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Congress Unhappy With FCC's Proposed Changes To Net Neutrality
Presto Vivace writes with news that the FCC's suggested net neutrality rules are facing opposition in Congress. "FCC chairman Tom Wheeler took the hot seat today in an oversight hearing before the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology to testify about current issues before his agency, including net neutrality. The overriding theme of the day? Pretty much everyone who spoke hates the rule the FCC narrowly approved for consideration last week — just for different reasons." Wheeler himself made some interesting comments in response to their questions:
"[He said] the agency recognizes that Internet providers would be disrupting a 'virtuous cycle' between the demand for free-flowing information on one hand and new investment in network upgrades on the other if they started charging companies like Google for better access to consumers. What's more, he said, the FCC would have the legal authority to intervene. 'If there is something that interferes with that virtuous cycle — which I believe paid prioritization does — then we can move against it,' Wheeler said, speaking loudly and slowly. A little later, in response to a question from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), Wheeler cited network equipment manufacturers who've argued that you can't create a fast lane without worsening service for some Internet users. 'That's at the heart of what you're talking about here,' Wheeler said. 'That would be commercially unreasonable under our proposal.'"
Here are instructions for how to send your comment to the FCC for those so inclined.
The cards are stacked against us, but if enough people ask them to reclassify Internet broadband as common carriers the FCC will cave and do the right thing.
The internet should not fall under their purview. The FCC can regulate radio... we need something for that. We don't need them regulating the internet at all.
What we need are market forces. Competition. If the big ISPs had some they couldn't play games without threatening their market share.
That is how you regulate them. By letting customers vote with their feet.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
send your comment to your elected officials in congress.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We will cheer Congress right up with a few friendly visits from your local neighborhood lobbyist and some campaign contributions.
Will do nothing but flap their lips. They cant even pass a bill they ALL agree on.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Obligatory analogy
Its like if cars were driving on sidewalks killing people... wait no. If cars exploded, darn. If GM bought the road into your neighborhood and wouldn't let you drive a Toyota on it. Its not that far fetched as some roads and major bridges are in private hands.
The solution is you split to company. Data line owners are not allowed to provide content.
Gotta make this a dirty word, like "Too big too fail."
Did anyone in the meeting ask if these rules will help the US not have one of the worst performing and most costly internet in the developed world?
There has NEVER been a similar situation that when unregulated goes well for the consumer.
Basic economics
Regulation is like salt in the food. Maybe a little, if the ingredients aren't bringing enough on their own.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Low will they stoop,
The FCC, but like hair
On the Blue Man Group,
Internet RF spectrum AIN'T THERE!
Burma Shave
The FCC like butt hair?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Riddle me this... do you want the US postal service to run your internet?
To be honest the post office has been stellar in terms of last-mile delivery. In fact, UPS and FedEx rely on USPS for many hard-to-reach delivery spots. USPS has relatively low rates for postage, and price increases have been incredibly low over time.
Compared to Comcast who has every incentive to screw me over repeatedly every year in order to get more profits and blame companies like Netflix/Hulu for poor performance, I'll take the USPS. Even if it means slower rates.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I messaged mine. Back with SOPA, I stated it was a free speech issue. Hollywood shouldn't have the right to censor people. My senator sent out a form letter to everyone,"SOPA is not a free speech issue" after I messaged him. But later he recanted and messaged everyone that SOPA was a free speech issue.
God spoke to me
send your comment to your elected officials in congress.
...Along with a stack of non-sequential Ben Franklins... You just might get their attention.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Lobbyists Unhappy With FCC's Proposed Changes To Net Neutrality
Good people go to bed earlier.
They especially like butthair on popcorn.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
excellent point, all comments to the FCC are part of the public record.
A minority are opposed to the FCC's proposal to turn the internet into cable TV. The remainder are unhappy that the FCC's proposal doesn't directly sell everybody into indentured servitude to their local monopoly ISP.
I have been averse to socialism, but I have changed my opinion on the last mile for housing. Ultimately, what is being paid for is a cable half a mile to several miles in length, putting that cable in the ground, and networking equipment on both ends. The market for cables, networking equipment, and ditch digging machinery is really big. One can easily go to the free market companies, and they will sell you all the cables, networking equipment, and ditch digging machinery that you need. There are even companies that have classes on how to operate that equipment, that even a high school dropout can understand.
