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FCC Says It Will Vote On Net Neutrality In February
schwit1 sends this report from the Washington Post: Federal regulators looking to place restrictions on Internet providers will introduce and vote on new proposed net neutrality rules in February, Federal Communications Commission officials said Friday. President Obama's top telecom regulator, Tom Wheeler, told fellow FCC commissioners before the Christmas holiday that he intends to circulate a draft proposal internally next month with an eye toward approving the measure weeks later, said one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agency's deliberations are ongoing. The rules are meant to keep broadband providers such as Verizon and Comcast from speeding up or slowing down some Web sites compared to others.
It might be better that way. I know I can't out-bid $MEGACORP on the Congressperson-purchasing market, err I mean campaign contribution donations. Unlike letting Congress handle this, there's actually a chance some random bureaucrat will do the right thing. A slim chance, yes, but a chance.
This /. story about a "vote" tries to make this agreement among bureaucrats look like something other than an executive fiat from a single Hugo Chavez. The idea is to convince you the representative democratic process is involved somehow. But rather than pick up on that, you seem to think it's more expensive to buy off half of a handful of regulators than to buy off most of Congress.
The only big problem with the FCC scenario is the standard revolving door between the regulators and future cushy jobs in the very industry they're supposed to be regulating.
So it's better to have bureaucrats handling everything, except for the fact that bureaucrats regularly come from and return to the industries they regulate and can be bought off rather easily. Nice bit of reasoning there.
This is stupid. The FCC proposed the Open Internet rules a while back, and we already took those to court in 2013 and 2014. A US Circuit court stated in 2013...
"That said, even though the Commission has general authority to regulate in this arena, it may not impose requirements that contravene express statutory mandates. Given that the Commission has chosen to classify broadband providers in a manner that exempts them from treatment as common carriers, the Communications Act expressly prohibits the Commission from nonetheless regulating them as such. Because the Commission has failed to establish that the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules do not impose per se common carrier obligations, we vacate those portions of the Open Internet Order."
I can't find a quick link to the 2014 decision, but it said basically the same thing.
So, are they common carriers? If so, they should be Title II regulated. Are they not Common Carriers? Then they're responsible for what goes over their networks, and they do NOT want that....
The FCC can throw out all the rules it wants. We've done this. They GAVE UP the ability to regulate these companies, and all it takes to get it back is for the FCC ITSELF to decide to do so once again. It's easy. They could do it tomorrow....
but Tom Wheeler, head of the FCC, is a former cable lobbyist... so....