay you $500/mo to connect ten BananaPi or equivalent PCs to your Internet connection. I’m so not joking, I’ll do it with a smile on my face, and thank you each month.
10gbps would mean an extra $2-3k/mo for me. It would mean total financial self-determination.
…And that is what the governments AND corps are afraid of: You, unshackled from the daily grind.
zomg pam anderson photos on AOL.
Oh, the 1990’s.