You do have it. I didn't explain it right. Local loop unbundling (LLU) is the idea that the company that controls the infrastructure cannot serve as a last-mile provider. One company lays down the fiber and leases it to someone else to run a service on.

It is perfectly technically feasible in the US. It's all just fucking politics because lobbying -- sorry, bribery -- is a huge thing (that, I assure you, most of the sane people utterly despise) that sways politicians because of fat fucking checks. (I shit you not, a large donor to the US Republican party literally said "pass this tax bill or we stop donating" during that tax bill fiasco that was in the US news late last year.) As I said, we had this concept back when the Internet was made up mostly of dial-up. Big phone companies here like AT&T and Verizon handled the phone systems and ISPs like America Online or Planet Pooch (a personal favorite) handled the "service" end of it.

This is the same country where, when Net Neutrality first popped up and LLU became a topic for a bit, some asshole companies said "that doesn't work for the US market". Of course it doesn't. You may lose some profit, you shitlord.

Two fuckups happened as the reign of dial-up ended. One, Internet over cable started to become a thing and the US law handling dial-up did not apply to cable. Fuck you, Bill Clinton, I believe. Two, companies lobbied -- bribed -- hard to keep it that way. Companies bought other companies. Basically colluded to stay out of each other's markets. (I ask you, how in all the fuck of the world does Comcast get to be San Francisco's only ISP and Verizon, basically, is New York City's only ISP? Both residential. I don't know if you've been to NYC but it's a big fucking market. Someone has to want a piece of that.)

The ISPs in the US fight hard to keep status quo, with:
* ISPs trying to shut down states' rights to create municipal providers (this is fucking outrageous in some cases)
* Fucking with laws to prevent pole access in areas where wires are still on top of poles
* Suing for some inane reason just to make it difficult to move in.

The only point I will concede to these shitstains is that the US is a large country with a lot of dead space and serving people up in mountains, for example, is a technical and fiscal challenge. You won't get a lot of profit serving so many people under X square miles. Ok. Let the government help out. And they do take government money meant for this kind of thing -- and fucking pocket it. New York City, if I remember right, is still involved in a lawsuit with Verizon for fucking them. Verizon disagrees. Assholes.

Count the number of curses in this statement and you'll understand the ire I have for the political party in the US largely responsible for this mess. It comes down to the power companies have over the US government, a term you may or may not be familiar with: regulatory capture. (Democrats aren't innocent but less to blame.)

(I've left out specific law names and program names because I forget the exact naming but I assure you if you were to research this you'll find real world examples of everything, sometimes multiple instances. I'm pulling articles from memory in the last 5-10 years.)

Wtf. This entire comment block is full of condescending assholes.

It’s down to local terminology. The US doesn’t have “local loop unbundling” like we had in the days of dial-up, where they shared infrastructure. Down to shit regulations and lobbying by the infrastructure companies. (Yes, I know, US lobbying is a crock of shit.) So the names got merged. The majority of our providers control the last mile and infrastructure thanks to shit regulations.

Whoops. Parent is me.

Move?

I typically refrain from using explicatives and ad hominems on Slashdot but how fucking stupid are you? Are you literally a Russian troll or just acting like one? If moving was an option for everyone, we wouldn't be in this shit sandwich because people would just congregate in areas with more than one ISP choice and ISPs would have recognized years ago monopolies don't work.

And yet, monopolies do work, you shmuck, and here we are.

No, moving is not an option. Most people don't want to pick up and move just because their ISP is being a shitstain. There are typically bigger priorities than that. No, we will not guaranteed get a third ISP. And even if we did, the effect is making the entry to market for websites that much higher. Startups now have to start or join an ISP? Are you fucking kidding me?

AT&T buying Time Warner is one of the biggest shit sandwiches in the history of the Internet, aside from losing the battle on Net Neutrality. We're going from 2 ISPs in some areas to 1. At best we'll go back to 2. At worst, everyone involved, actors good and bad, now recognizes the cost of business in the new age: buddy up with an ISP or don't fucking bother trying.

If the Department of Justice was in any sort of functional order right now, this deal would have been laughed at on day 1 or the two companies involved would never have tried.

I'm still confused how this even happened. Is Trump such a dick that North Korea wants to be the good guys again because they're afraid for their safety? What is the state media narrative in North Korea right now?

I don't understand the point or what we're even talking about anymore. You both shifted topics. First it was just Google throttling and something vaguely about net neutrality. Now it's a whole bunch of companies colluding and something else vaguely about net neutrality.

What is this argument about? Net neutrality shouldn't exist because if Google can do it then an ISP should be able to? How about none of them should be able to. I'm not arguing that it's right for Google to do any of this, just that it's unlikely.

I'm done. You lost me at the third statement. The rest of your post is prognosticating events that get more and more complicated and unlikely.

This is all pointless. I'm not saying they can't do it. They can. It's unlikely. They don't hold any kind of market position to make it work in their favor. Once Google or Netflix do this then they deserve to be hated as much as Comcast and hit with regulations.

No. Again, this is ridiculous. This already exists: web sites can charge you for access to their site. It happens all the time. Trying to wring money out of an ISP as large as Comcast as opposed to charging users directly would backfire. Comcast would just say no, denying Google a large part of the ISP customer market. Could they do it against smaller ISPs? Maybe. Would they?

They haven't yet, and I would consider it just as egregious as the bullshit ISPs have ALREADY done. Remember when Netflix was charged re-transmission fees by AT&T/Verizon/Comcast (can't remember which) for data across their Internet backbone? Remember when Verizon/Comcast (again, can't remember which) was purposefully letting the end of their network degrade, so customers see Netflix get slower, allowing customers to complain and never upgrading the end-point switches?

