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Seems they really want to revert everything that made the US a world leader.

- Reduce science

- Reduce collected data

- Reduce immigration

- Reduce infrastructure

- Reduce adoption of EVs

If an adversarial nation had control of the white house would anyone be able to tell the difference
Yup

At the core, it is Anti-Science.

Why Anti-Science?

Because the answers that come from science are independent of the authoritarian ruler's whims, and that cannot be tolerated, as key to authoritarian rule is that it must be entirely responsive to the whims of the regime.

It is the same reason that completely freaked me out when I read that Lenin and Stalin had directed their death squads to target their most loyal party members first. Why the hell would they do that? It turns out it is because the most loyal party members would object to the dictator's schemes on grounds of ideological principle, and such objections or principled people could not be tolerated. Pure evil, but genius in the context of a dictator's needs.

Thus, every authoritarian regime attacks the intelligent, academic, and scientific worlds. Both Mao and Pol Pot not only executed people with scientific and academic credentials, but merely for wearing glasses which signified people who likely read a lot.

Consistent Anti-Science actions are one of the key signs you are not dealing with a mere political party, but something far worse — a full-on authoritarian takeover.

Beware.

> Seems they really want to revert everything that made the US a world leader.

Conservatives takes different names in different places. Calling the spade a spade, a more truthful name is 'Reggressives', no matter what the colour on the banner is. The signatures of regressivism is , among others, the yearning for the past, to bring back the old ways of life, the predisposition for worship (idolatry)--be that of imaginary creatures or very wealthy people.

Some of us would find it really hard to imagine why some others would say, "yes please, more oil. I really would love to inhale more toxic fumes". Yet, such people exist. I can't explain why.

What did EVs make us a leader in? If I remember right, other countries have much higher adoption.
Wow. The article notes:

> Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans.

Carr says that when looking into whether that is being satisfied the FCC should not consider affordability because section 706 does not contain the word "affordability".

But it also does not contain any words for any of the things he does want the FCC to consider. All it says is "reasonable and timely".

I bet if you polled consumers and asked what they would think it means if they were informed some commercial service or product was available to them on a reasonable basis an overwhelming majority would include in their answer that it means it is available to them at a price they find affordable.

The FCC is a revolving door between industry and regulators. When you understand that the true mission of the FCC is to please big telecom it all starts to make sense. Hence the auctioning off spectrum in huge geographic blocks that only the largest corporations can finance. If the US was really serious about universal broadband there would be a Telecom Ministry doing the cable laying itself or at least local loop unbundling. If we treated roads the same way as broadband we would have private tolled highways near city cores and dirt roads in rural areas.
Of course the angle is disingenuous. "Reasonable" here implies that it's reasonably attainable for customers. This is merely choosing interpretation arbitrarily. Like me saying the sky is green because green is partly comprised of the color blue.
As with everything involving this administration, the behavior will continue until an effective negative stimulus is introduced.
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What a win for the Telcos. What a loss for all of America. If only municipal broadband/fiber was given the chance to grow there’d be real competition.
Telcos were given billions to expand and improve broadband for decades and never did it. If the FCC has scrapped the goal are they also scrapping the handouts? If so, it’s long overdue.
To be the devil's advocate, the previous admin also squandered a lot of broadband money away in a pattern that seems common to all Democratic infra projects. See https://reason.com/2024/06/27/why-has-joe-bidens-42-billion-... . Neither party is good at this. The FCC broadband map and the b/w labels (previous admin) are nice though.
Saying they squandered the money makes it sound like they spent it and got no results. In fact it has not been spent. They were just slow to work out the details for how states could apply and in processing those applications. They got through that and several states had their applications approved and were just waiting for the money to actually start building.

The new administration stopped that and rescinded all the approvals, made various changes to the program (which will result in many areas that would have gotten high speed broadband that would be sufficient for decades getting slower broadband that will be obsolete much sooner), and now everyone has to reapply again.

Kind of bizarre to point to an article that takes a quote from a Republican FCC commissioner at its face value when these people like as easily as you breathe.

Infrastructure projects take time and the project was coming along just fine within its timeline. It's not a coincidence that several red states were the furthest along in the process - https://broadbandnow.com/research/bead-grants. The "delays" in the process were because it prioritized needs rather than grant political favors. Ironically the new rules will set these states back and harm them. It's a recurring pattern.

Why do you feel the need to be the devils advocate? What do you get from defending this crap?
I think it’s important to point out that the two US parties are almost identical, but I wouldn’t call it “devil’s advocate”. It’s not defending one party to point out both are bad for workers.
In Poland I have 1000/300 fiber in my family house village with ~500 people population and same 1000/300 fiber in city I currently live both for 30 USD / month.
It just seems like the later a country got on the internet, the better their infrastructure is, Poland, Bulgaria, etc. all have way better internet than Austria or Germany
I have 2.5 gigabits in Belgrade for $15. It's crazy
Here in Ireland I have 1000/100 asymmetric in a medium-ish town, no data caps that I've been able to discover. I pay €40/month. There does not seem to be any options available for a faster upload, which is unfortunate.

I think the slowest speed on offer at the moment is 500 for rural connections. I think everyone except the most rural households (and probably our surrounding islands) have 500meg fibre to the home now.

It's nice.

Data caps? Does it really offer that speed at peak times though? Are oversubscription of backhaul infrastructure disclosed?

In semi-rural hill country TX, 2.5 Gbps symmetric from an internet co-op is $90 USD/month without data caps.

