Scam artists have a variety of ways to charge you for services or text messaging you never asked for. Telecoms insist the practices victimizes them even though they take the money.
•The number of IP addresses and web users is overloading the routers that manage web traffic.
•Even in towns where they don’t offer Internet service, ISPs don’t want competition from public networks. AT&T says if there’s any chance a service provider might want to move in someday, municipal broadband should be illegal. The FCC, however, admits there’s not enough competition and no incentive to speed up broadband rates. And when there is competition, wow, service suddenly improves.
•Of course, Comcast argues the FCC should approve its proposed Time Warner merger because as there’s no competition in most areas, most consumers won’t find a Comcast-ruled world any less competitive.
•ISPs also aren’t happy with the FCC proposing “broadband” should be redefined to a higher speed level. And AT&T and Verizon think data caps on home broadband use are perfectly reasonable, if not downright good for Internet users. But despite AT&T’s claims it needs caps to ease Internet congestion, it’s willing to offer much more data to new cell-phone subscribers.
•Some people who use the Tor super-secure browser claim Comcast threatened to kill their Internet service on the grounds they must be doing something dirty. Comcast denies it.
•Do you know what’s really in that WiFi hotspot terms-of-use page?
•Netflix asks why ISPs should charge Netflix for streaming to people’s homes (Netflix has paid several companies that seem to be bottlenecking the service) instead of paying Netflix (“[W]e’ll pay 10% of your network costs if we get 10% of broadband revenue. Or we’ll pay 10% of your network costs if you want to pay 10% of our content costs.”)