Still, it costs money to buy the stuff, and labor put it in the ground. It takes a lot of money to do that, but not much brains. A bunch of trained monkeys could do it. The city should do it, because of the amount of money and permitting involved, but not much else on its part. So, bring on the socialized last mile.
1. Who is this "you all" which you're referring to?
2. What makes you think that "you all" want a government which is "tightly coupled to large corporations"?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Democrats (love regulation) generally like it but Republicans (hate regulation) don't. So:
1. Obama appointees pretend to be against net neutrality, going so far as to propose rules against it.
2. Republicans, who hate anything Democrats are in favor of, even if they used to like it (cap and trade, Obamacare which is a copy of Romneycare, etc), suddenly love net neutrality.
3. Democrats fight enough to make it look good, then give in as they always do.
4. NET NEUTRALITY
Wanna hear my plan to balance the budget by raising taxes on the rich?
Your post pretty well covered the popular meme on Slashdot. In fact you really CAN influence FCC rule making, I have. I had the opportunity to observe several rounds of 2257 rule making and participating in one around. The FCC does in fact incorporate well reasoned comments into their rules. Chairman Wheeler KNOWS that the proposed rules have problems. He testified it has problems. The problem is, there's not currently a better proposal. "Pretend that they are telephone companies, call them common carriers" is the common refrain on Slashdot. Unfortunately regulating the entire year United States Internet is a little bit more complex than a headline. There's a REASON he isn't categorizing ISPs as telephone companies. If you want to participate directly, you will l need to find out what the problem is, why it doesn't work to just call them common carriers and think that's going to solve anything. What problems does that cause? It does cause real problems, that would really affect you. If you come to understand what those problems are then you can file comments and make a proposal to actually solve the problem. As I mentioned I've done the same with 2257. Actually understand the issues -understand why common carrier status is not by itself an answer and then you can propose actual solutions. The FCC does listen to actual solutions, they listened to mine. Mindlessly repeating a slogan doesn't help them come up with rules that actually work, though.
Someone summarize that mess.
Who said what? What was the ruling the FCC approved? Which side is pro-NN?
Ok, if they want to play hardball, I say let the free market decide - by the companies who are against it putting their money where their mouth is.
Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, etc should announce that any company demanding a fee for preferred bandwidth on their service will no longer be supported at ALL. If, say, Comcast starts charging for premium access, imagine how fast everyone would switch to AT&T or Verizon. Make the providers tout it as a feature instead of a weakness. They are all making money hand over fist as is (Comcast made $1.9B in net income last QUARTER) so gaining customer with the status quo would beat losing tons of slightly more profitable customers any daay.
DISH/Echostar is a good example of a company that plays this game well. They honestly don't give a shit about their customers (or employees) beyond the bottom line, but they do actually have the lowest prices because they are not afraid to play chicken with content providers (by dropping their channels during disputes) and haven't blinked yet...
2. What makes you think that "you all" want a government which is "tightly coupled to large corporations"?
Slashdot these days mostly pumps candidates that do exactly that. So do you; therefore it is what you want. Even if you will not admit it.
I tend to favor light regulation to ensure a level playing field, or alternatively a way to ensure a large enough pool of providers that customers have choices.
I really HATE the idea of reducing the market power of the end customer. It is my opinion that the current stream-of-consciousness rulemaking from the current FCC chair has that goal in mind. As things are progressing, with large content-providers being stuck with paying priority upcharge fees for the bandwidth and connectivity that THEY ALREADY PAY FOR, the ISPs (Comcast, TW, etc.) have another set of partners to collude with, without the need to satisfy the paying customers.
A plan that gives local ISPs a revenue stream other than their end customers is yet another erosion of the power of the customers in the marketplace, which is already so weak that we pay double or more for equivalent access than our international counterparts. Our market power is already severely limited by the lack of ISP choice in most communities, linked to the fact that there are only a few large providers nationwide.
I propose a rule requiring that an ISP's only source of income must be its customers. Is this "government regulation"? Or would it pass muster for the free market fundamentalists out there?
