Slashdot Mirror
Republicans Back Down, FCC To Enforce Net Neutrality Rules
An anonymous reader writes: Republican resistance has ended for the FCC's plans to regulate the internet as a public utility. FCC commissioners are working out the final details, and they're expected to approve the plan themselves on Thursday. "The F.C.C. plan would let the agency regulate Internet access as if it is a public good.... In addition, it would ban the intentional slowing of the Internet for companies that refuse to pay broadband providers. The plan would also give the F.C.C. the power to step in if unforeseen impediments are thrown up by the handful of giant companies that run many of the country's broadband and wireless networks." Dave Steer of the Mozilla Foundation said, "We've been outspent, outlobbied. We were going up against the second-biggest corporate lobby in D.C., and it looks like we've won."
This is good news but the deed isn't done until Comcast, TWC, AT&T, and Verizon are defeated in court.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
This sounds good-- but I wonder just what form that regulation will take, and what level of regulatory capture will emerge.
The republicans gave up too easily. Look how long and drawn out their battle against Obamacare was. In comparison, this measure seems to have been abandoned without much fight. I can't help but wonder why.
"In addition, it would ban the intentional slowing of the Internet for companies that refuse to pay broadband providers"
Or, from a different perspective, this bans Internet companies from paying more $$$ for faster connections without government approval.
Don't shoot the messenger; I heard exactly this on Bloomberg this morning.
Not having expensive and artificial barriers put on one of the most important informational and free speech enhancing tools? Yeah, I'd say we're happy about that.
It remains to be seen if the resulting regulatory action will be detrimental.
If your only concern is the financial costs, and/or, the reduction of hypothetical profits, then this discussion is over before it even started. The issue at hand is over the continuance of the internet as a viable medium for the kinds of exchanges it has historically facilitated. This action simply preserves the golden goose, and keeps greedy companies from gutting it.
This is a positive step IF the FCC is limiting this to ensuring all traffic is treated equally. But too many laws, rules and regulations have been perverted by the feds to concentrate power. The last thing we need is an obamacare version of internet regulation or regulators thinking ONLY of the children or ONLY of national security.
Considering that Net Neutrality is how the internet was run from day 1, I don't think there will be a problem.
I wont be happy until we in the USA have First World levels of broadband speed - like we were supposed to have gotten after the telcos accepted all that corporate welfare during the 90s.
The hired help can claim to have been doing their job all along, but it was really hard, what with all that public opposition and all.
Who wants to fight for lobbyist's interests when the cause is clearly lost and 4 MILLION AMERICANS WROTE TO VOICE THEIR OPINION DIRECTLY TO THE FCC? But the hired can certainly say they tried hard to serve 'their interests' to those that might come calling in the future.
It is not as if the hired help actually believed they ever served the public's stated interests.
This is the government preventing "rape", as you call it. Large corporate monopolies don't get elected. You are so misinformed I wouldn't even know where to begin educating and ignoramus like you.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
The problem with government involving itself in net neutrality is that it will most likely address the issues with the ISP's but create new issues with government regulations. Government can't seem to do anything for the greater good without getting some sort of control in return. I think its clear that is where the Obama administration wants the FCC to provide. I am in agreement that the internet should be like your electrical, gas, or telephone has been. Just supply me the service and I will do with it what I want. I understand the caps being imposed in some means because the ISP does not have unlimited bandwidth and imposing some sort of reasonable cap would allow everyone the ability to have the same service capabilities. Maybe as technology improves capacity those caps can be raised or even eliminated. The ones I have seen do not impose any restrictions on most users. In any case, this is more about providing a even and fair service to customers for whatever means they use the internet for. Not as a way to impose government control over the internet. I remember how poorly the government handled the telephone deregulation, or the air industry, or trucking, in which all of those services were negatively affected by deregulation. What should happen is a simple mandate to make internet traffic neutral and prevent ISP's from charging for preferential traffic consideration. I have no doubt that whatever government does will be over the top and will be anything but net neutrality.
Somebody works for Comcast....
So you're going to impeach the CEO of Comcast? Good luck with that...
"Some Washington lobbyists are beginning to argue that the FCC mission doesn't just cover the Internet. Advocates for pay-TV providers are saying the FCC should use Section 706 to act more aggressively against the companies that produce TV content. Why? Because the pay-TV providers think the content producers are charging them too much for programming — and because programming costs eat into the budget for building, say, cable broadband, what hurts pay-TV providers could hurt the spread of broadband.
In short, if cable companies can convincingly argue that their costs of buying programming are effectively a barrier to broadband deployment, that's a case for federal intervention."
Congress makes laws, executive runs the government. Please tell me when you think Congress lost the ability to make laws. While you're working on that, maybe you can explain why you feel that corporate monopolies should be allowed to dominate our access to information? Could it be because your favorite corporate information outlet told you so? Yeah, thought so.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
I bet you believe rape is OK so long as the majority votes for it! You are a slob!
They will be published when they are finalized.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Somebody likes strawmen!
A lot of people are gleeful about the FCC stepping in to shut down the nonsense from the likes of Comcast. However, those same people forget that this is the same government has demonstrated an indifference to due process, personal privacy, and basically just does whatever it wants whenever it wants... and if you complain you'll just get stonewalled until you die of old age.
The internet has been largely unregulated and that has been a really good thing. Most of the growth and innovation we've seen has happened there. With the FCC stepping in to regulate it, we should consider what happened to other industries they've regulated.
Look at radio and broadcast TV. Notice the innovation and dynamic response to changing circumstances? Me neither.
The issue is that it always starts out with good intentions. But ultimately they start spelling out what you're allowed to do and not do in extreme detail to such an extent that you can't do anything that they haven't thought of... and that means you can't change because it is literally illegal.
I hope I'm wrong. But this could be the beginning of the end of the internet as we've known it.
What is more... when the FCC starts regulating the hell out of it... we can expect the likes of China and the EU to be right behind the US... the whole network will clap down on itself.
