SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
After countless years pondering the idea, the FCC in 2022 announced that it would start politely asking the nation’s lumbering telecom monopolies to affix a sort of “nutrition label” on to broadband connections. The labels will clearly disclose the speed and latency (ping) of your connection, any hidden fees users will encounter, and whether the connection comes with usage caps or “overage fees.”
Initially just a voluntary measure, bigger ISPs had to start using the labels back in April. Smaller ISPs had to start using them as of October 10. In most instances they’re supposed to look something like this [image].
As far as regulatory efforts go, it’s not the worst idea. Transparency is lacking in broadband land, and U.S. broadband and cable companies have a 30+ year history of ripping off consumers with an absolute cavalcade of weird restrictions, fees, surcharges, and connection limitations.
Here’s the thing though: transparently knowing you’re being ripped off doesn’t necessarily stop you from being ripped off. A huge number of Americans live under a broadband monopoly or duopoly, meaning they have no other choice in broadband access. As such, Comcast or AT&T or Verizon can rip you off, and you have absolutely no alternative options that allow you to vote with your wallet.
That wouldn’t be as much of a problem if U.S. federal regulators had any interest in reining in regional telecom monopoly power, but they don’t. In fact, members of both parties are historically incapable of even admitting monopoly harm exists. Democrats are notably better at at least trying to do something, even if that something often winds up being decorative regulatory theater.
The other problem: with the help of a corrupt Supreme Court, telecoms and their Republican and libertarian besties are currently engaged in an effort to dismantle what’s left of the FCC’s consumer protection authority under the pretense this unleashes “free market innovation.” It, of course, doesn’t; regional monopolies like Comcast just double down on all of their worst impulses, unchecked.
If successful, even fairly basic efforts like this one won’t be spared, as the FCC won’t have the authority to enforce much of anything.
It’s all very demonstrative of a U.S. telecom industry that’s been broken by monopoly power, a lack of competition, and regulatory capture. As a result, even the most basic attempts at consumer protection are constantly undermined by folks who’ve dressed up greed as some elaborate and intellectual ethos.
![this [image]](https://i0.wp.com/www.techdirt.com/wp-content/uploads/2030/01/1.webp?w=619&ssl=1){kind=link}
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 31, @02:58AM
Democrats have no advantage there. They are defined by decorative regulatory theater. The lack of opposition is the republicans' biggest advantage. Makes it easy for the donors and lobbyists though. They win no matter which side they pick.
And we lose until we start voting the incumbents out and third party candidates in. It's our choice. Don't let anyone tell you different
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Thursday October 31, @03:08AM
I just read an incredible story about how AT&T and T-Mobile were looking out for us little guys. This is appalling.
Seems like the rest of the industry could use a taste of a little Bell breakup.
To think that fair minded people who don't require yachts, islands and a personal staff could run a more affordable service?
Doesn't sound like brain surgery to me.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by lentilla on Thursday October 31, @03:23AM (4 children)
Anyone else notice the latency figure (in the example provided) is shown in megaseconds?
A global conspiracy? Evil auto-correct? Or just babby's-first-attempts-at-metric? You be the judge!
(Score: 5, Funny) by jb on Thursday October 31, @03:29AM
They must be using RFC 1149!
(Score: 3, Funny) by pTamok on Thursday October 31, @07:37AM (2 children)
Good catch, but only we pedants will care.
I have long thought that the SI prefixes and their symbols have been unfortunately chosen. The confusion here between mega- (M) and milli- (m) is just one example. The problems with milli- (m) and micro- (µ) have plagued the medical profession for years. Medical use doesn't make use the symbol for micro- (µ) now - they use 'mc' instead. Either milli- or micro- should be replaced with a term that does not start with the letter 'm'. Perhaps milli- should be replaced with a Sanskrit-derived term [wikipedia.org]: sahasri- - 's' is not used in current metric prefixes [wikipedia.org].
Also irritating is the misuse of decimal prefixes to indicate binary powers - so kilo- (103 instead of kibi-(210), and mega- (106) instead of mibi- (220). It does not help that people in IT think that a 64-kilobit/second telecommunications connection is 64 kibibits/second - the actual number originates from telephony [wikipedia.org](G.711 [wikipedia.org]): sampling audio at 8-bit bit-depth 8,000- times per second, giving 4,000 8-bit samples per second - 64,000 bits per second.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 31, @08:28PM (1 child)
There. FTFY.
