> Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans.
Carr says that when looking into whether that is being satisfied the FCC should not consider affordability because section 706 does not contain the word "affordability".
But it also does not contain any words for any of the things he does want the FCC to consider. All it says is "reasonable and timely".
I bet if you polled consumers and asked what they would think it means if they were informed some commercial service or product was available to them on a reasonable basis an overwhelming majority would include in their answer that it means it is available to them at a price they find affordable.
vjvjvjvjghv · 4h ago
Seems they really want to revert everything that made the US a world leader.
- Reduce science
- Reduce collected data
- Reduce immigration
- Reduce infrastructure
- Reduce adoption of EVs
wnevets · 1h ago
If an adversarial nation had control of the white house would anyone be able to tell the difference
smt88 · 48m ago
I think an adversarial nation would reduce military activity far more than the current regime has.
That might be the only difference, though.
Mistletoe · 20m ago
If you reduce all those other things you don’t need to reduce their military. You already won, without a battle or any casualties on your side. The decay and rot from the inside will take care of the rest.
reactordev · 13m ago
In which case turn the military on the people and expedite the process. /s
giantg2 · 3h ago
What did EVs make us a leader in? If I remember right, other countries have much higher adoption.
caleblloyd · 19m ago
Leader in taxpayers subsidizing vehicles that only the upper middle class can afford, and leader in increasing gross vehicle weight so that driving small efficient vehicles becomes even more dangerous in a car crash
aaomidi · 2h ago
Technically Tesla was the first major company globally starting a trend. Aka leading.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> Technically Tesla was the first major company globally starting a trend
And China’s dominance in LFP is based on its acquisition of A123’s IP out of bankruptcy [1].
Yeah agreed, Tesla showed the world it was possible, but they seem to be failing to maintain their leadership position.
giantg2 · 2h ago
By that definition, we haven't been leading for years since the Chinese are cranking them out much faster than Tesla.
What if we want to be a world leader in satellite internet coverage? Is that a goal you support? Because that's part of what these changes are about.
Bluestein · 1h ago
Typical Chinese move: Observe, copy. Scale. Improve. Extinguish.-
testbjjl · 58m ago
Take the “L” friend, it’s okay to learn see perspectives.
datahack · 42m ago
That’s the kind of unkind and rather toxic comment I would expect on Reddit, not HN.
Unimpressed.
lenerdenator · 1h ago
As with everything involving this administration, the behavior will continue until an effective negative stimulus is introduced.
Bluestein · 1h ago
"Beatings will continue until morale improves".-
lenerdenator · 1h ago
That's the problem, though; no one's applying any negative stimulus at all.
timewizard · 1h ago
"That's the problem, though; I don't actually like democracy."
knodi123 · 4m ago
Did I miss the vote we had on broadband speed goals, or whether we should publish prices?
Get outta here with that. Most of Trump's outrageous policies are incredibly unpopular, even among his base. He's just enacting the wildly unpopular Project 2025, which he denied ever hearing of while hiring 70% of its authors into his administration.
ikiris · 32m ago
We seem to have hit the point where a civil engineer 2 brick layers and the town drunk are voting on if beams are necessary.
This seems to be good for Starlink at the expense of the fiber providers?
garciasn · 3h ago
Rural fiber at my lake home went from $35/mo for 100/100 to $89.95 this year. On a 12mo contract.
Starlink got my business after VZW forced their 5G boxes to use 5G and not allow forced LTE usage. 5G is unusable there with 60-100/0.03. I force my phone to use LTE and all is well but 5G just does not work.
I hate giving Elon money but it’s the only affordable month-to-month option now.
kemotep · 2h ago
Where do you live? Because Starlink is double my current internet plan for half the bandwidth and at least 10x in latency.
I am not seeing a plan on Starlink’s website that is lower than $120 a month for unlimited data.
I live in rural Ohio.
garciasn · 2h ago
It depends where you live what you get. I was able to get $80/mo Residential Lite service which should top out at 150 but I routinely see 400+ mbit down. Latency is around 20-25ms on average for me.