Hopefully some measure of freedom can survive in the deep web but I imagine they'll make that illegal at some point if only because it tends to draw the drug dealers and pedophiles.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Where did you get that number? Also, please explain how new taxes will be levied and on what they will be spent.
You can't answer any of that because you just blindly believe Fox News or whatever corporate shill you prefer to worship.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Freedom is like Cake you can't have it and eat it at the same time because once eaten or used it's gone. The eating part is where you can either have congress (legislation) control it or the Corps will. Phone and cable jack rates almost monthly. Although I have more channels to watch the content all sucks so I lost freedom to control it. Net neutrality speaks for at least the part where we have choice in the content we want to surf. Without it we will have to work through the same pile of crap load we get with cable to find that small website on programming a raspberry Pi or making your own fishing lures like gram-pa did before internet not like the young punk in Dicks sporting goods. Believe it or not once you give up NN you won't get it back the greed takes over and you loose the freedom of choice in content. As it is already search content is "dictated" to you now. We once had a search engine that worked when you had serious work to do now the results are polluted with unrelated crap. Sure we have a bazillion petabytes more data out there to search but it's still about hitting the content you want. Have to go, my sponsor wants the soapbox back.
While I agree the thought of net neutrality sounds good, think about the NSA scandle. We can't trust the NSA. What makes anyone think they can trust the FCC to do things right? It is the same government. You can't have it both ways.
I know its rather offtopic, but for non-US readers its relevant:
For anyone confused as to the situation of american politics in the past 8 years, the republican party has worked tirelessly to obstruct practically every piece of legislation after the ACA (healthcare legislation.) Theyve played a brinksmanship game with an artificially imposed budget limit, ironically created by them as a kudgel to complain about $cur_president's spending policies but with real power. This "debt ceiling" has been used twice to literally shut down the government. Mail didnt run, troops werent paid, contractors were furloughed, the FCC FTC and even the FDA were all deactivated not once, but twice in a bid to force the presidents hand to concede his high ground and allow their minority legislation to pass. this nihilism cost us 2 credit ratings and an estimated 24 billion dollars. Republicans gained nothing.
fast forward to 2015 when both our houses of legislature, the senate and congress, are now controlled by a gerrymandered republican electorate. The president is on his last term, something we call 'lame duck' and is now openly advocating for everything from free education to immigration reform policies. Republicans, with this control, still havent proposed an alternative to any legislation facing them, and wont even vote on major issues like campaign finance reform or immigration. whats worse, theyre still operating in a 2010 mindset of obstruct and destroy, so we're facing another brinksmanship game in which they threaten to stop funding for the Department of Homeland Security. about 240,000 employees would go unpaid, but be required to work, and every airport in the nation would likely experience a significant impact. Random government shutdowns have major repercussions in world markets that rely on a confident and reliable american government to back things like currencies and bonds.
so for republicans to back down on net neutrality is a serious step forward in a party that generally toes every corporate lobbyists hard line. Remember: theyre the party that apologized for inconveniencing BP during the largest oil spil in recent american history, and yet at this moment have conceeded to the will of the public.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The real problem is we don't know what is in the rest of the bill. If memory serves me it's 399 pages. Restrictions on internetwork data speeds don't take that many pages to write.
This is the Obama administration we're talking about. The same one that dictated the IRS to audit and kill off as many tea party people and groups as it can while not doing the same to leftist orgs. What if the FCC will require registration of websites to the federal government? What if they disagree with your political content and don't grant you license? Will you be operating a website illegally in the US? Sounds far fetch, but the issue of "we don't like what they're saying online" has been brought up in the FCC a few times. I wouldn't put it past Obama admin to use Net Neutrality as a way to get more federal control over what you put online. "Never let a crises go to waste"
Then there is the whole issue of the FCC, EPA, NSA, FBI, etc making their own rules and laws without them actually being laws...
For some reason I have a feeling this is going to be a bad, even if it addresses the real net neutrality issue, everything else tacked on is toxic!
Hopefully I won't have to use onion sites to read the news.
that have actually been perverted. Say what you will about Obamacare but there's no part about that law that isn't functioning as intended. Maybe you disagree with the intent of the law, but it's doing exactly what it was written to.
You're problem isn't with the laws, it's with the yahoos writing them.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Net Neutrality is not a policy despite your attempt to make it one by capitalizing it. And what they're proposing is a set of regulations; not the absence of all regulation. The FCC has already introduced the regs; they comprise 300 pages of new rules. That is certainly not how the Internet was run "from Day 1."
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
We will.
We have to give the government the power to regulate the internet before we can know what they'll do to the internet.
Wait, this sounds sickeningly-familiar....
Oh well. I'm sure it'll be fine.
After all, it's only the same FCC that has pursued a "wardrobe malfunction" for nearly 8 years, pushed for the Fairness Doctrine, and whose "Diversity Czar" Mark Lloyd was quoted as admiring the way Chavez seized control of radio/TV/media and placed them under State control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'm sure porn and less mainstream media outlets, political blogs, forums, etc that the government may dislike will have nothing at all to fear. /s (for the clueless)
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Independent regulatory agencies aren't really Executive.
They are and they aren't.
They're actually somewhat outside the basic 3 Branch Paradigm you were taught in school with its clearly defined boundaries.
If Congress actually had to sit down and create all the necessary regulations themselves for our modern world they would never get anything done (I know...I know...). Plus they can't be experts at everything, and even going back to the 1800s committees and hearings were often more about making political points that actually establishing facts and hearing from experts. So the delegation is a good thing in the long run, as long as the agency actually does its job, and the Congress remembers to check in now and then and make sure they are (*cough*SEC*cough*).
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
First, IANAR (I am not a republican). Dummycraps pass the shit sandwich known as Obamacare and my insurance went to worse coverage for higher prices. Maybe I'm wrong, but another effort to change how a large sector of the economy operates, and debated in secret, is following a bad precedent. Just remember that these rules are being pushed by the same administration that has prosecuted more whistleblowers in history, especially with regard to torture, and would like to see Snowden's head on a silver platter, so their track record on doing what is ethically right is really not great. But, don't let that cognitive dissonance get in your way...
