This kind of reminds me of the cycle of data center/edge/data center/edge that technology seems to go through over time. It is also a keen reminder that certain orgs are always behind the curve, and by the time they move to the 'next big thing', everyone else has already decided on a different approach, and it will be another 7-12 years before they catch on to the 'next big thing'... We are 17 years since AWS started offering self provisioned data center. 13 years since Amazon transitioned onto it. Given the growth of the power of individual systems, and the price tag of them, it was always inevitable that people would recognize that storying Petabytes of info on their own stuff gets a LOT more affordable when you can by 20TB SATA drives for the same price today that .5TB drives sold for in 2006. Same goes for server hardware in a VM/containerized/orchestrated environment vs 1 server per service... Given the abuses of the 'trust us, it's your data and our hardware/service' that are going to continue to get worse, why risk it when you don't have to?

There are a fixed number of h1b visas every year. They are (in theory) reserved for people with special skills that we dont have in the u.s., and that a company must go through a process of attempting to fill for several months as part of showing 'cant fill the job'. When its abused, its modern day indentured servitude. A 'hi paying job in Silicon Valley' of a whopping 75k a year sounds amazing... Until you get there. Then you are looking for a couple od roommates to pay bills while working 12 hours a day... So... Combine low pay (for the area) with high skills and ya.... No one wants that job, so lets have our government 'allow' companies to hold that green card over their head while they work for 1/3 the going rate?

So much more practical and realistic than 'alter the earth's climate to suit ourselves'.

Or... the headline and summary are misleading in order to give Trump Derangement Syndrome another outlet to express itself. “Companies appear to be streamlining and updating their processes, and workforce reductions are increasingly becoming a part of these decisions. Consumer behavior and advances in technology are driving many of these cuts,” said Andrew Challenger, Vice President of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. or The majority of cuts this year are due to “restructuring;” 49,868 cuts have been announced due to this reason. Bankruptcy claimed another 40,218 this year, a 33.8% increase over the first quarter of last year. Another 27,380 cuts were due to plant, unit, or store closings, 104.7% higher than the 13,374 cuts due to closings through this point last year. The article also talks about how the sectors laying off are also hiring more than they laid off, while trying to position the layoffs as being a potential symptom of an economic downturn (due to federal shenanigans), but the numbers, taken in context, simply don't support that conclusion. I'd liken it to dropping a penny and finding a dollar when you bend over to pick it up.

196,000 jobs were added last month, a rebound from the February report. Economic analysts surveyed by FactSet had expected a gain of about 170,000 jobs in March. It was the 102nd straight month of job gains. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...

Actually, zero rating is specifically permitted in the net neutrality regs. And folks forget, the reason comcast was throttling netflix was because they were overloading a public gig-e link in order to get to part of the comcast network. netflix didn't have a direct peerage agreement with comcast back then, nor did their ISP. (which is how ISPs get paid for sinking traffic, BTW). the bottom line is, that model has worked well since day 1. It only appears unfair if you don't understand that it does, in fact, cost money to carry someone's traffic, and the 'no cost' peering arrangements are predicated on the idea that the traffic flow is fairly even. pretty much every peering contract I've ever seen sets forth penalties and fees if your traffic starts going too much in one direction or the other, because at that point, one is using the link as a transit connection, which requires payment. Only folks who don't understand this seem to think that comcast was 'out to get' netflix.

data caps are the result of capacity and planning analysis. it' straightforward math. It's also the end result of about 100 years of telecom experience with managing shared resources in order to keep end user costs down, while still providing everyone service. If X people have access to a network link of Y size, the sum total of what they can all transfer is Z (where Z is some amazingly ridiculous number that is much much larger than Y), you can do a statistical analysis of every user and see that for every user that consumes more than their 'fair' share of Z, you have 10 or 20 or 50 who are no where close to using their fair share. As long as you set the expectation that there is a penalty for going too far over that limit, EVERYONE on the system always has great performance, because the total transfer amount for everyone together is below Y for the month. Or to put it simply, the neighborhood never overloaded their uplink. The difference between BT and commercial content distribution systems is... one is designed to be open and replicate data. the other is designed to service an application while also controlling who has access to the content, and ensure the content OWNER that their stuff isn't being randomly ripped off. Putting it physically close to the end users (setting up a streamer in the cable company office), just cuts down on both the bandwidth bill for your streaming service as well as for the cable operator. It's a win for everyone, because the service works even better than having to run through links that are potentially overly congested with other traffic...

