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New White House Petition For Net Neutrality
Bob9113 (14996) writes "On the heels of yesterday's FCC bombshell, there is a new petition on the White House petition site titled, 'Maintain true net neutrality to protect the freedom of information in the United States.' The body reads: 'True net neutrality means the free exchange of information between people and organizations. Information is key to a society's well being. One of the most effective tactics of an invading military is to inhibit the flow of information in a population; this includes which information is shared and by who. Today we see this war being waged on American citizens. Recently the FCC has moved to redefine "net neutrality" to mean that corporations and organizations can pay to have their information heard, or worse, the message of their competitors silenced. We as a nation must settle for nothing less than complete neutrality in our communication channels. This is not a request, but a demand by the citizens of this nation. No bandwidth modifications of information based on content or its source.'"
So say we all.
Too bad we failed to elect Obama. Bush is just letting the corporates take everything they want!
Because this time, the Government will listen to a petition of the people posted on a website.
That text is absurd. While it may be a figurative war, it is not a literal one.
I had just searched this out and signed it based on the FCC news. Good to see that my mind and the hive mind are linked.
What about QoS for VOIP?
Oligarchies don't have to listen to anyone, sadly. Everyone needs to learn how to do everything for ourselves or we'll become extinct when all the resources run out. (sooner than you think)
We'll all have to learn how to adapt to space without governments if we are to survive as people. If you were to set a course for a distant nebula, nobody could catch you as long as you kept your heading.
But that kind of travel is very far off. One breakthrough could trigger a chain reaction... a singularity.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Obama ran on a policy of net neutrality support and staffed the FCC board with members with the intent of establishing net neutrality.
Now the FCC (which the Obama administration controls) is doing a 180.
Is this being done because Obama and the DNC doesn't want it or because Comcast is throwing money around?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/re...
http://thehill.com/blogs/hilli...
Are you against overnight delivery options? This is propaganda against the same thing, except for bandwidth.
Companies offer expedited delivery because it increases the amount of business they can do. If it cost them customers to offer tiered services, they wouldn't do it. The internet will be larger and offer more options, not fewer, if Net Neutrality is kept out of the ISP industry.
The righteous indignation against internet freedom in this case is surprising for the community that wants so much choice in software.
Serious question. These petitions are clearly not only completely absent any actual legal or procedural relevance; they are routinely ignored by the white house, often complete with redicule and mocking, that is if any attention is paid to them whatsoever.
These things are at best a token 'feel good' nod toward public relations and more realistically, these things are just flat out time wasters for all involved.
So why is so much attention paid to them?
Isn't it better to use your time and money towards things that could result in some real policy or legislative changes in government, such as supporting or working to defeat politicians, supporitng lobbying efforts, or other more traditional methods of interacting with the state?
Oh and by the way, president Obama has made his 'transparency' campaign lie completely 'transparent' by now, you all should know that he will follow through on no promise that he doesn't already want to act on (which is most of them) and in the end is happy to lie right to the face of the voter and then go off into a back room and do exactly the opposite of what he states he will do, towards whatever end he pleases. So given that (Gitmo? allowing bills to be reviewed before signing them? eliminating lobbyists from the white house etc.) why would you guys spend any effort at all in trying to influence his decicions or actions? You *know* they could not possibly care less what you proles think.
Real question; what are you guys thinking here? No one cares!
The petition could be written on expensive parchment and soaked in Chanel #5 as people bow and scrape hope for the best, and it will still never fly!
The white spaces rules only allow 40 MILLIwatts (Gee thanks Barry Bubba!) and the FCC and broadcasters act like it's tearing up the Constitution!
Pump in something like 5 watts, set up your own local IPnetworks (be willing to sacrifice a few cheap and anonymousPC boards carefully hidden away until they confiscate them, and antennas made of coat hangers etc. they can't get em all); if you beg them to allow communication. they'll turn you down every time while they suck up to the plutocrats.
...they can bend it all they want.
Tom Wheeler is a crotchety old sleazebag who has been bought and paid for by Big Telecom. Unfortunately he's probably also foolish enough to think he's doing right by the American public. That's the most dangerous kind.
RIP Internet
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
I think not all information costs the same. Streaming movies is much more costly than reading news stories and it's impossible for ISP to guarantee that all of their subscribers will be able to stream movies at the same time. I would be ok if net neutrality rules were suspended for bandwidth hogging services.