Those 300 pages of regulations codify how the internet has always been. These regulations were necessary becasue the ISPs embarked on a new plan to squeeze content providers. They wanted to be paid both by the subscriber and by the content providers. But by nature these ISPs are utilities because they rely on access to the public domain in the form of conduits, telephone poles, street rights-of-way, and municipal owned fiber. Bu using Title II regulation, the FCC ensures that competitors like Google Fiber will have the same access to the public domain assests. That is the only way to have competition for the last mile of the network.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
The mundanes still believing in Kabuki theater. Money talked and won. Move along. The repulicrats will do as they please when they decide to do as such. Same Ivy schools, same banking lords, same families, same parties, and you're not in 'em - George Carlin.
Is it and why does it take 332 pages of unpublished regulations to accomplish it?
I only have a lightweight understanding of how the internet works, but is it possible a some future date that the providers could offer both net-neutral and net-freedom (my name for the a Comcast, Verizon optimized package). I suppose it would only be really feasible if there could be one hardware solution for the ISP that both packages could run in since a lot of people might start out with the net-neutral package but quickly switch to the net-freedom package when they see how awesome it is.
Hope you enjoy your ISP oligopoly frozen in place for the next 50 years, idiots.
We used to be able to do that with corporate responsibility laws, but they are almost gone and only a few states have them left but they are never used nowadays.
The Cake is a lie
Camel, Meet Tent.
I think that most people here on Slashdot will rue the day these regulations go into affect.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
We are ecstatic. We also enjoy drinking your tears you pitiful fuck.
When I read the headline, the first thing that popped into my head was a Robert Heinlein short story. I think the name was Magic Incorporated. The best that I remember of the story is that the demons from hell are trying to get a law passed in Congress. The good guys got together and blocked the law from being passed. But during the celebration party, it was found out that what the demons wanted to get passed as a separate law was put on as a rider on a different bill and was passed. The outcome of this was that the good guys had to go to hell to fight the demons.
Oh look, yet another low info voter.
Gigi Sohn, a special counsel for Wheeler, said the text of the actually net neutrality rules are only 8 pages. She said the other pages responds to the millions of public comments, "as required by law."
https://twitter.com/GigiBSohnF...
There is a war going on for your mind.
Out of his ass.
Somebody obviously doesn't understand how independent agencies work in the USA.
There is a war going on for your mind.
There are only eight pages of new rules. The rest is explanation, history, legal justification, and commentary. More here: http://e-pluribusunum.com/2015...
Yeah... well I'll keep the cork in until we see just how many hidden scams are added to any legislation.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Which is how the FCC has been making rules for the last forever. This is nothing new & *by law* it has to be done this way.
You are just another pathetic low information voter.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Yup, just another low info voter. Way too many of them on Slashdot these days.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Sig Heil #Obama #Dictatorship! #netneutrality #wearefucked!
What the hell is wrong with Slashdot these days?
"Republicans Back Down" is what is known in the trade of journalism as a "standing head". It is a newspaper headline, all preset in type, ready to be used for ANY morning's newspaper. That is how predictable Republicans are. They will ALWAYS back down, because it is all Kabuki Theatre. All they can imagine is being obstructionist, with no real agenda whatsoever of their own, and their pre-planned end strategy is to ALWAYS throw up their hands and say "oh, well".
I'll make it plainer. They have all turned into a bunch of PUNKS. Anyone who takes them seriously is a SAP.
How the hell can anyone be so blindly in favor of something when you aren't allowed to read the proposal before it's voted on? How can you possibly believe that this won't turn into colossal clusterf*ck? Do you really trust the government to do the right thing sight unseen? Have major companies ever bent over and taken it without passing it on to the customers? Do you honestly believe that this is going to level the playing field when you aren't allowed to know what the rules of the game are before starting?
You might want to read a real example of what's going to happen all over.
http://hyperborean.liberty.me/...
You're a crazy person, with a head full of disinformation, who's in no position to judge MetalliQaZ.
I congratulate the winning corporate overlords for defeating their rival corporate overlords. Keep up the good work, we're rooting for you!
I'm sorry, but this is not completely correct.
I am a network engineer and I have been in the I.T. field for over 30 years. My job is to break into computer networks (white hat hacking).
There are not two plans regarding this subject, there are THREE. Listed below.
1. Do nothing which results in Internet service providers throttling bandwidth that we pay for. Most people do not want this.
2. Net Neutrality. This is the idea that the Internet should be left alone because it's been working fine for decades. This is what a majority of the people want, and what they all think they are getting.
3. "Net Neutrality". The FCC and Obama came up with a plan to let governemnet agencies have vast sweeping control over what we see, hear and say on the Internet and they called this plan "Net Neutrality". Same name, but completely different meaning.
We can't see what it says until after it gets voted on, but we know it's over 300 pages long. The claim you just made would all fit on a single page.
Some of the vast control they would have is the ability to seize any and all records without any kind of warrant, and to just hand over information to TSA, even though it has nothing to do with travel. They will have sweeping powers, but at the beginning they will only implement the ones they said, just so the public would accept it. Later, they start implementing more and more, a little at a time so it's not noticed very much.
This is an important issue that could result in civil war. and everybody needs to writed the Senators and Representatives and DEMAND the FCC be completely stopped from getting ANY control on the Internet.
No, we will never see that, because most of the cost of regulation is opportunity cost: it's all the products, services, and competitors that don't get created.
Broadband prices will continue to rise after this, and the same people who pushed net neutrality will just keep on whining about the evil broadband providers, never acknowledging that their regulations actually contributed to the problem. Next thing, they are going to push for making Internet service a public utility and monopoly. Like other public utilities, it will be hugely overpriced and redistributive.
