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Congressman Introduces Bill To Limit FCC Powers
An anonymous reader writes "Representative Bob Latta (R-OH) introduced a bill on Wednesday that would limit the FCC's power to regulate ISPs in a supposed effort to keep the internet free. The bill's text is currently not available on the Library of Congress webpage or on congress.gov, but a purported copy has been spotted on scribd. Representative Latta's press release nevertheless indicates that the bill is intended to prevent the FCC from re-classifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II. Latta is one of the 28 representatives who lobbied the FCC earlier this month and were shown to have received double the average monetary donations given to all House of Representative members from the cable industry over a two year period ending this past December."
If one of the largest telecom shills in congress is introducing anti-FCC legislation, this means the telecoms might be fearing a potential turn-around at the FCC.
Just a month ago it seemed like this was all but impossible to think - maybe some home for REAL net neutrality rulings from the FCC?
The congresscritters are owned by lobbyists at this point, without question. Lock, stock, and barrel.
Even if things don't go the way they want, they'll just keep introducing legislation to try and get what their masters want. CISPA is the most blatant example of this.
Power and Money have no borders. USA, North Korea or Russia makes no difference for oligarchs. They want it all and don't care where the peasants live. As long they are compliant, work hard for a small change and don't ask too much in return. Welcome to XXI century where oligarchs around the world hold hands together.
Be honest now. When you read this, and how a congressman was trying to limit the power of the FCC, the entity that tried to eliminate net neutrality just recently, did you think "yay" or was your first thought "now how is this going to be used to fuck us over"?
Am I the only one who feels like ANY kind of law being introduced today is aiming at screwing the average voter over in favor of the interest of a few corporations?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
http://latta.house.gov/contact/ His number is Washington DC is Phone: (202) 225-6405. His Ohio toll free number is 800-541-6446.
Send him an email, or ring him. Please be polite.
I'm not convinced the Republican Party "of old" was ever all that much better although I could be swayed by the idea that they're a lot more brazen in their willingness to embrace just about any corporate proposal. I'm especially unconvinced the Democrats are any better,
Lame duck like Obama, you'd hope he'd use the FCC/FTC/Justice department to lean on the cable companies, block their merger attempts, get the DoJ to issue opinions in favor of municipal broadband and raise anti-trust investigations over market interference and monopoly behavior regarding things like Netflix paying twice for transit. He's not running again, let Hillary sell her own soul to big telecom to claim she'l undo his executive actions or make the Republicans waste their political capital defending the cable company.
I think the only hope in this situation is municipal infrastructure. Get the cities or counties to build a dark fiber network and lease it out to any and all that want to sell services on it. The information superhighway is a tired cliche, but the road/network analogy is true and there's no reason we can't think of roads/fiber as the same concept. City owns the roads, service providers buy the vehicles and sell their services.
In theory cable companies should be behind this -- cut them out of all that infrastructure to maintain, let the taxpayers do it and just provide the programming. It won't be rent-seeking money but their overhead goes down a lot.
Yes, there's a happy medium.
The history of AT&T is most interesting. At that time (late 1920s IIRC) there were hundreds or thousands of phone companies. AT&T was the biggest. AT&T used both technical arguments and outright bribery to establish the phone monopoly. It argued that with all these companies competing - mostly for the "last mile" - the country would suffer with too many conflicting technologies and incompatibilities, and price competition would prevent spending the money for the research and development needed. This was not so long after the railroads went through some growing pains that had to be fixed with legislation, so they had a point. But they also spread money around Congress like water - not just campaign donations but cash under the table. At one point it was estimated that 90% of Congress had been paid off by AT&T. So the competitors basically were never allowed to make the opposing technical case - it was a done deal.
The result was a slow but steady growth in technology, and the tremendous R&D of Bell Labs. But it's also possible that the other path might have resulted in much faster development - we'll never know.
Later AT&T and its children fought tooth and nail to prevent any other product from hooking up to its lines - again their argument was to "protect the infrastructure". The 1968 CarterFone Decision broke that side of the monopoly and allowed us to plug any phone or modem we wanted into the network, so long as it they "did not cause harm to the system". The present arguments are a continuation of this issue. In a related process, Skype applied to the FCC in 2007 to apply this decision to the wireless industry and require wireless carriers to allow any device to connect to wireless without getting prior approval from the carrier. (This would, I think, break the monopoly on phones that each wireless carrier presently maintains.)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/