So odd that the FCC would suddenly revert all these rules which were designed to advocate for consumers. Wonder what changed recently?
Republicans are always pro-business first consumers whatever!
Previously and recently, we've had to fight tooth and nail to make any progress on this and then others like Ajit Pai just flagrantly fake support for destruction of net neutrality.
Well there was that one court ruling that said agencies have to stick to what Congress actually authorized them to do rather than having free reign to reinterpret their own authorizations however they want.
This seems to be good for Starlink at the expense of the fiber providers?
Rural fiber at my lake home went from $35/mo for 100/100 to $89.95 this year. On a 12mo contract.

Starlink got my business after VZW forced their 5G boxes to use 5G and not allow forced LTE usage. 5G is unusable there with 60-100/0.03. I force my phone to use LTE and all is well but 5G just does not work.

I hate giving Elon money but it’s the only affordable month-to-month option now.

Yeah, a regulatory goal that can be met by FiOS today but will take Starlink billions to get there does not seem like the correct way to allocate federal funds.

Brendan Carr's has critiqued federal broadband spending: too much spent on rebuilding existing networks to be faster, not enough going towards new build out. This is because upgrading wealthy customers' internet leads to increased profit, and there is less money in serving the underserved. Several states have tried fighting the telecom companies on what they've delivered and I think the worst case was a slap on the wrist.

Starlink and 5G are likely increasing broadband coverage far faster than fiber, which is a big goal of federal broadband spending.

The new FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is very pro-Starlink. Honestly Starlink is the best rural Internet access in the short term but any government subsidies going into Starlink are not going into fiber which has higher speed long term.
Yeah cause they're not going to have to compete with real bandwidth availability.

given the new shiny one (that hasn't launched) is topping out at 1Tb of downlink (with half of it going to backhaul) and the current units are 80 Gb/s

It's good for incumbent terrestrial cable companies, too.
- They removed WSJ from the White House press pool because of the Epstein story

- Elon is still stoking the Epstein stuff on Twitter as we speak

It’s not good for Starlink for that reason. We are inside the belly of fascism, so your question reads like someone oblivious, with all due respect.

My building recently got wired up with a local ISP taht is offering gigabit fiber for... $25/month.

AT&T Fiber or Verizon Fios will tend to start at $60-90/month as an "introductory" price where your bill just keeps going up $10-20/months every yera unless you go through the dance of calling up and threatening to cancel every year. So you could be paying $140/month when a new customer is being charged half that.

Chattanooga, TN has long been known for its excellent and affordable fiber Internet [1].

We know what works: it's municipal broadband not national ISPs. We've known this for a long time but we somehow refuse to recognize it, in part because national ISPs have successfully bought and paid for legislators to create a moat through things like onerous regulation or outright banning of building muncipal broadband.

But why is this so? It's economics and incredibly simple. You see when a town or city or county owns the Internet infrastructure, you've removed the profit motive. Put another way, the workers own the means of production.

When you have a national ISP, some pension funds and shareholders own the means of production. And what do they demand? Ever-increasing profits. And how do profits increase? By raising prices and cutting costs.

There is absolutely no reason Internet access should cost $100/month.

And we see this same pattern play out in every market. It's the end state of capitalism.

[1]: https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/

thanks government we love slow and expensive.
We don't need the FCC to push fast broadband, we need to break up the stranglehold duopoly that phone and cable companies have on cities. If Google can't stomach dealing with them to create more competition, what chance does anyone else have?
ive always wondered what the end of america would look like
I am so sick of this anti-science, anti-competition, lawless administration.

I cant believe America is a fascist state. it only took 6 months. un fucking believable. Makes me sick.

FYI to all commenters: the current FCC chair was nominated by Trump>Biden>Trump and unanimously confirmed by the Senate all 3 times.
All in the pursuit of profit. But we on HN love billionaires and unregulated capitalism.
i absolutely dread the day of the enshitified internet connection.
Maybe this will force sites to stop wasting bandwidth and stem the bloat. You should not need a gigabit connection (which I do not even have in all of my home LAN) to browse the Internet.

Edit: downvoters, please explain why I need 125MB/s (that's 3 full installations of Windows 95 every second) for normal browsing.

I find the political angles to be boring. The reality out in the actual communities is much more varied and interesting.

For example, the Texas market is going crazy with FTTP providers. Even comcast is starting to get involved by upgrading infra and buying out even worse incumbents. My old house in the Houston area has two competing fiber providers now.

These aren't fly by night operations either. The last provider I had backed their entire last mile infrastructure with standby natural gas generators. I never lost symmetric gigabit internet access despite not having any power or water during Beryl.

At what point do we look at broadband penetration as a solved problem and focus on bigger ones? Unless you live in a radio quiet zone, there is going to be some ability to get online at this point.

I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users. The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber. I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options. If we really want to target overall coverage and affordability, then this does make sense.

Edit: why disagree?

You can always tell how tech savvy someone is, buy how much bandwidth they don't buy. They don't fall for the marketing/lobbying of the big incumbent ISPs.

Anyone I've known worth their salt in networking cares about latency far more than speed. Historically upload speeds on asymmetrical plans were a problem too, but since people have started to work from home, most cable/fiber/wireless internet providers' lowest plans offer upload bandwidth at multiple tens of megabits per second, faster than the ingestion speed of most video hosts, and more than enough for a dozen simultaneous HD video conferences, and their dowstream speeds are enough for dozens simultaneous 4K video streams at the highest resolution streaming services provide.

Incumbent ISPs lying about the benefits of gigabit plans, and lobbying for their requirement, is the equivalent of Intel bragging about 5 GHz speeds in the Netburst vs Athlon days. It ran at a higher clock speed, and that sold processors, but they ran slow, because they responded horribly to branching, and were late to the market on 64-bit an monolithic multi-core architectures.

Outside of rare power users, or someone especially impatient for one-off downloads, Gigabit is ridiculous for a large family or small office, and especially overkill for a small family or individual.

I can't stand the government either, and they'll probably replace that rule with one that's even worse, but it was a bad rule to start with.