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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.
Considering that Net Neutrality is how the internet was run from day 1, I don't think there will be a problem.
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.
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 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 *
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
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.
There are only eight pages of new rules. The rest is explanation, history, legal justification, and commentary. More here: http://e-pluribusunum.com/2015...