Slashdot Mirror
Telcos Move Net Neutrality Fight To Congress
Presto Vivace writes: "Public Knowledge is rallying its supporters after learning that some House members plan to try and add an amendment to H.R. 5016, the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act to block funding of FCC network neutrality rules. H.R. 5016 is the bill that keeps funding the government and whose failure to pass can shut it down. The White House has already said it opposed the existing FCC budget cuts and threatened a veto of a bill it says politicized the budget process." Public Knowledge is asking citizens to tell Congress to stop meddling with net neutrality. In a way this is a good sign. It is an indication that the telcos think that they will lose the current FCC debate.
Meanwhile, the FCC's deadline for comments about net neutrality has arrived, and the agency's servers buckled after recording over 670,000 of them. The deadline has been extended until midnight on Friday.
on the House of Reppresentatives website.
Maybe they should take some of Obama's campaign money and buy themselves a decent cluster of servers!
Evidently the horse trading on the floor of Congress is getting a bit wild if nothing happens unless the appropriate officials get bribed.
Corporations are people too, and as we all know, some people are more equal than others.
https://www.dearfcc.org
let's imagine that a majority of Slashdot readers is in favor of net neutrality -and- typically doesn't want to click to grind through to get the gist.
"House members plan to try and add an amendment to H.R. 5016 the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act to block funding of FCC network neutrality rules. so since the "FCC's (current proposed) network neutrality rules" suck, then we -want- this plan to add an amendment to succeed? or... since "Public Knowledge is asking citizens to tell Congress to stop meddling with net neutrality." we should instead want congress to leave the FCC alone (and its current commissioner, Tom Wheeler, fresh from the telecom industry)
please explain, in simple terms, on which side we "news for nerds" ought to feel about this news item!
point to point connectivity with no bias based on origin or destination. Just like our phone calls go thru no matter who we call or we is calling us, that is how our internet should work. It is very clear. Unless someone takes it upon themselves to muddy the waters.
| Imagine the consequences if we DIDN'T extend individual rights to corporations.The government could just read all the data on Google's servers after taking them.
As opposed to now? They read all the data on Google's servers without taking them.
The problem is that powerful corporations appear to have even more rights than individual people.
People managing powerful corporations do illegal acts, and other people (the shareholders who had no knowledge or control) are punished.
Personally, I'd love to re-incorporate my soul in a zero-tax offshore jurisdiction and subcontract out my physical body to earn income another country but not have to pay tax.
Since a corporation is not a natural person, but a particular structure created by legislative activity, there is no legal or moral reason that rights of such constructed entities cannot be legally constrained in ways impermissible for natural humans.
Let's face it - money always wins.
clearly the money is nervous, or they would not have gone running to congress.
Freedom lost even before the battle begun.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
until the the ISP's began to deliberately throttle services it worked very well.
Meanwhile, the FCC's deadline for comments about net neutrality has arrived, and the agency's servers buckled after recording over 670,000 of them.
That's because they didn't pay extra for the bandwidth. What did they expect?
Because the government procurement program is a mess and totally unrelated to campaign funds?
Whoever complained that this is "politicizing the federal budget" loses. I didn't pay attention to which side said that, but if that's the best argument you have, clearly you have nothing. Yes, deciding how to spend OUR money is a political process, and always has been. If you're position requires pretending that isn't the case, you're obviously living in fairy tale land.
the cold war is over. check your messages.
Didn't the "Communists" fund the building of the thing in the first place? Turn off Fox and think from time to time, man.
I'll bite. Obvious astroturf, but it irks me you are doing this here.
The problem with your argument is... telco market is NOT free market. I think the majority would be aligned with your opinion if one could actually compete in that area. Plus, I'm pretty sure you do not want a free-for-all in broadcast spectrum. A couple of weeks ago, there was a Slashdot article about guy running jammer in car. So, assuming you aren't a pure anarchist, telcos are using the gov't to hinder competition (from the beginning) as well as making deals with each other to stymy competition (see the TWC/Comcast public comments). Surely you can see where there should be rules/regulations given that.
Besides, we also have recent precedence on this. There are laws which prohibited certain anti-competitive behavior for newspapers. If you stifle the channels of communication, say the printing press in the 1800s, then you control the narrative(s). Today, the Internet is uniquely in that very same position. If you allow a privately owned organization to take self-serving priorities, with no competitive alternatives available, then you are again in a position where the narrative is dictated. Let's say Comcast buys Fox, and now only Fox content streams quickly. A Comcast subscriber decides to hear the alternative side of the narrative, say from MSNBC or CNN, but they get constant "spinning wheels," as they wait. Occasionally they get resets (as ISPs have been caught doing to P2P), or accidental DNS redirects to blackholes.
Also, the Internet was originally developed by the government and universities, and did not prioritize traffic. Imagine, for example, if GPS were to be "bought" by GE. You can only get fine positioning if you pay $x a month, but if you don't, you get 200m accuracy. Maybe this is your street to turn on, maybe it was a block back.