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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."
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.
I'm also concerned partially because at its root, the problem with broadband in this country is a lack of local choice. I believe competition (such as Google Fiber) going up against the phone company and the cable company would help lower prices while raising speeds far better than regulation that explicitly acknowledges monopoly status and exchanges (easily watered down) performance demands for guaranteed profit margins on (easily manipulable) books. I mean, the real problem with explicit acknowledgement of monopoly status is an implicit guarantee that the phone company and the cable company may not fail--and if they make poor infrastructure investment choices, they're insulated from failure.
I'm not suggesting this can't work. Only that there are a bunch of ways in which this can go haywire, so to me, the FCC's actions is simply the first step in a very long battle.
Huh? No, all Republicans hate Republican leadership. We call them "The Establishment" and wonder how the hell Boehner and McConnell get reelected. We were pretty giddy about collecting Eric Cantor's scalp, though. See, party leadership manipulates primaries and "crowns" our candidates for us. Romney, McCain, Dole, even GWB were the least liked of all candidates in their respective years. The problem is the "Anybody but X" crowd never settles on one person, so the leasst-liked guy with the plurality of votes gets the nomination. The party is pretty fractured, and there is a lot of dissent.
Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt, right here folks.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Nothing you posted refutes anything at all.
And surprise, surprise I still have the same doctor & (a better) health plan, but my fiance w/ an expensive sleep disorder was actually able to get insurance.
So you can fuck right off with your F.U.D.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Party support isn't the same. I'm a Republican myself - I'm against Obamacare, and every other Republican I know is too.
Compare that with Net Neutrality. I completely support Net Neutrality, as does almost every other Republican I know that is younger and/or understands the internet. The only ones really against it are the old guys who don't even understand it but simply say "Regulation is bad, mmmkay.".
Like it or not, everything doesn't boil down to corporate donations and dollars. Popular support weighs in too, and the right just isn't as united in this position vs Obamacare.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I agree, but only insofar as they really screwed the pooch on how they ran this.
A more intelligent method would be to give the ISPs a choice:
* treat all inbound/outbound user traffic equally (excluding obvious DDoS or similar), and retain full immunity from lawsuits caused by user activity (basically become a full common carrier).
-or-
* do what you want insofar as traffic shaping, but know that you do so without any DMCA Safe Harbor protection, and get no immunity from lawsuits or crimes caused by user activity. Why? Because if you modify/inspect user traffic, you gain and share a measure of legal responsibility for it.
You give the ISPs that choice. They can change their minds once every three years, but otherwise they should get those two choices, and no other. I'm willing to bet that the ISPs would rush to become common carriers in a heartbeat, since there's no way they could collude with every copyright holder on the planet to avoid lawsuits.
What they have now is the top of a very slippery slope... and I don't care what party runs the government, either of them will happily abuse the privelege farther on down the road as things get more burdensome.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
If its all so benign, then why is the regulation itself secret and not available for public review. Also, the size of the regulation at 320 pages is very suspicious, its hard to understand how so many pages could be needed for what seems like a few simple rules.