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Why the FCC Will Probably Ignore the Public On Network Neutrality
walterbyrd writes The rulemaking process does not function like a popular democracy. In other words, you can't expect that the comment you submit opposing a particular regulation will function like a vote. Rulemaking is more akin to a court proceeding. Changes require systematic, reliable evidence, not emotional expressions . . . In the wake of more than 3 million comments in the present open Internet proceeding-which at first blush appear overwhelmingly in favor of network neutrality-the current Commission is poised to make history in two ways: its decision on net neutrality, and its acknowledgment of public perspectives. It can continue to shrink the comments of ordinary Americans to a summary count and thank-you for their participation. Or, it can opt for a different path.
Don't even need to read the summary:
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... so where is the systematic, reliable evidence that not being neutral in the way you treat traffic is somehow better for the future of the Internet? There are two parties: money grubbing corporations looking to maximize profit by double dipping and "the people" that require net neutrality in order to be able to build their future on it. Sure, the party that donates the most money will win.
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... what was actually going on here. The republicans are against lots of government regulation. They just don't like it in general.
So if you put things to them in that context they're going to be biased against it.
The failure on our part was to explain properly to them that the situation only exists because government regulation makes it very hard for anyone to compete with the big ISPs. If you made that clear it would change the context of the regulation to them and would sway some of them.
Understand where different people are coming from on these issues or you can't reason with them.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Rulemaking is more akin to a court proceeding.
No, it's more akin to negotiating a price over some martinis and sending the courier to the bank to make a deposit. The "court proceeding" is also a charade. It doesn't have to be this way, but nobody gives a shit, and will reelect the same scum who are doing this, next month, and again in two years. Let's not talk about the government any more. Let's discuss why people want it like this. The government is just a reflection of it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The real reason is we don't live in a republic anymore but a plutocary. Even a fair courtcase would find in favor of net Neutrality
I have received some very nice e-mails from my representatives agreeing with my correspondence to support NN. Even more shocking, one made a complete turn around. I feel that our voices were heard a little! The best line was from Maria Cantwell stating "Without strong protections, broadband Internet providers will likely favor their own or affiliated content, service, and applications because they have the economic incentives and technical means to do so."
I think poor Walter means that "It can continue to SHIRK the comments of ordinary Americans" not shrink.
http://dictionary.reference.co...
Hire me...
I wish I had points to vote this up.
What you describe is exactly how it's supposed to work. If the government wants to control the hundreds of billions of dollars of network infrastructure that private companies have invested it, it has an obligation to show that such control is the least burdensome method of achieving a compelling state interest.
And - frankly - it's not. Motivating competition in the last-mile space is a MUCH more effective method for achieving the same interest, AND has lots of other benefits as well in terms of driving prices down and service-offerings up.
I think some of the ISPs are worried that legitimate packet prioritization is going be outlawed along with other sorts of prioritization due to ignorance of technology by legislators or regulators.
I've had discussions with coworkers in IT that were very sharp but still couldn't understand why it might be beneficial to prioritize voice packets over web traffic, for example. They really believed FIFO was the only fair way to treat packets and that anything else was somehow morally wrong.
And before some people chime in and say "but that's not what we mean", let me say that's exactly what some people mean by net neutrality. Maybe it's not what you mean, but there's no guarantee that your more informed view of net neutrality is going to be made into law.
You present this as if net neutrality was a simple policy choice. But what does that even mean? Does net neutrality mean that every connection has the same latency and bandwidth guarantees as every other? Why is that a good thing? What do you even mean by net neutrality?
Actually, those "money grubbing corporations" are likely just going to use "net neutrality" regulation to enrich themselves, because what feeds the flames of regulatory capture is new regulations.
Besides, most of those "money grubbing corporations" are publicly traded anyway, so if you think they are such a good deal, you can just buy your own shares.
Except that those private companies have received 1. direct subsidies, 2. Free intellectual property usage (basic TCP/IP technologies) and 3. free usage of rights of way.
So, since we, the public, have heavily subsidised those privately owned networks, we should also have the right to regulate them. Finally, since the ISPs have been pushing for local monopoly status, they should accept that they are treated like a local monopoly (subject to regulation).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
No, that's not how it works. You don't get to (essentially) trick them into using technologies, and then say, "well, since you're using that thing we put into the public domain, now we get to tell you what to do with it." The same thing with subsidization. Just because I donated to a kickstarter campaign today doesn't mean I get to go to the company five years down the road and say "Remember that $100 I kicked in? Now I get to tell you how to run the company, even though you never agreed to that at the time."
As for "free usage rights of way", those rights of way aren't free. They pay for them. There may be government assistance in terms of mandating that - where necessary - they are given the ability to buy the rights of way through eminent domain, but make no mistake, they weren't "given".
