As they should - the rules are nonsense. From the article:
A US law required the FCC to issue rules "preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin," and gave the FCC some leeway in how to implement them. The resulting FCC rules let consumers file complaints about alleged discrimination and define the elements the FCC would examine when investigating whether an Internet service provider should be punished for discrimination.
The FCC defined digital discrimination of access as "policies or practices, not justified by genuine issues of technical or economic feasibility, that differentially impact consumers' access to broadband Internet access service based on their income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin or are intended to have such differential impact."
I very much doubt ISPs are in the habit to turn down expansion in any area (and therefore more money/maintain their regional monopoly) because of the race of people living there. It seems like a way to force them to build out in non-white neighborhoods over other places even if it doesn’t make economic sense.
For one, that’s racism against white people by another name. We see that a lot now but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight it.
For two, it’s just an incredible waste of resources at the FCC. There are better ways to guarantee good internet for everyone instead.
“Anti-discrimination” laws are a modern patronage system. Instead of government jobs being given out based on political favors, private companies are forced into giving out the jobs, and if they refuse, (like Elon Musk) they get hit with spurious lawsuits until they comply.
I very much doubt ISPs are in the habit to turn down expansion in any area...
That's like climate denialism. There is a documented 30-year history of ISPs not expanding their network while claiming subsidies for exactly that: https://newnetworks.com/bookofbrokenpromises.htm .
...even if it doesn’t make economic sense
You're conveniently ignoring the "not justified by genuine issues of technical or economic feasibility" in your own goddamn quote.
> There is a documented 30-year history of ISPs not expanding their network while claiming subsidies for exactly
You are conflating two things.
I haven't read the book but does the data show they did it in a discriminatory manner, that is they didn't expand to minority areas even when it made business sense?
Do you really want your street to be dug open every month by a new sewage company laying a connection to one of your neighbours? Because they switched providers?
> There is a documented 30-year history of ISPs not expanding their network
Yeah, which has nothing to do with race at all, and everything to do with population density. ISP’s don’t want to invest to expand to rural areas with few customers for obvious reasons, none of which have anything to do with discrimination of any kind.
Would that people could be trusted to not discriminate in any way...maybe some subconscious personal bias, but then surely a group could even out the biases.
Which should we do? Disallow discrimination against white people on the basis of race? Or dismiss discussion of such discrimination as "specious bullshit flogging the reverse racism trope"?
I ask because those are diametrically opposed positions, and your second sentence illustrates why the first sometimes doesn't happen.
what are you talking about? this is about discriminating based on race, which includes the white race. your implicit assumption here is that anti-discrimination measures for minorities is discriminatory against white people. which is, uh, not a great take.
>I very much doubt ISPs are in the habit to turn down expansion in any area (and therefore more money/maintain their regional monopoly) because of the race of people living there.
You're doubting something that you made up.
>It seems like a way to force them to build out in non-white neighborhoods over other places even if it doesn’t make economic sense.
No, it doesn't.
> For one, that’s racism against white people by another name. We see that a lot now but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight it.
The thought of a person in 2024 who believes that the US government is systematically working to be racist against white people would be hilarious, if it were not so sad.
> There are better ways to guarantee good internet for everyone instead.
Like what?
This is the FCC press release on the announcement.[0] You might want to read it. Here are the actual rules[1]. You might want to read those too. And think about how peculiar it is that, out of all the groups defined, that you've chosen to focus exclusively on race. You know what the say. A man who has lived his entire life of privilege feels persecution in equality.
> I very much doubt ISPs are in the habit to turn down expansion in any area (and therefore more money/maintain their regional monopoly) because of the race of people living there.
Then presumably the law will have no effect.
Your conclusion is assuming bad intentions, but frankly the effect of most anti-discrimination provisions tends to be rather minor. It's extremely difficult to prove, unless people are blatant about it.
ISPs: "You can't tell us how to spend money ensuring equitable deployment of critical infrastructure!"
Also ISPs: "Ooh! Hey! Can we have some of that money in the jar labeled 'federal money for ensuring equitable deployment of critical infrastructure' ?"
How about this. Take it all back. Public utilities with equal access and reliability for all.
I’m not even going to try and address the other top level comment crying “reverse racism” just WTAF.
> Texas is the top producer of renewable electricity in the US, followed by California. Both states are rich in renewable sources and actively working to expand their generation capacity.
Edit: Texas is not a free market! It has subsidies & regulations.
> The outages in Texas are mostly the direct result of political ideology and incompetence
Do you have any metric that validates what you say? Becuase, a reasonable person can calmly make the opposite argument.
You can protect the grid against wildfires. OTOH, California's utilities also cause wildfires due to incompetence [1]. Texas had a record-low winter storm that caused a major outage.
Also, California's electricity is more than twice as costly as that of Texas.
> Pacific Gas & Electric has agreed to pay more than $55 million to avoid criminal prosecution for two major wildfires started by aging Northern California power lines belonging to the nation’s largest utility, prosecutors announced Monday
Texas had a record-low winter storm that caused a major outage.
Followed by record high summer heat that caused outages too. Texas power grid operates on the verge of collapse --- because of bassackwards "free market" ideology. You don't have to take my word for it, several studies have said the same.
Also, California's electricity is more than twice as costly as that of Texas.
Texas uses tax payer money to subsidize their grid's inadequacy. They pay selected large enterprises to shutdown and stop consuming when their grid starts to fail.
That’s false. PG&E is the largest provider in the state and their outages are caused by poor quality controls, lack of line and pole maintenance, vegetation overgrowth, poor resilience to weather conditions, and carelessness, primarily. This -results- in fires at times, and they are in constant litigation. They have a dysfunctional-by-design relation with the cpuc.