Say there's a pesky blog that keeps posting pointed, critical commentary at NBC-Comcast or at a cause they support. If you allow prioritizing of data, shockingly, that site's traffic might receive the lowest priority possible, or intermittent blockage. The Internet is the last bastion of the free flow of ideas. That should be protected, strongly. Because if there's an opportunity to abuse the privilege of prioritizing data, in order to increase profit or stifle dissenting voices, it most assuredly will be abused.
Here is an informative 3 minute video highlighting some of the ways to abuse data prioritization.
"Natural Monopolies" are an economic concept. These are industries in which the barriers to entry are so high that new competitors are blocked from entering. Infrastructure is commonly cited - power lines, power stations, the last mile infrastructure. The same goes for most infrastructure - telephone lines, cable lines, oil and gas pipelines, railroads.
So, there's no way to let customers vote with their feet in natural monopolies. There are no competitors. Hence the need for regulation to avoid the problem of monopolies, which is "monopoly pricing."
"...you can't create a fast lane without worsening service for some Internet users. 'That's at the heart of what you're talking about here,' Wheeler said. 'That would be commercially unreasonable under our proposal.'"
This makes no sense at all. Is it just a bad summary? Waxman is citing testimony that internet fast lanes inevitably and necessarily degrade internet service for "non-premium" users, and Wheeler responds that the proposed regulation enables the FCC to prohibit that inevitable consequence of the system it creates?
"Yes, this regulation will degrade service, unavoidably. BUT! The regulation also says that we will make sure that this unavoidable consequence is prohibited, so it's all good!"
Why would anyone need a fast lane if the internet is working?
Video streams at a small fraction of the speed of a good internet connection.
Obvious extortion is obvious.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Didn't Slashdot's userbase vote *OVErwheLmINGLY* for Obama the first time? I bet they voted for him the 2nd time, too.
That's why.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
You lost! We won! Get over it! Sure we will be forced to pay more for internet access with much less quality but if the result is that you Liberals are upset then all the better! A day to celebrate! Wheeler for President 2016.
Require ISPs that offer a "prioritized" service to also offer a "neutral" product offering. Prices may differ since a "prioritized" offering is essentially subsidized.
A move such as this brings the free market decision to all consumers regardless of cable provider monopoly status.
Several people replied asking for more information. It's really cool that we, as a community, are wanting to engage beyond just a slogan or headline.
My main point was that in my experience the FCC does read comments and incorporate good ideas into the next round of rules. So my post was more about the FCC process than about net neutrality per se. I'm no expert on wholesale bandwidth, though I've run a SMALL hosting company for many years. I'd have to do some research myself before I'd be able to file a useful comments. There's also more to learn than can fit in a reasonable Slashdot post. That said, I can point people in the right direction to learn more. There's a lot to learn, so it will take some time.
The current proposal is informed by the existing comments. Many of the people who bothered to submit a comment to the FCC are knowledgeable about the issue and the direction that the FCC has been thinking about going. You can read comments others have made on various FCC filings here:
http://www.fcc.gov/comments
Specifically this one is relevant:
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/comme...
Of course there are plenty of less informative comments, too, but there will be some gold in there.
Webostingtalk.com is a forum about web hosting where operators of a lot of small mom-and-pop internet companies discuss these things, as well as people involved with larger operations. There are threads on WHT discussing things in more detail, from people who actually know the difference between single-mode fiber and multimode fiber, and why one might be deployed rather than the other, and what kinds of government policies might influence such choices.
The core problem, as I understand it, is that the thousands of pages of regulations for common carriers are all designed for very mature industries, like POTS. The FCC will say "for the next 20 years, you must provide exactly this grade of service at this cost". It takes a for years to get a new grade of service or a new price approved, so you don't change things every year - more like every 10-20 years. That almost works for railroads and copper phone lines - nothing much has changed in the last 20 years (or 100 years) in the realm of copper phone service - some of the lines are about 100 years old. Do you want your ISP to be providing the same service they did in 1994? Obviously that wouldn't work.