My lake home is in Central MN.
kemotep · 1h ago
Interesting that there is a significant price disparity between locations for what is ostensibly a global service. Central Minnesota isn’t that different in terms of availability of services from my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area but even then if you are half a mile out of the service area it can cost a fortune. I just wanted to validate your claim of Starlink’s price competitiveness and at least for my address it is one of the worst offerings available to me at least.
deathanatos · 1h ago
> Interesting that there is a significant price disparity between locations for what is ostensibly a global service.
… is it? Why wouldn't a corporation use any and all data available to them to price discriminate as hard and as much as they possibly can?
> my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area
I … am not sure I believe that. Everywhere I think I have ever lived, broadband is a local monopoly.
erikerikson · 9m ago
In Kitsap county the municipality owned lines can be used via a service contract with any number of service providers. Kinda a monopoly and kinda not.
Marsymars · 1h ago
I only have one FTTH connection to my house, but if I stretched I could probably claim “3 fiber providers in the area” - the local cable co does FTTN with 2000/200 service and there’s an independent fibre provider that serves multi-unit buildings in the downtown.
opello · 1h ago
Rural telephone cooperatives that moved to fiber tend to provide an alternative in places where cable companies were the dominant urban option. Some of those cable companies also moved to fiber. The service areas end up overlapped and some competition keeps prices in check.
vel0city · 1h ago
It's not really a global service in terms of service area, it's many many many small service zones. You can only be serviced by the satellites overhead after all.
You're competing for the amount of bandwidth in your cell. If there's more people in your area wanting service, it makes sense it's more expensive. There's a fixed supply and highly variable demand per square mile.
wmf · 1h ago
The new FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is very pro-Starlink. Honestly Starlink is the best rural Internet access in the short term but any government subsidies going into Starlink are not going into fiber which has higher speed long term.
pwarner · 1h ago
Yeah drawing the right line on what's rural is probably key.
tacticus · 3h ago
Yeah cause they're not going to have to compete with real bandwidth availability.
given the new shiny one (that hasn't launched) is topping out at 1Tb of downlink (with half of it going to backhaul) and the current units are 80 Gb/s
greyface- · 3h ago
It's good for incumbent terrestrial cable companies, too.
ivape · 1h ago
- They removed WSJ from the White House press pool because of the Epstein story
- Elon is still stoking the Epstein stuff on Twitter as we speak
It’s not good for Starlink for that reason. We are inside the belly of fascism, so your question reads like someone oblivious, with all due respect.
etchalon · 3h ago
So odd that the FCC would suddenly revert all these rules which were designed to advocate for consumers. Wonder what changed recently?
paul7986 · 2h ago
Republicans are always pro-business first consumers whatever!
tbrownaw · 2h ago
Well there was that one court ruling that said agencies have to stick to what Congress actually authorized them to do rather than having free reign to reinterpret their own authorizations however they want.
tzs · 1h ago
If you are thinking of the ruling overturning the Chevron doctrine, that's not what it said. What it said is that courts do not have to defer to the agency's interpretation of an ambiguous statute. The court can make and use apply its own interpretation.
Under Chevron courts were to defer to agency interpretations if the statute was ambiguous and the agency's interpretation was reasonable.
tbrownaw · 54m ago
Here is an article that (1) lambasts the 2023 Sackett ruling that a swampy back yard is actually not a navigable waterway; and (2) says that that decision teed up the 2024 Loper decision that got all the headlines: https://minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/6R... , section starting at the page numbered 2863.
vlovich123 · 1h ago
Assuming you’re referring to Chevron/Loper, I fail to see the relevance to this case.
Also, it’s important to remember that Chevron wasn’t “however they want” or to “reinterpret their own authorizations”. It was a doctrine that if the agency (staffed by domain experts responsible for resolving the ambiguity) had a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguity in the law, even if the court thought it had a better opinion, it had to defer to the agency that Congress created and left it up to congress to resolve that ambiguity if they felt the agency did so incorrectly.
tbrownaw · 1h ago
> It was a doctrine that if the agency (staffed by domain experts responsible for resolving the ambiguity)
This is not an accurate description of what agencies are meant to be experts in.
