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Democrats Pan Google-Verizon Net Neutrality Proposal
GovTechGuy writes "Four House Democrats wrote to the Federal Communications Commission, urging them to write strict net neutrality rules and reject the framework put forward by Google and Verizon. The lawmakers, including Rep. Anna Eshoo, who represents the district containing Google HQ, said the Google-Verizon proposal increases the pressure on the FCC to come up with actual net neutrality rules, and characterize the deal as harmful to consumers and beneficial for the corporations. In particular, the letter took issue with two pieces of the Verizon-Google proposal: exemptions for managed services and wireless services from strict net-neutrality rules."
We don't like what they proposed but not only can we not make our own proposal, we can't find anybody else's to latch on to. Think up something that doesn't piss us off!
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
They're finally realizing that you can't let corporations have their way with the internet? Hopefully, this leads to a reversal that grants the FCC the proper powers to uphold these rules should they actually make the climb.
Palms will be greased.
Regulators who regulate the regulations before the regulation is a regulation?
If it moves, regulate it.
If it moves again, tax it.
If it still moves fire the board, fail the bank, then tax it again.
From the way I see it, if these politicians actually had the will to put their foot down on net neutrality then Google wouldn't even have to compromise and cut deals.
But what do I know.
Well - that's a relief. This should postpone the death of net neutrality for at least a couple of weeks.
I remember back in my day we fought tooth and nail to keep the government _away_ from controlling the Internet. Now apparently it's fashionable to want them controlling it, but only for "good" purposes. I'm sure they'll keep their hands off except to ensure the evil corporations don't screw the noble consumer over, though. Government's pretty good at that kind of thing. Incorruptible and efficient beyond reproach, that's what the government is.
said the Google-Verizon proposal increases the pressure on the FCC to come up with actual net neutrality rules, and characterize the deal as harmful to consumers and beneficial for the corporations.
"We think this is bad because it will force us to do work."
"We think this is bad because it will force consumers to pay money for something."
"We think this is bad because it means that corporations will make money."
Are you kidding me? Who is this lady and why is she not on a plane to Alaska?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The lack of neutrality for managed services is going to put an increased burden on IT companies. It will increase the costs where cloud services are already being proven to NOT lower costs.
The fact of the matter is that True Net Neutrality is beneficial to every company EXCEPT ISPs. ISPs being a set than includes broadband, T1, DSL and any provider as well as the increasing role mobile providers take. Basically a set of companies that receive quite a bit in government money ALREADY to fund construction of network infrastructure.
It isn't wrong. They wrote a fucking letter that says we don't like what Verizon and Google have proposed. It doesn't have any proposal of what the FCC policy should be. Just that Google and Verizon's shouldn't be adopted.
The closest they get is saying what concepts should be central in the policy that is adopted.
Since this is slashdot, we can make this a car analogy. Google and Verizon have designed and built a vehicle. They have presented it and it could be sent to the manufacturing line. These democrats have said "don't build it!" and instead are proposing that the factory make cars that have 4 tires, a steering wheel, some seats, and an engine. 4 cylinder? *shrug!* Comfy seats? Eh, if you like.
It would be one thing for a private organization to protest the Google/Verizon proposal. But these people are in the practice of legislation. If they object, why haven't they and their staff managed to come up with a proposal of their own? Its only been, you know, years.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
...doesn't exist yet.
When the internet first started...
There was no "cloud".
There was no streaming video.
There was no bittorrent.
There were no VPNs, no work-at-home over the net.
There wasn't even a web - though that came fairly quickly.
The internet was conceived as an open-ended transport mechanism, with no plans or constraints as to the data being transported, though there were some thoughts about QOS, recognizing that some data had to get there quickly, some reliably, some not particularly either.
Commercial deployments of anything, not just the internet, generally aren't open-ended. They tend to plan things, up-front, and put just as much thought into billing as they do into the rest of the job. (Ever see how much cell phone plumbing is dedicated to billing, as opposed to merely shuttling customers' data?)
The best reason for net neutrality is something we haven't done yet, something no company has planned for, and very likely something that would be hindered by default, because it doesn't fit into current plans. (Or can you say, "disruption not desired!"?)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
No, the Congress is too chickenshit to do their job, and want the FCC to do it instead. They know that no matter what is implemented, it's going to be absolute shit. If the FCC does it, then no congresscritters can be blamed, and they can just say "hey, we had nothing to do with it. Talk to the FCC".
Trouble is, it isn't the FCC's job. If the Congress wants Net Neutrality so bad, they are gonna have to get off their collective asses and write legislation. However, they know that it's going to lead to increased prices, decreased availability, and decreased access, and they don't want to get called out on it come election day.