We pay for our bandwidth and now the greedy ISPs are wanting to get paid by the content providers (Netflix, Hulu, etc). Do you really think they are going to absorb the additional costs if this continues? Of course not, they will raise their prices.
ISPs rarely deliver what you pay for so them crying that its the content providers fault is BS. The problem is lack of real competition in the ISP market. Most folks have a choice between cable and DSL. Two isn't enough to be very competitive.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Sorry, but just about every one of these I've seen have been coming back from the office of Mr. "YES! YOU CAN!" has been "NO! YOU CAN'T!"
Online petitions are worth exactly the amount of energy it takes to ignore them completely.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
would ask that ISPs be classified as common carriers. Then there could be nothing they can do.
If it brings prices down.
Let me put this out there: if they don't want net neutrality, mark my words, all the petitions in the world won't make a whit of difference.
Let's review this topic in two years and see whether I'm right.
*** Don't be dull.***
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.
-Styopa
Since Comcast is now getting paid by Netflix - have they turned around and cut everyone's bill? Surely, they aren't just pocketing that money.
its time we see to it the the corporate influence on the net abolished they ruin every thing they touch the internet is no exception the f.c.c. has lost there minds it time we tell them ether they rule in the favor of the people and the people alone or we find a way to faze them out. im sick of hearing how the internet is under attack and corporate influence is the cause they don't make laws we do when is that ever going to be expressed. they need to be told once and for all to shut up and go away the internet belongs to the people not them they just don't deserve a vote. they ruined the main steam media let them feed from that filthy troff until it runs dry then they can starve to death as it is a deserving fate.tell them to take their collectivist ideas and jam them where the sun don't shine. it time we let them rot on the vine.we don't need them we have the internet for now.
So I guess this page on the FCC website doesn't actually mean anything then. I guess the bribes finally became large enough.
One that has the same sentiment but doesn't sound like a 14-year old wrote it.
Comcast should be fined for extorting Netflix so they don't throttle their bandwith. The problem is that Comcast buys out politicians so the government no longer regulates monopolies, monopolies regulate the government.
God spoke to me
As I see it, an ISP should first of all do QoS on their traffic based on *subscriber*...what their plan is, whether they have any SLAs in place, etc. At this stage the *type* of traffic should not be considered.
As a second optional stage, *if a subscriber asks them to do so* then they could do type/source/whatever-based QoS, but that would *only affect packets belonging to that subscriber*.
That way, your traffic can't affect mine, and mine can't affect yours. If I want, I can do my own QoS, or I can let the ISP do it for me. It is *not* the ISP's job to prioritize your VoIP packets ahead of my bittorrent packets. They should be equal. If you want them to prioritize your VoIP packets ahead of _your_ bittorrent packets, then that's fine.
Isn't the very fact that the service providers CAN determine what we're getting and sending to and from whom is itself a violation of privacy? I don't care about net neutrality if the packets I'm dealing with are properly secured.
Net neutrality is the law here (signed yesterday)!
In this deep shit country I feel better each time I read the news about justice, democracy or fairness in the US.
As a veteran of the early days of the Internet, I wish people would just chill out from trying to get the Federal government to put more regulations on the Internet. The lack of regulation is what enabled the Internet to be what it is today.
Someone has to pay to put bits into a network, someone has to pay to move bits in a network, and someone needs to pay to move bits out of a network.
Leave it to the content providers and ISPs to figure out how to slice up the pie.
If you want more competition in local ISP access, work on that instead. Go start one! You could even offer 1 Gbps non-oversubscribed bandwidth. I'm sure you won't run into any regulation causing a barrier to entry...
Seriously, slashdot, why can't we discuss the possibility of a new internet? Is it too revolutionary for you? Does it make you nervous? NSA instruct you to censor all such talk?
Is it even technologically possible to make a new internet with ISPs that are co-owned by all the users? I feel like someone has already suggested this a few years back.
As bad-taste as it is to post another submitted story in a front-page story, here is another whitehouse.gov petition story that addresses net neutrality from an angle that is actually winnable:
http://slashdot.org/submission/3512823/whitehousegov-net-neutrality-petition
That links to this: http://wh.gov/lfOKl
In order to win this fight, we need to make people understand that net neutrality is a services-paid-for issue. They paid for something, but they are being robbed out of getting what they purchased. To win net neutrality, you MUST sell that point to people.