Their expertise is meant to be in how best to act within their bounds. Which is distinct from deciding what those bounds are.
threatofrain · 32m ago
Their expertise is in science.
idiotsecant · 1h ago
That's a pretty reductionist take. Here's what I think is a more reasonable one. If I told you your job was to keep the house clean, but made you come back to me for permission to pick up socks, but told you that absolutely didn't give you permission to pick up shoes, waited 8 months to reply to your request for permission to vacuum, denied you authority to decide what pieces of paper are trash and which are important, and also told you that it wasn't your job to get large muddy dogs out of the house you might think I wasn't serious about having an effectively cleaned house.
And then it turned out that the muddy dog just bought me a new yacht.
downrightmike · 3h ago
Previously and recently, we've had to fight tooth and nail to make any progress on this and then others like Ajit Pai just flagrantly fake support for destruction of net neutrality.
_--__--__ · 3h ago
FYI to all commenters: the current FCC chair was nominated by Trump>Biden>Trump and unanimously confirmed by the Senate all 3 times.
Cornbilly · 2h ago
Also, FYI to all commenters: The FCC board is required to have no more than 3 members from a single political party on the board of 5.
xeonmc · 2h ago
Are there any similar requirements for the Supreme Court?
ivape · 1h ago
When it’s all said and done, Americans will have to find the courage to admit the Judicial branch was an utter failure. That whole thing was supposed to be immune to political coercion. I say it will take courage because it got rammed into our heads that God made the constitution, and that it’s infallible. It’s a massive failure through and through.
The founding fathers did not protect the branches from each other nearly enough, and certainly did not give the people an end-run mechanism to bypass and fix it.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> it got rammed into our heads that God made the constitution
Article III is light in describing the courts [1]. Our judicial system is mostly a creature of Congress, not the Constitution.
I’m personally a fan of choosing by lot, from the appellate bench, a random slate of justices for each case. (That court of rotating judges would be the one in which “the judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested”.) You could do this entirely through legislation—nothing in the Constitution requires lifetime appointments to a permanent bench.
The problem is that the executive appoints the lower court judges, so the pool is tainted. A solution to this is probably something everyone needs to start thinking about (the whole problem), because a future democrat or sane republican will need to push a reform onto the court. Biden tried to push term limits before he left. Trump is a pen tester and showed all the cracks, so there's going to have to be a massive repair job of our systems.
JumpCrisscross · 49m ago
> problem is that the executive appoints the lower court judges
President nominates judges; he doesn’t appoint without the Senate.
Moreover, “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments,” a category that includes “Judges of the Supreme Court” [1]. The Congress may, by statute alone, remove the President’s power to appoint SCOTUS justices.
From what I can tell senate confirmation means nothing. They ask a bunch of questions to grill them but the answers do not matter, they get confirmed anyway so it's all show to me.
tzs · 51m ago
You can't really read anything into that.
As has already been noted by law there can be no more than 3 commissioners from the same party.
Traditionally when a commissioner's term expired and they were from the party that did not control the Presidency the President would ask the other party's Senate leadership who to nominate and would nominate that person.
Also traditionally the Senators of the President's party would vote to approve that nominee.
Biden followed this tradition, as did the Senate Democrats.
wat10000 · 1h ago
This is highly misleading. He was nominated to the commission by both Trump and Biden. He was nominated as chair by Trump this year.
Niksko · 1h ago
FYI to all commenters, take 5 seconds to google Brendan Carr and you will see how much of a partisan, anti-free-speech hack he is. The man wears a gold Trump head pin on his lapel ffs.
toofy · 3h ago
i absolutely dread the day of the enshitified internet connection.
ikiris · 2h ago
Maybe this will suddenly be the line where HN people discover that regulations matter when their internet sucks.
/doubt
anonym29 · 2h ago
I take it you've never lived in an area where Spectrum DOCSIS over copper coax and geostationary satellite internet were the only options available at all?
jmyeet · 1h ago
My building recently got wired up with a local ISP taht is offering gigabit fiber for... $25/month.
AT&T Fiber or Verizon Fios will tend to start at $60-90/month as an "introductory" price where your bill just keeps going up $10-20/months every yera unless you go through the dance of calling up and threatening to cancel every year. So you could be paying $140/month when a new customer is being charged half that.