I'll assume that's either a typo or you're trying to find out if anyone is paying attention.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday October 31, @10:22PM
Thanks,
it was a typo/braino. I was thinking of the high-end frequency (4000 Hz) that determined sampling at the Nyquist rate [wikipedia.org] of 8000 samples per second.
Thanks again for pointing it out. It was not deliberate to see who was paying attention. Unfortunately, my proof-reading skills have great potential for improvement.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by lentilla on Thursday October 31, @03:35AM (6 children)
A possibly more complete solution would be to require ISPs to register their "plans" with the FCC. Require the same information, plus the ZIP codes where the plan might be offered, an estimated number of potential customers and the date from which the plan is offered. In return the ISP gets a "plan number" which is required to be used in advertising.
Comparison shopping suddenly becomes a whole lot easier. One can compare plans via plan numbers, or search by ZIP code.
Furthermore, since the "plan number" would appear on the bill, identifying anomalous charges would suddenly become greatly simplified. Not to mention having clear cut grounds for a "please explain these charges on this plan number".
(Score: 3, Informative) by krishnoid on Thursday October 31, @04:12AM (5 children)
I think they already sort of did that [fcc.gov] to qualify for subsidies. You can search for an address, and see what various ISPs are claiming to provide for Internet access and cellular phone service in terms of availability and speed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Thursday October 31, @12:33PM (4 children)
Now we just need pass/fail testing. If they claim your zip-code and cannot provide that level of service to you, they must spend up to 10 million dollars to meet the spec. That figure might seem high, but anything less and they'll just call it a small price of doing business and pas it on to consumers. The figure HAS to be ruinous.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Thursday October 31, @02:22PM
Even just moving to a ZIP+4 would greatly cut down on that sort of shenanigans.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday October 31, @02:57PM (1 child)
See that's the problem with "the system" right now, its not that it has too much regulation or too little regulation, its that every service is regulated differently and apparently at least ONE customer doesn't realize that's already contract law in most municipalities, it doesn't have to be federal law to exist because it probably already exists in your muni contract with the cable company.
Look for a part of the cable service contract, probably named something like "Rate Discrimination Prohibited" where it probably defines they have to publish a max connection fee and they CAN charge less for promotional reasons but they cannot charge a penny more for any resident of the muni to connect. Now every municipality in the country has a different contract, although almost all have something like that line. And, sure, maybe a corrupt city could approve a maximum connection charge of $10M and waive it down to $19.95 for everyone except someone the mayor has a personal grudge against.
The cableco is permitted to be a-holes but the contract usually has a punishment for that in a section titled "remedies for franchise violations" or "franchise recovation process" and sometimes the written contract CAN be pretty brutal to the cableco. Sure, not $10M but if your profit margin is not much and the penalty might be up to $100 per violation per day they have to sell a lot of ESPN to make the profit to pay the fee. Again, if the city is hopelessly corrupt or the company is hopelessly corrupt maybe this "accidentally" was not included in the most recent contract.
Usually municipal contracts have a line like "Grantee will provide services to any person within the franchise area" or similar phrasing. Its a legal document so there will be various disclaimers about "up to 90 days to provide service to new construction areas or areas newly annexed by the city" etc.
As with most legal things, people generally have more rights than they're willing to demand. But demanding a contract have a clause written into it that's probably been in the contract since 1985 is not going to improve life for the citizens. You can try to get federal laws passed etc, probably wont happen and probably won't help, but its remarkable how big of a fire can be lit if a documented complaint is presented at a city common council meeting. Admittedly the CCC probably doesn't give a single F about an individual resident but I guarantee at contract renegotiation time that problem will be cited as a reason the city "has to" demand an extra 0.1% of revenue kickback or whatever.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday November 01, @03:36AM
There DOES need to be a new law. I have personally witnessed a case where my zip code was supposedly covered but when I called, they said "sorry you're not covered". So no contract existed. So that's a fail on the pass/fail test.
Translating what they generally offer to old school terms, no commit, burstable to X.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday November 01, @03:34AM
They'll just reduce the capability you're officially "offered".
