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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."
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.
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 good in both interpretations.
The first way, it prevents companies from extorting money from the public.
The second way, it prevents companies from treating the public like a second class customer, and forces providers to improve service globally, when they offer improvements in connectivity.
I fail to see the downside, unless you think that people with shittons of money should get treated differently than people without shittons of money.
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.
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"
Somebody works for Comcast....
So you're going to impeach the CEO of Comcast? Good luck with that...
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"
They will be published when they are finalized.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Bull, you can always pay for more bandwidth, just like we currently do at home. This simply means that Comcast can't charge Netflix an extra $1,000,000 per month to no be throttled and lose all of their customers due to performance problems and it they cannot charge home users an extra $5 a month to not have their Netflix throttled to unusable speeds, $5 a month to access Facebook, $10 a month to access Google sites, etc.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
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.
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.
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.
That's not entirely truthful, from what I remember reading.
The links were allowed to become congested alright, because Verizon and Comcast refused to upgrade them when they did upgrades elsewhere, and told Netflix in no uncertain terms that they would not upgrade them unless the extortion payment was met.
It also glosses over what I read, in that neflix offered co-location of local cache servers INSIDE those networks, to reduce the effects of congested links, whch both verizon and comcast refused.
>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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
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
misrepresent and misunderstand what is happening (it's not a bill)? check
mention page length along with a statement and implication of ulterior motives? check
mention the IRS non scandal? check
hyperbole and fear monger? check
hypothesize in direct contradiction to what is actually known ("im just asking?")? check
complete ignorance of the role of independent regulatory agencies and their authority? check
complete and total ignorance? big check
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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.
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
Think about AT&T providing tapping of Internet trunks. What makes you think you can trust a private company to do things right without oversight?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I'm not referencing that, I'm talking about what they could (and WOULD) do if net neutrality was killed. They'd throttle the shit out of connections for both businesses and home users and if you complain "Well, you're not paying for the `high speed' option on your 50 Mb connection, that's why you can't stream any videos!".
If net neutrality was killed, they would nickle and dime the shit out of customers and force internet businesses to raise prices or be cut off from their customers.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
And Comcast actively refused to upgrade the links, despite having fucktons of spare money to do so and demand from their own customers telling them it was necessary -- that demonstrates "intent" too.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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...
How twisted do you have to be to believe that, to prevent the government from tyranny, you have to try to prevent it from fulfilling its proper function? I ask you seriously. If your government has turned against the people, your society is in deep doo doo, and worrying yourself sick about little details like this is not just silly, it is failing to face the real problem.
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.
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.
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 ?
Two wrongs don't make a right.
I said the same thing. Shortsightedness because it gains you temporarily what you want, never works in the long run.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Why would I be surprised by that? The Universal Access Fee for POTS telephone was levied to subsidise the costs of regulation, and to support the enforcement of regulation on the telecom industry to assure the availability of telephone services in rural areas.
This kind of action is very similar, but does not, nor is it intended to, provide universal access to the internet. Instead, it just puts restrictions on what ISPs are allowed to do with traffic passing through.
The question is weather the small tax is better than the extortion. I believe it is.
...because thinking that Title II should apply to data and not just POTS means you're short-sighted?
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
I think this is what people don't get.... it may be true that that links to certain services were weak points, but what Comcast wanted to do was charge the content providers for those links, despite the fact it was already their own customers that wanted (and WERE PAYING FOR) the bandwidth. The larger problem is that I am a Comcast customer, and also a Netflix customer. I pay Comcast a lot of money every month for service - nearly $100 when you include everything (yes, including modem rental), and what I want to use that service for is (sometimes) to stream Netflix. Comcast should want me to be a happy customer with how much I'm paying. They obviously don't give a crap... but since there's no reasonable competition in my area, I (you know, the actual Comcast customer) am screwed. Netflix is not "pushing" their content, I, the customer, am pulling it over the bandwidth I've already paid for.
Every industry with competition is driven towards serving the customer. Period. The problem here is not throttling, it's ultimately a lack of competition and collusion between ISPs. I'm not a big fan of regulations - if you actually have a free, competitive market, you don't need regulations, but companies take advantage and participate in anti-competitive behavior otherwise. The regulations shouldn't restrict the services of the company, they should be to keep the free market free, even if that means that, in the short term, people get their netflix throttled.... long term goals are much more important.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Yes, but it often makes JUSTICE.
That is all.
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.
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?
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.
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.
things_that_never_happened.txt
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.
But you can't defend one and not the other.
Opposing both is logically consistent but the rightwingers have been defending one.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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"
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.
They're charging Netflix $1,000,000 to have a direct access to their network.
Awesome, so we can change people to access our networks? I should tell my ISP that I would like to be paid. Last mile ISPs should not be able to change non-lastmile customers to access their network. A last mile ISP should not be allowed to have congestion on their networks and links to/from their networks. Lastmile ISPs are being paid by their customers to access the Internet at large. It is the ISP's job to access Netflix or to purchase bandwidth from someone else who can access Netflix.
They have the psychology of a toddler. They believe they should have everything they want and throw a tantrum when anybody else gets something nice.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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.
No, that is your strawman.
My argument is that you cannot as a group support profiling when it's done to other people then complain when it gets done to you.
I was opposed to the IRS tactics but I actually had a RIGHT to be since I ALSO oppose all OTHER forms of profiling.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Then you either weren't paying attention or you have a very bad memory. Every attempt by the democrats to act against profiling has been met by vehement opposition from not only Republican politicians but massive outcries from Republican voters and organisations as well.
Not to mention Fox News who, of course, will always be there to remind you that racial profiling is not racist. Somehow.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
If it were only about setting data free, you'd be right. BUT this is the government we're talking about. You believe the government isn't in this to gain more power and control over us?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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"
* 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.
Great. Because an ISP assigns better QoS to VoIP or streaming video than someone's bittorrent or ftp traffic, they automatically become a co-conspirator when someone uses Vonage to plan a bank robbery.
It sure would be nice if all this regulation was designed to do was enforce neutrality on bandwidth. But that's no the case, and to pretend so is to be willfully and destructively ignorant.
sigh
For the third time, I didn't say that they're currently throttling connections. I pointed out that if they were legally allowed to have various "speed lanes" for a given bandwidth, they would throttle the shit out of everyone (businesses and ordinary customers) unless you paid them huge amounts of money. Not only would every popular website / web-based service be charged massively more for a "fast lane" to their customers, but every end user would be nickled and dimed with "$5/month for access to Facebook" and "$10/month for access to Netflix" on top of their monthly payment for a given bandwidth speed.
This is not "a boogeyman", the ISPs already showed their hand and admitted that they want to do just that - keep your bandwidth the same but throttle your ability to access popular things unless you pay additional fees for a "fast lane".
Congrats on supporting ISP monopolies making the internet too expensive for most people to use. Then again, you're an AC, so you're probably just a dumbass troll.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
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.
Amen -- 300+ pages of 'regulation' that's conveniently not set to be publicized until after it's approved.
Can't wait for them to rule on licenses for websites like /. in order to have a "public forum".
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
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
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"
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.
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"
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". ")
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"
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?
I don't know whether they are or aren't, but that's a tangential issue. What is it that you're concerned the government will be able to do that they don't or can't do currently if internet service is classified under Title II?
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
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"
COMCAST represents everything that is wrong with America. Just go to consumerist and you will see.
New Economic Perspectives
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.
That is hilarious.
Comparing it ObamaCare?
Because the health insurance companies weren't denying coverage, increasing premiums and telling people that they have to die in the name of profits?