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.

Comments

"A related article suggests..."

[QuietLagoon]

The authors of that related article are not against Title II for ISPs per se, but, imo, are against the government doing anything to help consumers.

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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."

Re:"A related article suggests..."

[T.E.D.]

Yes. I have no huge problem with providing links to opinion articles from ideologues. However, please label them as such, rather than just slipping it in as a "related article". Simply adding "from Grover Norquist" would be fine.

FWIW, Mr. Norquist is the guy who coined the phrase "shrink Government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub", and is famous for trying to get politicians to sign "no tax increases no matter what happens" pledges. He also once said in an interview that if it was a choice between everyone's grandmother being eaten by ants, and a tax increase for only the wealthiest 2%, "we console ourself with the fact that we have pictures". A joke answer to a joke question, but a pretty telling one.

So you know going in for sure and certain that he's going to be against the government involving itself in any way, and in particular against anything that might possibly raise a tax somewhere. It will really have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand outside of those two points. The only interesting part is how he gets there.

Re:"A related article suggests..."

[bigpat]

Devil is in the details. There are many many government regulations that stifle competition, do nothing for the consumers and simply serve to entrench lobbyists, big businesses and vested interests at the expense of customers and the public... In the history of government regulations it is right to be cynical that this is what you are going to get 99% of the time.

Then there are simple, focused, easy to understand and easy to implement government regulations that really can help create more choice in the market and reduce fraud.

If there were any other way but for government regulations to bring us back towards a free market in Internet Access providers, then I would choose that. But in this case we have to have government regulations to counter balance the government regulation of the rights of way along our streets and the government regulations and licensing of our EM spectrum which create local monopolies and reduce consumer choice in the first place and you can't simply open up the spectrum, our streets and our poles to whomever wants to run a wire or transmit a signal otherwise we would have chaos and nobody would have reliable service, so we are stuck with government regulation to try and fix the problem of local monopolies and an un-free market.

Hopefully, we get regulations that are really focused on making for a better free market and not just stamping the marketing label "Net Neutrality" on whatever we end up with. Best we can probably hope for is a compromise that gives us slightly more choice and a bit more competition, but the complexity of regulations will probably still mean that the days of small ISPs able to run some wires and connect to the Internet and compete on price and service are not coming back.

Internet as a public utility = higher cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm - really? Anyone recall the POTS Long Distance war??? Sure drove down pricing there, same thing will happen with Internet providers.

public utility means higher costs?

[fustakrakich]

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.

This is a good thing....

[bleh-of-the-huns]

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.

Re:Don't expect ISPs to bend over and take it

[Lunix Nutcase]

You, dear consumer, will be the one taking it in the shorts.

Riiight. Because the current mega-ISPs are such great companies to deal with and are always looking for ways to lower the prices of their service, increase data caps, etc. Oh wait...

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).

Ok, just did. Everything in my utility bill had to do with city services I use. Nothing was an extraneous fee.

ISPs are going to pass the cost on to the customers. Period.

So nothing new. But at least in this case the cost will be for good.

And you can kiss the small, local ISPs goodbye because they don't have the resources to deal with this.

Except that the small, local ISPs are mostly wanting the Title II regulations.

Support What You Sell

[sycodon]

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.

Re:The future and its enemies

[silfen]

In Europe Internet access is heavily regulated but FTTH is everywhere and much cheaper than in the US.

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.

Re:Of course they did

[steelfood]

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).