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FCC Declares Intention To Enforce Net Neutrality
Unequivocal writes "The FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, told Congress today that the 'Federal Communications Commission plans to keep the Internet free of increased user fees based on heavy Web traffic and slow downloads. ...Genachowski... told The Hill that his agency will support "net neutrality" and go after anyone who violates its tenets. "One thing I would say so that there is no confusion out there is that this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles," Genachowski said when asked what he could do in his position to keep the Internet fair, free and open to all Americans. The statement by Genachowski comes as the commission remains locked in litigation with Comcast. The cable provider is appealing a court decision by challenging the FCC's authority to penalize the company for limiting Web traffic to its consumers.' It looks like the good guys are winning, unless the appeals court rules against the FCC."
I did not see this one coming....
Here I am, here I remain.
Assuming they aren't already. You know Rogers and the other providers are going to be watching very closely how this develops.
If "Net Neutrality"= "treat traffic the same regardless of source and destination", then GOOD.
If "Net Neutrality"= "treat traffic the same regardless of protocol", then BAD.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
What you don't realize is that by "neutrality" they mean politically; all Republican websites will be required to forward half the incoming traffic to liberal pages.
They'll swap that when (if) the Republicans come back to power.
You know, nothing good will come of this, and whenever the government try anything they just fuck it up and or it should just be left to the market!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The FCC, working for the rights of the consumer and not the rights of the big corporations?
Is it April 1st?
of course the government would never have had any part in creating these massive corporate horrors like say local monopolies would they?... /sarcasm
prosecute fraud [as an example, unlimited isn't] and end the local monopolies and most of the problem should go away. the actions of these companies wouldn't likely be tolerated were there any choice for the internet user in the matter.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Well, to be fair this does seem like the kind of thing that should be established in, you know, a law or act or something. Not just one commission saying, "We've decided this is illegal now and will enforce it". I'd much rather see this on the books as a semi-permanent change, rather than something that will be easily reversed when the political winds change direction.
Every so often, a foundational concept comes along that could affect development for decades or centuries hence. The concept of "network neutrality" is one of these.
Just imagine the future possibilities:
On one hand, you have a future where you can never be sure what's really "out there", where there are huge swaths of information that you simply can't access, not because you or the information owner have any disagreement, but because some third party that you don't even know has determined that you shouldn't or couldn't see it. In this world, many sites are slowed to the point of unusability simply because your carrier doesn't want to have to compete with them when they offer a similar service. Quality suffers due to the lack of open competition.
On the other extreme, we have a future in which the Internet consists of the "world of ends" so charmingly envisioned by Doc Searls and David Weinberger. In this world, every information provider competes on fairly level turf with everybody else. Services that are genuinely better are allowed to win out solely on their merits, and not on their competitive associations. Quality of service continues to progress at a lightning pace, friction for improvements is low, so the best man truly does win.
Some people would say this is esoteric, that it's not about the "real world". But these people miss the fact that in the world of the future, the Internet will be the primary means of communication around the world. Already we see whole industries being consumed and integrated into the Internet. I no longer have cable, no television antenna sits on my roof, since Hulu + Netflix does everything I ever asked of my satellite dish and then some. I no longer have a phone line, since Vonage lets me do what I wish, anywhere I like for less. I basically don't send letters anymore, Email does the job faster, better, and cheaper. It's easier for me to do my banking electronically than it is to drive downtown to the nearest bank branch.
The world of the future is the Internet. And it's up to us, our generation, to see that this gorgeous technology is established with social norms and laws that allow us to use it to its maximum potential. This is our time. SAY YES TO NETWORK NEUTRALITY, AS LOUDLY AND OFTEN AS YOU CAN.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The FCC's Network Neutrality Principles are:
Neither of the principles you state are, as such, strictly necessary to meet those principles.
That being said, discrimination by source or destination could in some cases violated the principles (e.g., if an ISP that is also a content provider outright blocks access to traffic trying to reach competing content providers over its network, or blocks all port 80 requests, or all requessts that appear to use the HTTP protocol, going to their non-business subscribers IPs.) Likewise, discrimination by protocol might in some cases violate the protocol (indeed, the last example of discrimination by source or destination is also a discrimination by protocol.) Whether deprioritizing rather than outright blocking traffic using certain ports or protocols would violate the principles depends on the circumstances; presumably, deprioritization that made it impractical to use the protocol for its principal purpose would be problematic.
of course the government would never have had any part in creating these massive corporate horrors like say local monopolies would they?... /sarcasm
Are you suggesting that the Federal Communications Commission should tell the States what monopolies can and cannot be setup within their borders?
