Idijit Pie should be tried for treason for forcing this repeal the American people didn’t want while clearly doing it for his old company.

I just want to stress for people: Their bandwidth was throttled to 200-600 kbps. For simplicity’s sake we’ll average it to 400.

400 kbps is roughly 50 times slower than the US national average, and about 100-200 times slower than what the “unlimited” plan the fire department bought promised them.

That isn’t “Kind of inconvenient” throttling, it’s “borderline unusable for modern purposes” throttling, especially in a situation like this where quick, up-to-date responses are essential.

To be fair to Verizon, they have admitted they did wrong, and that they should have waived the cap and not throttled the data. The problem is that their mistake, in a situation like this, can get people killed. An apology and admission of wrongdoing don’t bring people back to life, and the fact a mistake like this can be made raises serious concerns about the competency of these newly-deregulated companies, concerns that would’ve be completely moot prior to the repeal.

This wasn’t a fucking mistake. They specifically claimed that if they were allowed to control what speeds different people got at different times, they would use that to divert more bandwidth toward emergency responders and crisis areas, and then they deliberately did the exact opposite of that because they knew they could get away with it and it would save them a couple bucks at the expense of human lives.

This is not an ‘oh whoops we got caught throttling a video streaming service that we compete with sorry we won’t do it again no really’ apology. This is ‘we cut off the communications of a group of people literally fighting for their lives in a blazing hellscape because lol what are you going to do about it we own your government’.