"Government abandons attempt to electrify lighting, says it's unfair to flammable technologies"

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

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!

so much for a government of the people, by the people, and for the people

Technologies have more protection against discrimination than people?

"Unfair" to telecoms who essentially stole billions from the American taxpayers and didn't build out what was promised

FCC too corrupt to function

Slower technologies like Starlink. Yup.

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

"Government clousures toilet factories, says it's unfair to diaper companies"

At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences.

Ah yes, it is impossible to know whether a consumer will still want faster Internet in the future. They could enjoy the retro experience of a dial up modem making noises when connecting.

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.

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

There is still ISDN in the US and it's still there to uphold artificial scarcity and price fixing. Broadband in the US is basically neutered to ensure that the ISPs can buy cheaper equipment and maintain high pricing.

It's also why they wanted to remove network neutrality, so they also could gouge small data centres and make backroom deals with big tech giants.

I know you may hate the word "data centre", but if the small ones can't compete, say goodbye to any form of competition.

They will literally make arguments for affirmative action and reparations as long as the beneficiary is a rich corporation instead of a human in need.

It's no longer the land of opportunity, it's the land of mediocrity.

Those poor cable companies with their outdated tech.

So we now go back to dialup?

Ah yes. In Germany we call this "Technologieoffenheit" and do not consider internet speeds, but car's.

Turtles are great and all, but dammit I want my pipes fast.

So they're in favor of net neutrality?!

Thanks Elon.