I agree with your conclusion that more competition would drive out those who seek to limit services, but I seriously question your method.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Most of the types who have traffic shaping explained to them - which is what usually happens when politicians are the ones pushing the cause - still don't understand the concept of port blocking.
When I pay for "Internet Access" I don't expect my service provider to be able to dictate what I can and can't do with my internet connection. This includes hosting my own mail, FTP, and HTTP servers! What business of it is theirs if I post an image on Fark and host it myself?
As long as you're not spamming and/or doing illegal things they need to back the hell off.
As far as I'm concerned, if I'm having select ports blocked I am NOT getting "Internet Access".
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
s/Democrats/individuals/;
s/Republicans/idiots/;
And you have a post that's non-partisan, and yet still true!
Note: I don't mean to imply that Republicans are idiots. I do mean to imply that Bush and Cheney are.
>Is it April 1st?
No, this is what happens when you vote in competent Democrats to run things instead of Republicans like Bush and Cheney.
I agree. Democrats have consistently stood up for the little guy:
I think it's time to wake up. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are deeply, deeply corrupt.
Titles 3 & 4 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Specificially the preemption of franchising authority regulation of telecommunication services, and the elimination of most of the greedy/protective (depending on your political views) PSC boards.
The alternative is something they don't want, which is why they are trying to find some illiterate judge to declare the FCC impotent.
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
Presumably because Congress, by law, has given the FCC authority to regulate interstate and foreign communication to acheive policy aims set by Congress, including, for instance, direction "to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet" and "to promote the continued development of the Internet" and to "encourage the deployment on a reasonable and timely basis of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans", and also because of the US Supreme Court ruling in Brand X, 545 U.S. 967 (2005) that "the Commission remains free to impose special regulatory duties on facilities-based ISPs under its Title I ancillary jurisdiction."
(Additional authority is cited in the FCC's Memorandum Opinion and Order in the Comcast case.)
No, there are net neutrality principles that the FCC has articulated that it believes are appropriate and necessary to acheive the mandates the FCC has been given by Congress with regard to the internet, and which it intends to use to guide its policymaking in that area.
True, principles, as such, have no binding force. The FCC Net Neutrality principles, one should note, are essentially a statement of how the Commission intends to acheive the objectives set for it in law, using its existing statutory authority; they aren't asserted to be independent legal authority.
Anyone can take the FCC to court for anything they want; whether they can win or not is another matter.
The stimulus bill that was passed requires any firm getting stimulus money for infrastructure upgrades, to follow the FCC's net neutrality tenets.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I just can't understand how ISPs make this a difficult problem. Obviously there are some users that use a lot of bandwidth, there are others that don't. They have tried to discriminate based on "type" of traffic for a while, but why not just on the users total traffic for the month? It is super simple, keep track of the volume of data for all customers. From this data generate a QoS ordering for every customer (quantized based on QoS technical limits) daily or every so often. Now people that don't use bandwidth get served first and others get their packets dropped when bandwidth is at capacity(which I imagine isn't 100% of the time). Essentially high bandwidth users get all the extra bandwidth left over after the low bandwidth people get as much as they want. Then there is none of this packet filters, port blocking, man in the middle TCP reset junk that they are doing now. If you really want you can guarantee a minimum bandwidth for each customer and make reservations for that in the system.
Remember when the US built out the electrical grid? Or when it built the interstate system? Or when it sent people to the moon? What a bunch of failures.
I'm sure it's not in your opinion, but you're sadly oversimplifying or ignoring every use case and ignoring the drivers behind QoS in general. If you want something simplistic and turnkey, there's certainly products out there. Netequalizer springs to mind.
But hey, let's throw in a few simple examples:
HTTP downloads vs. Flash video streamed over HTTP. One is decidedly interactive (even if buffering certainly helps), the other one is decidedly non-interactive (even if faster = neater, naturally).
