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FCC Favors Net Neutrality
dkatana writes: Yesterday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said net neutrality is high on the agency's agenda, and a set of rules will be proposed beginning of next month. He also talked about reclassification of internet providers such as Google Fiber as Title II Telecom Companies. If Google and other fiber providers are given pole access, it could be the beginning of a race to deploy fiber-to-the-home to many cities and towns, where the cost of digging trenches has deterred many initiatives and protected the monopolies of the entrenched telecom providers. Advocates for net neutrality believe that Title II classification would allow the FCC to protect Internet services by regulating against paid prioritization.
A related article suggests one side effect of the internet becoming a public utility will be higher costs for internet access.
Today is not 1 April!
Hard to believe what I'm reading here. I was starting to grow cynical.
Anyhow, just wanted to post to say this appears to be a good thing. Very, very exciting.
blog
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The authors of that related article: "Grover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform. Patrick Gleason is the organization’s director of state affairs."
Hmmm - really? Anyone recall the POTS Long Distance war??? Sure drove down pricing there, same thing will happen with Internet providers.
Don't worry. Verizon and its buddies are filling up those bribe bags for the incoming Congresscritters as we speak.
Not if we get real competition and municipal services out of the deal. Whatever happens will be sure to protect the incumbent interests, so all this talk right now means little to nothing.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
After more or less opposing it, right until he knows it won't pass. Litterally waiting to the week after the last set of mid term elections, the Obama administration puts forth a lot of great reforms, knowing full well they will go nowhere, and never see the light of day again.
And as it relates to any topic, a person writing a story or an article can always find a slant one way or another to meet their own political views or agendas.
As far as new taxes, have you looked at your bill recently.. all those lovely below the line fee's disguised as taxes of some sort, or regulatory recovery fees, you know things that should be included in the price because they are the cost of doing business, but instead are disguised as creative taxes and fees which are not mandated by any gov (state local or federal) entity, just so the company can keep it's base advertized price the same and claim they are not raising prices.
Under regulation, this would hopefully go away. Also, the feds have said they do not have to apply all of the Title II regulations (and they specifically call out the tax portions) to ISPs.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
har har
FCC loves coming up with (and misimplementing) excuses to exercise authority, news at 11.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
On average, consumers would pay an additional $67 for landline broadband, and $72 for mobile broadband each year,
I dont mind this. Especially since it will help others who do not have broadband now.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Google is the one asking for it. It makes sense to reduce their cost of deploying fiber. In Europe Internet access is heavily regulated but FTTH is everywhere and much cheaper than in the US.
If services like Google Fiber are made Title II, watch how fast those sorts of projects come to a screeching halt.
Oh really?
While Google's filing never specifically throws its support behind Title II, it does specifically point out how Title II rules could come with some significant benefits. Specifically, Google's director of communications law Austin Schlick argues that as a freshly-regulated telecom service under Title II, Google would gain access to utility poles and other essential utility infrastructure to aid expansion of Google Fiber. While the FCC has the right to forbear from these provisions, Google argues they really shouldn't if they value improved broadband services:
"In determining whether forbearance is consistent with the public interest, the Commission must consider whether forbearance would "promote competitive market conditions, including the extent to which such forbearance will enhance competition among providers of telecommunications services." Forbearance from allowing BIAS providers access to available infrastructure under Section 224 would have the exact opposite effect, maintaining a substantial barrier to network deployment by new providers such as Google Fiber, that telecommunications classification otherwise would remove."
Seems Google disagrees with your opinion of what they would think and do.
You, dear consumer, will be the one taking it in the shorts. Don't believe me? Take a very close look at ANY of your utility bills and tell me how many fees you are paying that have nothing to do with the thing you are using (the actual electricity, the actual water, etc). ISPs are going to pass the cost on to the customers. Period. Oh, and they're going to have to hire bunchteen thousand paper pushers to deal with the regulations so you'll be paying their salaries and benefits. And you can kiss the small, local ISPs goodbye because they don't have the resources to deal with this.
