Bill Would Ban Paid Prioritization By ISPs

jfruh writes In the opening days of the new U.S. Congress, a bill has been introduced in both the House and Senate enforcing Net neutrality, making it illegal for ISPs to accept payment to prioritize some traffic packets over others. But the sponsors are all Democrats, and with Republicans now in charge of both house of Congress, the chances of it passing seem slim.

Comments

Re:Fuck the libs!

[bmo]

"That's because Republicans believe in the free market not communism."

Funny, the current bunch Ds are typically to the right of Reagan.

And no, the Rs aren't in favor of any kind of free market either. And "free markets" don't exist, ever - they are an imaginary construct much like "friction free inclined planes" in physics.

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BMO

Gloriously Short Bill

[jacks smirking reven]

Credit where credits due, the actual bill itself (linked in the article) is only 4 pages in total and although IANAL it does seem to be straightforward and to the point. It also generously defines "edge provider" as

(A) any content, application, or service over the Internet; or
(B) a device used for accessing any content, application, or service over the Internet.

Maybe someone with a bit more knowledge can poke a hole in it, but in this age of 1000+ page bills that no-one seems to have the will to read it's a nice change.

Re:Gloriously Short Bill

[jfengel]

It's short only because it's telling the FCC to do the real work. The key bit is:

Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Commission shall promulgate regulations that...

A lot of major laws are like that. The law itself grants some kind of authority to an executive branch department, and they come up with the regulations that implement that authority. That can often run into many thousands of pages, and they can change literally every single day. Regulated industries often have employees whose sole job it is to ensure that they're in compliance with the regulations.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The Congress aren't experts in the domain. The executive branch employees are (or at least, are supposed to be). They work with the industry experts to clarify all of the corner cases and vaguenesses that make up any complex issue. And the issues are complex; they often seem simple to outsiders but only because they don't know what they're looking at. The same thing probably happens in your job.

The departments aren't completely unsupervised. They report, ultimately, to Presidential appointees, who have to be approved by Congress and produce regular reports to the Congress. And when things go wrong, they get hauled in front of Congress to explain themselves.

Er, digression aside... what would have happened were the bill to pass (it won't) is that the FCC would produce a lengthy set of regulations, which would surely provoke all kinds of outrage as the actual nitty-gritty details are less pleasant than the overall sentiment. In fact, I'd say that they're aware that it won't pass, which is why they get to make it so vague. Real bills, the kind where they want to strictly limit the authority of the departments to get exactly what they want, are the result of compromises within the legislature and are usually much more detailed. You can get the details in legislation or in regulation; the former is more permanent and the latter is more flexible, which can be good or bad depending on your point of view of the matter at hand. But there will be details, and they're going to be voluminous.

Re:Fuck the libs!

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem of insuring that rent seekers don't destroy the value of an open Internet is a collective action problem because it's in each ISP's interest to tax the hell out of usage as heavily and as _opaquely_ as possible(i.e. suppress pricing feedback so consumers, even if they had a choice, wouldn't know when to exercise it), even if when all ISPs do this the overall wealth creation is less.

The solution to collective action problems is government. Government is therefore the ideal institution to impose net neutrality.

Net neutrality channels profiteering into a more transparent and efficient mode of economic activity. It's an extraordinarily simple rule, and so the regulatory cost is de minims.

If you want to refute the argument, you need to either 1) show that an open Internet is less efficient at generating wealth than one that is heavily tolled, or 2) show that the problem is not a collective action problem in actuality.

Obviously there are all kinds of theoretical approaches: dramatically open up radio spectrum so it becomes cheaper for new ISPs to enter the market, mandate transparency in tolling practices, etc, so that consumers can easily and rapidly switch ISPs. But that's a pipe dream.

In practice net neutrality is the simplest and cheapest way to address the problem. Maybe in 100 years things will be different and we can drop the rule.

Re:Fuck the libs!

[frisket]

Previously, government action mostly consisted of helping the rich and connected build and protect their market monopolies. Sound familiar?

Yep, sounds like Republicans to me. And Democrats. "Government" in the US means "government by the rich for the rich".

One of the problems is that there are two right-wing parties and no left wing at all. When Republicans froth at the mouth about socialism or communism they haven't a clue about what really is; they just think it's the same thing as government control, forgetting that their governments have been just as controlling as the other incompetents'.

Where the GOP went wrong was in getting into bed with the pro-lifer, fundamentalist, flat-earth, =3, bible-thumping loonies, who are further to the right than Hitler. They need to ditch those associations — a better choice would even have been the libertarians, who despite their own looney ideas on state control are far closer to the original Republican ideal or liberty than Oral Roberts or the Waco flakoes.