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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.
You can NOT have competition without regulation. What you have is a single monopoly.
This isn't selling 10 dollar t-shirts, it's infrastructure. How do you propose the market would solve thins? how would you want to ahve everyone who want to compete to have to dig up your yard and street?
You idea is foolish and naive at best. It flies in the face of history. There has NEVER been a similar situation that when unregulated goes well fore the consumer.
Read more history and less Fox.
TO anyone who has read the history of the markets, you statement look stupid.. no not stupid, fucking stupid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Any ideas to get that competition thing going?
Personally, I support making the actual last mile wiring a public utility. Let ISPs share them.
In other words, regulation?
Riddle me this... do you want the US postal service to run your internet?
People tend to hate comcast more then the Post Office, so... yes?
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.
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Wow. You really -are- stupid, that higher up post was not an anomaly. I'm sure a lot of people just passed over your comment with a sigh, but I'm going to do you a favor.
First, you seem to think that the US Postal service is somehow inept or inefficient, but you are wrong. NO ONE at the top floor of ANY competitor of the USPS agrees with you. Get some facts without page-view seeking bullshit, or Corporate Propaganda here:
http://www.rooseveltinstitute....
Second, you seem to think laws that prevent low-budget startups from ripping through our sidewalks are -ARCANE-. You better stay the hell outta my town.
Third, the last mile is absolutely pulbic infrastructure just like water and electricity (do you want the post office to bring you power?) , and Tacoma Click! is a perfect example of this done right. More than a dozen ISP's to pick from.
Finally, you are trying to find ideological solutions to technical problems and that means ALL OF YOUR IDEAS ARE STUPID. Wake up to the fact that you have manipulated into the world view you hold.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
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.
Even all but the most insane Libertarians understand that some regulation is necessary to prevent bad outcomes. I once heard a speech by Ron Paul, of all people, defend environmental regulations on the grounds that one doesn't have the right to pollute their neighbor's air or water.
Network neutrality is that sort of regulation.
There do exist other sort of "gotcha" regulations like HIPAA that are so detailed as to be nothing more than a paperwork minefield designed to crank the costs of compliance through the roof for smaller players, while adding maybe the paperclip budget to the cost of the bigger ones, while generally serving little to no real-world purpose.
Really? Poles and cables? The future is wireless. Actually, the present is wireless. Poles and cables for anything but electricity is archaic. Every time this topic comes up, it always boils down to the poles and cables. Get rid of the poles and cables and you get rid of 99% of this problem.
Then why is Google spending so much money on fiber to the home? As RF frequencies increase (since there's only so much bandwidth available at the lower frequencies - a 100Mhz channel at 900Mhz takes up relatively more spectrum than a 100Mhz channel at 10Ghz), cell sizes decrease due to lower propagation and penetration of the higher frequencies to a point where it takes a Wireless access point at every house (or possibly in every room in the house) to provide equivalent throughput to wired infrastructure.
Progress is better than regress, and you don't really need that much innovation to have dumb pipes.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
The 'market' is trying to destroy the internet by owning it all under one umbrella and dole out tiny bits to consumers for as absolutely much money as they can squeeze out of us. I have to wonder, do you actually know what a free market is? The ISP market is nothing like a free market situation. Neither is cable television, but although that is a different subject, it is still related due to the cable companies being major broadband players in this water sprinkler. (Not extensive enough to be called a pool.)
There's basically a few ways to handle this.
One: Let the companies do what they want. That will be an utter nightmare for consumers, and due to the growing necessity of the internet and all it's related data services, it would totally screw all of the populace of this country. Dumbest choice possible.
Two: Regulate the companies properly. Let's face it, they are really providing a necessary utility these days, just like power and water. Make them toe the line. The companies would hate this, but they get to stay in the game.
Three: Since it is a utility that the corporations have already shown they can't be trusted to manage, have it become ran by the government. Although the government isn't the most efficient organization, they also aren't trying to suck every last cent out of your cash anemic self as they don't have a profit motive. Expansion and improvement are likely to be slow, but then again, the corporations were already given massive bonuses in tax exemptions or write offs and many other ways by the government, and they still haven't delivered the very things they agreed to as a requirement for receiving that aid. For that matter, they've demanded several more times the previous largesses just to do what they were already supposed to have done. Looks like the government won't do any worse for the consumer than the companies are already screwing up.
What's the right choice? I couldn't really say, but the status quo of #1 has already proven it's a failure, so it at least is NOT the right choice. For the other two, I guess it really depends on how it's done.
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.
Poles and cables? The future is wireless.
I just bought my house three years ago and wired it with cat 6. Wireless is for mobile devices, temporary connections, and people who want ease-of-install more than they want reliability or speed. I do this for a living; dropped connections cost me and my clients money. Wireless will probably not be the right answer for my workstations in my lifetime.
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I don't think you understand how monopolies work. The majority of Comcast's customers have no alternatives. Where are they going to go? Back to dial-up? There are at best one or two other providers in any given market for internet service, and *none* for cable television. So, Google, Facebook, et al say they won't accept connections from Comcast servers, then ... what? Comcast's customers stop using those companies' services, but don't switch providers. In retaliation, the peering providers that used to trade back all that traffic that those sites were generating stop doing that, so those companies lose even more traffic.
This is the point of a monopoly: they control access, and so they can control how the market functions.
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.