Vice

In late 2013, Los Angeles City Council began a push for a citywide Wi-Fi network at no cost to citizens. It would bring internet access to the estimated 30 percent of Angelenos lacking reliable high-speed internet connection, giving many low-income residents a boost up in the economy. But the project, called CityLinkLA, never materialized.

Back in 2011 the Obama Federal Communications Commission announced the creation of a $300 million broadband map using the Form 477 data Internet service providers provide the agency. At the time the map was heralded as a novel way to highlight the coverage gaps and competitive shortcomings of what is pretty clearly a broken US telecom market.  But users quickly discovered that despite the project’s steep price tag and good intentions, the map itself was almost useless.

[Commentary] A large reason for the nation’s lack of competition at faster broadband speeds is the country’s phone companies, for whom residential broadband isn’t profitable enough, quickly enough for investors’ liking. Verizon, for example, has all but given up on expanding its FiOS fiber footprint to focus on making inroads in the wireless video and advertising markets. Smaller telcos, like Windstream, CenturyLink, and Frontier, have similarly shifted their focus toward enterprise services, and tend to only upgrade aging DSL lines in the most profitable areas.

The Federal Communication Commission's controversial repeal of network neutrality in 2017 has yet to go into effect, but a researcher at Northeastern University has built an app that detects when mobile carriers may be throttling traffic to apps like Netflix and YouTube. Dave Choffnes and his Ph.D. students built the app, called WeHe, in 2017 and now it's available for anyone to download.

[Commentary]  If you care about preserving network neutrality, the most important thing you could possibly do would be to run for political office on a platform that promises to protect the free and open internet and to roll back regulatory capture by big telecom.