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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."
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.
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.
I don't know about five, but how about the CIA
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.
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.
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Hmm, I'm sure someone could object that one or perhaps all of these programs didn't cause any abuse... but that's just from atop of my head, and I'm not even American (as you can no doubt tell from my spelling).
and I'm not even American (as you can no doubt tell from my spelling).
You are correct. The fact that you spelled all those words properly instantly gave you away as someone who didn't go through the American public school system ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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".
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
If Government's success rate is around 90%, with 1 in 10 failing, I have way more faith in my Government than any corporation or business.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Because letting corporations run completely amok has never caused grave economic consequences.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Social Security's biggest problem is that it's money constantly gets raided.
It's like a corporate retirement plan that gets abused by the CEO and underfunded.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
But to get more on-topic, here's my problem with the FCC action: what problem, exactly, are they solving? I've read lots here about net neutrality and all the horrible things it's supposed to prevent, but have any of those horrible things actually, you know, happened? If not, what's the rush? Why not wait to see exactly what the abuses are, so that we can know what problems the government is supposed to be fixing?
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
OK, so the right-wingers on slashdot may consider me a left-wing radical pinko socialist commie bastard... but even I can name five.
But that's incidental to the real problem... for this industry, are we better off with government regulation, or with service providers self-regulating through market forces? I think you'd have to be heavy on the Austrian side to think that market forces can properly regulate an industry that is dominated by local monopolies.
IMO, even IF the 'teh gubbermint' can't do anything right, it's still a better bet than having people whose interests are directly opposed to ours in charge of regulating themselves via market forces in an uncompetitive market.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I've read lots here about net neutrality and all the horrible things it's supposed to prevent, but have any of those horrible things actually, you know, happened?
Comcast has been caught actually dropping certain types of traffic. High-up ISP corporate officers have been publicly claiming that they should have a right to charge the sites that their customers visit.
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.
The problem is, how did the market become "uncompetitive" in the first place?
Oh yeah, Government interference. First by creating and enforcing local monopolies rather than simply selling right of way space to anyone that wanted it, and second by scooping up several billion in taxpayer money and just GIVING it to the big telcos to create and infrastructure.
If the government had just stayed the hell out, we wouldn't be having this discussion today as the Internet would likely already be far more built-out and with way more players in the market, each of them significantly smaller than the giant megacorps we have involved right now.
The BEST thing the government can do is to eliminate local monopoly legislation,(along with any other regulation making the barrier to entry so damned high) and demand a full refund of the money we wasted on the megacorps. Then give that money back to the taxpayers.
And before some "hair on fire" leftist comes along and tries to beat me with the "You don't want ANY regulation!" straw man argument; OF COURSE I want SOME regulation. I want the absolute MINIMUM amount of regulation possible, and ONLY those regulations put in place by elected officials. Unelected bureaucrats should not be allowed to create regulation and any regulation created by them should be summarily deleted from the record. PERIOD.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
I guess checking Google News for Internet Kill Switch is too much trouble.... this reply is at least as much for the person who said to get news from somewhere other than Slashdot, but it's been proposed and talked about by more than one Congressman. There are multiple bills mentioned in the below quote alone:
News about the Leiberman Senate bill has been in the mainstream press recently, and they've had hearings on it:
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Clearly your knee jerk idiot that doesn't actually study what he spouts off about, but sometime I indulge fools. Here you go:
- US Post Office (nearly bankrupt)
This has in no way made things worse. It's the best postal system in the world.
- The Sedition Act (jailed reporters/protesters for simply saying "We shouldn't be involved in the Great War.")
It was repealed on December 13, 1920.[ SO while it was a dick move, that very same government removed it.
- Social Security (upside down - more checks sent out than cash coming in)
Laughable. Social security is fine, stop buying into to the republican crap. read the papers written by the people that actually study it for a living. Yes, it occasionally needs modification, no it's not going to 'bankrupt' us. and it has in no way made anything worse.
- Medicare (ditto)
(ditto)
- Amtrak (nearly bankrupt)
How did the government intervention make this worse? The were going bankrupt well before the government intervened.
