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."

Comments

Bring on the lausuits

[MetalliQaZ]

This is good news but the deed isn't done until Comcast, TWC, AT&T, and Verizon are defeated in court.

Re:Bring on the lausuits

[Anonymous Coward]

The only time the "people" win is when the Federal Government does not regulate. Regulation is strangulation and, ultimately, death.

I guess by "people" (with quotation marks) you mean corporations.

Yes, let's not have any rules or oversight on "people" who were born in a lawyer's office, can potentially live forever, are motivated purely by greed, and will gladly break the law when it suits them. What could possibly go wrong?

Sounds good

[wierd_w]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[circletimessquare]

Regulatory capture is a form of corruption. What you want is regulation without corruption.

With no regulations, worse abuses than regulation capture occurs: domination by oligarchy who abuse consumers and smaller players. With no recourse. Because there's no regulations. And there's no magic free market fairy who fixes things another way.

It's important to note this because there persists this economically ignorant nonsense that regulations cause problems. No, corruption causes problems. Regulations are the only way you get any fairness.

We need to fight *corruption* not *government* on the issue of regulation. I do not love government, but when it comes to markets, government regulation is the only thing that keeps the playing field fair so the magic of capitalism (efficiency via competition) can work.vMeanwhile, an unregulated marketplace left to itself becomes abusive.

There unfortunately persists this quasireligious faith based economic illiteracy in the USA, on the same intellectual level as creationism and antivaxxers, that unregulated marketplaces are magically free and fair because magic.

1. unregulated marketplaces: hell

2. corrupt government (regulatory capture, rent seeking parasites, oligarchy): hell

3. truly fair government regulation: the only way capitalism can work. without a fair playing field with referees, there is no fair game of capitalism. players cheat

Re:Congratulations

[MichaelMacDonald]

Considering that Net Neutrality is how the internet was run from day 1, I don't think there will be a problem.

I hope this wasn't a trojan horse

[Karmashock]

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.

Re:The real problem

[silentcoder]

>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.

Actually, I never got why that was an issue. Republicans mostly support profiling by law enforcement when it's based on race and religion. Why should it not be based on publicly stated philosophical beliefs then ?
Tea-party groups were vocally anti-taxation, this makes them prime profiling targets for the tax-man to double-check, by their own public statements they are highly likely to have cheated on their taxes.

Much more so than the leftwing organisations who tend to defend the services that taxes pay for.

Why is it okay to do extra checks on Muslims at airports, or to stop cars driven by black people 6 times more often than white people - but not to check anti-tax-lobby-groups' tax records more thoroughly ?

Of course, the leftwing VOTERS who oppose all profiling would agree that tax-man profiling is bad too, but I don't get why rightwingers think they have a right to complain about that at all. They DEFENDED profiling, until it happened to them - and they they continued to defend it for everybody EXCEPT them.
Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it to. If you back off from the idea (which to my mind flows logically from "equal before the law") that NOBODY should be under additional suspicion based on their race or religion, then you have ALSO backed of from the idea that they shouldn't be under additional suspicion based on the political beliefs.

Re:Congratulations

[duckintheface]

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.