These networks are owned by the ISPs. It seems to me that government, before it steps in and tells them how best to run their networks, should have the burden of showing how net neutrality is better for the network than prioritization schemes.
You've got your cart on the wrong side of your horse, young man.
It's up to the ISPs to demonstrate to the people (via government) that they're using the resources —to which they have been granted limited monopoly rights— in the public interest, and that their pursuit of profits is not leading them into anti-consumer activity such as creating artificial scarcity for extortionary purposes when negotiating with other network operators, holding their users hostage, arbitrarily throttling bandwidth to customers whom they have testified are causing network congestion when in fact no such congestion exists.
For example.
Network Neutrality is the neutral position. It's not telling ISPs how to run their network - it's telling them to stop fucking with their customers' traffic. It's telling the ISPs to stop indulging in funny business and get back to making money the old-fashioned way: by providing an actual fucking service.
But yeah, fuck big government and Ayn Rand and America Fuck Yeah and all that because... Oh, I don't know, because who the fuck cares any more? This stopped being a dialogue years ago.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Oh, frell off. you know, I know, everyone knows that net neutrality doesn't mean every connection has the same latency and bandwidth. It doesn't mean you can't prioritize a skype connection over a download.... It means you can't prioritize Company A's traffic over Company B's traffic because Company B didn't pay the ransom. It especially means you can't prioritize your own content over everyone elses to stifle competition.
Damn Trolls...
it has an obligation to show that such control is the least burdensome method of achieving a compelling state interest. And - frankly - it's not.
Yes, it is. See common carrier. It has been tested empirically for more than a century including physical carriage networks. The empirical testing has shown that when carriers are prohibited from discriminatory behavior, the resulting increase in competition among merchants and manufacturers who use the carriage networks results in greater overall economic expansion. It is why FedEx is not permitted to negotiate preferred carrier status with one manufacturer to inhibit shipments made by a competing manufacturer.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
> everyone knows that net neutrality doesn't mean every connection has the same latency and bandwidth. It means you can't prioritize Company A's traffic over Company B's traffic
You and I know somewhat what a REASONABLE set of rules of rules might be, but GP is right as to the draft language. It basically said every packet has to be treated the same. As to company A and company B, if company A is a hospital and company B is a Nigerian prince, that's a difficult situation to write legislation for. Is it okay to deprioritize email from known spammers and allow the email from a search and rescue team to go through first? That's not allowed if the rule is "all users must be treated the same."
How about ads? On a slow wireless link, is it okay to deliver the text of a web page before the ads from DoubleClick ? They are both http web traffic.
Administrators making case-by-case decisions can make reasonable decisions in most cases. Coming up with simple rules deciding what admins must do in all cases for the next 20 years is much trickier, especially for bureaucrats who don't know the tech as well.
Network Neutrality is a great concept for the consumer, but not for the provider. So given that there are millions of comments broadly in favour of NN in the "Public Consultation" phase and a small group of lobbyists/back-room power brokers against NN, we get to see where the power lies - with the public who vote into power the politicians who set direction for the FCC, or the corporate interests behind the scenes.
The biggest part of the problem, though, is that there is no real choice in the domestic internet provider markets in the US. There is certainly the illusion of choice, but in each market, the vast majority of consumers have access to a single incumbent backbone provider who also provide "last mile" connectivity, or one of a small number of alternatives which are either themselves clients of the backbone provider re-using and reselling that provider's last-mile capability or alternative access methods which offer a service which is either inferior or significantly more expensive.
The traditional capitalist approach to this is for a smaller, hungrier, competitor to the incumbent to set up shop and offer a better service for lower cost, thus enticing customers away from the incumbent and providing the new competitor with the revenue to expand services. In this scenario, centrally enforced Network Neutrality is not required - if one provider chooses to prioritize traffic in a way that its' customers do not like, they can leave in favour of the alternative. However, the massive initial infrastructure costs associated with setting up as a backbone ISP with last-mile connectivity, so that the new competitor is not dependent on the existing incumbent breaks the model, and you need high-value independent actors, such as Google, going in and setting up their own networks, because they can absorb the huge initial capital outlay.
The alternative to having several "backbone plus last-mile" providers with broad or total coverage in each region (which would be eye-wateringly expensive) would be for the backbone elements to be treated as utilities/managed by independent Not For Profit entities, and for all ISPs to be resellers of bandwidth competing on services and price.
Once you have genuine competition, Net Neutrality becomes something that individual providers (resellers) can offer to their customers or not (although verifying that a provider actually IS offering Net Neutrality would probably be beyond Joe Public and most of them would not know or care, anyway). A customer can choose to sign up to a service provider who guarantees low latency for online gaming, or one with high video streaming bandwidth, or the odd one who offer a life-size Lara Croft blowup doll, if they choose to. Because the free market with a low barrier to entry encourages providers to provide the services that the customer wants and is willing to pay for.