Net Neutrality certainly wasn't how the Internet was run from day 1: plenty of providers restricted what you could do on their networks, foremost DARPA itself.
Those wacky right-wing zealots at the EFF posted an article about some issues with the "General Conduct Rule" that is being proposed. To be honest, it sounds a lot like a catch-22 that could be used to go after almost any provider on almost any grounds. The potential for abuse is staggering, especially given the very blurred lines between the private and public sector in recent decades. Link: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
Actually, it WAS a policy. Title II is NOT new. We had it in the ... God Damnit, I'm tired of typing this shit. You !@#$ers should !@#$ing know that we had title II regulation and that it was knackered back in the !@#$ing 90's by a bush appointed FCC head. This isn't NEW. This is OLD, and it worked AWESOME back in the !@#$ day.
This is PRECISELY how the internet was ran back in the day. I'm old enough to !@#$ing remember it too. Get off my !@#$ lawn.
This will be the new government line: "Some packets are more equal than others."
Let it be remembered that the day the internet died, it was to the majority of Slashdot applauding. You just let the only entity more corrupt than the telecommunications companies take over the internet.
Joy.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
After all the fighting by carriers & government officials I have to wonder what the catch is going to be. I highly doubt this is a "we were wrong, lets get this fixed" mentality ("we" is not limited Republicans, there was a lot of corporate/political interests involved). More likely they saw the writing on the wall (judicial, public, etc) and wanted to be seen as on the wining side while getting some of their own interests snuck into the regulation making.
I guess in my mind the problem is that companies and corporations come and go. In 1965 CBS, NBC, and ABC had a huge amount of power and control of what Americans could watch. Now most of the time a good portion of Americans are watching CNN or Fox or getting information from blogs or News organizations Internet pages. ABC, NBC and CBS are less powerful than they were 50 years ago.
The government never gets weaker. Once they intrude into an area they just keep on lathering more regulations. Soon it becomes impossible for new players to even enter the sector because it requires a staff of lawyers and ex-regulators just to operate in that business environment.
The only thing worse than corporations being able to dominate our access to information, which is what happened when CBS, ABC and NBC controlled all broadcast media, is to have government able to dominate our access to information. New technology, cable, satellite, the internet, eventually broke the big three's domination access to information. Nothing, this side of revolution, can break a government's domination of information once they get it.
Look. The only reason you wouldn't be able to keep your insurance that the ACA could even *vaguely* be named responsible for is if it was so bad that it didn't meet the minimum standards of the ACA, and your insurance company didn't upgrade the policy accordingly -- most likely, they cancelled it in favor of new policies that *did* meet the minimum requirements. The whole *point* of the ACA was to see to it that people were *sufficiently* insured.
Otherwise, the only reasons you would lose your current insurance would be if the insurance company cancelled your policy -- and in that case, the blame lands squarely on the insurance company; or your employer decided to take the opportunity to cut your benefits and blame it on the ACA. In that case, look to your employer.
As for your doctor, the only ACA-related reason you might not be able to keep your doctor is if they don't bother to register with the pool you chose -- and all you have to do there is tell your doctor which one it is. And if they fail to register, you can blame your doctor. My doctor did the right thing, and she's still my doctor. I specifically asked, and she said there was almost nothing to it.
Now, let's look this issue right in the face. Are there conditions where you couldn't keep your doctor? Sure. For instance, if your doctor got run over by a bus. Or retired. Or committed suicide. Or moved to Botswana. Or switched jobs. So "Obama lied", right? But of course, if you're a sane person and not trying to shill your way through a bout of Obama-hate, you would understand that there will be some exceptions, and generally, they're going to be related to the doctor's circumstance -- just as the bus incident would be. Because there isn't one damn thing in the ACA that says "this here doctor can't be used."
As with the previous poster, my circumstances were enormously improved by the ACA. I did get to keep my doctor (it was no problem at all, she just did a little paperwork, that was it) and my coverage is now excellent.
Is everything perfect? No. Republicans are blocking the medicaid expansion here, so many no- and low-income individuals who were intended to be covered by the ACA, aren't. While this goes on, the taxes we paid here to cover them go to another state as the already-allocated funds are disbursed elsewhere. Consequently, our medical and insurance costs here are rising because we are paying the hospitals for uncompensated care for people who should have been covered, and for which the funds were already allocated.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Judging by other websites I've seen that on, Fox News has a talking point about 300-odd pages and said low-info voters like to repeat it.
now if only mozilla could also have fought for free video format, but for this cause, yeah fuck that...
RIP mozilla
The GOP-controlled Congress will soon be zeroing-out the budget for the FCC to do any enforcement on this ruling. They do control the purse-strings, but it is the most cowardly, corporate-whore, Machiavellian play imaginable. Nothing will change and consumers will pay ever more to monopolies.
So, does this now mean my ILEC has to open up its DSLAM and fiber to my company, or other ISPs and telecomms? Didn't think so.
Doofuses. This is overreach, and overkill. It's possible some sort of Congressional band-aid *might* have been appropriate here, but you chuckleheads have used your geek clout to open Pandora's box. Expect to see full-blown Central Committee censorship within, oh, 5 years. It was already headed there, but this clinches it.
Just remember that somebody told you so, Dumbasses. Everything from IP "rights" to political correctness now trumps the 1st amendment, property rights, and contract law.
Particularly sad to see the EFF involved in this.
will now be controlling your internet. Oh, and it always was about control - they've (Dems and Repubs) always wanted control over the internet. Now they will have it under the guise of "net neutrality", and you guys fell for it.
Can anybody see the train wreck ahead?
So how exactly is it needed now, except as a stalking horse for eventual full application of Title II, which is NOT how the internet was run from day 1.
Get it working first, then fence it in, I suppose.
I'm composing a list, with apologies to George Carlin: Seven Words You Can't Say On ObamaNet. Suggestions invited.
Wow, the link to the rules has been posted on this very thread THREE TIMES.
