Thread by @doctorow

The central claim behind Comcast's long holy war against #NetNeutrality is that without "network management" (slowing down your connection to the sites you like unless they pay bribes to Comcast), their network would face "congestion."

1/

This was obviously bullshit all along, but all doubt was erased in 2015, when a set of leaked memos from Comcast management affirmed that "network congestion" is a pretence for charging customers to use the service they are already paying for.

reddit.com/r/technology/c…

2/

Nevertheless, @AjitPaiFCC cited this "congestion" as justification for his slaughter of Net Neutrality, an accomplishment he was only able to pull off by pretending that millions of comments from fake/stolen identities were "evidence" for his case:

buzzfeednews.com/article/jsvine…

3/

The shills who cheered on Pai's cheating have spun the pandemic as evidence for the value of network discrimination, claiming that the killing of Net Neutrality incentivized investment in ISPs' networks (despite a sharp DECREASE in investment).

pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/sli…

4/

As @KarlBode writes, the pandemic is the best evidence yet that the claims of network congestion are absolute self-serving bullshit. After all, when Comcast lifted their bandwidth caps they did NOT experience the network collapse they warned us of.

techdirt.com/articles/20200…

5/

The telcoms sector knew they'd be pilloried if they surprise-billed locked-down Americans for exceeding their caps, so they eliminated them, and...everything was fine. Almost as though the only reason for the caps was to gouge Americans.

6/

Big Telco shills have a way to spin this: they say that the caps exist to allow for "price differentiation" that allows light internet users to buy cheaper packages - but if that was so, you'd expect your relatives who only check email once/day to get a $3/month plan.

7/

No such plan is in evidence. Instead: "Everybody pays a high price for broadband in America. Again, with with a few regional exceptions, because it's a broken, monopolized market."

eof/