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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!”
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
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.
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!!!
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.
This paid shill announcement brought to by Verizon.
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.
There are some small, local ISPs usually in remote locations and according to the FCC those companies are in favor of the regulations as well. The GP is just some whoring shill.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 ?
The internet has worked just fine without these regulations.
That's the problem. Since the internet first came to us via phone companies (which are under Title II), they treated internet traffic like phone conversations. No shaping, no priority, no throttling, just letting everything through equally. Then last January Comcast won a law suit saying that the FCC can't enforce that on them. So now Comcast is trying to change the internet. Net Neutrality is trying to keep it the way it is. So if you like how the internet worked for us so far, you're going to want Net Neutrality.
Note that the new taxes would be about $6 per month. Balance that against price reductions due to added competition and it should work out nicely for consumers. You do believe in competition as a market force, don't you?
The rest of your complaints are more related to a lack of competition than classification as a telecommunications service, so you should add them to the cost of not taking this action.
All the way back to Smith it has been understood that providing a level playing field to build a market on is very much the job of government.
Google is in favor of title II. Apparently they believe it will help them to enter the market so they can challenge the incumbents. I'm fairly sure that is the result of in-depth analysis and not due to consulting the magic 8 ball.
Currently, many people have a complete monopoly situation in broadband. It is literally impossible to reduce competition in those markets. Others have 2 choices. It is nearly impossible to reduce competition there. Do you REALLY think title II will drive Comcast or AT&T out of the market>?
It seems to me you're knee jerking on regulation without assessing the situation as it stands now at all.