That's what CenturyLink did to me. Instead of fixing their crappy antique hardware, they unilaterally downgraded my plan, so I "have nothing to complain of" because at least when =they= test it, it meets the "3Mbps" (not a typo) that's on their version of the official capacity.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday October 31, @03:37AM (5 children)
It's not just money. We also have little to no privacy. I find that the ISP's slowest plan has acceptable speed and latency. Speed and latency is the least of my concerns. It's all the other stuff they do.
I was interested to learn the reason why the World Wide Web shifted from http to https: In http connections, some ISPs were injecting ads. They can't do that in https connections.
On piracy, big ISPs have been walking a middle way. They don't tell the MAFIAA who you are, but they keep count of how many times the MAFIAA has accused you of piracy, and, after the 3rd totally unproven accusation, temporarily block your connection each time you are accused again.
I don't know how much data harvesting ISPs do, how detailed a profile they create of all their customers, but I suspect they record a great deal and sell that to marketing organizations. Searching online for info on health problems strongly suggests you or someone in your family suffers from those health problems, and there are opportunists out there who will try to take advantage of that info, if they have it. Then there's pr0n. Have you been looking at it, you immoral, dirty old goat? Yet another potential rip off is stock market activity. Extremely unfair if you are trying to buy or sell, and these flash traders get the drop on you so that you are always buying a little higher and selling a little lower. That kind of screwing has been extended to consumer goods, with this "dynamic pricing" crap.
As to money, those damned ISPs are constantly raising the rates. They make a game of it. You threaten to leave, and they transfer you to the "customer retention department", where your rate is lowered to what it was before the hike. Have to do that every year.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 31, @04:12AM (1 child)
Presumably you've encountered articles about police using DNS records from the ISP to track and prosecute suspects. Can't do much calling someone a criminal based on their DNS history, but you've heard of it before, right?
ISPs gather the data. It costs money to store data, though.. so ISPs will.. monetize that data. Sell it. To the highest bidder. (Of the moment. Anyone. Everyone. All the bidders. Make an offer. It's bad business to not take your money.) DNS information. When most of your data flows - they know when you're at home, what your sleep schedule looks like, when you're getting up early or home early or home sick. Ads.
DNS will give them a lot. Where you do most of your shopping. (target.com? local flyers. Amazon? maybe ads more for tech co's.) It will tell them your political affiliations. Based on the sites you go to, your racial profile, your wing'ed-ness, religions. You can be correlated with others in the area. Just from DNS information.
And of course, they know, based on torrent swarm and trackers, whether you watch a lot of movies, TV, stream, or none of the above. It'll be sold for advertising.
There was an article about 23andme going bankrupt -- what will happen to all that private, private DNA data?!?!?!? Heh. It's an asset. The creditors will get it. The creditors will do what creditors do best: they'll sell it. For as much as they can possibly get, for as long and recurring as they possibly can. It's an "asset", not a "liability" -- the DNA data will be assigned to creditors.
Your DNS information is an "asset", not a "liability". It will be monetized.
Feeling good about DNSSEC now?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday October 31, @03:22PM
There is a subtle difference in that 23andme is going bankrupt because almost any possible profitable use of the data is illegal under currently existing federal law so they can't make any money.
If they could scam using the data, they already would, and would not be going bankrupt, so it would not be possible to worry about scammers making money, LOL very chicken and egg.
Also its HIPPA federally protected medical data even if it wasn't specifically genetic data, there's just not much they can do with it that's not an open-and-shut legal case.
On the other hand DNS data, well that's about as close to unregulated as you can imagine. Not accepting money by selling the data to North Korea ... not much regulation IIRC.
Also DNSSEC provides minimal privacy. Its hard/impossible to MITM, but if your ISP sees DNSSEC traffic to IP address 45.54.66.1 that's ns01.gannett-dns.com so they DO know you're a Gannet newspaper reader. I only picked on them because they own my local legacy newspaper and of course the domain is not DNSSEC signed.
Cloudflare has a tolerable good explanation on their site of how DNSSEC works. Its mostly oriented around preventing MITM but its not really a protocol oriented around privacy maximization.
