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Verizon Challenges FCC's Net Neutrality Rules
GovTechGuy writes "Verizon filed an appeal on Friday asking a federal court to strike down the FCC's net neutrality rules, which are scheduled to take effect on November 20. A federal judge tossed the FCC's previous attempt at enforcing net neutrality against Comcast last May, and more legal challenges are expected in the coming days."
I think that all of the net neutrality challengers should get together and head over to http://www.privateislandsonline.com/oceania.htm, where they could buy a volcanic island. Perfect for the super villain that has everything except an evil lair!
/. readers could petition the local government to allow multi-tiered internet provision and drop all evil enterprises to the bottom of the list, throttling them back to dial up speeds! Mwha, mwha, mwha!!!
Once set up,
Verizon asserts that it is committed to an open internet. Verizon believes the Federal Communications Commission has no business regulating communications. Verizon reports that the turd floating in the punchbowl is a Baby Ruth bar.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Who can?
Let them filter and throttle their private network, but if so connection to the public one is prohibited.
You have to understand that Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the 24hour corporate spin machine has told them that NN is all about limiting what you can say on the internet. They liken it to the Fairness Doctrine, the now-dead bill that once required broadcasters to give equal time to liberal and conservative viewpoints and, ironically. the same law Limbaugh used to get on the air, a law that once made sense when there was a scarcity of broadcasting outlets.
Net Neutrality works the other way. We now have limitless outlets for expressing our views on the Internet, but corporations need scarcity in order to make money. So they seek to throttle the bandwidth, creating an artificial scarcity on their product and drive its value up. Without Net Neutrality, corporations have the right to discriminate against speech they don't like or companies they are in competition with. It's the exact opposite of Free Speech, but the conservative media have convinced their followers that black is white and that this bill is double-plus bad for Free Speech.
Without Net Neutrality, the Internet risks falling into a communications war, bad for all Americans and bad for the Corporations who are arguing against it. I don't understand how the same ideology that argues so strongly for Free Trade around the world has taken such a strong stance against the same exact principle for the Internet.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
The courts (pretty much all of them) don't understand the issue and will get it wrong, handing the carriers a huge gift and the public an ass-reaming like they have never had.
I'd just blame it on their pathological hate of any form of regulation. I'm sure a few of them would abolish the police and just give everyone guns for self-defence if they could.
Well, since it was ruled in court that police have no obligation to protect you, only to investigate crimes, you basically are better off with a gun.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Only if Congress has granted them the authority to do so and only for the reasons that Congress specified as grounds to do so.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The fact that Verizon's unhappy with the very weak net neutrality legislation that has loopholes big enough to drive an aircraft carrier through sideways tells me Verizon has some SERIOUSLY evil plans in store...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
New companies see the consumers broadband connection as a free resource to exploit. The ISPs would like these companies to share in the burden they are placing on their networks.
That, my friend, is a detestable rewording of the issues intended to evoke sympathy from the masses.
Share the burden? Exploit resources for free? That's called framing. Was that your intent?
New companies see the consumers broadband connection as a resource the consumers have paid for.
New companies see the consumers broadband connection as a resource the consumers will use to get goods and services.
People thinking about starting new companies see an opportunity to start new business using the consumers broadband connection to deliver goods and services.
People thinking about starting new companies can create innovative new products and services using the consumers broadband connection.
Let's all go back to the pre-iPhone model where the telcos were gatekeepers of phone apps. In those days you were lucky to get Tetris on a phone. It wasn't the vibrant ecology of business we now have, but at least no one was "exploiting" the user's "resource".
Grow some integrity. Get a job working for someone who doesn't pay you to lie.
Imagine if your power provider wanted to charge different prices for your power based on whether you used it for toasting bread or watching TV; even further, what if it charged more for your toaster power if you used a brand of toaster that has not paid the power company for 'better' rates. The courts would never allow such a business practice.