The related article is full of false information, conjecture, and fear mongering.
On top of that the author just pulls magic numbers out of his butt with no supporting data.
Maybe it will increase taxes by a marginal $67 per year, but it will reduce the cost of my internet by far more than $67 per year since the prices will no longer be bloated by the local monopoly.
Okay, currently Google Fiber is $70/month for Gig service.
Now, say it goes up that $67/year that was quoted.
That means it's going to be $76/month (call it $80 just to be outrageous).
So, oh NOEZ! I'm now paying more for service!
When, before, my other options were $125/month for Comcast's 50/10 service and $50/month for 3M/512K DSL?
Oh! The pain! The pain!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Remember, Google isn't out to make profit directly through providing Internet service. They are an advertisement company, and just want to make sure as many people as possible have unfettered access to their ads.
Yo ass-hat Google is requesting the classification. They see it as a good thing.
Perhaps you could enlighten us as to why you think there is some kind of mysterious and sinister side to net neutrality.
This paid shill announcement brought to by Verizon.
How dare you bring your silly "facts" into this. The GP is too busy posting his corporate-whoring talking points to actually care about facts.
If only most people saw it that way. One of the most successful industries and platforms of the modern world and people want to hand it over to regulators and white guys in suits. Unreal.
Then it's good enough to regulate the ISP's. Look at what at&t was before the government broke it up in the 1980's. It was a regulated monopoly. But today we have some competition in the telecom - regulation could only enhance it by removing ownership of the poles.
Google did not say they support regulating broadband as if it were POTS. Their letter is pretty short - the first page pretty well covers their position, then there are 2 1/2 pages supporting it.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.do...
If one page is too long for you to read, here's the one sentence summary of what Google said:
If you assholes have bureaucrats set our pricing under title II, you'd better also give us access to poles under title II.
It's like telling the dentist "if you pull out my tooth, use novacain" - that doesn't mean you want the tooth pulled.
This isn't regulating the Internet. It's regulating the people who provide access. There's a huge difference. And tons of Internet businesses and smaller ISPs are very much for this reclassification. The only people against it are the megacorps who seek to lose a lot of control and will no longer be able to extort money from competing content providers.
Google has never specifically asked for it. But to claim they will stop their fiber buildout if the reclassification happens is pure fiction. Their own policy statements say that Title II reclassification would make it easier for them to build out their fiber network.
All we need is a simple rule that says if you sell it, you have to support it. Prohibit the bullshit "Up to" marketing and make them specify what bandwidth you will have ALL THE TIME. Full Disclosure.
Then, they HAVE to support it by expanding their infrastructure as needed. if they don't then the consumers should receive pro-rated refunds of their monthly fees.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
A related article suggests one side effect of the internet becoming a public utility will be higher costs for internet access.
OK, first, I'm dubious. But suppose it does go up. How much is it worth to have access to all the Internet offers? At $50/mo, we're hardly pushing the limits of what this stuff is worth. If we just have to pay a little more to get broader access, no content restriction by privateers, and competition for higher speed networks, I'll do the dance of joy.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
In the linked article is the statement:
“Most studies find,” Hood stated, “that lower levels of taxes and spending, less-intrusive regulation correlate with stronger economic performance.”
Sounds pretty, doesn't it? Who could argue against that? Think of the children!!! Mom and apple pie!!!!
What they DON'T tell you is what this weasel phrase "stronger economic performance" means: Does it mean "better service, lower prices and increased customer satisfaction" OR does it really mean "higher profits and f*ck the customer"?
Go on, take a wild guess...
Brace yourselves - If the providers are reclassified as utilities, the race will be on... to upgrade everyone as fast as possible...
They ( the providers, specifically ) will immediately whine about the cost of the fiber upgrades. and want to charge more.