Google and Verizon really stepped in it. Their new pact doesn't have enough opportunity for government power brokers to choose winners and losers in exchange for campaign contributions. How dare these big companies decide to carve up the free Internet without giving the local warlords their due?
Expect a grand jury investigation of Google WIFI spying to begin sometime in the next 2 months. It's going to take a lot of campaign contributions and jobs for family members to call off those dogs.
Managed services are a good idea, if they are run on top of a neutral network. As long as that physical network is developed by an unbiased entity and resold fairly with no oversubscription, ISPs should be free to carve out as much bandwidth as they can pay for. As demand increases, regardless of content, investment in additional capacity will follow.
The problem with the existing situation is that as long as the ISPs own the underlying physical network, the "manages services" aren't running on top of the Internet, but rather the Internet is transformed into a "managed service". There is no incentive whatsoever for the ISPs to invest in additional capacity beyond what they require for their own services, so investment in the Internet is dead, and its value for future innovation is lost.
Somebody in Washington is actually STOPPING the maniacally evil corporations for once? I must be missing something. Either that or I'm going to fall over dead from a shock induced heart attack in 3, 2, 1.......
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Im the AC to which you are responding, and I still don't think you get it. Let. Me. Spell. It. Out.
It isn't wrong.
Yes it is. No where in the article does it say that Google/Verizon laid out the specifics. No where in the article does it say that the G/V plan forces the FCC to do anything. In fact, it is the Democrats that are the ones urging the FCC to take action.
It doesn't have any proposal of what the FCC policy should be.
Well, they reference this: http://www.broadband.gov/the-third-way-narrowly-tailored-broadband-framework-chairman-julius-genachowski.html
The closest they get is saying what concepts should be central in the policy that is adopted.
My impression is that is as close as the google/verizon proposal gets also. It IS a discussion about the framework, not the specifics.
The real argument, AFAICT, is about whether the wireless spectrum should be regulated by the FCC or not. So if there is a video service on your cell phone, should the data transfer for that video be network neutral? G/V are saying no, and the Dems are saying yes.
your car analogy is wrong in so many ways.
legislation affects everyone and should be thought out properly.
your choice of car affects only you (for the most part).
your analogy would be better if you changed cars to roads.
google (delivery company) and verizon (freeway road maker) have come up with a scheme to govern how all automobiles drive on all roads, and want legislation passed to make everyone follow it.
verizon wants to put tolls on all but one lane on the freeway, forcing anyone who doesn't pay through the nose to use the slow lane.
google doesn't care how cars drive on freeways because google has car depots in every town and google services are only offered to the local population. google cars rarely have to travel over the freeways. google makes so much profit locally that it can easily afford to send a few small cars on the fast lane when it needs to - and because it's got its local depots, most of it's international traffic can go over the slow lane anyway. google is quite happy if all its competitors are forced to pay huge tolls to send data at reasonable speeds or even to just NOT have their data penalised.
and enlightened You thinks that the US government should just blindly adopt their proposal and enact legislation in favour of these two parties instead of producing real legislation designed to benefit society instead of benefiting incumbent corporations.
It doesn't have to say in the article. We've already seen the framework proposal from Google/Verizon. So have they, or they wouldn't be bitching and moaning. And it is immaterial that Google/Verizon are not forcing the FCC to do anything. I didn't assume, say, or otherwise imply that they were. The Democrats are urging the FCC to take action. So are Google, Verizon, and other groups with political or philosophical interests in the matter.
Which is, interestingly, the FCC Chariman's proposal. Not a congressional one. And literally, cannot be implemented. Because it cherrypicks which parts of the Telecomm act to apply to broadband providers. So, I will retract one part of my original post. They did have someone else's proposal to latch on to. Although it seems rather useless to suggest an alternative proposal that can't be used because Congress has to change the law.. Also, the Google/Verizon framework is specific enough that the FCC could make a ruling on a case with it. The FCC Chairman's is legally impossible.
Google and Verizon, at least, believe that their framework can be partially implemented under FCC authority now. I don't know if they're right about that. That would require more legal ability than I possess. But I know the issue has been around for years and gone nowhere. I stand by the "we don't like it, we have no ideas of our own, do something that doesn't piss us off" bits of my original translation.
Personally, I think the Google/Verizon solution is .. pragmatic. Thats about all I can say about it. The FCC chair's is currently dead, legally. On the other hand, the solution I would prefer is wildly idealistic and as such won't happen, ever.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
If they object, why haven't they and their staff managed to come up with a proposal of their own?
