This is the script of my national radio report yesterday on expected
increases in the cost of Internet services. As always, there may have
been minor wording variations from this script as I presented my
report live on air.
- - -
So of course there's no way to be sure, but the stars are kind of
lining up in a rather depressing way in terms of another one of these
perfect storms, that suggests some big increases in Internet access
costs could be looming almost immediately.
First off, obviously Internet pricing is not immune from the broader
economy and as we all know inflation concerns have fired up again, and
we all know what that potentially means in terms of higher prices for
lots of stuff.
But the Internet is perhaps even more vulnerable to these effects for
a number of reasons. One is that ISPs -- who still usually rate among
the least loved companies by American consumers -- buy a lot of
equipment and much of this comes from countries where new tariffs have
just been put into place or could be soon. And those kinds of costs
are usually going to be passed down to consumers one way or another.
Also, the Internet landscape in the U.S. is quite different from most
developed countries, that often have a government sponsored high speed
Internet deployment like fiber that reaches almost everybody, and then
various Internet access firms can use that fiber to compete with each
other with a range of services.
But here in the U.S. we have the dominant ISPs that mostly evolved
from the original large telephone and cable companies and have split
up the country into fiefdoms where they can choose to simply, for
example, not provide fiber to customers who they consider to be less
lucrative. So competition for true high speed Internet in the U.S. is
still really quite dismal. And while there are mobile-radio based
services and all the hype about 5G and the rest, none of these really
can compete in terms of performance and frequently reliability with
high speed fiber or some advanced cable systems. AT&T at one time said
they were going to build fiber in all sorts of areas where they never
actually did, and now they're saying they won't be doing fiber in many
areas at all.
The upshot of all this is that the lack of effective competition at
these levels also provides an incentive for the companies to boost
prices. Another factor is the lack of real net neutrality models or
other consumer-friendly regulation. The ISPs, various courts, and now
the new FCC chairman have pretty well quashed net neutrality efforts.
In fact, the new chairman seems to be pretty negative toward
regulating ISPs in general and appears to prefer letting the firms do
largely what they want.
And you don't need to be a telecom expert to know that what these
behemoth ISPs want is higher monthly charges, bandwidth caps, and
seemingly to build out as little new high speed Internet as possible.
The thing is, we're now a quarter of the way into the 21st century.
Having decent and affordable Internet access is not a luxury -- for
the vast majority of people it's an absolute necessity. Many firms
have cut back on customer services based on anything other than
Internet, shutting down call center support, and more. It's basically
become something of a nightmare for anyone who can't afford or
otherwise can't get good Internet, and of course there are still lots
of people who really don't WANT to use the Internet for these purposes
but find themselves pretty much forced to do so.
And now many people will be facing the double whammy of poor Internet
access (if any) and rising prices for that access. And while I wish I
could bring better news about this, there's every indication that
these kinds of problems are going to be getting worse -- perhaps
rapidly worse, and most of us may end up paying a lot more even for
poor Internet service compared to many other countries.
Sometimes it feels like consumers are being treated as if we're still
in the 20th century -- or maybe even the 19th. And that's very sad
indeed.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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