Some people just refuse to believe that they can possibly be incorrect, even when proven wrong with incontrovertible facts. Fucking Randroids.
Newsflash! Greedy companies ALREADY gutted the Internet. Or clogged it with content spam, I mean, advertising. Seriously, you need a quad-core machine with at least 8GB RAM, and a GPU more powerful than 50 average PCs from back in the day, just to process the average commercial website anymore, over, say, a even a 50mb pipe. It takes forEVER for scripts on accuweather, yahoo, most newspapers, etc. to run. That's after you wade through half a page or more of "sponsored result" dreck on a "search" engine.
This crap doesn't need preserving. It's only going to get worse, especially with the government officially getting in the act. So, what will happen? Well, we used to say the Internet routes around damage. With or without government approval, permission, regulation, or assistance. Now, if the Internet itself IS the damage... Well, you do the math.
Broadband already is basically a monopoly and hugely overpriced. I'm not a fan of turning it into a regulated utility, but let's be honest about the state we're in. If Comcast is your only viable option, you're already dealing with a provider that acts more or less like a government department, just one with higher profit margins.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
They have to vote on the new rules so we can see what they are.
Win for corporations or anybody else that can afford to lobby.
When do nameless, faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats have enough fine-grain control of everything you do?
Along with these new 'Net Neutrality' laws comes the power for the FCC to decide what is "lawful traffic".
Think of Janet Jackson's nipple slip. Imagine the joy once the FCC gets control of the internet.
The FCC doesn't care about your net neutrality - it is the carrot being dangled to get control over this space.
Time travel is possible. We are quickly heading for 1984.
Seems the chickens have realized who is guarding them.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Page number count doesn't mean anything and you know it! Since it was so short, I posted it here for all of Slashdot to read:
Net Neutrality certainly wasn't how the Internet was run from day 1: plenty of providers restricted what you could do on their networks, foremost DARPA itself.
The restrictions applied by DARPA applied to all internet users. Services like AOL and Compuserve, when they first offered connections to the internet, offered the internet service they were allowed to offer. They already had services beyond what was allowed on the internet. As the restrictions on internet usage were incrementally relaxed, it became possible for customers of one ISP to offer services to customers of other ISPs. As this increased the potential market for customers of the ISPs, ISPs facilitated it by making "peering" arrangements with each other. These peering arrangements, at first, worked on the assumption that traffic between each pair was roughly equal in both directions. Then "super star" services came along, upsetting the balance of traffic. So, the providers on the receiving side of the "data deluge" decided they wanted to be paid for the imbalance.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
I'm always glad to see people get what they asked for. I just don't see why I have to get what they asked for.
These regulations were necessary becasue the ISPs embarked on a new plan to squeeze content providers. They wanted to be paid both by the subscriber and by the content providers.
Actually, most of the content providers are subscribers. They pay their ISPs for access to the internet. Consumers of the content may be subscribers of different ISPs than the content they access. So content providers were providing content to subscribers on different ISPs. Initially, the ISPs saw this as increasing the potential market for their own subscribers, ISPs facilitated it by making "peering" arrangements with each other. These peering arrangements, at first, worked on the assumption that traffic between each pair was roughly equal in both directions. Then "super star" services came along, upsetting the balance of traffic. So, the providers on the receiving side of the "data deluge" decided they wanted to be paid for the imbalance.
Another issue is that the major ISPs, like Camcast and Time Warner, now own some of the major content providers. Naturally, each ISP wants to prioritize the content of the content providers it owns.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
All we need to know about the intent of this regulation is that they've refused to make the text public for review. I'm all for neutering Comcast, et. al., but hiding the text of the regulations leads me to believe I'll be neutered, too.
Not where I'm living.
Well, no, not at all. Even in markets where Comcast has a monopoly, it has to keep its prices low enough and its product up to date enough to make it unprofitable for other players to enter. Comcast isn't subsidized by taxes, subject to political pressures, or public sector unions. And you have a choice whether you buy Comcast's product, a choice you don't get with many public utilities.
Hooray!
Sure. But the barriers to entry for the broadband market are tremendously high, which is why most locations have only one major provider. If you want to become a broadband provider, you'll usually choose a place without an existing broadband solution, because otherwise you run the risk of a price war that could make your newly built infrastructure a lot less profitable. The fact that Comcast could lower prices in itself is a disincentive for others to enter the market, which basically means that Comcast doesn't have to lower prices. It's similar to when companies like WalMart announce that they'll beat any competitor's price. That's partially to get your business, but it's also a very public announcement that nobody else should even bother trying to compete on price, which prevents WalMart from actually having to act on its guarantee on any large scale. The counterintuitive net result is higher prices on average.
With barriers to entry being what they are, keeping your product good enough that nobody risks huge piles of capital to build out risky new infrastructure is about as high a bar as keeping your service just barely good enough that people don't vote you out of office. Sure, it could happen, but it probably won't. It keeps things from getting ridiculously bad, but they're still pretty damn bad. The fact that Comcast is just slightly better that a government agency that provides a service you need in order to live really is damning with faint praise.
I'll be honest about my personal experience--just about the only government agency I've dealt with that is worse to deal with than Comcast is the California DMV. I'm fairly certain that if they outsourced the DMV to Federal Express or Amazon.com, the whole operation would be a single rack of servers and a couple of guys to keep them running and mail out the printouts.
That's true in the sense that you can choose not to have broadband Internet access at all while skipping out on running water or trash collection is not really a good option for most people. If we needed broadband as badly as we needed city water, you could bet your bottom dollar that Comcast's prices would be even higher than they are now and their service would be even worse. A much better setup would be if you could choose between Comcast and some other technically comparable alternative, but that's not a reality in most places. In terms of market outcome, there's a world of difference between "My optional product or my competitor's optional product," and, "My optional product or go fuck yourself."
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
i get gop email...here's where some of their money went:
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2015 08:42:22 -0500
From: Senator Rand Paul
Subject: the latest insult
Protect Internet Freedom
Big government can’t seem to keep its hands off of anything.