Chattanooga, TN has long been known for its excellent and affordable fiber Internet [1].
We know what works: it's municipal broadband not national ISPs. We've known this for a long time but we somehow refuse to recognize it, in part because national ISPs have successfully bought and paid for legislators to create a moat through things like onerous regulation or outright banning of building muncipal broadband.
But why is this so? It's economics and incredibly simple. You see when a town or city or county owns the Internet infrastructure, you've removed the profit motive. Put another way, the workers own the means of production.
When you have a national ISP, some pension funds and shareholders own the means of production. And what do they demand? Ever-increasing profits. And how do profits increase? By raising prices and cutting costs.
There is absolutely no reason Internet access should cost $100/month.
And we see this same pattern play out in every market. It's the end state of capitalism.
Maybe this will force sites to stop wasting bandwidth and stem the bloat. You should not need a gigabit connection (which I do not even have in all of my home LAN) to browse the Internet.
Edit: downvoters, please explain why I need 125MB/s (that's 3 full installations of Windows 95 every second) for normal browsing.
wmf · 26m ago
You don't need gigabit but resource constraints have never reined in bloat in the past and they won't now.
giantg2 · 2h ago
I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users. The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber. I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options. If we really want to target overall coverage and affordability, then this does make sense.
Edit: why disagree?
baby_souffle · 2h ago
> I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users
640K was "perfectly fine" for most people, too.
100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users. The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world and settling for 2010's version of "fast" in 2025 is ... not how we're going to get better.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas
Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...
ericmay · 1h ago
> Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...
Well they voted for it, so I'll stick to my fiber in my big city and they can fend for themselves and pay $90/month for 10 up 1 down or whatever while I pay $40 for 1 gig....
With the snide remarks aside, why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
I'm sympathetic to a goal of "have really, really fast Internet service" but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
baby_souffle · 1h ago
> Well they voted for it
Not all of us.
> why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher. SL May have a slight edge going vast distances since the speed of light is faster in a vacuum compared to glass but for 99.999% of residential ISP needs, fiber-to-the-home is going to offer a more robust pipe that fits more and with less latency.
> but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
Almost certainly. Regardless, any better solution necessarily exists only in a world where 100/20 isn't "cutting edge" 30 years after it became technically possible.
userbinator · 55m ago
100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users.
What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?
vjvjvjvjghv · 54m ago
Work from home? Copy large files?
Dylan16807 · 43m ago
> The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users.
100/20 is fine for one person. But gigabit isn't very hard to achieve and is a far better goal speed for entire households. Gigabit is also a lot more convenient any time a big download is involved.
> The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber.
Coax can do it.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options.
Shouldn't fiber be a bit easier to run than coax? If you're going to run one data wire to a new area, it should be fiber. And if you can run power you can run data too.
vjvjvjvjghv · 54m ago
A country that wants technological leadership needs to aim higher. It needs to do more than the absolute minimum.
maccam94 · 2h ago
If you're laying a communications cable, you should just do fiber. It can carry any type of traffic at high data rates, and you can upgrade the speed over time by just replacing the optics at the ends rather than having to replace the whole cable. Fiber plans are only expensive if your service level is expensive, or if you have to pay to get the line run to your building
dlcarrier · 1h ago
You can always tell how tech savvy someone is, buy how much bandwidth they don't buy. They don't fall for the marketing/lobbying of the big incumbent ISPs.
Anyone I've known worth their salt in networking cares about latency far more than speed. Historically upload speeds on asymmetrical plans were a problem too, but since people have started to work from home, most cable/fiber/wireless internet providers' lowest plans offer upload bandwidth at multiple tens of megabits per second, faster than the ingestion speed of most video hosts, and more than enough for a dozen simultaneous HD video conferences, and their dowstream speeds are enough for dozens simultaneous 4K video streams at the highest resolution streaming services provide.
Incumbent ISPs lying about the benefits of gigabit plans, and lobbying for their requirement, is the equivalent of Intel bragging about 5 GHz speeds in the Netburst vs Athlon days. It ran at a higher clock speed, and that sold processors, but they ran slow, because they responded horribly to branching, and were late to the market on 64-bit an monolithic multi-core architectures.