And where, pray tell, will be the competition when Time-Warner, Comcast or just Time-Cast, is every mile from first to last?
They have already proven (to us and to themselves) that one can easily achieve a stranglehold over a state-subsidized, privately-owned-yet-no-strings-attached set of networks and jack the prices up, when they even deign to offer as high speed internet for high prices what most of the rest of the world (short of other 3rd world countries like Ethiopia and even then) consider barely better than dialup.
The service they offer is dismal, the speeds they offer snail-like, the data-plans are strangulating, more and more of said data plans are eaten up by ads injected by those charging us for said dataplans themselves, and the US is falling behind everywhere not restricted to satellite-only access. This on lines and infrastructure taxpayers have paid for... several times over, including in places that have never seen said infrastructure yet (but the money sure got pocketed).
Now they want to triple-dip. Are you truly suggesting the situation will improve by letting them run free, rather than ensuring their heads roll?
The FCC got three million responses, or almost one percent of the entire US population. And FCC staffers deride the public comment process as filled with 'hilarious hallucinations.' Because, according to this staffer, those comments submitted by 'legal and economic experts' prepared under the employ of institutions with a vested interest "collated information in a more systematic way" and "from a much broader population of consumers."
Think about this. Actual citizen voices don't matter because private interests have the money to hire people and staff time to organize large submissions with systematically collated information about the population of Net product consumers. Do you see how citizenship to impact public policy has been stripped from the process, leaving the public as nothing more than consumers of product in a rigged market?
They think we don't understand. That we're simply unqualified to understand the nuance of policy. But that's clearly not the case. As highly qualified Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig have been stumping for Net Neutrality for the better part of a decade. These people are not policy stupid. They've submitted comments with 'systematically collated information' by nationally and internationally recognized experts.
These FCC staffers quoted would have us believe the public is misinformed and uneducated. That is the spin they want to present to the press.
It's offensive. Regardless of what position you take on the matter.
300 billion$.
In 2006 dollars.
That's how much tax subsidy the ISP industry has recieved from the public.
subsidy that was SUPPOSED to pay for expanding the "last mile" across the country, to every nook and cranny the they did with telephone decades before.
Only they pocketed the money instead and delivered nothing in return for it.
And yes, they very much were given.
You're nothing but a shill.
Trying to assert that the internet is like "a series of UPS trucks", as you do, is not in any way an apt analogy, and you know it (or should, at any rate, if you're hanging out on a site like Slashdot).
Of course the Internet isn't a series of UPS trucks.
When something is shipped via UPS, only one party pays UPS. Sure, sometimes the other party pays the first party so they can pay UPS, but UPS doesn't collect money for the same package from multiple parties. On the other hand, ISPs do collect money for the same packet from multiple parties. This is a bad thing and net neutrality should prevent it.
If you can't understand why it's important that ISPs not be able to be paid more than once for the same packet, then you really shouldn't be in a discussion about whether the government should or shouldn't impose regulations on ISPs.
Moreover, it's the ISPs that want to change things. Previously, if you tried to get a video from YouTube, NetFlix, or some website owned by your cable company, they would have been treated the same. ISPs then realized three things:
1) Those Internet video upstarts were making the ISPs' own cable TV offerings less popular.
2) Those Internet video upstarts were making lots of money. (Cue dollar signs in the eyes of the ISPs.)
3) They (the ISPs) were duopolies or monopolies in most areas and thus can do whatever they want without fear of competition.
With this realization, they implemented caps and overages to "manage network traffic" (really to make it more expensive for you to utilize Internet video to replace cable TV) and they want to make "Internet fast lanes" to extort money out of Internet Video providers (further raising the cost of these) or to slow them down (making them unusable and making cable TV seem better by comparison).
It's the ISPs that want to change the status quo of every bit being treated equally so they should be the ones presenting proof as to why they need to do so. So far, they haven't presented anything compelling. Unfortunately, their lobbyist money and political influence might count as "compelling arguments" to the FCC even when the vast majority of the public scream against it.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The FCC does not regulate torches and pitchforks.
That will never happen.
Sure it could. The only thing the keeps it from happening is the bread and circuses.
In the USA, if you are moderately ambitious and/or moderately intelligent then you can be moderately successful.
So basically, it's not worth rocking the boat because you're doing "ok".
Polititians aren't stupid. They know that as long as they mostly appease the people with ambition or intelligence
then those people aren't likely to start a rebellion because the risk/reward ratio is not in their favor.
The (longterm) walmart and mcdonald employees are either not ambitious or not intelligent (or else they would
quickly find a better job) and therefore don't pose any threat as you need both a little bit of intelligence and
a little bit of ambition to organize a successful rebellion and if you have either intelligence or ambition then
there is usually much safer ways of getting ahead than plotting an overthrow.