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FCC Confirms Delay of New Net Neutrality Rules Until 2015
blottsie writes: The Federal Communications Commission will abandon its earlier promise to make a decision on new net neutrality rules this year. Instead, FCC Press Secretary Kim Hart said, "there will not be a vote on open internet rules on the December meeting agenda. That would mean rules would now be finalized in 2015." The FCC's confirmation of the delay came just as President Barack Obama launched a campaign to persuade the agency to reclassify broadband Internet service as a public utility.
Opensource.com is also running an interview with a legal advisor at the FCC. He says, "There will be a burden on providers. The question is, 'Is that burden justified?' And I think our answer is 'Yes.'"
Welp, what ever we do will be legislated out of existence next year. Tough luck, come on boys shut the lights off and turn off the computers, we aren't wanted anymore.
Here's hoping this means that Wheeler's plan to split the baby in half is dead, and we'll get some real action in terms of Title II classification.
It is my intention to conclude this proceeding and have enforceable rules by the end of the year.
Say what you will about the guy, but he didn't exactly swear a blood-oath there.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
No matter when it passes, who passes it, or what the wording is, any new rules put in place by the FCC are beholden to political pressure which is powered by lobbyists. https://www.opensecrets.org/lo...
Why should the providers shoulder this burden? They're not marketing, charging for, or making the content available. It's ridiculous. And invasive.
Actually, the major providers also own some of the content producers. Comcast owns NBC/Universal, Time-Warner owns Warner Brothers, etc. As such, the providers want to prioritize their subsidiaries' content.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
N/T
I'm willing to bet money the FCC has been bought off to the point they won't make a decision until after the next election and this is just the first of many stall tactics.
This is probably good news. Obama makes a public statement urging the FCC to step in and enforce net neutrality, and the FCC suddenly delays a decision they were about to make. That means the decision had already been made and it was that the FCC was not going to intervene. Now they are reconsidering and thus they want more time to figure out what all Obama's request entails.
Better known as 318230.
in 2015 they'll say it won't be until 2016. just after the elections.
someone elses problem then.
and in 2016 'we're re-evaluating our policys in light of the new administration' and it will be pushed back to 2017.
is desperately trying to come up with a Free Market solution to Net Neutrality. E.g. some way he can get Net Neutrality (which he wants) w/o the government stepping in and requiring it (which he doesn't want).
His only solution is to let Net Neutrality go away. Then when ISPs raise rates through the roof competition becomes viable again. Sorta like how we started researching fracking and Shale Oil after gas hit $4/gallon.
I don't really see it as viable. For one thing gas is only dropping temporarily while OPEC kills off the competition. Comcast has already been caught using lawsuits to stifle competition and has literally told the FCC that's it's OK if they merge with Time Warner since they never have/never will compete with them; and that it's just too expensive for new players to enter the market. Personally I think there's just too much money to be made killing a free internet....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The only burden they need to face is competition, even from the government if necessary. And their obligation should simply build us a dumb pipe. We'll do the prioritizing and filtering at our end. Unfortunately, that's all a pipe dream. The voters just wake up every two years to vote for Comcast and Time/Warner and Boeing to run the government, then sink back into their self made dungeon, like that giant eel that almost ate the Millennium Falcon...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a series of servers placed at or near ISPs in order to get content closer to the user connections. What Net Neutrality means is you can't block or limit any CDN and favor another.
The early days of online surfing had solid walls called Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe. The WWW was the end of that, but now we've got HTTP sites that don't serve the whole world the same content.
This has been a hot issue for a couple years now and there is no doubt the FCC has been studying this for some time. Obama has allowed the agency to be filled with Telecom industry cronies and lobbyists who stand to get sizable golden parachutes from the likes of Comcast and Time Warner if they hold the line. Obama's only card to play if they stonewall is to fire Director Wheeler and replace him with a pro-neutrality director, who will staff the agency with members who will vote the way he wants. If they can delay until the new Congressional session begins in January, then Republicans can block any pro-neutrality nominee. So firing Wheeler after the new session begins is very risky and will likely fail.
The only way Obama can affect the change he wants is to move on the director now. As long as this issue has been discussed, why should we wait another year for the FCC to rule on this? They clearly already know what they want to do. They are just stalling. I hope Obama can see that.
Peace, K1
Comcast and Time Warner Cable are trying to merge!
Why should the providers shoulder this burden?