She did come up with (or at least co-sponsor) a proposal: the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009.
What research did you do before posting this opinion? Reading Eshoo's wiki page or a basic search would have brought up the very bill you like to pretend doesn't exist.
A) This is slashdot. We don't have to have accuracy to make car analogies.
B) The analogy would be wrong if I was trying to show that everything about legislation and everything about car choice was the same. I wasn't.
C) My analogy wasn't about what car to buy. My analogy was about what car to make.
D) My analogy doesn't make any judgement, positive or negative, on the Google/Verizon "car". Just that the Democrats don't have one.
See, Google/Verizon and these Democrats are design teams and they push cars (policy) for the factory (the FCC) to implement. Google/Verizon have one. These 4 Democrats don't. You see how simple and short that is, compared to your drawn out and highly wrong analogy?
The Google/Verizon proposal doesn't favor themselves. In fact, it would protect their competitors, to use your hideous analogy, from paying huge tolls. Maybe you should read it sometime. What it doesn't do is make additional regulation of wireless. You know, that shitty connection you have now? You'd still have it if the FCC "blindly adopted" the Google/Verizon proposal. There is no sekret $profit!$ clause where adoption means automatic price hikes. If the wireless providers wanted to hike prices, they could do it right now. Whatever reasons they have for not being higher now, would still exist post-adoption.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
I'm not the only one that likes to pretend it doesn't exist. The article contains the full text of their letter to the FCC. You know how many times that act got mentioned? Not once. So I learned it exists. Woo.
Of course, you know what you didn't mention? The fact that the Internet Freedom Preservation Act got proposed to the previous Congress's Senate and House. And to the Senate in the 109th Congress. It died in committee each time. Its that good.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
I don't quite understand why a legislation on Net Neutrality would "lead to increased prices, decreased availability, and decreased access".
Right now, the market is solely in the hands of big corporations whose sole purpose is to maximize profit by:
- charging at the highest rate
- investing the less possible
In theory that works well for the customers in an opened market with enough competitors. But that's not what we are experiencing here.
I like the analogy of roads, infrastructure, and cars, content. Try to imagine what it would be if these were build by the private sector without any kind of regulation.
Right, because regulating food and drug safety meant a government takeover of our food and drug supplies....
I don't quite understand why a legislation on Net Neutrality would "lead to increased prices, decreased availability, and decreased access".
I don't understand it, either. When they actually have a bill that contains *only* network neutrality (rules on fair practices regarding routing, throttling, etc) then we may know if it would. However, the legislation proposed so far is huge, and the actual "network neutrality" portions are but a small part. Maybe it's the many hundreds of pages of proposed law that have very little, if any, bearing on actual network operation that they are concerned with?
What's even worse with so much legislation in the last few decades (and a trend that seems to be accelerating) is that Congress (no matter the party in power) often write laws that simply grant (or create) some government department populated with unelected bureaucrats broad powers to create rules & regulations with the force of law (basically doing the job of Congress without having elections as a check).
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Of course you don't get it. These robber baron wannabes are just spouting mindlessly spouting Rand-isms.
The market is already stagnant and dominated by entrenched natural monopolies. Our prices and service levels are the laughing stock of the planet.
Not much damage can be done by telling monopolies to play nice.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sounds more like a certain 4 congresscritters didn't feel "included" enough in the drafting of policy. Nothing some campaign contributions couldn't rectify.
I kind of feel that the less regulation the better... too many ways for it to be misapplied. And there's still enough competition and alternatives out there to keep any one ISP from doing anything too nasty.
But I would love it if they found some way to prevent Verizon from blocking HTTP and SMTP ports on residential FiOS so I wouldn't have to sign up for their business FiOS just so I could run my own damn web and email servers on the default ports.
verizon wants to put tolls on all but one lane on the freeway, forcing anyone who doesn't pay through the nose to use the slow lane.
It honestly worries me that you got modded insightful when you seem to have no clue what the proposal was saying. It has NOTHING TO DO with forcing tolls, metaphorical or otherwise, onto competitors.
If you had actually read ANY of the recent articles on the subject, you would know that the proposal from verizon and google would PREVENT any "fast lane" tolls from being applied to wired internet, and ensure net neutrality. It would also give FCC power to enforce it, which it desperately needs given the comcast fiasco of a few years ago.
What everyone has their panties in a knot over is the fact that neither Verizon or Google want to impose regulation on wireless-- not that they are asking for a guarentee of no regulation, but simply that their bill imposes no additional restrictions on wireless.
Google gives the reasons that
A) the wireless market has PLENTY of competition, and as such regulation is unnecessary (we are capitalist, right?)
