FCC To Make Move On Net Neutrality

GrApHiX42 writes "The FCC will announce on Thursday it plans to pursue a 'third way' forward in the fight for tough net neutrality rules, opening a new front in an ongoing legal battle that could come to define the commission under Chairman Julius Genachowski. A senior FCC official said Wednesday that the chairman 'will seek to restore the status quo as it existed' before a federal court ruled it lacked the authority to regulate broadband providers and set rules that mandate open Internet. The goal is to 'fulfill the previously stated agenda of extending broadband to all Americans, protecting consumers, ensuring fair competition, and preserving a free and open Internet,' the FCC official said."

Comments

We need net neutrality to prevent censorship

[onionman]

Without net neutrality regulation, I fear that providers will have far too much power to censor content. In my area, there is only one choice for broadband: Comcast. My provider has already demonstrated a willingness to censor based on protocol and re-direct DNS lookup failures to their own search engine. I don't trust them at all to act in the best interest of the consumer when sites like Hulu and iTunes start directly competing against cable TV offerings for content.

Re:We need net neutrality to prevent censorship

[fnj]

It pleases me to imagine a new data protocol, one with an encrypted data channel riding on a "plain text" channel. Imagine a stream of HTML with images and attachments, the encrypted data being impressed like steganography on the images and attachments. Sure, it's very low efficiency, but it would be highly difficult and unprofitable to try to discriminate the encrypted data channel. The scheme even carries a pleasing level of schadenfreude in that you are screwing The Man with lots of frivolous plain text and by making it super hard to detect and counter.

Re:We need net neutrality to prevent censorship

[adolf]

Your scheme, while brilliant, is inefficient to such excess that it is self-defeating.

To perform steganography effectively (read: "undetectably"), one must bury the data within normal-looking noise. The amount of adjustable noise required increases proportionately with the amount of desired steganogaphically-encoded data. So, to encode a Big Thing (a movie, say), you need Lots Of Noise, or rather, a substantially larger amount of adjustable normal-looking data than that which you intend to send.

This makes the steganographical usage you describe very easy to classify: Those who aren't using it for a given task are going to consume (just to throw some numbers out there) 1x bandwidth. Those who ARE using it for the same task are going to consume, say, 10x.

If this attempt to screw The Man ever became common enough to be useful, The Man would simply counter with appropriately-higher fees for high-bandwidth users, or worse.

Steganography is indeed very useful for transferring some quantity of relatively small data in an undetectable fashion. But, in this context, it doesn't seem that the parties are concerned with relatively small bits of data -- they're more worried about bulk. So, by increasing bulk through steganography usage, one makes them self stand out even more in a non-neutral network than they would have by not bothering with such charades to begin with.

Re:We need net neutrality to prevent censorship

[vlueboy]

Without net neutrality regulation, I fear that providers will have far too much power to censor content.

Binary usenet comes to mind. Alive for decades... gone on one company's whim that was greedily copied by everyone else's.

Re:More government encroachment

[n6kuy]

Just what we need, a government takeover of another entire industry.

How 'bout we do something to increase competition, instead.

Just make them common carrier

[jonwil]

Just make ISPs common carriers like the phone companies. Then the FCC can enforce the rules it wants.

Re:... OR

[astar]

something off center about your argument. fcc is executive, but it also has legislative and judicial functions. In fact, these extras are impossible to get rid of.

this area is called administrative law. It is supposed to be simple, informal, and navigateable without a lawyer :-)

the reason it is constitutional is that while you have go into the admin court system, when you exhaust your remedies, you get to go to the usual courts in the other branch of government.

as far as rules, agencies can make all sorts of binding rules, persumedly from within their enabling language. and all the admin judges will take them as gospel. but once you leave the admin system, the other judges will feel quite free to slap the agency around.

Actually, having rules is a positive. I have seen programs repeatedly try to run without any rules! for the admin review judge, a question becomes "do i shut this program down". Interesting considerations at that point.

Re:More government encroachment

[jmorris42]

> Just a quick question: Who paid for/subsidized those wires?

You are getting close to the truth of the matter. Yes the telcos paid to put in the wires but it was subsidized in a way. It was part of a deal where AT&T would run wires to MOST[1] of the country in exchange for a monopoly.

So every time this topic comes up I remind people of the only long term solution that would actually work and get ignored. Break up the phone companies one more time, this time along the correct lines. Company A gets the monopoly, the local loops and the COs and sells access at rates set by the government. Company B puts dialtone, IP or video on the wire along with as many other companies who want to compete. And do it for the cable companies as well, they have had enough time extracting monopoly rents they can be split along the same lines of the natural monopoly vs the value added services.

But of course what we get is the government will essentially nationalize the Internet. Service will go to hell if you can even get past the political cleansing. And with Big Media having achieved regulatory capture decades ago the p2p scene will be toast.

[1] Even then they carved out a lot of really rural areas that they wouldn't serve, which is why there are small local phone companies that have been around for a really long time. But all are way out in flyover country where 'real' people never go and thus are ignored.

Re:in other words

[Kirijini]

Perhaps I should remind you that we live in a Democratic Republic where only elected representatives are to make the laws, not government agencies.

Allow me to introduce you to administrative law. I think you'll get a real kick out of agency rulemaking.

Fight the FCC?

[Torino10]

Considering that the FCC can open up WiMax, and initiatives such as O3b may demonstrate that MEO satellite systems can offer nearly fiber speeds to third world nations, aren't the TelCo's just slitting their own throats? If companies like Google, ones that make more money by increasing the number of people who can access the internet and there services, are willing and able to offer free or nearly free internet access via low latency MEO satellite constellations and other radio transmission methods. why would agencies such as the FCC want to stop them?