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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.
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.
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.
The peering bandwidth is the issue. They can provide all the last mile bandwidth they want, but if you can't connect to any services outside their network because they want to keep customers using their own services then that isn't really the Internet and we are back to the days of AOL chat rooms and BBNs with (pay) walled off private networks.
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."
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.