Conveniently forgetting the billions already given in tax cuts for this to happen ( early/late 90s ?...).
The charges will be raised to provide for the cost of the upgrade, a larger-than-necessary amount, and the rate will be frozen
in perpetuity..... with even more profit for the providers.
And retirement jobs, vacations, and bungalows/cars/hookers/blow for the congresscritters/regulatory board members.....
related article....
go fuck yourself OP. go do it now. piece of shit.
Seems like there are more megacorps benefiting from net neutrality, than what we have now. I'm not worried about Google, Facebook or even Netflix passing the costs onto me, so much as I am the cable company. They WILL pass the buck if their cost of business go up. For Google, it just means a small dip in revenue.
If ISPs are required to have the same sort of backup and redundancy that POTS has, then higher prices are fine. I'm OK with paying a little more to have Internet service as rock-solid as POTS.
No matter what is said about the subject matter of Net Nutrality, the reality is. the MPAA and RIAA own the internet, look at the new laws introduced because of them, and the how the ISPS have to comply so the MPAA and RIAA dont go after the ISPS.
What Net Neutrality means to Wheeler and pals is something quite different than what you or I want.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I don't care if Comcast wants to negotiate more money from Google for a fast lane. Net Neutality lets big companies like Google and Facebook off the hook and passes the upgrade costs onto consumers.
The internet has worked just fine without these regulations. Once the FCC starts regulating it, don't be surprised when they start to grow their mandate into regulating trolling as bullying, and other unintended consequences.
From what source? Industry? From what I can tell, Ruters just vomited up what the Progressive Policy Institute postulated. Usually "Think Tanks" are simply political shills, but this one is supposedly "independent" or so says their website and Wiki. However from the PPI article, they list about zero details as to how they arrived at their numbers other than to say "we calculated".
All I know from similar discussions on Slashdot, people have posted about various countries around the world that have moved to the treating of ISP's as public utilities, and there wasn't one that didn't offer better faster more inclusive internet service at much lower costs than the US or Canada. Unless the PPI is unintentionally identifying the corruption, and political influence leading to favorable legislation towards telecommunication companies to keep the status quo.
You can't regulate the Internet, only the companies operating on it. The Internet is just a bunch of interconnected networks. If you create a completely separate collection of networks that's sufficiently large enough, you could also call it the Internet, say Internet 2 (oh wait, that's taken already).
I have no problems with regulations on how companies behave, especially when it comes to anti-competitive behavior. But it sounds like you do.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
The arguments being made for Net Neutrality are not for Neutrality but control. The Pro "Neutrality" angle is a government dominated Internet, the anti-Neutrality angle is a corporate dominated one. There's not much of a difference considering how hard it is to tell the difference between the two. Real net neutrality is a level playing field without government protectionism (which we have tons of at the moment) and the ability to purchase whatever we want and there's real repercussions for companies that attempt to fuck over the users because the users have another option.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I've lived in one of those European FTTH areas. There was a lot of government spending on FTTH. For years, it couldn't be hooked up because the necessary hardware was too expensive, and when it could get hooked up, it wasn't any faster than other Internet access either. The whole thing was a gigantic boondoggle for unions, telecoms manufacturers, and the telecoms industry.
If you're talking about "cheaper" you have to ask "cheaper for who". For the average tax payer, no it isn't cheaper, because they pay a lot in extra taxes for the government subsidies of the infrastructure. And it gets even more expensive because in many cases, FTTH has been an inefficient solution.
Of course, this sort of deal is very appealing to young, educated folks like students who don't pay a lot of taxes but see the lower ISP bills. That's what makes "European" anything so appealing to that group. But even as far as subsidies for young intellectuals go, this kind of crap is a bad way of doing it, because it mostly transfers money into the hands of big corporations and well paid union workers.
It's shite.
