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Court Upholds Internet Deregulation
Internet Voting writes "Big telecom companies seem to have won big with the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding FCC's ruling deregulating the Internet. Opponents argued that telecoms could now deny third parties access to their telecommunications lines and eliminating competition. From the story: "In its September 2005 ruling, the FCC relieved telephone companies of decades-old regulations that required them to grant competing Internet service providers 'nondiscriminatory' access to their wirelines in order to reach consumers.""
This deregulation is a consumer's worst nightmare. We already have very limited competition in broadband service, and this promises to kill off what little there is.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The essential problem is the tendency to accelerate the concentration of wealth. Owners can always find proxies to hide the influence of a media outlet. Small players can print any limited distribution screed they want, but it takes a major daily, or a cable channel or a decent powered radio or TV station to get the mass coverage, and those are all going to big corporate ownership. Of course, you don't have to watch, read, or listen, or, especially, believe.
This "regulation" was a step toward making sure that companies could compete evenly and fairly, by limiting the power of a government-granted monopoly. How is allowing the monopoly to grow unabated and block competition equal to deregulation? It isn't.
If we changed the law so that banks didn't have to follow standard accounting practices, would that be "deregulation" or "a complete nightmare?" If we removed the requirements that food be edible and properly labeled, would that be "deregulation" too? How about we just eliminate the rule of law, and the constitution, and clear-up a whole lot of regulations?
"From your Comcast address? No, that won't do. My hardware is not Comcast-enabled."
Even without that, things are going that direction. I tried to send a note to a friend's hotmail address the other day. Since I use flat text formatting, it kept on getting rejected by a spam filter and I had to switch to html format to get it to go (needed MORE junk characters, amazingly enough). Gee, I'd bet those eMails would have gone through had I been using hotmail. Denying mail from other providers because it's suspected of being "spam" is really just one step away from only allowing hotmail users to talk to other hotmail users. Thanks, MSFT, for taking a perfectly portable, open, transport mechanism like SMTP and making it incompatible.
It hit me then that the openness of the internet is under attack from many different vectors, not just on the net neutrality front.
blah blah blah
I will give you a very good reason why. The Internet is mankind's single greatest invention.
Not antibiotics. Not the motor vehicle. The Internet. Why?
Information has been given the ability to travel the entire globe in less than the time required for you to read this post. Think about that. A coup could happen in an African country, and literally the entire planet could know about it within five minutes. A discovery for an infectious disease could be made at some remote lab in Antarctica...five minutes later, the whole world would know.
Information between teachers, doctors, scientists, philosophers, religious figures....the collective knowledge of our entire species is just a point and click away.
That's why.
Living With a Nerd
Bad for the end-user, champagne and fine chocolates for the big name telcoms. Reason being the ISP's no longer have to share their telcom lines, whether those be fiber, phone, or coaxial. Which means for the most part, if you want internet/phone/tv you are stuck with the company that owns the cables going to your house.
Just so long as there are more than two or three competing telecoms
Uh, there's one in any given location, that's why the regulation was there in the first place.
Hopefully, they will compete for the business of third-party ISPs.
Sorry, that one telco can now just turn off any of the other DSL ISPs whenever they feel like it. The third-party ISPs will either grovel and shovel over a wad of cash to stay on, or they call their customers and tell them how nice it's been, but goodbye.
Presumably someone will eventually invest a trillion dollars in wiring up a second telephone network, but that'll be a while since any sane investor will realize that once the trillion dollars is sunk, AT&T will simply refuse to connect the phone networks together, and the company will crash and burn faster than MCI's "in network" calling plans. Until then, the third party DSL ISPs exist at the telcos' whims, and when they are cut off, your choices will be between one telco's DSL, one cable company's cable, and dialup or wireless/satellite.
It amazes me how the press gets sucked into the lingo. This is not at all a ruling in favor of deregulation. To the contrary, it is a ruling authorizing private regulation of the Internet. Moreover, private regulation in this space is much more dangerous than government regulation because it works. The government can't do much at all to regulate the Internet, thanks in large measure to the First Amendment and thanks in no small measure to the fact that the government does not have any physical control over the transport layer. But the major ISPs do have such control, and are not bound by the First Amendment. In short, this ruling says, in plain English, "Whereas the government may not and cannot regulate communications over the Internet that are protected from suppression by the First Amendment, we hereby free those of you who have the power to suppress freedom of speech to go ahead and do so."
Aire Libre
I don't want them to pay back all the public funds they were give, or the tax breaks etc.
What I want is to know what percentage of their infrastructure was built with public funds and tax breaks and so on, if that is 45% then I want a 45% discount on my monthly bill.
For every site that I am unable to reach because of their deregulation, I want compensation on my monthly bill. For every censored email, I want compensation.
Don't tell me that your 'public internet access' I pay for will only access content you approve of. I will not buy a special car to drive on restricted roads. I will not pay for two services to access both Google and Yahoo. I will simply sue every time I am denied access based on their censorship. Yes, I realize that there may not be any basis for that in law, but we must do something to let them know what their consumers want.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Of course the big telcos don't want to roll out snazzy new broadband lines if they have to bear the cost of R&D and deployment, and then immediately allow competitors to use their brand new high-speed lines at the price the government insists on. I mean, their competitors can just lay new fiber optic lines themselves, right?
Oh, wait...the government created the whole mess in the first place with geographical monopolies on the right to run telephone lines, muddied the waters even more by declaring that cable companies are "information services" and thus don't have to share *their* lines, and now want to wash their hands of it and stand back and watch Joe Consumer take it up the ass.
On a *completely* unrelated note, I suggest that any group of politicians hereafter be called a clusterfuck. (e.g., A herd of cattle, a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, a clusterfuck of politicians).
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
He isn't talking about tax breaks; he is talking about direct infrastructure investment made on behalf of the people of the United States that is now being used for profit by private companies. That, by itself, is not problematic, so long as the the companies have equal access to the infrastructure and the profit making remains entirely competitive.
Where I live, Verizon doesn't offer me DSL. But Cavalier Telephone offers me DSL, over Verizon's lines. (My neighborhood is fairly poor, so Verizon probably thinks we aren't worth it). So does that mean that I won't be able to get DSL then? If that's the case, my only option is Comcast, who doesn't allow me to use Bittorrent. So now I will have only one choice for broadband internet. And it's a company that doesn't believe in neutrality.
Yay for deregulation!
The problem isn't censorship, it's competition. Right now, if the copper running to your house is owned by Company A, and Company A offers Internet Service, and Company B wants to provide you with Internet Services, Company A is required to share the copper they laid with Company B. What this ruling does is allow Company A to tell Company B to take a hike. The consumer (you) now has no choice for internet service because the company that owns the copper determines what options you have.
So, if Company A were to drop prices significantly, and crush all local competitors, thus ensuring that they have a strangle hold on the local area's ISP offerings, they can then jack prices up as high as they want and the consumers will have no other options for providers.
I would guess this could also have some higher stream issues if some major back bone provider decided that it didn't want to allow data from some other provider at that level. That might be route able to still get through, but if they blocked it all the way to the last mile, you'd never get that data.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
This was totally what I first thought of.
I used to have accounts on GEnie and INN, but when a bunch of my friends got Prodigy, I had to buy Prodigy too.
I was so excited when I got my first real "Email" from CompuServe - it was amazing. I cancelled all my other accounts and kept only CompuServe.
Now? I guess it's just another old idea that's new again.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
At some point, though, a product becomes so ubiquitous that it is no longer just a common good and has become a staple. At that point, living without it really does have social repercussions and, in the case of the Internet, we are rapidly reaching that point. How many paper resumes do you think get submitted in industrialized nations these days? If the choice was limited to getting raped by my telco and/or not having a job, that's not much of a choice is it?