SIP telephony vs. SIP videoconferencing. Agnosticism per your definition would make the algorithm punish the SIP videocon.
Or, let's take an even simpler example: P2P. Rather than a few very hungry connections, you get a large number of connections pushing less data per connection.
One can always argue that service providers should provide enougb bandwidth so that they won't even have to prioritize data the first place. Nice in theory, hard (or simply uneconomic) in practice. Take a cable provider - with a limited upstream bandwidth per channel, you need some sort of fairness. Simple per-plug fairness works to some extent, but you don't really want to punish the puny amount of upstream data your average HTTP request would generate just because the same user is P2P'ing like there's no tomorrow. Makes for a bad user experience.
When we get to wireless, it gets even messier with the limited and shared upstream and downstream.
I could go on for a whie, but I believe the point has been made. It's not a case of "You simply XYZ" at all.
Many Republicans and conservative organizations have supported net neutrality. Savetheinternet.com for example includes the Christian Coalition of America and Gun Owners of America. While it is true that Democrats have generally been more supportive of net neutrality, (McCain was awful on net neutrality), it isn't helpful to simply assume that Republicans must all have one view of this and Democrats all the other. This doesn't reflect a much more complicated reality. It is common human behavior to assume that because one disagrees with another group on some collection of issues they will disagree with you on everything but that's not always the case. Thinking that way really isn't helpful.
Wrong. The FCC's original 1934 mandate included both the regulatory authority over the airwaves that had previously belonged to the Federal Radio Commission and that over wire communication that previously belonged to the Interstate Commerce Commission, so even if we're looking at their original jurisdiction and ignoring newer laws like the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the FCC has always had a broader mandate than the airwaves, and its always included communication over wires.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that "net neutrality" was mostly an antitrust issue, and, further, assuming, again for the sake of argument, that this particular area of commerce isn't explicitly within the FCC's regulatory purview, that would make it a matter for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), not the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Better yet, let's review the FCC's anti-public good performance going back to the mid-90s. FCC has consistently worked on behalf of private interests to the harm of the public.
The FCC under Clinton did as much damage to the public as the FCC under Bush. Just looking at the FCC's most recent failures, I am not optimistic about FCC doing anything in the public good regarding net neutrality. At best, we'll get some immediate treat that will keep consumers happy in the interim at the cost of a loss of consumer rights further down the road.
Roads are mentioned in the constitution as is the post office. I figure if the founders were alive today and rewrote the thing they would probably include the internet given that it's the modern equivalent. Normally i'm against regulation and would say "let the market decide" but there are some areas that only have one provider with no competition. Since the internet is such a necessary thing at this stage I think it's necessary to ensure people have open roads and that their mail is not opened or given preferential treatment based on a commercial sender/reciever. Net Neutrality makes sense constitutionally.
The FCC is acting under general policy direction from Congress. The specifics aren't dictated by Congress, but then, if Congress wanted to dictate the specifics, they probably wouldn't create regulatory agencies in the first place.
Continuing to follow through on a policy statement made in 2005 that it has pursued by various means in the intervening time period is hardly a "whim".
Acting under legal authority articulated by the US Supreme Court (in Brand X in 2005) isn't "ignoring the rule of law."
It's not that simple. The 20% causing the congestion make the network unusable for other services, so that the others can't use the network to do what they want.
For example, VoIP telephone services are unusable if there is any significant amount of packet loss or jitter, or if latency is too high.
The 20% of the population using 90% of the bandwidth hurt the quality of the service of people who the network is really important to, because the people not using large amounts of bandwidth aren't simply sending as many bits as they can down the wire (like transferring bulk data); instead they are transferring small parcels of very important data.
And the moment providers start thinking about offering QoS services to prioritize these people's small 256-kilobit data streams for sending voice and video; the Bittorrent users are screaming bloody murder, and whining to the FCC about how X bid bad provider added a few minutes of extra time to their bulk download spree, how dare they!
This is a pretty good sign that the FCC expects to loose it's court case. It's a common tactic up here in Cananada, say you plan on doing one thing, and then wait for the courts to tie your hands to stop you. (That way you win all the support, and it's not your fault when you don't have to do it)
It gives me the choice to choice a competitor without having my connection artificially slowed down. If I as a ComCast customer can choice to use a video download service other than ComCast's own service, then I have more freedom. If instead of using ComCast's phone service I choice another, I have more freedom. Or if instead of viewing ComCast's preferred political messages I can view others I have more freedom.