- Pelosicare (the CBO just announced it will add $110 billion to the debt, every year; not deficit neutral as advertised)
Did you read the report? or did you jsut drink Glen Becks tears? twit.
A quick sum up:
A) The Current health policy(prior Health care reform) will costs the federal government a fucking lot.
B) Health care reform wont reduce it to zero. but it will reduce it.
a quote:
"CBO also estimated that the legislation will reduce budget deficits by about $140 billion during the 2010-2019 period and by an amount in a broad range around one-half percent of gross domestic product (GDP) during the following decade"
If you didn't read the report, do you even read the CBO directors blog? No? YOU yes YOU are a fucking nitwit. Educate yourself and stop listening to liars, or get the fuck out.
People like you who keep themselves INTENTIONALLY ignorant, and still spout of opinions as if they have and real weight are the only people I would not defend with my life to say what you want. That junk in the alley way down town? I'd defend him. YOU are a fucking plague on society and can rot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
A few months ago Congress did pass a law giving the sitting president power to "kill switch" the internet
No they didn't. The bill hasn't even gone to a vote of the full Senate. What you were reading about was a Senate panel passing it. The two aren't synonymous.
If the government had just stayed the hell out, we wouldn't be having this discussion today as the Internet would likely already be far more built-out and with way more players in the market, each of them significantly smaller than the giant megacorps we have involved right now.
Uhh, history teaches us the opposite... not with earlier internets of course, but with roads, plumbing and all kinds of infrastructure that suffers if forced to pay off quickly. The situation is greatly improved if there is an organisation willing to invest huge sums _for the good of the people_ without monetary return in prospect. This has always been a government in the past.
Building for profit from ground up doesn't get equal access to everyone, but equal and neutral access is something our society, you and me _extremely_ profit from in hindsight.
With an internet built on private money only, we'd have a fragmented mess of incompatibility.
For a somewhat related example, just look at the OS platform market today. The OS is just infrastructure, the applications are what matters.
Now we might not see the long term benefit of everyone having the "same" OS to run the applications form. But if this happened "magically"*** today, people in twenty years would say how silly we were back then not to realise this obvious improvement.
Has happened with currency (you know, when each city had it's own coinage), rail track standardisation, trading tolls, etc.
*** I don't care which OS, just that it enables everyone to run all applications. Obviously this is not realistic anyway because of very practical reasons, i.e. multibillion dollar companies having some objections there.
Nice attempt at revisionist history. Ma Bell became a regulated monopoly after they were sued under antitrust law in 1913. They were sued because AT&T started buying up all the competition in 1907. They became "uncompetitive" all by themselves by functionally eliminating competition and purchasing as much right-of-way as possible to prevent new competitors from entering the market.
Once the broadband net is no longer neutral, the case to argue about keeping it neutral is already over. Right now the broadband net is theoretically neutral, so it makes sense to treat it like other neutral networks (e.g. telephone).
Once broadband is not carrying mostly neutral traffic, but paid-partner traffic the argument that is should be treated like a neutral network becomes much harder to argue. That is why the FCC wants to make this move now.
Why do you insist on repeating this as if it were truth? Do you still not recognize the existence of natural monopolies? Even the Austrians recognize the existence of natural monopolies.
That has little to do with the creation or reason for existence of the telco monopolies. They existed prior to that, and would exist even without it. Massive fixed costs for providing telco service ensure the existence of those monopolies.
That is just about the funniest thing I've read today. Market actors consolidate due to economies of scale, in any market where economies of scale exist.
The elephant in the middle of the room you so clumsily step around is that the massive capital required to achieve economies of scale in the telco world is a bigger barrier to market for would-be entrants than anything the government adds. Without the guaranty of monopoly, there wouldn't *be* a telco provider in a lot of areas. No one wants to sink millions in up-front costs when they can't be sure of having customers.
That's a recipe for disaster. The people writing the regs would have even less understanding of the industries they are regulating. So we'd have even MORE regulations written by lobbyists for the industries that are supposed to be regulated.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What would be best would be local municipally owned wires leased to ISPs, perhaps multiple ISPs.
It's good enough that companies will sue to stop it, like TDS did.