I'll tolerate anything
The hell we don't have a claim to it. They're running things on public land with tax breaks, government granted monopolies, subsidies, etc. In short, they're using public space and public money. If they want to not deal with us, fine. That's their choice. However, we want our public space back and them to pay back all the money we gave them to build their network. That would basically mean that they'd have to dismantle their network or buy all the space that it's using from the general public.
Also, your analogy is false. It's like the government letting you set up shop in a public park then saying that you need to let another group use it. Yes, it's your shop, but it's in the city park. You'd always be welcome to refuse, but the city could then kick you out of the park, which would hurt you business more than letting them rent space from you.
It's more like things with broadcast television networks. They're welcome to claim that they don't want to show what people want, however, the airwaves are owned by the US citizens (look it up). If they did that, the people would be perfectly within their rights to demand that the station stop broadcasting.
Bullshit! We the citizens paid for all of that! From tax breaks, relaxed regulation, and so forth to the insane monthly bills they charge us as customers. All of those companies REFUSED to service more than 20% of the United States unless the local and federal governments gave them pretty much everything, bought and paid for by tax money, in order to expand their networks for more potental customers. It applies to both the telecos and cable operators.
This has absolutely nothing to do with govermnet taking over business, this has to do with telecos using up public resources for their own private profits of which they're riding on the backs of their customers and local goverment citizens all in which comes to basically greed!
Since all those lines are technically and legally owned by the public then they should be forced to farely share those lines. The only reason why the governments allowed this to happen was cause the original agreement was to help expand economic growth, but instead they've been sucking it dry. But since the government is corrupt the telecos just simply buy them off to allow them to do whatever they want essentially.
So yeah, I have to say we have every fucking god damn right you retarded piece of shit of a fucking troll.
They presumably made a profit from the installation of the lines. It is the customers who paid for them. Further more most of the POTS lines were installed by our parents and the existing generation of Telco employees inherited them.
Furthermore if you look at the administrations of most Telcos you will find they are filled with non-productive people and paper pushers who sit around all day drinking coffee while they scheme more ways to suck book out of the customers they hold hostage. This is why we see telephone plan after plan after plan. This is why only a few years back we had horendous Long Distance rates. It is only through competition that we start to see the benefits of modern technology filter down to benefit the public. The thing is there is not enough competition.
IMHO the telco should be restricted to line maintenance and that is it. Its their job to maintain the wires just as it is the contractors job to maintain the hyways. Suppose the road maintanence crew were allowed to look inside the trailers of every semi... what would we get? Someone saying this truck is ok but that one isn't?
Basically this is what the telcos are up to.
For years, the US political system has relied on this sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge attitude by the common voter. We can talk smack against the "libruls" and "political correctness" and express our devotion to the freewheeling marketplace, but in the back of our minds we take it for granted that, wink-wink-nudge-nudge, the courts will come and rescue us whenever the business tycoons we vote into power get too absurd in their obeisance to their own wallets. But surely, by now, after a generation of primarily right-wing judicial appointees, we see that the situation has changed. The courts are no longer the last bastion of liberal social policies. Nor should they be. Let's stop expecting the old men in robes to bail us out of the messes we are in. We are a nation of laws, and we owe it to ourselves and our descendants to have laws in place that express our true political will.
Of course, that means we actually have to pay attention to whom we elect into Congress, and to what they do once they're there. Even worse, we'll have to stop being hypocrites and realize that most of us actually want a life cocooned by taxes and regulation. Are we up to that?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Before- regulations
Now- no regulations
It's really not hard. No regulations, eh? So why can't I just start a wireless ISP and beam signals? Why do I need the FCC's OK for that? And why do I need to get permission from every non-customer who lives between my central office and a customer to put cables under or their land, plus get permission from the city to put cables under or over city streets?