You haven't gained any freedom, what's happened is a private corporation has lost freedom to more government regulation, and I don't see how anyone could think that this is a surprising thing.
BS!!! I have gained more choices than either putting up with ComCast or going without. If you want to live in a world where one entity controls what you can see then Cuba's 90 miles from Florida.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Why was this modded insightful. It should be "-1 ignorant". There is virtually nothing factual or truthful about the parent post about the ICC, it is a rant from either an libertarian extremist or a far-right extremist. Personally, and without looking at the user's other posts, I vote for far-right with a patina of libertarianism. I say this because the poster appears to claim that the Republicans weren't really conservative. Apparently it seems he may have his own custom definition of conservative not shared by the rest of society.
The article for the ICC at Wikipedia is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission
According to the parent, the ICC was formed after a dispute over four trucks, especially considering that the article states the ICC was formed in 1887 to regulate railroads. I'm fairly sure that interstate cargo transport would not have been done by ICE trucks. If they existed the existing roads would have not been passable, the relative unreliability of early ICE engines and vehicles is another factor to consider. Even better, in the 1970' and 1980's Congress started taking away powers from the ICC (many were probably just redistributed instead) and in 1995 the ICC was abolished by the Republicans in Congress. The remaining functions of the ICC were distributed to the Surface Transportation Board. Interestingly, the ICC was the model for many other federal agencies like the FCC, SEC, and FTC among others. Its hard to argue against the need for a functional SEC and FTC today at least in a credible manner.
While personally I would like more people, who are well informed to be involved in a constructive manner with the government. I prefer inactive, but informed individuals rather than people like the parent, who is badly misinformed or who even knows what they are spewing is untrue. While I'm not saying the parent does this, but acting like hooligans nonviolent or otherwise in order to obstruct the government helps no one, not even themselves.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
You are right, but what is missing is an alternative solution. We could avoid this all together if we had competition for broadband providers. Then, the market would (in theory) favor network neutrality.
But, the problem with that is
- Politicians aren't smart enough to figure that out
- Network neutrality is too important to trust to the market
Let me clarify that last item. Network neutrality is as vital as the first amendment. Without it, Comcast customers might click on the FCC link and see a page that says "The FCC has decided that network neutrality is currently being enforced just fine, and the FCC will not get involved." We are in a new and strange world - where one person could read a newspaper and see one thing, and another user could go to read that same newspaper, but there is someone secretly standing between them and the page right in front of them, who can change the article. That slippery slope is more dangerous than the slippery slope that the FCC brings.
For every person like me, there's probably 5000 people who would say "who cares if Comcast/Cox/Whoever changes those boring news articles? I can download my music/porn/games twice as fast!" So I would prefer to see the FCC get involved, rather than not.
Normally i'm against regulation and would say "let the market decide" but there are some areas that only have one provider with no competition
And why is that? It couldn't have anything to do with government franchises that grant a single company an exclusive right to do business in a particular area, could it?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
>>>If you compare what the USA pays per capita for that health care, compared to developed European countries
Yes and if you compare the QUALITY of the cheap "bargain basement" European care, you'll see why the USA is still the better health system. The European may save money, but at the cost of rationing services such that citizens have shitty results:
UK HEALTHCARE WAITING TIMES
8 months - cataract surgery
11 months- hip replacement
12 months- knee replacement
5 months - slipped disc
5 months - hernia repair
SOURCE - The BBC, May 2009
PROSTATE 5-YEAR CANCER SURVIVOR RATE
100%- United States
90% - Canada
77% - United Kingdom
MEP Daniel Hannan said in early August, "The worst thing to be is elderly under the UK Health System..... you will be denied care and left starving in wards." Another young woman asked the UK System for a PAP smear to test for cervical cancer. She was refused three years in a row. And then she developed cancer and died at age 25. In the United States she could have simply *paid* to get the PAP smear, found the early cysts, and survived.
Yeah U.S. is expensive. But it's also LIBERATED so nobody controls your health except yourself. No silk-suited bastard in parliament can say "no" or otherwise run your life. Look at my signature.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall