The other other Big Tech antitrust problem

With Amazon, Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech firms, how long do you think it will take for America's broadband ISPs to get the same attention? Because they probably should.

So says an excellent piece by arstechnica's Tom Simonite:

The new fervor for tech antitrust has so far overlooked an equally obvious target: US broadband providers. “If you want to talk about a history of using gatekeeper power to harm competitors, there are few better examples,” says Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy.

Sohn and other critics of the four companies that dominate US broadband—Verizon, Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T—argue that antitrust intervention has been needed for years to lower prices and widen Internet access. [As many as] 162.8 million Americans do not use the Internet at broadband speeds [and] New America’s Open Technology Institute recently found that US consumers pay, on average, more than those in Europe, Asia, or elsewhere in North America.

[...] Children without reliable Internet have been forced to scavenge bandwidth outside libraries and Taco Bells to complete virtual school assignments. In April, a Pew Research Center survey found that one in five parents with children whose schools had been closed by coronavirus believed it likely they would not be able to complete schoolwork at home because of an inadequate Internet connection.

Such problems are arguably more material than some of the antitrust issues that have recently won attention in Washington. The Department of Justice complaint against Google argues that the company’s payments to Apple to set its search engine as the default on the iPhone make it too onerous for consumers to choose a competing search provider. For tens of millions of Americans, changing broadband providers is even more difficult—it requires moving.

I live in Canada, where broadband access is more affordable, so this issue wasn't top of mind for me, but Simonite's piece raises some excellent points; the telecom oligopoly that has been allowed to develop south of the border is just insane, and absolutely needs to be reigned in, or broken up, or at least broken open. Here's hoping that Democrats get a chance to do so; with everything they'll have to deal with (assuming they get control House, Senate, and White House, of course), their dance card is going to be pretty damn full for the next couple of years.

Simonite's piece is excellent, and well worth a read - there's a lot more over at arstechnica than what I've extracted above - so go give them some clicks.

New blogs!

When I started this blog, I really wasn't intending for it to be as tech-focused as it's become. I was actually planning to start a blog about game design - or, more precisely, ARPG design, not from the perspective of a game designer, but from the perspective of an avid player of the genre. You know, my personal take on what works and what doesn't in the games that I've liked and disliked over the years, sprinkled with insights that I've gleaned from various sources around the 'net. I was planning to use Diablo III as a kind of case study, comparing and contrasting some of its elements with those of other ARPGs to figure out exactly why some of them work so well, while others.... don't, really.

But then GWX happened, and VR, and the Nintendo Switch, and the end of Moore's Law, and the slow-motion Singularity, and... Well, the short version of this long story is that my ARPG gaming blog has become something really, really different from that.

And that's fine; really, it's fine. Windows 10, the Nintendo Switch, the nascent VR industry, and other developments in the technology that drives so much of our lives is really fertile ground, and stuff about which I ended up having quite a few opinions. But I still do want to write about the gaming-focused stuff, which is a problem, because it no longer fits in here. I ran into a similar problem not too long ago, when I found myself needing an outlet for some of my thoughts on the politics of the day... which also don't fit here.

And so, I've decided to carve out some spaces where they do fit. Two new blogs: one which can be politics all day long, and another all about how (not) to design an ARPG. Yes, that's right, I'll now be spending my copious spare time posting to three different blogs that nobody will read, because nobody reads blogs anymore, Excelsior!

I may start by moving a couple of my older posts over to those two blogs, just so that there's something there other than:

My other blogs may go nowhere at all. Or, they may be just the outlet I needed for a lot of ideas that I've been keeping bottled up for a few years now. If nothing else, they'll give me more excuses to do some writing, without needing to worry if my writings "fit" with the theme of this (tech) blog. And, hey, if only one person finds and reads either of them, and finds any value at all in what I've written, then it'll be more than worth it.

So, if you've stumbled across this blog, and are wondering why I'm maybe not posting as often here as I used to... this is why. Maybe check our my other digital spaces, to see if I've posted anything there, instead.