He is the one that chose the current chairman. Whats so difficult get some one from industry that is known to be a preacher of net neutrality. So either he is stupid, incompetent, or devious you pick.
sign this petition if you agree: http://wh.gov/lwhr8
yes, the usefulness of these petitions are questionnable. but if enough *voters* make a fuss, people notice. cynicism and total inaction never changes anything.
No, the problem is that people don't understand what they've paid for. If you'd really paid for both ends of the traffic, with unlimited bandwidth, the prices would have been much higher than they are.
Why should Comcast customers who don't use Netflix subsidize those that do?
"[...] to mean that corporations and organizations can pay to have [...] the message of their competitors silenced."
The new rules, as described in the previous article, allow a content provider to pay an ISP to install extra equipment to increase the bandwidth they have to their customers. They do not allow a content provider to pay to have an ISP block or degrade access to another content provider.
The new rules are just common sense. ISPs should not be permitted to sell content providers exclusive access to the bandwidth their customers already paid for - but why shouldn't they be permitted to install extra bandwidth for a content provider at that provider's expense?
After a 5-year long campaign by European and U.S. digital rights NGOs, today the European Parliament turned a dubious Commission proposal on its head to safeguard the principle of net neutrality. It’s a historic win, and all over the news. It also shows how digital rights advocacy is maturing.
I'm all for network neutrality as a CONCEPT. As someone who has been running servers for decades I don't see how Washington can make a LAW requiring network neutrality that doesn't blow up in our faces.
An ISP gets hundreds of thousands of connection attempts from known email spammers every day. The volume of other attacks can be measured in how many hit you per minute. You absolutely MUST block and prioritize traffic based on its origin in order to have any hope of running a usable network. If Washington says you can't block or slow traffic based on the source and other attributes, email pretty much stops working. Worms will spread much faster. It becomes illegal to protect yourself or your customers from even the simplest of DOS attacks. In general, things would just get real nasty real fast. I'd need to see a proposal that looks like it might possibly work before I could support a law on the issue.
Though I know what some of the unintended consequences would be, there are always others that we don't foresee - every law causes some problem, so we should be careful about passing new federal laws.
Secondly, what is the motivation for this? We're afraid of something that COULD happen. We come up with hypothetical scenarios, but none of this is real - it hasn't happened. If it does happen, do we not already have laws about "unfair competition", "tortious interference", etc? Doesn't it make more sense to be alert, be watchful for any real problems, and see if our existing laws about unfair competition and such work as needed?
Why such a rush to pass laws that we know will cause problems, to stop a possible problem that doesn't yet exist?
You want real, effective action, write your goddamn Representative and Senators. Petitioning the White House makes no sense when it's Congress that passes laws. (The President does have leeway when enforcing laws, but petitioning everything you disagree with seems silly. Judges don't really take public opinion into account save for certain areas.)
Write: "Dear Rep/Senator Whatsisname, I believe net neutrality will be beneficial to both the country and the economy. A regional monopoly of telcos by content creators and distributors hurts competition and consumers. ISPs should be vertically separated from content creation/distribution."
That's the gist of it. Would need some cleanup.
Most important of all, don't insult your Representative or Senator. Just because you disagree with them on some issues doesn't mean they won't vote in favor/against others if enough of their constituents demand it.
These two companies are huge donors to Obama, Look how they are willing to approve mergers. The previous net neutrality push was only to turn out the base, now it is time for the payback. What I am at a loss for, what about the turning over of the internet to international government bodies means for this policy change.
Just a thought, but it seems that many of the objections here seem to be premised on the assumption that ISPs (and Comcast in particular) is taking too big of a profit margin. (Some people seem to think that running an ISP costs almost nothing and that Comcast are clearly pocketing almost all of their income.)
So, perhaps rather than asking for regulatory changes that would break the internet, it would be more sensible to ask that ISPs - at least those with monopoly positions - be required to publicly release detailed income and expenditure figures? If there's any real profiteering, I don't see that you can do all that much about it without first knowing where it is and isn't happening.
I'd never signed up for the Whitehouse.gov petition site, thanks for making us aware there was a petition for this very important topic for the future of the Internet.
I can't believe there's only 5k signatures so far. I expected whitehouse.gov to get slashdotted.
We've been handing the entire country over to corporations for 40 !bleepin'! years. For God's sake, cut the man some slack. Has he compromised some principles? Yeah. But in the real world that's what you do to get things done. A General goes to war with the army he's given.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Third party candidates have no chance of winning because every possible candidate is vetted for suitability by the ultra rich. It's even got a name now, it's called the Sheldon Primary
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
as great as this is, the blood worthless white house web site refuses to accept me creating an account via either Chrome, or Safari, so fuck the federal government and Obama with the horse he road in on.
worlds worst speller
Net neutrality needs to die and quickly.
