FCC Planning Rule Changes To Restore US Net Neutrality

Karl C writes "In a statement issued today, FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler announced that the commission will begin a rule-making process to re-impose Net Neutrality, which was recently struck down in Federal court. Among the standards Wheeler intends to pursue are vigorous enforcement of a requirement for transparency in how ISPs manage traffic, and a prohibition on blocking (the 'no blocking' provision.) This seems like exactly what net neutrality activists have been demanding: Total prohibition of throttling, and vigorous enforcement of that rule, and of a transparency requirements so ISPs can't try to mealy-mouth their way around accusations that they're already throttling Netflix. Even before the court decision overturning net neutrality, Comcast and Verizon users have been noting Netflix slowdowns for months."

Comments

Re:Could we be so lucky?

[lgw]

If this is so great, explain "total prohibition of throttling". Most networks are oversubscribed, and that's OK since most users use a small portion of their allowed bandwidth. One way or another, there will be throttling. What about QoS-based throttling? Voice traffic is harmed much more by dropped packets than torrents. The ISPs sell voice service, and they sell products that compete with torrents. Doing the right thing for QoS directly serves the financial interests of the ISPs. Should we cut off our nose to spiderface? Never spiderface.

So are we going to have clear rules about what you can and can't throttle? Simple rules won't work. ISPs will be better at gaming those rules than the FCC will be at writing them. As SuperKendall posted about 4000 times the last time this came up (and still most people didn't get it): the way Comcast was throttling Netflix was perfectly OK under the last set of rules. Do you think more rules will help? There are always corner cases to exploit, because each new rule just creates new corners.

Anyhow, we know where any complex set of rules ends: the big players end up writing the rules. I'm sure the cable companies would happily give up throttling Netflix if they get in exchange the ability to bar any new players from entering the ISP business. After all, they don't have local monopolies everywhere yet, but with a high enough regulatory barrier to entry they could get there.