Outside of rare power users, or someone especially impatient for one-off downloads, Gigabit is ridiculous for a large family or small office, and especially overkill for a small family or individual.
I can't stand the government either, and they'll probably replace that rule with one that's even worse, but it was a bad rule to start with.
yxhuvud · 1h ago
Not certain I buy this argument - higher throughput tend to require more modern hardware throughout the whole chain, and modern hardware also tends to have better latency than old. So for most people, they will get improvement in both latency and throughput if they would get a gigabit fiber connection. But sure, if you are comparing chains of the same hardware generation, go for latency in most cases.
dlcarrier · 25m ago
You're all using the same equipment, regardless of the tier you sign up for. The firmware in your modem or their router limits the maximum packet rate, but individual packets and small groups of packets are always traveling at gigabit speeds, regardless of the speed cap.
That difference in latency isn't even what matters; it's the latency from the various types of modems. With the direct connection of fiber providers, you can often get sub-millisecond latency from nearby collocations, and rarely do ISPs have more than a few milliseconds of latency.
With cable providers, DOCSIS adds ten to twenty milliseconds of latency. You'll get about double that latency With LTE providers and low-eath-orbit satellite providers that have nearby ground stations. With geosynchronous satellite providers, you'll get several hundred milliseconds of latencu.
A 50 Mbps fiber plan will get an order of magnitude lower latency than a gigabit plan from anyone else.
jedberg · 1h ago
I don't know about where you live, but by far the lowest latency option for me is symmetric gigabit. And my options jump from 200/20 to 1000/1000, and 200/20 was for sure not enough for everyone to stream and video chat at the same time.
runako · 15m ago
> how tech savvy someone is
> rare power users
I would expect a lot of overlap between these two groups! Extremely common things tech people do that benefit greatly from high-bandwidth connections:
- disk backup to the cloud
- use Docker
- have a household with multiple HD TVs (Netflix recommends 30Mbps per stream)
- software installs/updates as a brief interlude instead of an ordeal
Essentially, high-bandwidth connections let you use the Internet like it's functionally infinite instead of something rationed.
kingstnap · 35m ago
There's no reason to artificially limit the speed. If your city has fibre, everyone can have gigabit internet.
There's no savings for the ISP to throttle your pipe.
dlcarrier · 20m ago
Most ISPs are guaranteed a monopoly by the local government, so anything they can charge for, they will charge for, because there's no other option.
WatchDog · 59m ago
All other things equal, higher bandwidth links are inherently lower latency.
Propagation delay usually dominates latency, so it's generally not the biggest factor, but on a simple local network with two PCs and a switch, you can expect about 1ms latency with 100BASE-T, and 0.12ms latency with 1000BASE-T.
They're not sending out 100BASE-TX ONTs to lower-tier subscribers. You're all using the same hardware; they're just limiting the packet rate to match the plan.
Regardless, the latency difference between 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE‑T pales in comparison to the difference in modem speeds between different providers' network types.
Fiber providers with an ONT get LAN-like speeds, while cable providers' DOCSIS modems add tens of milliseconds of latency, LTE modems are similar to double that of DOCSIS, and satellite providers range from similar to LTE all the way up to hundreds of milliseconds of latency, depending on the orbit and if there are ground stations nearby.
Again, within any provider, you get the same latency with any the plan, but changing providers can have order-of-magnitude differences.
> Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans.
Carr says that when looking into whether that is being satisfied the FCC should not consider affordability because section 706 does not contain the word "affordability".
But it also does not contain any words for any of the things he does want the FCC to consider. All it says is "reasonable and timely".
I bet if you polled consumers and asked what they would think it means if they were informed some commercial service or product was available to them on a reasonable basis an overwhelming majority would include in their answer that it means it is available to them at a price they find affordable.
- Reduce science
- Reduce collected data
- Reduce immigration
- Reduce infrastructure
- Reduce adoption of EVs
That might be the only difference, though.
And China’s dominance in LFP is based on its acquisition of A123’s IP out of bankruptcy [1].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130131031501/http://www.reuter...
What if we want to be a world leader in satellite internet coverage? Is that a goal you support? Because that's part of what these changes are about.
