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[–] G4 ago 

Yeah, this won't do a thing.

Even if they did "break off into smaller companies", do you really think they won't just pick their own areas to control and become local monopolies? It makes sense to do this, even if you're a competing ISP. When you control an entire area's Internet connection, they are your bitch. You own them and their money.

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[–] dabork 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago  (edited ago)

It's worked before and it turned out just fine. Look into the anti trust suit involving BellSouth. They had the phone market by the nuts but eventually people got fed up and they had to break apart which opened the door wide for competition.

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[–] theoldguy ago 

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[–] pitenius 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Oh, look an article by Wired, which is owned by Conde Nast, which is owned by Advance Publications, which owns Bright House Networks and 31% of the Discovery Channel.

Let's try a new headline: Don't Blame Us. Blame Yourselves.

Thanks, corporate massa!

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[–] tex 0 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago  (edited ago)

Having once worked for Comcast, I can verify that they are a thoroughly awful company. However, other service providers such as AT&T suck just as much. The reason they all suck is that they have to negotiate with local governments every time they move into a new area. These agreements require the companies to contort to satisfy all kinds of weird requirements. So instead of general customer satisfaction, Comcast terrorizes their employees about things like "average handle time" because missing a metric means potentially losing millions of dollars. They don't give a shit about losing your business because the same government ensures they have a near monopoly. Breaking Comcast up into smaller companies won't change anything.

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[–] aundregrande 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

I hate to upvote this, because it makes me feel as though I support it. I do agree, however, that splitting up the companies won't do much, for the reasons you outlined, as well as the fact that no additional competition will be provided for consumers. They will just have a smaller company...

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[–] Caboose_Calloway 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Comcast is a government-authorized service monopoly. They are part and parcel of the government. Calling for their breaking up is like calling for the breakup of the military. It will never happen. Ever.

Our only chance is to start laying our infrastructure and building a network of settlement-free peers. This means that each person setting up hardware in their own home and agreeing to pass all network traffic without charge and expecting every other person to do the same.

This is readily possible and the necessary equipment is already on the market. We don't need to grovel to big corps for our internet.

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[–] Entomo ago 

You still need connections to the backbone. And for that you need deep pockets.

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[–] pitenius ago 

Not that deep. I mean... I'm that rich.

We're working on something here... there is hope. Also, check out the work Tucows has been doing.

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[–] Caboose_Calloway ago 

Not exactly. Once all your connections are settlement-free you practically become something like a tier-1 peer. You are the backbone.

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[–] dabork 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Anyone who has no confidence in this needs to do some research into BellSouth. They used to be absolutely enormous (think comcast on steroids and HGH), but eventually they were forced to break into smaller corporations and it quickly balanced the market.

Then again, that was also over 20 years ago and we've lost a lot of corporate accountability since then.

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[–] ThePieAssassin ago 

Why would this be limited to Comcast? It is pretty much like this in every single market, Comcast or not.

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[–] carbanara ago 

we need our congressman to represent us. They havent done anything in our interest in years

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[–] edthomson92 ago 

Is there also a petition for TWC?

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