Gigabit goal “prejudicial” to satellite and wireless
Ah, so money changed hands. Got it.
“Government abandons attempt to electrify lighting, says it’s unfair to flammable technologies”
In my brother’s neighborhood, more than half the houses have gas fueled porch lights. They burn 24/7, because no one wants to remember to turn the gas on/off with the sun or to light them every night. These are homes built in the last 40 years: the gas lights were a ‘quaint’ fad.
Jfc… That’s mental, how long have they had those?
I’d never be able to use that, I’d be too worried some shithead would manage to shatter the housing and start a fire
…OK but I used to work in a neighborhood where a bunch of people had actual, period exterior gaslights left over from the 19th century. They had been upgraded with digital timers and stuff. Automatic shut-off/restart. That’s ridiculous!
Alarm clocks are unfair to window knockers.
Sounds like Elron got involved and started whining
“We are eliminating the automotive safety standards because they are unfair to the dangerous cars”
actual clown logic
Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what they did.
Well? What do you think DOGE did, in addition to grabbing up everyones’ data?
“Welcome to clown world! Please check your brain at the door and put on your white makeup!”
Major telecommunication companies collected billions of dollars through state rate increases and tax breaks since the 1990s under the promise of building high-speed fiber-optic networks, but largely failed to deliver the fully realized infrastructure.
So we pay, nothing happened, and now out of fairness, deal with it?
Brilliant!
I think they got like 100 billion or more, might have been several hundreds, in the Obama years, never delivered. Then a later administration, I think Biden’s, gave them another such deal.
Probably just a bribe to buy access for projects like PRISM.
That surveilance data doesnt transport itself after all.
so much for a government of the people, by the people, and for the people
When was that ever the case?
Yeah if you were white, owned property, and had a penis. Otherwise, no that was never the case.
Technologies have more protection against discrimination than people?
They can’t fire Mitch McConnell, it would be unfair to all the living senators.
Companies have more voting power apparently
Corporations are people and dollars are speech 🙃
“Unfair” to telecoms who essentially stole billions from the American taxpayers and didn’t build out what was promised
Twice, in Verizon’s case
FCC too corrupt to function
Infrastructure is important, and walking back from these gigabit targets is awful. There is no replacement for fiber. We all deserve to have access to fast internet.
But to yell at a cloud for a moment, if we’re being honest most people should not need gigabit. I know everyone is a gamer now, but let’s forget about bulk downloads. For normal browsing most people should not need much more than about 12mbps. 12 mbps is fast enough to have two 1080p h265 streams running concurrently. And yet, when you try to use the modern web at that speed, it’s a terrible experience because of all the adtech bullshit that gets crammed into every page. When I measured this Ars article it was 6.53MB. That is, to borrow a yardstick from a blogpost I reread recently, long enough to fit 3 or 4 of the great Russian epics inside. It is bigger than the shareware version of DOOM, big enough to fit the entire python standard package library documentation. For one article.
Don’t let this cheapen the FCC being chickenshit and captured by specific perverse corporate interests, but publishers have sold us a bridge when it comes to the modern web. Web3 was supposed to fix all this with micropayments. I’d gladly pay whatever my paltry share of Ars’ CPM they expected to get out of my pageview, wouldn’t you? But cryptobros turned it into a get-rich-quick slopfest and then it died.
edit: having meandered over to my computer because I just cannot sleep, I decided to measure the page as I access it, with ublock, noscript, and umatrix turned on. That article now weighs just over 724kB. Way better. Reader mode loses the images and gets the article down to 2.49kB. Meaning the actual content is roughly 0.04% of the delivered size of the original page. The stylesheet alone is many times the size of the content. I know I’m really indulging my old man energy but web pages do not need to be this large. I know cache exists, and that’s fine, but it’s still a bit ridiculous. Some people in this world do still use dialup and/or pay per MB. Your 6.5MB web page might cost somebody a nontrivial sum to read, relative to their means.
The irony is not lost on me that my home instance itself is not the most lightweight web app. The page I am using to edit this comment is 1.9MB. With the cache active it’s <100kB transferred per page load but still, if I weren’t a hypocrite I’d probably switch to a Piefed instance.
edit 2: added emphasis
But to yell at a cloud for a moment, if we’re being honest most people should not need gigabit.
For now*
The way tech moves, this won’t be the case forever. And it’ll be better to have it already then need it and have to wait another decade for it.
I get your point but also that’s a bias borne from the industrial and technological revolutions, it’s entirely possible that we may already are seeing the slow down of large scale technological advances from every 2-4 years seeing major leaps to every ten years or more, hell I cant think of any major tech jumps over the last 10 years of particular note outside of AI (hurk) and battery/ green energy neither of which need faster internet.
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Yes but some of us DO need it for our small businesses to run.
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
He was wrong then, and you’re wrong that nobody needs gigabit. Stop handwringing for big corporations. This isn’t a difficult thing to do, it just makes companies slightly less money. America has some of the most expensive internet in the world, and some of the worst per mb.
Slower technologies like Starlink. Yup.
“Government clousures toilet factories, says it’s unfair to diaper companies”
Dont give them such great ideas.
DEI tech.
That’s the fucking point!
Soon the US will be manufacturing external 28.8 kbps modems with a SCSI interface using steam powered tools.
Excuse me I prefer my pixels, packets, and kilobits delivered by horse drawn carriage thank you.
Sorry, all our steam is being used to build aircraft carrier catapults.
So that’s why vaccinations are dialed back, right? It’s unfair to diseases?
jfc, you really do get the government you deserve, lol /s