Unimpressed.
Get outta here with that. Most of Trump's outrageous policies are incredibly unpopular, even among his base. He's just enacting the wildly unpopular Project 2025, which he denied ever hearing of while hiring 70% of its authors into his administration.
"we" = the corporations: "yes, quite right"
sigh
Starlink got my business after VZW forced their 5G boxes to use 5G and not allow forced LTE usage. 5G is unusable there with 60-100/0.03. I force my phone to use LTE and all is well but 5G just does not work.
I hate giving Elon money but it’s the only affordable month-to-month option now.
I am not seeing a plan on Starlink’s website that is lower than $120 a month for unlimited data.
I live in rural Ohio.
My lake home is in Central MN.
… is it? Why wouldn't a corporation use any and all data available to them to price discriminate as hard and as much as they possibly can?
> my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area
I … am not sure I believe that. Everywhere I think I have ever lived, broadband is a local monopoly.
You're competing for the amount of bandwidth in your cell. If there's more people in your area wanting service, it makes sense it's more expensive. There's a fixed supply and highly variable demand per square mile.
given the new shiny one (that hasn't launched) is topping out at 1Tb of downlink (with half of it going to backhaul) and the current units are 80 Gb/s
- Elon is still stoking the Epstein stuff on Twitter as we speak
It’s not good for Starlink for that reason. We are inside the belly of fascism, so your question reads like someone oblivious, with all due respect.
Under Chevron courts were to defer to agency interpretations if the statute was ambiguous and the agency's interpretation was reasonable.
Also, it’s important to remember that Chevron wasn’t “however they want” or to “reinterpret their own authorizations”. It was a doctrine that if the agency (staffed by domain experts responsible for resolving the ambiguity) had a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguity in the law, even if the court thought it had a better opinion, it had to defer to the agency that Congress created and left it up to congress to resolve that ambiguity if they felt the agency did so incorrectly.
This is not an accurate description of what agencies are meant to be experts in.
Their expertise is meant to be in how best to act within their bounds. Which is distinct from deciding what those bounds are.
And then it turned out that the muddy dog just bought me a new yacht.
The founding fathers did not protect the branches from each other nearly enough, and certainly did not give the people an end-run mechanism to bypass and fix it.
Article III is light in describing the courts [1]. Our judicial system is mostly a creature of Congress, not the Constitution.
I’m personally a fan of choosing by lot, from the appellate bench, a random slate of justices for each case. (That court of rotating judges would be the one in which “the judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested”.) You could do this entirely through legislation—nothing in the Constitution requires lifetime appointments to a permanent bench.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-3/
President nominates judges; he doesn’t appoint without the Senate.
Moreover, “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments,” a category that includes “Judges of the Supreme Court” [1]. The Congress may, by statute alone, remove the President’s power to appoint SCOTUS justices.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointments_Clause
As has already been noted by law there can be no more than 3 commissioners from the same party.
Traditionally when a commissioner's term expired and they were from the party that did not control the Presidency the President would ask the other party's Senate leadership who to nominate and would nominate that person.
Also traditionally the Senators of the President's party would vote to approve that nominee.
Biden followed this tradition, as did the Senate Democrats.
/doubt
AT&T Fiber or Verizon Fios will tend to start at $60-90/month as an "introductory" price where your bill just keeps going up $10-20/months every yera unless you go through the dance of calling up and threatening to cancel every year. So you could be paying $140/month when a new customer is being charged half that.
Chattanooga, TN has long been known for its excellent and affordable fiber Internet [1].
We know what works: it's municipal broadband not national ISPs. We've known this for a long time but we somehow refuse to recognize it, in part because national ISPs have successfully bought and paid for legislators to create a moat through things like onerous regulation or outright banning of building muncipal broadband.
But why is this so? It's economics and incredibly simple. You see when a town or city or county owns the Internet infrastructure, you've removed the profit motive. Put another way, the workers own the means of production.
When you have a national ISP, some pension funds and shareholders own the means of production. And what do they demand? Ever-increasing profits. And how do profits increase? By raising prices and cutting costs.
There is absolutely no reason Internet access should cost $100/month.
And we see this same pattern play out in every market. It's the end state of capitalism.