My ISP could in theory MITM traffic to ns01.gannett-dns.com and record all traffic passing thru its MITM or send me to a completely different server (a competing newspaper, I suppose) and inserting/replacing fake data is "impossible"-ish with DNSSEC. However it does nothing for privacy.
Consider I could add a GPG signature to this post to prove the GPG key probably controlled by VLM signed this post, probably because I'm VLM or at least because someone posting this has access to my private key LOL. However anyone who wants can read this signed post, its hardly encrypted, merely authenticated via a signature.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday October 31, @04:58PM (1 child)
If you still use cleartext DNS, of even worse, you use the ISP provided DNS server, they are no doubt keeping track of the names of sites you visit. Both Google and Cloudflare and probably others offer free DNS that you can use instead of your ISP's DNS server.
Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 31, @08:30PM
So Google and Cloudflare can keep track of your DNS requests?
Because those guys are *totally* on your side! /s
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Friday November 01, @04:06AM
But you can't do that, that's [fnord] socialism! [fnord].
Yes. You can't do that. That's socialism. Whirr, click.
(As is good-quality free healthcare, worker protection legislation, parental leave, decent public transport, safe streets, etc. All socialism, can't have any of that nasty stuff here).
(Score: 4, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday October 31, @03:48AM (2 children)
They'll find a way to make them unreadable, difficult to understand or misleading.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday October 31, @02:36PM (1 child)
Don't forget misleading portion sizes.
The scam of the serving size being precisely one oreo cookie could be implemented by ISPs as the standard "Up to 1 Gig/sec speed" and in the fine print its "only for the first 8 seconds per month, following the first GB of traffic use of more than 1 GB total traffic per month will result in a use surcharge of $40/GB and for your safety your connection speed will be lowered to 128K after the first GB of monthly use"
Or the plan offers "10 gigs" but its per 24-month contract not per month in the 24-month contract.
I would be happy if they made misleading advertising illegal. "Why pay your old provider $100 per month when we only charge $20 per month!" with the fine print being "only with signed 36 month contract and price rises to $175/month after the first month". Back when I used to watch ads, this was every cable TV cablemodem advertisement I recall seeing. I don't watch ads anymore so I wonder if its still that bad.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday November 01, @03:40AM
It is still that bad for pretty much all the big-names, far as I've looked.
I don't look much anymore either.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday October 31, @02:28PM (1 child)
Who, what is "huge" and when was that claim no longer true, like decades ago or just a decade ago or more recently...
It's interesting to think about the criteria required to pull that off for even one human being.
Have to be outside of cellphone coverage so no hotspots. Have to live in a VERY weirdly shaped valley such that none of the multiple competing satellite services will work. Have to live far enough away from civilization that the remaining wireless ISPs won't serve you. No fiber to the home or cable modems or DSL, obviously. Now that I've defined at least one human who lives where there's no possibility of any internet access, it's even harder to figure out the conditions where there's precisely one ISP (or two for the duopoly claim).
Hmm I wonder if they can find even one person this would apply to, there's probably a human interest story in it.
I wonder if its possible. Live at the bottom of a former open pit mine so there's minimal sky access so you usually can't see any of the multiple competing satellite services, and its gotta be living illegally on land zoned for industrial use only so rural service agreements will not apply, and its gotta be in the middle of nowhere so there's no wireless options.
It would be cheating to include intentional footguns like intentionally living in a steel building's basement to prevent all wireless access. But that would be illegal by building code and zoning codes where I live, so it would have to be in a rural area where there's not much codes or code enforement, however that is where there are no enormous concrete and steel skyscrapers with basement residential apartments. Hmm... even "cheating" might be hard.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Friday November 01, @03:48AM
Well, a practical monopoly.
Here in the Northern Wastes, my cost options start with shit DSL, go up a bit for fixed wireless, and triple for data-limited satellite (Hughes, cuz Starlink isn't available here). Or I can pay $5/GB for cell data (on a two-bar connection), or whatever it is now.
That's about half the rural areas of the state. Some of which don't have cell access. (Used to live in such a place. If you wanted cell service you either drove 3 miles to the top of the next hill, or walked a mile up the road and hoped you could piggyback on the volunteer fire chief's booster. ISP was choice of exactly one fixed wireless, at 5Mbps.)
The scope of such places keeps shrinking, but in the western US, they're still significant.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.