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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.
The abovie summary conflates the FCC process with Congress. The ammendment to HR 5016 would have cut funding to the FCC, with an eye to making it impossible to enforce regulations. It seems the amendment was defeated. Late the morning Save the Internet and similar groups sent out email alerts, and that seems to have done the trick, at least for this vote. We need the FCC to reclassify ISP's as common carriers and Congress to refrain from obstructing the FCC.
Net Neutrality seems to have went from everything open and no restrictions to no fast lanes or some shit. You can pick any side you want without too much confusion because while this is called net neutrality, I do not think it actually is any more. It might be part of it, a part I would not agree with, but it is more likely something else.
To note, I find there is nothing wrong with a fast lane as long as no customers are getting less than what they purchased in order to have it. (No slowing me down to deliver NetFlix at 30megs).
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.
A corporation is a legal entity, not a "collection of people". Your entire argument (flawed though amusing) is based upon an incorrect assumption.
I find there is nothing wrong with a fast lane as long as no customers are getting less than what they purchased in order to have it. (No slowing me down to deliver NetFlix at 30megs).
You are confused. The "fast lane" means normal speed, and anything else means deliberately throttled. There is nothing wrong with a "fast lane" for prioritizing particular TYPES of traffic, such as real time voice, but no ISP with monopoly power (almost all of them) should be allowed to discriminate based on the source or destination of the data.
The "fast lane" means normal speed, and anything else means deliberately throttled. There is nothing wrong with a "fast lane" for prioritizing particular TYPES of traffic, such as real time voice, but no ISP with monopoly power (almost all of them) should be allowed to discriminate based on the source or destination of the data.
Basically this. But the problem with even that kind of throttling is that it would be abused and distorted to do the other kind as well. So the overall best solution is no "fast lanes" (which in reality means slow lanes) at all.
Imagine if the telephone companies made commercial TYPE calls better quality than calls to grandma or to the kids. No matter how you slice it, in the long run it's a bad idea.
No, I didn't say that at all. I said something specific so pay attention.
I said there is nothing wrong with a fast lane as long as no customers are getting less than what they purchased in order to have it. If the ISPs can do that, a fast lane is perfectly fine. If they cannot, then there is a problem which likely is already covered by consumer protection laws (bait and switch possibly).
You see, I'm not saying that is how they work, I'm saying that how they have to work if we are going to have them.
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?
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.
And that can be done. There is typically available bandwidth outside what is used for internet service and the fast-lane can use that and be switched to your specific leg of the drop at the last moment.
In effect, the fast lane would be carried outside the regular service and combined right before it hits your house or building sidestepping the service congestion. and if it cannot, then they cannot have a fast lane.
Like I said, there is nothing wrong with a fast lane _as_long_as no customers are getting less than what they purchased in order to have it. If that cannot happen, then no fast lane. It is not a hard concept and you describing situation where it wouldn't happen doesn't really apply.
the cold war is over. check your messages.
The problem is what the customers purchased is generally a connection to the internet with no particular gaurantees about performance. If you want connections with service level agreements coverting performance to defined locations (e.g. major peering connections) you can get them but expect to pay a hell of a lot more than you would pay for a regular "broadband" connection.
Since they never agreed to provide any particular ammount of bandwidth in the first place there is little to stop them taking away some of the bandwidth they currently give to "best effort IP" to reallocate it to premium services. Whether they do that statically by creating fixed bandwidth channels or dynamically through prioritisation doesn't really make a fundamental difference.
When the "best effort IP" service is the entire service it's in the provider's interest to make it not suck so they retain customers. OTOH when they offer both "best effort IP" and premium services it's in their interests to make the "best effort IP" service suck so they can sell more premium services (which may or may not be IP based).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Sounds domesticated to me - when's the last time you saw a horse pull a plow without being asked?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Citizen's United has nothing to do with fourth amendment rights, and a corporation doesn't need to have fourth amendment rights to prevent the free reading of information on seized servers.
Citizens United, and now Hobby Lobby, stand for the worryingly advancing proposition that corporations are identical to people and must be afforded all the same rights... in spite of the fact that they're fictitious legal entities. They're bad decisions which have made worse law, and your strange argument in favor of them is frankly completely incorrect.
First, a service level agreement is essentially what third party providers purchase when thry buy a fast lane. And they do pay a lot more for it (normal access fees and a fast lane fee).
Second, if the ISP is purposely limiting your connection speeds, they are defrauding you as a customer as the up yo or best effort speeds will have to be lower than what they represented and you purchased. There simply is no way around it. If the premium service is being paid by a third party, the incentive will be for service that doesn't suck because it can demand a higher rate for the servicelevel agreement (fast lane) from the third party.
Finally, you seem to be wanting to argue against what i said by bringing up other than what i said. I specifically set conditions to my statement of acceptance of fast lanes. Its like i said i would go swimming if a life guard was on duty and you are harping about how dangerous it is to swin without one so i shouldn't swim at all ever.