Slashdot Mirror
FCC Vote Marks Effort To Take Greater Control of the Web
GovTechGuy writes "The FCC voted today to open an inquiry into how the broadband industry is regulated, the first step in a controversial attempt to assert greater regulatory control over Internet service providers. In a 3-2 vote the Democratic members of the Commission voted to move forward with the FCC's proposal to reclassify broadband as a telecom service, increasing the regulation it is subject to. The move also has large implications for net neutrality, which FCC Commissioner Julius Genachowski has made a focus under his watch."
Yeah, the headline on this one is a bit sensationalist. The FCC is for prevention, not takeover.
Don't be silly, of course it does. And so do prohibitions on human slavery. The Free Market just isn't nearly so great as people make it out to be.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Yeah, this has exactly as much to do with taking control of the web, as regulating the phone company has to do with taking control of what you can say over the phone.
1 out of 10 government systems fail, and of course they will. The government puts out a lot of ideas per year. Medicaid was the one that worked. Social Security was one of the ones that didn't.
I find it amazing that corporations are overstepping their bounds and people complain that net neutrality with negate the ability for companies to regulate your internet. In short, they want to take away your freedom unless you give them more money.
Why is it people think the government doing absolutely anything is infringing upon rights but when a corporation does it then it's okay?
The law gives the FCC several categories to put things in, and gives them different powers over each category. That ruling said they were trying to use powers from category A on ISPs while ISPs were in category B. So now they're trying to move ISPs into category A.
The Internet is one of the last few bastions of freedom left in the world...
...and since you only have one or maybe 2 ISPs to choose from, the Evil Corporations can steal that freedom pretty much however they want. Unless the FCC tells them not to, which is what this is.
Ok, well first off I have to apologize. My OP was a little flame-baitish because I didn't really know how to get started on my point. :-)
The point that I want to make is that the free market, to the extent that we think of it, has limits, or at least limits to where it's beneficial to society, something a lot of people fail to recognize. Note that I didn't say net neutrality doesn't violate the free market, only that it doesn't violate the principles of the free market, which are that free and open trade between parties produces a net benefit.
The reason it doesn't violate those principles is because the current state US broadband exhibits one of the primary market failures, which is a lack of adequate competition to keep producers from gouging their customers.
With the FCC being smacked down with regards to "lol you can't regulate us" the first step has been done to regulate the industry, not because of some wild-eyed's bureaucrat's fantasy, but because it needs to be done.
The days of the mom-and-pop ISP are over and done with. The lack of regulation let these thrive, but the large telecoms and cable companies have gobbled up every single one of these since the dot-bomb. They are gone, never to be seen again.
Now everyone is left with either a local monopoly or at best a duopoly of broadband providers, who are increasingly out to screw the customer, like Comcast has been shown to do. Comcast wanted to play hardball. Well, here it is, guys, the big-time. Don't say we didn't warn you.
--
BMO
In general media it's forgivable, but can't we make an effort at technical accuracy on Slashdot? I didn't see anything in the summary or in the article itself about "the Web".
Tyranny always rears its head under the guise of national defense, war or some sort of civil protection from the bad, ugly guys out there. The Internet is one of the last few bastions of freedom left in the world...too bad the Statists out there cannot see the Federal Government for what it truly is.
And remember when those damned abolitionists reared their ugly heads and took slavery from the free market? They really showed how much they love freedom then, didn't they? Damn Federal government! Damn them and all those who question capitalism!
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
This headline and summary blow and are almost exactly contrary to the facts. The FCC's position, as outlined here is that the FCC is identifying *only* the transmission component of broadband as a telecom service. In practical terms, this means precisely that they will *not* pursue net neutrality-based oversight at this time, and will ignore content-related matters in favor of simple access and transmission oversight.
In other words, the "web" itself is exactly the thing they are not trying to take greater control of.
But Comcast (or Cox or Cablevision or.....) isn't a free market. It's government-created monopoly and therefore the government needs to regulate the monopoly to ensure it doesn't abuse its power. Just the same way electric monopolies or natural gas monopolies are regulated.
I'm a right winger and I support Net Neutrality as necessary.
And yes I approve this message.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
An even bigger reason is because all the ISPs they're trying to regulate only managed to get so powerful because the government gave them public money and allowed them to put wires up all over the place ignoring property rights, thus effectively setting them up as monopolies. Of course companies that use public funds and get special privileges from the government should be regulated.
You do know that it's government keeping only a few Cable providers available don't you? (ie: I can't start up my own cable company tomorrow and offer service to my neighborhood without going through my local government.) They also sign deals with cable companies to have exclusive rights to areas for certain periods of time (effectively granting a monopoly to said company.)