*The latest insult: President Obama and the Federal Communications Commission
are going to take over the Internet on February 26th if we don’t do everything
we can do to stop them right now.*
A plan deceivingly referred to as “Net Neutrality,” involves declaring the
Internet a “public utility” and gives the FCC the power to decide what Internet
service providers can charge and how they operate. This is not only a direct
attack on the free market, but it will also result in an increase in Internet
access fees for millions of consumers in America. It’s a massive tax on the
middle class, plain and simple.
The details are complicated but here’s the truth: _If "Net Neutrality" is
passed, for the first time ever, the Internet will be under the rule of an
antiquated regulation designed for land line telephones._ President Obama wants
to take something that’s working just fine, and tie it up in red tape--sound
familiar? We've seen this movie before--it's called ObamaCare.
The FCC plans to vote on Feb. 26th on whether or not the government should take
their usual heavy handed approach to controlling the Internet or do the right
thing and leave it alone.
*I need your help to tell President Obama and the FCC: "Don't mess with the
Internet!"*
An unregulated Internet has been the single greatest catalyst in history for
individual liberty and free markets on the planet. It has created the greatest
revolution since Henry Ford invented the Model T.
Let's get this straight--technology has progressed because it has been driven by
a free and open Internet--not because of DC bureaucrats. This latest attempt to
regulate the web threatens to interrupt that positive innovation, set the market
back, and kill jobs.
A free, flourishing Internet is as important as anything man has ever created.
But those freedoms are under assault.
*Please, stand with me and help protect Internet freedom by signing this
petition today.*
These attempts to regulate the Internet are a direct attack on the freedom of
information and an innovative market. The government needs to stay out of the way.
Free markets are worth protecting. Please tell your friends, your families, that
there’s nothing neutral about net neutrality. *We have to stop this aggressive,
invasive, and harmful regulation and we need all the help we can get to do it.*
Sincerely,
Senator Rand Paul
Paid for by Protect Internet Freedom
This email was sent by: Romney for President Inc., 138 Conant St., 1st Floor,
Beverly, MA 01915.
This message reflects the opinions and representations of the Protect Internet
Freedom, and is not an endorsement by Mitt Romney. You are receiving this email
because you signed up as a member of Mitt Romney's online community on 2012-11-06
No, that's incorrect. For quite some time, the DARPA-based Internet and the commercial Internet existed side-by-side. Both DARPA and many ISPs had all sorts of restrictions in their TOS.
Your history is fiction. Once DARPA allowed more general usage, people immediately negotiated all sorts of arrangements to hook up to the Internet.
Yes, mostly due to government regulations, planning departments, and other governmental gatekeepers.
Actually, the majority of Americans have two or more wired providers, plus two or more wireless providers. That's in addition to satellite Internet and various local options based on microwave links.
If Company X can offer the same service as Comcast but more efficiently, then it is rational for Company X to enter the market. What Comcast currently charges makes no difference.
Skipping out on running water or trash collection is a perfectly reasonable choice for many people, since there are excellent and cheaper alternatives than municipal monopolies.
This is NOT about playing fair with Netflix, but about regulation, taxation, control, and the censorship of information on the Internet.
1. Will need a FCC license to run a website.
2. All content will have to comply with FCC rules.
3. No more free speech on the Internet, (Think China, and their version of the Internet).
Thanks, FCC for "Net Castration".
I don't doubt that those contribute significantly (although nobody seems to want to put up real numbers to back up the claim), but even in the absence of regulation, wiring up a large geographical space is bloody expensive. There are very high capital investments to be made in either case, and you have to be reasonably sure they'll pay off.
I'm perfectly willing to believe that our regulatory regime is the major source of the problem, but I'm skeptical that the problem is "regulation exists" rather than, "our regulation sucks." I mean, not all of the countries that are beating the snot out of us on the broadband front are known for their light regulatory touch. Their regulatory environment likely just encourages competition better than ours does.
I think this hinges pretty heavily on the definition of "broadband." A lot of these claims are based on somewhat dated thresholds like 4Mbit, which is "broadband" by some definitions, but kind of laughable when you compare the results to other civilized countries. Once you get to higher tiers like 10, 25, and 50Mbit, things start looking substantially less competitive.
I'm hopeful for what wireless providers will be able to bring in the coming years, but the competition situation for real broadband right now is pretty grim, limited by the fact that the best ways to move lots of data fast is over physical wires and it takes time and money to run wires.
That needs to be phrased very carefully. It needs to be able to do it more efficiently than Comcast at its equilibrium competitive price. Your second sentence is key. What Comcast currently charges isn't the rate you have to beat. The target rate is whatever you think Comcast could cut its rates to if it had to compete with you. Given that has already amortized a goodly chunk of its capital investments and it's able to bundle with television and sell one or the other as a loss leader depending on the market, that makes it a risky prospect. So unless you have a real ace up your sleeve, you'd generally invest elsewhere and Comcast never actually has to come anywhere near that rate.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
These regulations are not just about Netflix vs Comcast, but about taxation, censorship, Gov. control, and limiting free speech.
1. Web sites need to get a new license. (Think big fee).
2. Web sites must filter ALL content to comply with FCC.
3. No more free speech as we know it. (Think China's version of the Internet).
Thanks FCC, for "Net Castration".
Here Here, you're spot on !.
Why do you need to "wire up a large geographical space"? You can be a small-town local ISP, pull wires through existing tunnels, rent wires from the electric or water utilities, use microwave and WiMax links and distribution, etc. (all things small companies in European cities that I have lived in have done).
Really? I don't believe that's true. Netflix works fine at 3 Mbps, what more do you want?
Having lived in several "other civilized countries", I think US broadband is pretty good and cheap. Furthermore, many of those subsidize broadband, so it's actually a lot more expensive than it seems.
The cost of making a product is independent of the price you later decide to charge for it.