I like that my ISP can scan my email for spam and remove it, I like that the ISP I for web hosting blocks traffic from sites that are trying attacks against my web site and I am sure the vast majoity of parents like that their school blocks various web sites that are designed to prey on kids. All of this would be prevented by the various net neutrality bills that have come up.
Once net neutrality is killed we can switch to the family of laws that are need and that is application neutrality. Application Neutrality is the principle that ISP don't have to treat all sites and data on the internet the same but that they have to treat with a same set of rules for all traffic for a application type. ISP should be able to block email or block various web sites and application neutrality allows them to do so provide they filter email the same or block web content by the same set of rules for all sites.
Look like I'm a little late to the party, but I also started a petition here. I like mine better, I'm not sure I understand where he's going with the military bit in this one, but there's no reason why you can't sign both.
Why do you censor comments asking if it's possible to create a new internet? If you think that's trolling, why not just label the comment as trolling?
Although I am for free speech I am also in favor of surveillance. That leaves me in a bad position as free speech ends when spying and potential penalties may be applied for unapproved speech. So we can admit that speech in America is a bit less than free. If we stack on top of that a further issue of corporations having more access to bandwidth than regular folks it is simply another blow against free speech. At this time I'm not so certain that American society can take that kind of hit without some serious rebellions cropping up. Many people simply do not trust our government enough as it is. Endless wars as well as a House of Representatives dedicated to inaction and the legacy of the Nixon mess has turned people away from our government.
How about reining in your lapdogs instead of a half hearted face saving attempt.
Politicians are so transparent it's not funny, a single call from the president to the FCC director will change thins instantly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You are just drooling at the idea of charging companies and your customers for access to each other. if you were a REAL ISP you would know that blocking malicious content has always been allowed in every net neutrality bill.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Unless it benefits you. A lot of you have stated that you would like to see ISPs disconnect infected Windows machines from the internet. Hypocrite much?
The world lived without this technology before so why can't we now? Let these corporate assholes play their game to the point of self destruction. You want clothes, movies, music, computer & parts? Just get up and drive to you nearest store, even if their markups are 34%(especially computer hardware stores).
Have you read any of the bills, or are you just guessing? The bills are only 5-10 pages each , so you CAN read them and get a clue.
S215, for example, specifically requires ISPs to accept and process spam. Most spam comes from a fairly small number of sources, people who send out thousands of spam messages per minute. As they move around a little bit, competent admins block those sources. There's no reason to accept connections from these spam factories - they have gigabit connections pumping out spam and nothing but spam. Under S215, ISPs would have to accept that spam because it says spam filters must be per-recipient. It requires that the ISP accept the connections, process the email to see what the rcpt address is, look to see if the user exists (a one in a million chance for some spammers who generate random addresses like 74jdbk84hfdh6@domain.com), etc.
Others require that the ISP pass all legal content. If you're at all familiar with CAN-SPAM, you may know that's ridiculous - 90+% of spam is legal.
Isn't the FTC part of the executive branch of the government? All BHO should need to do is just say no.
The FCC ruling and the administration's response may be reactions to the cat already having got out of the bog, meaning the idea of Net Neutrality have have become moot on a variety of levels. ISPs are already throttling bandwidth for business gain, and how could regulators stop that as long as they allow major ISPs, Comcast, AT&T, etc. to have de facto monopolies, and bias search results and bandwidth? Google search is at least as non-net-neutral in a different way by biasing what you see first.
Couple that with the NSA spying and Internet security attacks, and we may be seeing the end of the Internet and the emergence of its alternatives including those that trade freedom from spying and spam for less than instant gratification. The incentives are to make the Internet moot. Maybe our networks don't need to be always on and connectionless, maybe they can be more latent and secure and yet serve us nearly as well and maybe better with fewer bottlenecks and single failure points and fewer big corporations and governments controlling what we can see and do.
If you want to support Net Neutrality, then you have to post a comment on the FCC website. The FCC has to formally consider every single comment it receives on its website, through its comment/complaint process.
You can say anything you want, but constructive, helpful comments are more important than personal comments.
The FCC doesn't make it easy to post your comment on this particular proceeding. Here is the link you need to follow. In the 'proceeding' text field at the top of the form, type the number '14-28.'
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/uploa...