A great example is Google fiber - that would have been all kinds of illegal under a common carrier regulatory regime. That service is GIGABIT - 50X as fast as the competition, for about the same cost as the old cable or DSL. That's exactly the kind of progress we want to promote, not outlaw.
Let's say you wrote a new set of common-carrier style regulations for internet, rather than inheriting most of the POTS bureaucracy. You may recall that for Google Fiber, Google looked for cities where the government would get out of the way and let them get the damn thing built, ASAP. If the FCC were managing ISPs the way they do phone companies, Google wouldn't (couldn't) have deployed quickly in Provo, they would have had to chose a city in Costa Rica or somewhere instead.
Again, I'm not an expert on the wholesale or retail internet market. I commented on the 2257 rules because I did have a useful combination of expertise in that area - and the FCC implemented the suggestions I and others made.
If you know of these problems, why don't you share them instead of just saying...oooooh problems..ooooooo...It sounds like you're full of hot air. I understand common carrier is just a means to an end, but it sure as hell seems like a good opportunity to break the monopolies that are in place.
Please read the first three sentences of my post. Alternatively, read the last three sentences. My post isn't about either common carriers or net neutrality, it's about the FCC rule making process.
If you're interested in my thoughts on those other topics, see the last four paragraphs of this other post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Please
I'm confused on the emphasis here.
Are you from LiveJournal?
Because your hangups are so profound you would probably have a breakdown before being able to serve on this evil government committee?
This is an inane argument. It makes me angry. This attitude weakens democracy. It reminds me of people that have never voted but bitch about their elected officials.
What the fuck?
Did they teach you that in civics class? I am pretty confident that the USPS and my municipal ISP are not "out to get me". In fact I am fairly confident that the majority of the people elected to the muni are good people with a sense of civil responsibility (i.e. public servants). Are there some bad eggs? Sure. The fact is we can still hold government more accountable than a Fortune 500 company. I own stock in my government, not Comcast
Maybe you should get some help. Can you show me on this doll where the government touched you?
So by your non sequitur argument... We don't need regulation of the Internet. The problem is that the major ISPs represent monopolies.
If only we had some way to break up these monopolies.or... oh wait, that would be regulation.
It doesn't cause problems, though. Reclassifying internet service providers as common carriers does exactly what is needed. I note that, for your entire wall of text, you didn't mention any of these problems you're so sure it would cause. Three guesses why, Slashdot readers!
Not trolling, but how would Google Fiber be illegal under common carrier?
The idea behind treating them as common carriers is that the FCC would then be allowed to set the services they can offer, coverage areas, and what price they can charge*. It takes a few years to go through that process because it's based on calculating the company's cost, bickering about how much profit will be allowed, penalties for operating efficiently and making more profit than planned, etc. It's illegal to offer a regulated service that's not approved, and Google fiber wouldn't be approved.
There are many conditions of approval that Google fiber wouldn't meet. An obvious one is universal coverage - generally you can't just run service to places where a lot of people want to buy it. You have to run lines to each household in the sparsely populated areas if county, to neighborhoods where no customers have preregistered, etc. One can argue about whether or not that was good for copper phone lines, but it simply wouldn't have happened with gigabit fiber. Google would have gone to appropriate areas in Costa Rica or somewhere instead.
Assuming Google managed to work out some agreement about universal coverage, etc. figure that whole process should take 5-10 years and end up with Google running gigabit to all incorporated areas (city limits) whether or not any customers in the neighborhood want it. Those comprises might add 35% to the cost and two years to the deployment. So figure seven years in the approval process and two extra years deploying to different areas in different ways to meet FCC demands - it would be delayed by about nine years total. Nine years delay is "okay" when you're talking about upgrading POTS from party lines to dedicated lines. Nine years is a long time in internet time, though.
* For phone companies, the FCC used to set prices, but a few years ago they turned that over to state boards, so there are 50 negotiations and 50 approval processes required before improving service.
Since there were no real alternatives available and both parties are pretty much the same thing with different labels, different talking heads putting their own particular spin on the same ideas, I guess US based slashdotters should have refrained from voting altogether. I mean both parties are right wing and the only difference is their public image. Care to enlighten the rest of us who you voted for?
Little white buttercup
Lift your right buttock up
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”