Did I say it was? What I said was that if another provider can provide the service more efficiently, then they will enter the market. At that point, Comcast's prices would change from monopoly pricing to competitive pricing. The reason why that matters is not pricing, but that Comcast at least has to keep their equipment and services competitive. A government-mandated monopoly doesn't even have to do that.
If this so called "Net Neutrality" is soooh! great then why is it not posted on the Internet (Full Text) for All to see and read). This is not about Netflix vs Comcast, or some other distraction, they already struck a deal. It's about taxation, full control, licensing, and limiting and/or eliminating free speech, diverget thought, and the free flow of information on the Internet (Think China's Version of the Internet). 1. Web sites and ISP's will need to get a new license every year. (Think Big Fee). 2. Web sites and ISP's will need to pay new taxes, which costs will be passed on to the consumer. 3. Web sites and ISP"s will have to filter ALL content to comply with ALL new FCC rules/guidelines. 4. Web sites and ISP's will have to furnish Proof, that they are in compliance with ALL FCC rules/guidelines. Thanks FCC, For "NetTrojan". ")
Let the a bunch of leftsts financed by George Soros take complete federal control over the internet, and micromanage it however they wish with a series of secret regs they refuse to release and refuse to testify about, based on a problem very few, if any, people can define or even say affected them in any way. Then, cheer, as the last resistance to this scheme is surrendered by people who are also probably being paid off. What could go wrong? Only a Progessive calls that progress.
Comcast is a HUGE contributor to Obama and the DNC... THEY are the one company on Earth LEAST likely to be affected by this. THEY will get waivers from any of the 300+ pages of regs that will initially roll-out of the FCC just like the President's important allies got healthcare waivers, it'll be any future startup company that will find it cannot get waivers from the avalanche of new rules that the unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats will write and apply to the net over the next 20 years; as with ALL other federal regulatory moves, there is no limit to the number and scope of future rules. Have you ever LOOKED at your phone bills????? One these regs kick in, the clock will start ticking to the roll-out of mini tax after mini tax on your internet bills ("universal access fee", "handicapped access fee", "rural areas fee", etc ... it'll all sound so "nice" but it will all just be taxes.). The ISPs will become as "free" as at hour hardline phone company with start-ups as frequently arising as they do in landline phone service.
Dopes who bought into the "net neutrality" promise are going to really HATE the effects ten years from now... and then they'll blame Republicans...
Sure, it's possible that a lot of little ISPs could cover an area effectively as well and compete with the monopolists on a block-by-block basis. Economies of scale work against it, but it's possible. I don't think such an ecosystem would create too much competition, though. Any ISP capable of starting up and surviving in a tiny footprint would likely choose the most under-served space to do it, so you'd expect most areas to be "monopolist + 1 small ISP" instead of a few ISPs, which is what you'd get with a lot of large operations working a city at a time.
Then again, "a lot of large operations working a city at a time" is exactly what we don't have, so the 1 small / 1 big equilibrium is better than nothing.
You don't think that the number of people with competitive broadband depends heavily on the definition of "broadband"? If I define "broadband" as "a working sewer system" I think we'd see a substantial increase in the number of people with broadband. And if you define it as a 25Mbit Internet connection, you'd see a much smaller number. So when the telcom industry tells rosy stories of robust competition in the broadband industry, they're using a definition carefully chosen to make that story true.
Netflix recommends 5Mbps for HD and 25Mbps for UHD. If we want to stick to a single stream at SD, it's great, though. Previous generations survived with low res black and white televisions with no ill effects, so we could actually get away with a lot less than that. As long as our Internet usage patterns remain what they were in, say, 2012 for the foreseeable future, we can define ourselves as having perfect infrastructure and decalre victory.
Weirdly, the US broadband market seems to be the only tech market where we haggle over how many years ago everything became "good enough" to stop improving. I mean, Intel keeps putting out better processors even though MS Word runs perfectly well on the ones from a few years ago. It's hard to fill up the hard drives we buy today, but they're still getting bigger. Which is good, because cloud storage sucks at 3Mbps, so all of the possibilities on that frontier are out the window unless we upgrade.
It's these kinds of vague, hand-wavy assertions that drive me nuts. This stuff is just numbers, and it's knowable. Which countries and how much? What's the definition of "a lot more expensive" in terms of dollars per month so it's easy to compare? I admit it's hasty back-of-the-envelope work, but I'm not able to subsidies that work out to the equivalent of more than a few dollars a month.
They have to keep their equipment and services competitive with whatever a new competitor might bring online, but they can keep their prices at monopoly levels until that competitor actually does come online. The fact that Comcast has to keep up efficiency doesn't result in all that much benefit the end user if it all ends up in monopoly profits. The fact that it's marginally better than a government ISP is still damning with faint praise.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The Republicans DID NOT "shut down the government"
1. The gutless Republican leadership was afraid of a shutdown so they offered Obama bugets that fully-funded EVERYTHING that had always previously been funded, even funded Planned Parenthood, which is an outrage to many Republicans, (it just lacked NEW funding for Obamacare). When Obama refused to accept the money, HE shut the government down. HE ordered employees of the government to go around closing parks etc (which he supposedly could not do for lack of cash... but that's another detail that proves how political he was being)
2. The Republican leaders then panicked some more and offered Obama a budget with ALL the money, including for Obamacare, but with a 1-year waiver on the "employer mandate". Obama refused to accept the money and HE kept the government "closed" (even though most government workers kept working and were promised they'd get all their pay)
3. The Republican leaders fully-caved to Obama...fully funding everything with no strings attached. Obama took the money and "re-opened" the government allowing government workers to keep the unemployment the collected while not being payed AND re-paying them the missed paychecks (so they basically got windfall profits and an extra full-pay vacation). The Obama, several months later, used his pen and implemented a 1 year delay to the employer mandate to push the negative effect past the 2014 elections to try to save the Democrat senate (and thereby proving that much of the shutdown was actually just Obama playing political games... he was perfectly willing to do the mandate delay to benefit Democrat politicians)
When Obama was inaugurated, he announced that "I won, you lost" to the Republicans... and he NEVER actually negotiated ANY compromises with them (he wasd never willing to make ANY commitment in ANY meeting with the GOP and in all comments on the subject he says he hoped Republicans "get over" thier beliefs and compromise with him, always with the caveat that his positions would not change as part of any such compromise - in other words his definition of compromise is "you agree to go my way")
Yes. Mitch McConnel said his job was to make Obama a 1-term president... but ALL opposition party leaders say that. Tip O'Neil said HIS job was to make Reagan a 1-termer... what is completely unprecedented in US politics is a president who refuses to compromis on anything and refuses to negotiate on anything, even after costing his own party control of both the House and the Senate.