[1]: https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/
Edit: downvoters, please explain why I need 125MB/s (that's 3 full installations of Windows 95 every second) for normal browsing.
Edit: why disagree?
640K was "perfectly fine" for most people, too.
100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users. The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world and settling for 2010's version of "fast" in 2025 is ... not how we're going to get better.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas
Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...
Well they voted for it, so I'll stick to my fiber in my big city and they can fend for themselves and pay $90/month for 10 up 1 down or whatever while I pay $40 for 1 gig....
With the snide remarks aside, why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
I'm sympathetic to a goal of "have really, really fast Internet service" but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
Not all of us.
> why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher. SL May have a slight edge going vast distances since the speed of light is faster in a vacuum compared to glass but for 99.999% of residential ISP needs, fiber-to-the-home is going to offer a more robust pipe that fits more and with less latency.
> but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
Almost certainly. Regardless, any better solution necessarily exists only in a world where 100/20 isn't "cutting edge" 30 years after it became technically possible.
What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?
100/20 is fine for one person. But gigabit isn't very hard to achieve and is a far better goal speed for entire households. Gigabit is also a lot more convenient any time a big download is involved.
> The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber.
Coax can do it.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options.
Shouldn't fiber be a bit easier to run than coax? If you're going to run one data wire to a new area, it should be fiber. And if you can run power you can run data too.
Anyone I've known worth their salt in networking cares about latency far more than speed. Historically upload speeds on asymmetrical plans were a problem too, but since people have started to work from home, most cable/fiber/wireless internet providers' lowest plans offer upload bandwidth at multiple tens of megabits per second, faster than the ingestion speed of most video hosts, and more than enough for a dozen simultaneous HD video conferences, and their dowstream speeds are enough for dozens simultaneous 4K video streams at the highest resolution streaming services provide.
Incumbent ISPs lying about the benefits of gigabit plans, and lobbying for their requirement, is the equivalent of Intel bragging about 5 GHz speeds in the Netburst vs Athlon days. It ran at a higher clock speed, and that sold processors, but they ran slow, because they responded horribly to branching, and were late to the market on 64-bit an monolithic multi-core architectures.
Outside of rare power users, or someone especially impatient for one-off downloads, Gigabit is ridiculous for a large family or small office, and especially overkill for a small family or individual.
I can't stand the government either, and they'll probably replace that rule with one that's even worse, but it was a bad rule to start with.
That difference in latency isn't even what matters; it's the latency from the various types of modems. With the direct connection of fiber providers, you can often get sub-millisecond latency from nearby collocations, and rarely do ISPs have more than a few milliseconds of latency.
With cable providers, DOCSIS adds ten to twenty milliseconds of latency. You'll get about double that latency With LTE providers and low-eath-orbit satellite providers that have nearby ground stations. With geosynchronous satellite providers, you'll get several hundred milliseconds of latencu.
A 50 Mbps fiber plan will get an order of magnitude lower latency than a gigabit plan from anyone else.
> rare power users
I would expect a lot of overlap between these two groups! Extremely common things tech people do that benefit greatly from high-bandwidth connections:
- disk backup to the cloud
- use Docker
- have a household with multiple HD TVs (Netflix recommends 30Mbps per stream)
- software installs/updates as a brief interlude instead of an ordeal
Essentially, high-bandwidth connections let you use the Internet like it's functionally infinite instead of something rationed.
There's no savings for the ISP to throttle your pipe.
Propagation delay usually dominates latency, so it's generally not the biggest factor, but on a simple local network with two PCs and a switch, you can expect about 1ms latency with 100BASE-T, and 0.12ms latency with 1000BASE-T.
Regardless, the latency difference between 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE‑T pales in comparison to the difference in modem speeds between different providers' network types.
Fiber providers with an ONT get LAN-like speeds, while cable providers' DOCSIS modems add tens of milliseconds of latency, LTE modems are similar to double that of DOCSIS, and satellite providers range from similar to LTE all the way up to hundreds of milliseconds of latency, depending on the orbit and if there are ground stations nearby.
Again, within any provider, you get the same latency with any the plan, but changing providers can have order-of-magnitude differences.