Because their customers are paying them to shoulder this burden. Directly. With real money. These paying consumers expect their bytes to be relayed at the rate and volume they pay to send or receive. Whatever other business arrangements a providers customers may have with any other party is none of the providers @$%&*+! business.
Simple. Straightforward. And entirely incompatible with our government's monopoly protected cable and phone companies that have decided they'd like a big juicy piece for themselves.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
It is the vast popular opinion of the people that they want Network Neutrality. The monopolistic corporations however feel that extortion of websites to pay up or get slowed down should be legal. The question isn't whether campaign contributions corrupt a democracy because we're all finding it that bribing politicians shouldn't be legal like it is. The question is,"Just how far do the people with all the money want to screw things up?"
God spoke to me
By taking a public stance diametrically opposed to the desires of the communication companies whose lapdogs Obama appointed as FCC commissioners, Obama is reminding the loyal opposition that when these lapdogs ultimately capitulate to the communications monopolies' desires, they are doing so at great political cost. Delaying the capitulation will reduce the value of Obama's obvious posturing, reducing the magnitude of the quid pro quo that would otherwise be expected in the face of such seemingly insubordinate behavior. Of course, this formula of attempting to leverage any sort of return from favors hasn't exactly paid off for Obama so far, but it seems to be the only tactic he knows.
Why should the providers shoulder this burden? They're not marketing, charging for, or making the content available. It's ridiculous. And invasive.
Nonsense. The reason they should "shoulder the burden" is that you already paid them to do so via your monthly bill. And instead of investing in improved infrastructure to carry the extra bits, as has been done in other civilized countries, in the U.S. they've just been pocketing the money and taking vacations in Jamaica.
Seriously. U.S. has worse speed AND higher prices than most of the Western world, including pretty much all of Europe.
I pay for bandwidth. It doesn't (should not) matter where that bandwidth comes from. And the suppliers of the content, on the other end, should not have to be forced to pay AGAIN for bandwidth I already paid for.
Not to mention that the proper role of ISPs is as carriers anyway, which means they should be content-neutral.
Imagine if they were old land-line telephone companies (as they should be): if you called Aunt Martha, and she talked a lot, you still paid the phone bill for that call. It didn't matter if she talked for hours, or how fast she talked, you still paid the bill. Further, if people were calling your teenage daughter all damned day because she was popular and spent all damned day on the telephone, as many teenagers did, should SHE have to pay just because she was popular, and talked a lot? No. The people who called HER paid the bill for the calls.
There is not one single legitimate reason why ISPs in the U.S. should get to double-dip for their services, when they already aren't delivering good service for the money anyway.
I miss the good old days when assassinations were viable...
Instead corporations have evolved into hydras.
It isn't a burden anyway. The biggest issue is Netflix-style HD video delivery, from what I understand. CDN's provide an excellent solution to peering congestion, and the technology is used everywhere at the moment. The issue isn't that streaming video is a huge burden, it's that residential network operators are throttling the CDN's themselves. Verizon was one of the culprits, and they had slowed Netflix to a crawl even for fiber customers. There is zero technical reason for that. The technical hurtles for delivering their own content digitally are identical to delivering a competitors'.
The content providers already pay for their bandwidth too.
In addition to the fine replies above, perhaps they should ALSO shoulder the burden because they took HUGE subsidies from the government to create the pipes they're now trying to monopolize...
Also, WHAT burden? Is it a burden to NOT fuck up the pipes?
Net neutrality isn't necessarily what people want, but its the closest thing to what people want that they can get right now in the US.
Think about it. If we had actual competition, and I could go and pick from one of 10 ISPs...none of them would dare, let say, throttle netflix, as they would basically bankrupt themselves. Prices would go down, services would go up (you may have a package that gives videostreaming priority...which is not net neutral, but if its a CHOICE, and you can go to the competitor that gives gaming traffic priority...it may not be a bad thing for you as a customer. Sucks a bit for providers, but still).
The problem is we don't have that. If you're on Comcast, and they throttle netflix, and you want netflix, well, TOUGH. Yay, Netflix makes a deal, and thats cool..but I want Crunchyroll and Funimation. Well, too bad. Its netflix or eat up the throttling! Net neutrality helps that, but it still doesn't give me choice.
There is no "burden" to be shouldered. That's just a false play by the ISPs to paint themselves as victims.
They are already being paid handsomely many multiples of the true operating costs to deliver packets to and from their subscribers. That is all ISPs should be allowed to do. They shouldn't be given tools to engage in anti-competitive practices like throttling packets coming from their competitors in preference for their own properties or demanding protection money to get fair treatment.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Until Obama is no longer in the white house, that a corrupted republican scum is at the head of the country and get paid by the ISPs.
A politician would be assassinated if they stated that.
Because the providers are selling me bandwidth. Once they do so it's not their bandwidth any longer, it's mine and so they can't charge netflix for sending me traffic, for fastlanes or anything else It's my bandwidth not theirs..
What the ISP's want to do is charge both sides for the same bandwidth. They also want to discourage cord cutting by making it more expensive.
It comes down to one simple premise; If the ISP's do not have big enough pipes to support their customer base and contractually obligated bandwidth they need to invest in expanding their infrastructure instead of recording it as profits or bonuses for already overpaid executives. It's that simple.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
This also succinctly describes Amercian health care and prescription drugs. I'm sensing a pro-corporate trend here.
Bandwidth costs money.
Eventually every company will go 'Well, Comcast pulled it off. Okay, we'll also throttle netflix that way and charge an additional fee for 'fast lanes'.
Shaw out here in Canada does that basically. They watch what other large telecoms do first, like Comcast and AT&T. If what they do seems to generate revenue and do well, they implement their strategies out here.
Fuck the FCC and Fuck the courts.
This is nothing but an attempt by government to control our communications, and control our right to free speech. Millions will not tolerate any kind of censorship, and considder those behind such a move to be valid military targets. Personally, I don't want to see violence happen, so I recommend the FCC stay out of it, stop trying to seize control over something that has worked just fine for decades, and I am sure the people will control the ISPs in the same way.
It must really be hard to live so far out of reality. Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?
Actually you do. That's what the UK did 10 years ago and their ISP market took off.
I would mod you up, but I don't have mod points, but I will instead state my agreement:
Ideally, the government wouldn't *have* to get involved in this discussion, because the free market would have fixed it already. Unfortunately for us, the handful of broadband providers have lobbied themselves into the position of somehow-legal almost-monopoly status, so now we need *some* way of fixing it so they can't take that almost-monopoly status and use it to completely screw us over. I mean even more than they already are.
What we really need is more (read: any!) competition, but that's not seeming likely, so this is a stopgap.
If internet service was a free market, it wouldn't exist. All it would take is one douchebag with the right lot to say "fuck no, you can't put that [junction point/wiring box/exchange] on my property" and that's an entire neighborhood possibly off the grid. And most neighborhood have no shortage of those types.
Shutting down the FCC? Who in the real world cares about the FCC? The only ones I could possibly think of would be religious fundamentalists that still agree with the obscenity regulations the FCC mandates.
I'm not saying that it won't happen... But it would be bad. Pretty much everybody in the real world is cares about the FCC, they probably just don't know it. The most important job they have is spectrum management. The average person probably cares if someone else is using the spectrum allocation allotted to the carrier that is managed by the FCC. And from the government perspective, its all fun and games until someone starts stepping on an x band satellite uplink freq for something critical to national security or military radar system.
It's blue in the world where Republicans won record victories. Not sure what color you think it is yourself... one of us is living in reality and it's not the person who is denying simple truths that just occurred.
The most important job they have is spectrum management.
And that role could not be taken over by another organization why again? The existing rules in place would hold for a while.
Just because the FCC is defunded doesn't mean another temporary org to manage truly important things could not be formed... It would be a great way to eliminate the vast overreach that many federal agencies are involved in. Personally, if I were doing this I would mandate that the new organizations not be headquartered in DC to help reduce the influence of politics on operations...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not saying that it can't (or even shouldn't) be done by somebody else. But most people think of the FCC and things like the "wardrobe malfunction" of the super bowl and the like, when they do serve other functions. But the sad reality is politicians are typically not very good at understanding the second and third order effects, and I could absolutely see a defunding occur because of politics without considering core business of the agency like spectrum management even being considered.
Which is the reason that ISPs and telecoms have giant lobbying arms and budgets. The fact that "There is not one single legitimate reason..." is merely a political problem to be overcome.
You have to think like Big Business. Got a problem? How much money will it take to fix it? Is the cost of fixing it substantially less than simply living with the problem? OK, done, allocate millions to lobbying in order to protect billions in profit.
So they want to control the speed of the Internet!? This is ridiculous we already have shitty internet speed! and to me they want to slow it even further down for the corporate rich 4astds instead? Fine they I mght as well move to Europe then! American commie crap today if they start invading our American lives!ðYðYðY