Why aren't you complaining about what ISPs have already done, instead of complaining about what Google could do? When Google starts abusing its market position the way Comcast, Verizon and AT&T have talked about and already done with respect to Net Neutrality then we can talk about regulation to curb them because I, and many others, see no signs of Google even thinking about it. Other companies have already done it and have a history of abuse.

What you're saying is still ridiculous. Comcast has a lot more vertical integration than Google and has a large leg-up to begin with. Comcast can simply keep a step ahead.

This goes both ways. What you're saying is ridiculous because Comcast could do the same thing. Nothing is stopping them from pouring money into research for a search engine and using their monopoly on the ISP market in the US to advertise it. They could even inject ads into web pages for their "Cast-Out" search engine (but would be stopped by Net Neutrality). For all intents and purposes, Comcast would have an easier time creating a competing search engine than Google creating a large ISP footprint. The costs are just not the same.

Unless you're a Russian propaganda troll or congressional staffer shill, I know you're serious but that doesn't make your statements any less ludicrous. (And if you are, this is the wrong place to troll.)

What the fuck does "can you imagine if google starts to slow traffic to your ISP?" even mean?

It doesn't make technical sense that "Google could slow data to your ISP". Comcast offers no services to me if Comcast is not my ISP. If Comcast is my ISP, this means Google is making THEIR OWN servers slow, so using Google is slow. If Google Fiber were my ISP, they have no reason to make Comcast slow from their servers because I wouldn't be accessing Comcast servers, and just like if Comcast made everything else slow unless you paid your Google Fiber/Comcast ISP "special charges", that would be violating Net Neutrality -- oops, they want to take that away, too.

Besides, you'd just switch. Google Fiber by and large overbuilt on another ISP's footprint so there is a competitor to turn to. Google has a long way to go before they hit the user numbers that Comcast has.

Google has no reason to do any of this and the other ISPs have nothing to fear unless Google's ISP division plans to do more overbuilding, a term and process which the ISPs certainly invented as one means to prevent competition by raising the cost of market entry.

Let me introduce you to Europe, which has local loop unbundling, which is a fantastic way to create competition by reducing the cost of market entry because you don't have to build near as many wires, if any. Also let me introduce you to the internet service anti-competitive laws around the US pushed by concern-troll Republican lobbying bullshit-artists ALEC.

Enough of being nice, though. Fuck anyone who brings up these arguments. This shit is past getting old, it already is old. The market forces that drove the situation that US internet access is in is well-understood:

1) Forced monopolies because the telcos literally divided up the country with tacit non-compete clauses
2) Claim building in a competitor's area is too expensive -- because they made sure of that; see #3
3) Drove up the cost to market entry by lobbying for laws to benefit them and harm area-entrants -- pole access, deny municipal entrants with random bullshit laws country-wide -- you're saying I can't expand my internet service outside my electrical service footprint as an electrical utility why, exactly? -- and make over-building a possibility (hello local loop unbundling)
4) Got politicians to repeat their bullshit "there's plenty broadband competition; T-Mobile's LTE competes with Comcast's wireline!"
5) Drove service costs to near-zero to get more money
6) Profited the fuck off customers by creating natural, basically-government-protected monopolies -- see #1-4

If it's going to be that unpopular -- and I'm sure they know it will be -- how about... not trying it in the first place because you're supposed to represent me and not corporations? They're going to either start a smear campaign over Net Neutrality as it gets closer or be as quiet about it as possible, but only because I'm pretty sure they know they have to convince people that removing it is not the worst thing to hit the Internet since fake news.

This is such a prime example of how much power companies have over the American population at large and it's pretty disgusting. Am I a dirty liberal? Probably, but I don't see why expecting representatives to represent the opinions of the majority of the country, instead of a very rich few -- sorry, vocal few; campaign donations are free speech now -- is so difficult. There's a good reason why Congress' approval rating has been so low for so long.

"Corporations are people, too." I hope Mitt Romney is never given the chance to forget he uttered that filth.

Really? Paying off ransomware companies? That's just going to make them target wealthy people. I mean, I'll be fine but it's probably only going to provoke more attacks since you're guaranteed a payday if the person you hit has AIG.

And:

public static bool operator==(const Person& a, const Person& b)
{
        if(a.Wealth() != b.Wealth())
                return false;
        else
                return &a == &b;
}

Who are you trying to convince: me or yourself? "I'm right and you're not" is the logic of a child in fourth grade and is not going to suffice talking to adults. Please try again. You argued nothing and are throwing another distraction.

Answer to my points or just get out.

No. You are throwing a distraction and I'm not going to bite. The initial claim was that the audience in attendance was bigger.

I'm not going to argue it was the most-streamed event*. That's not what their point was. I don't care who had a bigger audience, Trump cared. They lied because they pointed to pictures and said, "this is framed badly, we had a bigger audience," when clearly from the pictures you could see much more empty space. Not once during this fiasco did they point to online streams, they said, "audience" which can be bent by any person to mean anything. The language is vague on purpose. They all pointed to picture evidence, Trump's ridiculously-worded anecdotal evidence and "bad framing".

* And beside the point, it doesn't give numbers. It is not concrete and would be insane to draw specific numbers from.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/...

"The 17 million streams are the total number of streams, not the average number of people watching. That 17 million figure may include people that reloaded the webpage, or that clicked in and watched for 30 seconds, or people where the inauguration started to auto-play on the CNN story they clicked through."