The internet is an amazing tool, but I think it needs discipline and will to use it efficiently; under the current net neutrality paradigm, it can achieve neither, so its potential can't be realized. I think a tiered internet means a controllable internet, one that would be more useful (and profitable) than the media chaos that reigns there now. Absent attribution and consequences, the internet is an obstacle to control, in much the same way equal access and fairness doctrines impeded the usefulness of broadcast mass media in the last century, or easy and cheap access to printed mass media impeded the usefulness of newspapers and magazines in the century prior to that one. We've had a few centuries since the invention of the printing press to understand the ramifications of mass media on the population -- I think it would be irrational in the extreme to not apply that understanding to the internet.
I'd just blame it on their pathological hate of any form of regulation. I'm sure a few of them would abolish the police and just give everyone guns for self-defence if they could.
please...would that it were so. An armed society is a *polite* society.
Right. It's a bit like gun control... like it or not, freedom to bear arms is in the constitution, and no matter how sensible it might be to forbid private ownership of guns, the danger from circumventing constitutional restrictions is FAR worse than guns ever would be. If congress said no to the FCC, and you don't like it, don't advocate the FCC doing an illegal power grab; instead, lobby congress.
Only if Congress has granted them the authority to do so and only for the reasons that Congress specified as grounds to do so.
Again congress has not given the FCC authority to regulate the internet.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I have not made an in depth study of the statutory basis for the FCCs authority. My original point was that if Congress has not given the FCC the authority to regulate the Internet, it does not have that authority even though it is the "Federal Communication Commission" (and that it can be debated as to whether or not Congress has the Constitutional authority to give the FCC authority over the Internet).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I think that it's absolutely stupid that Verizon had to wait until the rules went into effect before they could sue over them. Just think for a moment how much cost and trouble these rules will cause if they're overturned months, or years, after they went into effect when all of this could have been avoided by testing them in court first.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Verizon has already sued over them, and the rules go into effect on November 20, so its obvious that Verizon did not have to wait until the rules went into effect before they could sue.
What they had to do was wait until the rules were published in the Federal Register which is the thing that makes them an official rule.
That's a valid concern, which is why the law requires regulations like this to be published in the Federal Register for a certain length of time before they go into effect, and courts have the power when a challenge is made, if certain criteria are met, to prevent the regulation from going into effect until the challenge is resolved.
How did that Wild West society work out? There were a lot of guns out there, too, weren't there?
and a variety of slow, expensive, crappy alternatives. (I've tried DSL. Sucks balls) Which is almost as bad as having no alternatives, and certainly does not constitute healthy competition or a free marketplace.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
You have to enforce politeness at gunpoint in the US?
So THAT'S why all those gangbangers are so nice to each other all the time. . . oh wait. Nevermind.
-GiH
Oh, the throttling they'll do to traffic they can't identify...
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I find it deeply frustrating when these companies behave like this. You look and just feel helpless. What can you do? They have millions of dollars and probably lots of connections in the legal world. I want to believe that we lowly humans have some kind of liberty against them. Anyone have any thoughts?
I wonder if the FCC wouldn't have better luck by regulating advertising claims. I'm neither a lawyer nor American so I'm not sure what legal rights/responsibilities they have, but would they (or some other friendly government entity) be able to write a standardized definition of the phrase "broadband internet access" and insist that ISPs not mislead consumers by offering them something they aren't really getting?
Most of the important requirements of net neutrality are, after all, just restatements of what internet access is supposed to be.
It might also be useful if they could provide a working definition for "minimum available bandwidth", i.e., the minimum bandwidth the user can expect to actually receive when the network is at its most busy, and require ISPs to provide this information (as well, of course, as any applicable data caps and/or "fair use" policies) to potential customers in plain terms.
(It probably isn't economically practicable for ISPs to economically provide a specified minimum bandwidth at all times, but something like a 99th-percentile system might work well. One of the other practical problems with creating a workable definition is that bandwidth to any particular remote host might be limited at the other end, and it may be difficult to unambiguously define where "this end" stops and "the other end" begins; hopefully, though, the experts could come up with something.)