Any one need any more proof that Net Neutrality crusade is just about control and money? FCC all in? Aaaaahhhhh yeahh kinda says it all. Places like netfilx are all in because it fits their business model. Someone else taking care of bandwidth.
I'm not sure I get your point. How are costs going to go up with net neutrality? Your pipes are laid. If you don't lay new pipes, you're not incurring any new costs.
Net neutrality is about what goes through those pipes. As an analogy, your sewer company wants to charge Pepsi money for your piss that's from Aquafina water, and charge Coca-Cola money for your piss that's from Dasani, or limit the flow rate so that your toilet gets backed up if you drink any of those products. And what's more, your sewer company is doing this because they have their own water bottle company that they want you to use. Net neutrality just says your sewer company must accept whatever liquid waste comes out of your house equally, irrespective of the size of your sewer pipe. If the sewer company doesn't want or can't handle so much of your shit, they shouldn't have put in such large pipes out of your home in the first place (fortunately, there are regulations and building codes that manage this bit for real sewer companies and sewer systems).
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
If Netflix is paying Comcast for priority, they're not getting their money's worth. Lately we've had Netflix stalling and taking forever to load. If Netflix is paying for priority, they're getting ripped off. But, then again, why would Comcast treat Netflix any different than they treat any of their other customers?
When Netflix calls to complain Comcast would try to upsell them on subscription channels after hanging up on them three times.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'd prefer there to be one line company and multiple providers. They broke it out that way in texas and the result has been very good financially.
So I can choose from close to a hundred different electric companies who deliver electricity to me over the line.
Some are "green" and expensive.
Some are cheap.
Some are free on weekends.
Some are free between 10pm and 6am.
Some are short term contracts at 8.8c pkwh.
Some are mid term contracts at 12c pkwh.
Some are long term contracts at 10.5c pkwh.
Some are well known and seem to just charge higher prices "because".
And every term and price along those curves.
I.e. I have options and cost savings are there.
When there is an electrical service problem tho-- I only go to the one "line" provider. They maintain the lines. The electrical providers just put power on the grid.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Now that the GOP controls both houses, if anything the FCC proposes angers the Republican paymasters (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, et al.), Congress will just zero-out the parts of the FCC's budget that is even remotely attached to overseeing cable / broadband. Nothing is about to change. Nothing.
You mean, like AT&T before them? That sure turned out well, didn't it?
That Google wants it is not surprising. That there are still enough Statists in this country, who think, it is a good idea, is rather flabbergasting...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
we have the most pathetic excuse for broadband in the United States today.
Perhaps with some enforceable rules in place we can finally get some competition in to break up the big ISP's.
Yeah, we'll have the ones who will threaten to take their ball and go home, but it's expected out of some of the big players. Watch how fast they change their mind when the government funds the network infrastructure needed and opens the lines up to anyone who wants to play ISP. ISP's don't like things to be equal because they no longer get to set the rules.
My choices today for ISP:
1) Satellite. HAhahahahah. No.
2) Comcast. ( My current selection )
3) Verizon DSL ( via a decrepit copper plant that barely handles voice as it is. Tried it, got 56k downloads on a good day. )
4) Cellular.
That's pretty much it.
As far as I'm concerned, since the big boys can't seem to play nice on their own, someone needs to lay down the rules to break up this regional monopoly problem. Imagine what our prices would look like if we had true competition in the ISP market. Say, a dozen vendors who can promise equal speeds. Think we would be paying what we are today ? Hah. Not likely. When the playing field is equal, the only way folks choose Company X over Company Y is due to price, reliability, and incentives. ( Usually in that order )
Look at the bright side, ( if they end up regulating it ) now when the most hated ISP on the planet shrugs off customer complaints, you can bring the issue to the PUC. In my organization, that level of complaint gets VP's and other executive levels involved instantly. Seems they don't like to get hit with the hefty fines the PUC likes to wield when company X is doing something stupid.
Given the state of broadband in the US today, do we really want to continue on with the current status quo ?