You want government to fix a government problem by adding more government?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Because its prohibitively expensive to be a physical plant provider for the last mile when there is already an established player?
Yeah its called a Natural Monopoly
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
Reading the article, I see that Verizon is against this, so I'm probably for it.
I especially grimaced when I read this part:
That's more transparent than usual, isn't it? In case it's not, I'll translate: "How are we supposed to have free reign to let America's infrastructure steadily decay, if regulation comes from someone other than the politicians we bought?"
The Internet is full. Go away.
>>>Do you think a fiber bundle to every door is something that just happens? That's a massive government project.
So is war but the government doesn't seem to have any problem organizing that. And besides it doesn't have to be done all at once. Start with one city (say Baltimore), see how it works, and then do another city. And another. And another. It took 30 years to finish paving the last mile of Eisenhower's original interstate project, but it was still worthwhile.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
But but... that means the government has a monopoly on pulling cable!
Seriously I agree with you, but the typical pro-business free-market thinker will tell you that you are a big-government liberal who wants to take over or put out of business the local cable and telephone companies by assuming government ownership of last-mile fiber.
Instead we should let each and every company with a few billion dollars to spend come along and tear up every street to lay their own fiber. (And no, we can't pull another line in the same conduit. Either the company that owns the conduit shouldn't be forced to host their competition, or the conduit itself is a government monopoly that must be abolished!)
Were I a land developer, and if the local government didn't force me to let the local cable and telcos run lines to every house in my new subdivision, I'd tell them both to GTFO, pull my own fibers from each new house to my own CO (fibers owned and managed by the HOA or each homeowner), and then encourage any and every company wanting to service my neighborhood to run a trunk to my CO.
Someone would do it - heck I bet Google would do it - and then the local cable and telephone companies would scramble to do it, too.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Seriously, regulating telecoms does not equal controlling the web.
The reason we want net neutrality is so that network carriers do not control the web, just offer their service without unreasonably interfering in the way a customer uses the network. Reasonable limits could be throttling heavy users WHEN there is high demand in order to more reasonably share network traffic, or when a user is using the network in a criminal way.
For example, without neutral networks, we could have a far-fetched hypothetical situation where an ISP limits the availability or performance of services from competitors, and gives preferential treatment to their own services.
I know that the web becoming more of a high-bandwidth place tossing around videos is pretty far-fetched. I know that it would be pretty crazy for ISP's to start competing with video on demand and telephone providers. I know that it would be ludicrous to expect some cable monopoly, such as Comcast, to manage to come along and snatch up some media outlet, say NBC, around the same time that they push for bandwidth caps and tiered pricing. Certainly they would never do something like make those limits apply to other media outlets, but not apply those limits to their own content.
Furthermore, nobody could imagine that they could manage to produce astroturf movements to gain sympathy from the average Joe so that not only can they get away with it, people will be begging the big bad government to stop interfering with their plans.
It would never even get this far, so we don't even have to worry about the unthinkable future possibilities, such as ISPs giving network priority and affect the actual network performance of their own content, compared to their competitors. We won't have to worry about ISPs extorting money from websites in order to give them enhanced performance (at the expense of the non-paying sites). We don't have to worry about them rerouting traffic, or trying to limit criticism by controlling the web.
Really, they couldn't even get halfway there without a lot of protest, right?
It's not like they were allowed to become a monopoly through the help of our government anyway.
No, I think the real expense in starting up the ISP is in the fact that without government regulation, they would have to go in and set up their own infrastructure which includes running hundreds of miles of line. Now if the government forces ISPs to open their lines to other companies a la electricity...maybe we can fix something.
Without regulation, those with the most wealth have the best chance of making even more wealth. Markets are not necessarily closed systems, but you can't just throw "growth" at the issue of wealth migrating into the hands of a few.
So your very first statement, which seems to put all blame for 'uncompetitive' markets on government regulation, sounds simplistic and even a bit troll-like.
Blar.
You do know that it's government keeping only a few Cable providers available don't you? (ie: I can't start up my own cable company tomorrow and offer service to my neighborhood without going through my local government.) They also sign deals with cable companies to have exclusive rights to areas for certain periods of time (effectively granting a monopoly to said company.)
You want government to fix a government problem by adding more government?
Municipal government != state government != federal government. While in general, governments at the lower levels are better at serving the interests of their citizens, it's not a hard-and-fast rule. As an example, "fix[ing] a (municipal and state) government problem by adding more (federal) government" was exactly how we got rid of Jim Crow laws. The monopoly status of cable providers, and the power it gives them over the internet in the age of broadband, is a problem which clearly is not going to be resolved at the municipal or state level, nor is the free market going to invisible-hand it away. If you've got a better alternative than the proposed very mild federal intervention, feel free to present it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.