Having seen what the 'open for all' internet looks like, before the ability of telecom/ISP companies to effectively manage the impact of bad actors, the idea that people, in their ignorance, actually believe such nonsense as 'every packet is equal' is disturbing. This version of 'net neutrality' does not protect end users. read the thing. read ALL of it. For every headline in the regs that says 'protect end user privilege', there are 8-30 exceptions that essentially allow an ISP/Telco to do exactly what people claim they do not want to allow them to do. Don't want to be charged 'extra' for access to netflix? No problem, says FCC/ISP: You now have a bandwidth cap per month, and once you go over it, we charge you extra... unless you use our streaming service, which is zero rated (I.E. doesn't count against your bandwidth cap). The entire regulatory framework is filled with that kind of crap. And the best part? the FCC declares itself as the sole arbiter of anything going wrong online... So before, where you could go to the FTC (which has all the experience shutting down protectionist, monopolistic behaviour), the FCC now gets to determine if google or verizon doing something that is expressly allowed by it's regs (but is clearly a violation of anti-trust laws) is legal! WAKE UP PEOPLE. Stop thinking with your hearts and read the crap being shown to you as 'the protection you need from your evil ISP'.

The internet/web is a mirror of humanity. No matter what kind of control system you try to impose on it, human nature will be reflected and sometimes magnified by the tools we use. The Web, and the social media system that grows on it, are a great example of the fun-house mirror result you get when people's thought processes and discrimination ability lag behind technology. I first wrote about this in 1999, as the net.sheep effect. People have been conditioned by 100s of years of text-as-truth to trust anything they READ (because putting things down in writing was once an epic effort, requiring not only a great deal of money, but also the expectation that the quality of the words would be worthy of the effort to put them down and publish them). It's only when a small portion of the user base begins to leverage that habit, that the abuse of being able to reach the entire planet with a rumor begins to become clear... not because gossip is new, but because making gossip seem not only true, but authoritative (by virtue of being written/published/repeated by thousands of sites) is. The only way to address that with technology is by bringing back the one thing that makes a modern society civil : Personal Accountability. Virtual Reputation needs to not only be a 'thing', but a 'thing' that has consequences. Facebook has been a little slow on this, because they recognize their site is a huge rumor mill... if they start squashing rumors, what will that do to their numbers? All in all, the answer to this issue is the same as it was when the printing press was invented, when radio came out, when TV came out: People who are going to report/spread information have to be held accountable for the accuracy of that information as well as the damage they create by doing rumors instead of facts.

People keep using 'net neutrality' as if it's going to provide some kind of amazing magical protection for end users... The one thing that doesn't 'fix' your user experience is making rules with thousands of loopholes in them. And that's what you get when you demand lawmakers to fix problems for you. They build a compromise based on what's best for the providers and what is acceptable to them to give up to make you feel better. Holding data hoarding companies to a standard of responsible use for your personal info is perfect. that stuff needs to be defined as your own personal property, that you lease,rent or otherwise permit them to use it for due and fair consideration.

How do I get my part of the settlement? I've got 2 Vizos. :)

Won't be missed. Never really was able to get past the foolishness of people who were supposedly really smart. Real smart folks just don't roll that way.

Consider it infrastructure. If you were to start building a new city from scratch in the last 20 years, you would know to leave plenty of room for multiple carriers to drop fiber and copper all over the place. Now come back to reality, where you have 100 year old copper in places where there may or may not be physical access to run fiber to replace it, may or may not be a place to put equipment to support your ideal high speed infrastructure (you can go further with an analog electrical signal, than with a digital one, hence DSL limits), and frankly, rolling out 30 cities worth of fiber infrastructure to cover a good percentage of the population is harder, more expensive, and takes longer than building out 1 city and 2 population centers that are barely 100 miles apart.

The difference boils down to engineering and scaling problems. I would compare the two like this: lets say 'small country' is using a pickup truck to move his family across the street, while 'big country' has to use 100 tractor trailer rigs to move an office building worth of people 2000 miles. I'm sure the folks in the office look to have terrible performance from their moving company, if you decide to just compare how long it takes to move. Doesn't really capture the whole 'heft' of the project though, does it.
what WOULD be interesting, would be to show how much each country 'lifts' with it's access, and create a consumption based metric for internet quality.