This guy is a well-known political wacko.. why waste our time with such a post?
I am looking forwards to the day when an enfeebled Grover Norquist demands all of his Federal benefits, just like that hypocritical waste of skin Ayn Rand.
I'll bite on this. People think net neutrality will enable them to watch and pirate more Game of Thrones. That right there explains 30% of the content on .\
... but they should because they are paying for it as if they were.
Ordinary people don't care about net neutrality because they aren't draining the world's bandwidth
Isn't part of being classified as a telecom company, come with the regulation that you can't record your users activities?
This isn't regulating the Internet.
LIES. Have you read the damn thing? There's huge swaths of "lawful content" provisions -- "Lawful Content" meaning anything anything explicitly stated as legal. "Unlawful Content" meaning anything not explicitly stated as being legal -- Which means the ability to regulate or ban any type of content that is UNREGULATED.
For fuck's sake, READ the damn thing before you spout opinion. It's one thing to hold an opinion based on the BS that the media propaganda feeds you, but it's quite another to actually espouse that opinion to others without having checked any facts. The latter makes you a moron.
A interesting situation. You don't actually change who provides you power, you change who you pay for power. Each "provider" must be providing their own source of power or act as a broker and find better prices.
Way to create a false dilemma. I dont pirate anything, yet I support net neutrality 100%. The cable operator I pay for an internet connection should not determine who/where I go to. I pay for a connection and if they want to oversell the connection that is something they have to deal with.4
When you cant win, ad hominem.
I love the talk about how the deregulation helped break up the phone companies and rates are "lower" due to "competition". AT&T controls approximately 40% of Verizon's stock, somewhere in the 35% range for Sprint, I do not recall what the factor is for T-Mobile, but I do remember it also owns some portion of the stock of all the small guys as well. Similarly Verizon has a piece of AT&T and Sprint and Sprint has similar investments in it's "competition." The competition is essentially a PR sham. No president since JImmy Carter has enforced the Sherman AntiTrust Act,(this is still a law BTW) which was designed to prevent insane monopolization. As a result of the failure to enforce an existing law: we now have 6 corporations that control nearly 100% of all telecommunications (including cable & satellite), 5 corporations controlling about 80% of all food production and distribution, 4 corporations controlling approximately 95% of all media. Free Enterprise and competition are what normally lower prices and spur innovation. Unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism creates monopolies, which are the antithesis of Free Enterprise and competition. So BIG BUSINESS is not in favor of net neutrality. Take a guess why.... If you want to go to the schoolyard name calling and label me a liberal (still not sure how that is supposed to be a badge of shame), you would be wrong on that count too. I am a realist who looks at facts and at history. Sorry I am on the verge of a rant unrelated directly to the topic so I will stop.
There are quite a few states that allow this sort of setup:
http://www.alliedpowerservices...
And it's the same as the situation with DSL over POTS already (but there are few providers on the market).
The Republicans are already making plans how to kill it.
im already paying $50 a month for 50kb/s
You know it occurs to me this could be Obama's Highway Act. The one good thing he managed to do while his administration was in the capital (Obviously this is a horrible bad thing for actual net freedom). And obviously this is an unrealistic and disproportionate solution but: We have a gigantic amount of unemployment and underemployement. I walk past a minmum of 40 homeless or jobless people on the way to work, walking just 2 blocks, and 40 different homeless/jobless people on the way back, another 2 blocks, in downtown houston. Not to mention probably passing another 3000 (technically) on the highway.
Push fiber, everywhere. Dig those ditches. Pay people to dig them.
You know assuming you could just go dig a ditch withotu experience. You can. If the construction companies who hold a monopoly on any public works let you.
At the moment it's all talk. Actual action can be buried by committee, or forbidden by court or US congress. Given the court has already claimed the FCC can't affect preferential services, there's little point in writing rules they can't enforce. If the FCC really wanted to 'stabilize' privately-owned infrastructure, they'd be demanding good dentures first.