Can't. Physical infrastructure should be built once, and owned by the government, who rents out bandwidth capacity to retail ISP providers. Then you get competition in that much more ideal market.
Racism against white people exists, there’s nothing “reverse” about it. You can discriminate and exclude based on any skin color.
Competition is what we need, look at cities where Google fiber is available, internet for everyone is faster and cheaper than anywhere in the country and there are of course no data caps in those cities.
It’s why internet is way better in Kansas City than Silicon Valley. Kansas City has actual competition in their marketplace and common people provably benefit.
There are politicians agitating against white people in the US. Doesn't get more systemic than that. Let's not even get into the think tanks, or the media explaining how whites becoming a minority is a good thing.
And all this is okay, in the name of diversity. It's crazy, racism is racism and this rhetoric is only antagonizing. Nothing good will come of it.
We have similar issues in my country but not to the extent I see in the US.
Could you please give an example of a major politician agitating against white people? To be specific, I do not mean someone pointing out that our system has been built to privlidge white people at the behest of white people, but a politician specifically agitating against white people.
Because I can find endless pages of the head of the Republican party agitating against Mexicans (they're sending rapists), Latinos, Black people (shithole countries), Muslims (literally banned them after musing about how great it would be to kill them with bullets dipped in pig's blood), and Asians (Wuhan flu and China virus, over and over and over).
> An unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop. Folks like me who were Caucasian, of European descent for the first time in 2017 will be in an absolute minority in the United States of America, absolute minority. Fewer than 50 percent of the people in America from then and on will be White European stock. That's not a bad thing. That's a source of our strength.
And that's a very innocent one, but terrifying nonetheless. Imagine the same wording but about how a reduction in blacks would be a strength, all hell would break lose.
I have read all the comments I've replied to, and I know for sure I don't say anything even close to that. I do however ignore the irrelevant whataboutism "republicans do X all the time", but ignoring isn't the same as denying they do. It's simply not relevant to the discussion and not worth a comment.
I guess that's the misunderstanding if I really stretch it, but it's just GP projecting and putting words in my mouth. I figured maybe having to re-read would help realizing that.
It doesn't seem to me that Biden is calling for culling of white people or whatever. The US has long been regarded as a melting pot of cultures, and Biden just seems quite enthusiastic that there'll be more of that. White people have, as a group, (not every single white person, of course) been overrepresented in some ways. It would be alarming if people talked about a reduction in the black population because they've historically been oppressed and disadvantaged, and they don't make a huge portion of the population.
I missed the part in the constitution where it said America should be made up of mostly whites. If you want more whites in america, i guess you should have more children.
That's not what I'm saying. I don't care either way, but I also don't push to change the demographics. I have no reason to, I don't define the strength of a country based on the color of the population.
Correct, and probably how things end up based on birth rates alone. What is a problem however is the wording:
> An unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop.
> Folks [...] of European descent [...] will be in an absolute minority in the United States of America, absolute minority. [...] That's not a bad thing. That's a source of our strength
It can be interpreted as the nonstop immigration is a tool with the goal of changing the demographics. Why? What's so important and why do they put a value on proportions of race?
Just now in Texas you have federal and state employees fighting against each other, the former to let as many as possible in, the latter to prevent it. What is the goal here?
My take on not just this example but the race discussions in general are to divide and keep us busy fighting over useless issues to distract us from the corruption. Same with the east vs west endless war, we need an external enemy to be outraged against so we can ignore the enemies within. Otherwise we might be able to put the differences aside and collaborate to achieve something useful as a planet, but how would that help the elite to keep living like gods?
You could start with arguing in good faith, because this:
>you have federal and state employees fighting against each other, the former to let as many as possible in
Is flat out false. There are laws in this country and we have a process for asylum seekers. Texas is choosing to not follow those laws AND it thinks it gets to override the Fed on issues of border control, the law is real clear on both.
Why does the border control want to cut the fences to begin with? What's wrong with the official paths for asylum seekers? The right to seek asylum doesn't have to mean the country has to help them cross by illegal means. I live in a country where we tried that, doesn't help anyone least of all the migrants forced to live in underground communities. Incentivising chaos only brings more chaos, which may even be the goal.
That statement by Biden is not terrifying at all, stop tilting at windmills. You sound like the moody uncle at Thanksgiving that talks about nothing but right wing talking points.
"balancing it out" is just a nice way to say you're discriminating against certain people because you prefer a different skin color. Equal opportunity employment laws explicitly outlaw this in no uncertain terms, and it's against the spirit of everything I was taught growing up about inclusion.
Labeling problems "systemic" or not is kind of meaningless. You seem to implicitly agree the problem exists. Should we not address non-systemic problems?
A US law required the FCC to issue rules "preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin," and gave the FCC some leeway in how to implement them. The resulting FCC rules let consumers file complaints about alleged discrimination and define the elements the FCC would examine when investigating whether an Internet service provider should be punished for discrimination.
The FCC defined digital discrimination of access as "policies or practices, not justified by genuine issues of technical or economic feasibility, that differentially impact consumers' access to broadband Internet access service based on their income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin or are intended to have such differential impact."
I very much doubt ISPs are in the habit to turn down expansion in any area (and therefore more money/maintain their regional monopoly) because of the race of people living there. It seems like a way to force them to build out in non-white neighborhoods over other places even if it doesn’t make economic sense.
For one, that’s racism against white people by another name. We see that a lot now but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight it.
For two, it’s just an incredible waste of resources at the FCC. There are better ways to guarantee good internet for everyone instead.
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