B) the wireless market is still "young" and growing rapidly, and regulations could hamper the growth (especially given point A above)
C) If ever there is a problem in the future, their proposal does nothing to prevent further regulation, and in fact asks for a periodic review to make sure everything is still gravy (IIRC)
Really, the only reason its become a big deal is because no matter WHAT google does, proposes, or says, people want to make a big deal of it and find conspiracy theories about how Google intends to steal your identity, your life, and who knows what else.
Quite honestly, I'm beginning to believe the longer before any sort of legislation on Net Neutrality is passed, the better. It's going to be a real mess once the ignorant Congress and the predatory corporations involved are done with it all.
One benefit to waiting would be that these mobile device exemptions might go away. As it stands now, I think anything relating to specific device classes should only be added to a proposal if it has a mandatory 3-5yr review built in.
I completely understand Verizon's desire to limit what they have to provide to their handsets (though customers should fight back on this and aim for a happy medium). They are a business and need to make money--trying to use a phone like I use my desktop+cable modem is probably going to put too much strain on the system if everybody starts doing it (see: iphone's in NYC). Only problem is that in 5 years, we may well be able to deliver everything people want over 6G wireless without issue--but this legislation will chill out and let them keep limiting connections even though the physical limits are gone. Without some mandatory tech review forcing common-carrier status (when the lines actually become able to carry enough common data), it will be just like the chicago taxi gas surcharge which was implemented when gas was over $4/g and is still added to every fair several years later with gas under $3 (with a review, they could have either decided to raise the taxi rates or remove the surcharge...not tack on an extra $.50 in hidden fees to every ride).
Bottles.
Why not just pay based on how much you use?
The issue is that the ISPs feel that Google, iTunes, Amazon, etc. are getting to use "their" bandwidth for free. You won't be getting the bill for that 100GB of data, the websites you happened to visit will.
If we're going to allow that, I think I'll have to form an ISP and bill websites $100000 per KB my customers browse.
Don't worry, I'd still bill my customers for their internet access too.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Congress take the CISC approach to writing laws. They put as much in as possible so that they can get as much passed as possible with a 'single' law.
I wish they took the RISC approach. If the law has 15 parts, then pass 15 different laws. The laws could be shorter, and should be easier to understand. Something tells me they would still add pages and pages of confusing wording so that the average Joe can not make sense of the law anyway.
>>>The market is already stagnant and dominated by entrenched natural monopolies.
I have almost 15 different companies to choose from for my Wireless internet. What monopoly are you speaking of?
.
>>>Our prices and service levels are the laughing stock of the planet.
The US is the second fastest continent-sized federation in the world, second to Russia but ahead of the EU, China, Canada, Austalia, Brazil, and so on. Again, I don't think you know what you're talking about.
As for prices - I don't know. Have not done much research comparing the average EU price to the average US price.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If they object, why haven't they and their staff managed to come up with a proposal of their own? Its only been, you know, years.
Because by definition any fair proposal on network neutrality that they could put together would anger their corporate sponsors. Any proposal that their corporate sponsors support is, by definition, not network neutrality.
Support SETI@home
Really? There's enough competition out there? Are you blind or a complete idiot? 1 or 2 wireline providers, 4 major wireless providers, 1 of which doesn't go beyond city limits.
I wish they took the RISC approach. If the law has 15 parts, then pass 15 different laws.
Then the Republicans would have to filibuster fifteen times as many bills.
Yeah! Those dirty Republocrats! Just wait until the Demopublicans get elected!
Step back, put down the partisan kool-aid both parties use to distract you, and open your eyes. The only real differences these days are "wedge" issues designed to inflame and divide without bringing about any real change in the direction the country is heading (hint; look up the Weimar Republic. The US is doing almost exactly the same things that led to the Weimar Republic collapsing and the rise of Hitler and the NSDAP/Nazis).
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Heh, well, I already admitted to being a Verizon customer, so yeah, I'm probably blinded by my complete idiocy.
But I don't watch TV, so I don't have cable, which I guess I've heard horror stories about being a bunch of regional monopolies. And it looks like it's just Verizon and maybe a bit of AT&T rolling out fiber networks. But I asked the Verizon tech not to cut my copper phone lines, so I still have the hordes of DSL providers to choose from. And I've been known to subscribe to multiple ISPs at once so I'd have multiple ways to get connected if one fails for some reason... as service gets cheaper I think more people might go this route. Heck, I still have my Metricom Ricochet modem :P
I actually kinda wish telecom would get hit by some major monopoly, if only temporarily, so the peoples would be motivated to finally deploy a decent community mesh network, maybe based on OLSRd or something.