Then there's the arguments against equality of outcome: It costs more (than something else), or avoiding a user-pays profit incentive is communism.
Anytime I read or hear about new regulations or taxes, I like to formulate my opinion by beginning it with...
"Since 50% of my income already goes toward city, county, state, and federal taxes and "fees", let's just raise them a little more so ..."
And then end it with whatever benefit the lobbyists are promoting:
"Google can be everyone's ISP."
"Netflix no longer has to negotiate interconnects"
"we can steal more movies faster quicker better"
"pr0n downloads faster"
"we're not tempted to buy more useless crap"
"we can trust my government is keeping me safe from the evil corporations"
"we can trust my government is helping the good corporations"
"Big Brother's job is easier"
"we can keep the children safe from slow internet speeds"
"the terrorists don't win"
"we can have less competition"
"we can finally find out if Socialism really works, because all pigs are equal, it's just that some are more equal"
"we can all be victims of social engineering together, equally"
Just to see if it really makes sense or not.....................
Right and that cable company has little incentive to expand those pipes if service is good enough (which it is). Netflix was paying more, in order to deliver slightly faster buffering times to their customers. If Netflix isn't paying for the massive amount of bandwidth they're using, then it's the cable company customers who pick up the cost. Why should cable company customers, who don't even have netflix, be forced to subsidize the rest?
And just because the pipes are laid into my house, doesn't mean that the providers aren't constantly upgrading their switches and routers to handle all of this. If what they have is fine enough for non-netflix traffic, then let netflix pay more for what they hog.
Which one, and when?
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
This is what I've been pushing for in many of my diatribes as well, and I think (ultimately) what people will want when they stop being taken in by all the FUD - this is how it works in many other countries and it is by most accounts (and in my experience) working rather well.
Where I come from (NZ), the situation has improved vastly since LLU happened. I can only hope that it happens in the US for ALL types of infrastructure (DSL, Cable, Fiber) - then we'll see some real competition.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Mainly because often enough the prices we get charged are higher than the retail price.
More often than not, the main benefits you can get from an "alternative" provider are things like customer service and no-bullshit service terms (none of this "$20 for the first 6 months, then we rape your bank account because you signed an auto-debit form and you're on a contract so the ETF is $500" stuff).
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Mainly because often enough the prices we get charged are higher than the retail price.
Here where I live, the city I'm in as well as another nearby has opted into get group rates from one of these providers. I am saving a couple cents per KwH with really no effort on my part. For that matter, I still get and pay my bill to the provider that owns the lines.
But you're right if you're talking about DSL, for the most part. However, in my old hometown almost everyone was on a nearby CLEC's DSL service when Verizon owned the lines. In fact, I don't think Verizon even wanted to offer DSL - despite having all the equipment installed. When Frontier bought out the area's lines, everyone switched directly to Frontier. Some mainline providers are worse than others.
...You don't happen to be in a certain part of Southern Illinois and talking about the CLEC Clearwave, do you? That area used to be GTE then Verizon now Frontier, and I know at least one town that recently opted to get group rates with a competing electricity supplier and everyone was automatically switched unless they opted out.
But yeah, I was talking about DSL. If I were offering it in that area, I would be able to offer "up to 6mb" DSL for about $70/mo. Frontier offers it for $35 and AFAIK, this isn't an introductory rate, but it is more than $20 BELOW my cost -- for $70 a month, Frontier will do a 24mb DSL/phone bundle with unlimited calling.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
I am in a certain part of Southern Illinois - and near enough to have heard of Clearwave. There are at least two towns around here that opted into a competing electric supplier automatically. However, the ISP I was talking about was in my hometown - much further north. This particular CLEC bought out an ISP in Macomb, IL. Surprising, because this ISP was established in '95 as a dial-up provider and managed to stay relevant for years by later adding DSL and wireless Internet.