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FCC Chair Genachowski Resigns; What Effect on Net Regulation?
New submitter RougeFemme writes with news of Friday's announcement that FCC chairman Julius Genachowski will step down in the next several weeks (also at Politico), and asks "Obama promised us the continuation of a free, open Internet. Will the resignation of the FCC chairman have any affect on that 'net neutrality'?"
That right there should tell you how that will turn out.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What company will be his new employer: Comcast? Verizon?
it's pretty goddamned ridiculous that one person can presumably have so great an effect on the freedom of us all in a way that goes well beyond national boundaries or the ability of any single individual to know if they're doing the right thing.
I'm not sure a high percentage of Obama's supporters, or americans in general, know what net neutrality is. I don't think most videogame enthusiasts know how net neutrality is important to their future lives. I -know- most netflix users don't.
That's important: most people aren't already "with" net neutrality. The pro net neutrality side is small, the telecom side is smaller, but they have money, our side does not. The only way we keep them from crapping up the internet is with significantly higher numbers, by explaining to people how losing net neutrality is going to mean worse graphics for their games, netflix dying out and going back to something closer to blockbuster, inflating prices for internet access, no increase in speed, and your favorite mom and pop websites being replaced by MTV, MSNBC, and FOX websites.
In case you couldn't tell, I'm in favor of using FUD to our advantage. Feel free to try to convince people to care about net neutrality by honest, unbiased information, and feel free to call me a cynic for thinking that approach won't work.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/f-c-c-commissioner-to-join-comcast/
Four months after the Federal Communications Commission approved a hotly contested merger of Comcast and NBC Universal,
one of the commissioners who voted for the deal said on Wednesday that she would soon join Comcast's Washington lobbying office.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"In case you couldn't tell, I'm in favor of using FUD to our advantage. Feel free to try to convince people to care about net neutrality by honest, unbiased information, and feel free to call me a cynic for thinking that approach won't work."
Try: "Better service, plus more freedom and privacy, for a lower price."
If the freedom and privacy parts don't get them, maybe the better service and lower price parts will.
First off, it should be understood that the existing "net neutrality" rules (FCC Rules 47CFR Part 8) are being challenged in the courts, and odds on will be overturned. That's because they were designed to be overturned! They were a political feint designed to get past the last elections before the (DC Circuit) court got to them, which will be this year. Before adopting Part 8, the FCC suggested other rule options that would have been legal, but they put flagrant errors in their actual Order, as if to say "overturn me!". (The biggest one was hanging it on Section 706, basically a legal footnote, which doesn't grant that power, rather than Title II of the law, which could, if applied correctly, which would probably have opened the telco networks a bit more.)
This is a good thing. The rules, were they to stand, would be very dangerous.
The commercial Internet did not get created by government-imposed rules; it was however created because government-imposed rules on the telephone companies required them to allow ISPs to use their facilities. The key rule, dating back to 1980, was called Computer II. So ISPs could lease lines for business and do dial-up for consumers. And until 2005 ISPs could lease DSL for consumers too. Then the FCC, which had shifted in 2001 (hmmm... who took over that year?) to become very strongly in cahoots with the Bell companies (SBC/ATT, VZ, Qwest). They "deregulated" the phone companies, allowing them to not provide access to ISPs, so the phone companies could be the only ISPs on their DSL and fiber networks.
Telco networks were common carriers. They had to be absolutely, totally content-neutral, as they were tariffed as "dumb" bit pipes. ISPs are legally treated as "information" providers, which grants editorial control and is meant to be the content, not the carriage. They are largely used like carriers, but that's because the carriers suck so bad.
It was a couple of months after that FCC move that the term "network neutrality" came out. It was a terrible idea, meaning that because there was no competition any more for Internet, just cable vs. telco, the Internet itself should become content-regulated. So spammers, pirate CDNs, and other miscreants would have the right to congest your ISP and your ISP would not be allowed to do anything about it. They could do "reasonable network management", though, which means, basically, "whoever makes the most campaign contributions wins". Small ISPs would be creamed; Verizon (the law firm with an antenna on the roof) could do anything, including block much-wanted content.
Julius did very little to fix this. Until 2011 he had a real hard-on for Verizon FiOS, though when VZ said they were discontinuing its expansion, he got ticked. The previous Chairman, Kevin Martin, hated hated hated Comcast (which is run by Democrats); Julius G was friendly to them. But didn't change the FCC's anti-competitive trajectory very much. Wall Street likes monopolies. Julius is a Wall Street kind of guy (a VC).
So long as people argue for Internet content regulation ("network neutrality"), instead of for a free choice of ISPs ("open networks"), they'll be spinning their wheels. Alas, the next Chairman (probably Wheeler, Kornbluh, Sandoval, Levin, or Strickling) is unlikely to change much. Susan Crawford would really shake things up, but is probably too controversial to get the job.