No, that is NOT what net neutrality means, despite it being the standard "response" whilst the anti-NN PR push was underway as to why NN was terrible.
If you QoS VoIP over FTP, this is NOT necessarily a violation.
If you QoS YOUR VoIP over someone ELSE'S VoIP, then that IS a violation,
If you QoS YOUR VoIP over FTP, then that IS a violation.
NN and common carrier means you can prioritise types, but not routes. Just like you can get express delivery (for more money) than standard delivery with the common carrier of the postal service. 911 calls are prioritiesed over all other calls (you can dial 911 even if you have no legitimate phone access because you failed to pay line rental) by the common carrier telephone services.
No, I think you got the dependency and the definition wrong.
The argument for government support for broadband for the home is that people need it for education and jobs. For that, a single SD stream is sufficient, and for that, almost all Americans have multiple providers.
Your definition of broadband means that you are effectively arguing that the US government should engage in a massive regulatory scheme so that pampered upper middle class folks and their kids can retreat nightly to watching separate UHD video on their subsidized Internet connections, and that is just wrong. Even if you accept the notion of positive rights, there is no rational policy objective served by that, and it effectively ends up taxing poorer people to give already well off people a nice entertainment option.
No, it's not "knowable" because money is fungible. Subsidies occur in the form of cheap loans, and loan guarantees, easements, contractual commitments that don't show up as debt, R&D contracts related to infrastructure, free provision of "public" television, and many other forms. A lot of infrastructure was handed to companies in places like Germany as part of privatization of national telecoms. But there are more obvious forms too: Germany used a massive surtax on income in order to deploy a fibre network throughout the country in the 1990s (a lousy investment).
Yes, that's what I said.
It ends up in enormous benefit to the end user compared to a government monopoly, because with a government monopoly, the user ends up paying monopoly prices and receives outdated service. That was the norm with US and European national telecoms until they got privatized. In both places, you couldn't even legally connect an analog modem to the phone lines. The Internet didn't take off on either continent until they were privatized.
Note that, ironically, Germans are making "grass is greener" arguments about the US:
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt...
So, the neutrality debate is about network providers adjusting performance for different types of content. It seems to me, far more important question than if they are legally allowed to do it, is WHY ARE THEY ABLE TO DO IT? A much bigger problem is the fact that they are able to tell anything at all about the content, because that means it's not secure and should be a violation of privacy. I'd prefer net neutrality failed, because we shouldn't be depending on network providers to monitor our traffic for content type, but we should fix that by making it impossible, not by legal means which clearly no longer apply to the government itself and by extension, the companies that facilitate communications. FCC net neutrality ruling doesn't fix the problem, it just lets the government PRETEND they've fixed the problem. Plus, the govenrment wants net neutrality, else how are they going to "fast lane" their surveillance program traffic without exposing it to dweebs at the ISPs?
It remains to be seen if the resulting regulatory action will be detrimental.
True, but we have seen real harm due to a lack of regulation on this particular issue.
Congress, with past Presidents sign the acts, has authorized the Federal Government to regulate all Telecommunications by passing the Telecommunication Act of 1934 and again in Telecommunication Act of 1996. FCC is carrying out that law as it sees fit within the framework of the law. It is up to the President and Congress to have a check on the implementation of these laws by the FCC. If any agency exceeds its lawful mandate I cannot help that the President and Congress refuse to exercise or enable this overreach.
I was putting pressure on my Representative (R) though I had no influence with my two Senators since they are both from the (D) party. I pushed for the "the Internet is a utility" based on first principles in the Republican party, which does not always lead to wanting private ownership of public goods.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
A few questions...
1. Who decides what "legal" content is?
"Net neutrality, or open Internet, is the principle that Internet service providers should give consumers access to all legal content and applications on an equal basis"
a. is hate speech legal?
b. is Tor legal?
c. is bullying legal?
d. is encryption legal?
e. torrents?
2. How will they know if content is "illegal" content?
3. Isn't regulated the opposite of open?
4. Hasn't the FCC always wanted to regulate the internet but we have always stopped them to keep the internet "open" and "free"
The regulation only states that ISPs may not throttle or block content providers. NETFLIX will still pay to get their pipe directly into the local ISP switch. To do otherwise will put their streams in jeopardy as the net gets congested with various "natural" bottlenecks that the ISPs have no control over.
Continues to be home to a bunch of statist creeps. The reflexive leftism and statism here shows how brainwashed you all are. Keep drinking the Koolaid.
I guess that means a stopped 24-hour clock is right 170 times more often than the GOP in congress...
Furries make the internet go.
If the telcos and cablecos weren't allowed to consolidate their monopolies.
For the last 30 years baby bells have been asking for and getting favourable legislation at state/regional level (legislated monopolies and mergers being allowed) in exchange for promises to invest in infrastructure.
In EVERY SINGLE CASE, those promised rollouts have been cancelled long before completion, but state regulators haven't baulked when the telcos have gone back asking for even more concessions (including undoing local-loop unbundling access and driving virtually every CLEC out of operation - there are fewer now than there were in 1981)
The end result is that AT&T is almost completely reassembled without that pesky "universal service" obligation that got imposed in it in 1934 as part of the massive antitrust action which created Title II in the first place.