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FCC Approves Net Neutrality Rules
muggs sends word that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has voted 3-2 to approve an expansion of their ability to regulate ISPs by treating them as a public utility.
Under the rules, it will be illegal for companies such as Verizon or Cox Communications to slow down streaming videos, games and other online content traveling over their networks. They also will be prohibited from establishing "fast lanes" that speed up access to Web sites that pay an extra fee. And in an unprecedented move, the FCC could apply the rules to wireless carriers such as T-Mobile and Sprint -- a nod to the rapid rise of smartphones and the mobile Internet. ... The FCC opted to regulate the industry with the most aggressive rules possible: Title II of the Communications Act, which was written to regulate phone companies. The rules waive a number of provisions in the act, including parts of the law that empower the FCC to set retail prices — something Internet providers feared above all. However, the rules gives the FCC a variety of new powers, including the ability to: enforce consumer privacy rules; extract money from Internet providers to help subsidize services for rural Americans, educators and the poor; and make sure services such as Google Fiber can build new broadband pipes more easily.
4-5 years in the courts...
Is there is no local loop unbundling. This was the real solution. With competition to supply the service who cares if comcast or time warner are pieces of crap. You can drop them like hot potatoes. Instead we have more control and less freedom.
So when do they release these 322 pages of new rules? With all this transparency, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?! /s
I mean, after the broadcast flag incident, how is it everyone so comfortable with letting the FCC become the packet police? The regular court system has proved to be inadequate... when?
Wonder what the public key field is for?
You mean like the ISPs already seem to want to go to?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Anyone know if this will have an immediate effect on the throttling ISP's seem to be doing to Netflix content unless they make special deals with the ISP's (I'm looking at Verizon specifically)? Does this mean it is now illegal to demand third party websites pay extra for their content to not be throttled (which is exactly the kind of scheme Verizon and other ISP's are currently running)? If so I wonder how this will effect deals already made to speed up content.
What process has been in secret? He has been open from the start. Just because republicans state it has been a secret does not actually mean it has been, unless you watch Fox news.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
this seems to good to be true... it's what the populace wants, what the corporations didn't, and it makes sense.
I can't correlate this with being a current government agency that interfaces between the public and commerce...
after so many time being disappointed by the choices our government makes i guess im in battered wife syndrome type shock.
"IT'S (probably*) A TRAP!"
- Rear Admiral Akquixotic of the Mon Calamari
*: There's a small chance that this will end up actually helping consumers. A broken clock is right twice a day, and a reg-captured FCC occasionally does things that benefit the common man.
For example, the Block C Open Access provisions on Verizon and AT&T's LTE bands (or at least some of them) are what prevented these carriers from preventing tethering or the use of custom devices. Any FCC-certified device, rooted or not, tethering or not, can be on those bands, and there's nothing the carrier can do to stop it without breaking the law.
Those provisions have been a lifesaver for many customers of these two carriers who want to use the LTE from their phone to tether a laptop on the go, but don't want to pay extra or buy dedicated hardware for it. So the FCC definitely helped in a pragmatic sense with those rules.
Then again, I'm sure the industry coalitions have fully formed lawsuits written up, signed, in the envelope, and just waiting to be mailed when this decision hit. Who knows how long it'll be until the results of this trickle down through carrier policy and plan offerings to affect the everyman?
It doesn't go far enough. What we really need is to separate content creators from the network providers. Have a separate utility company that only provides your internet connection and nothing else. That way, every company that wants to sell you product is on 100% equal footing. Make the market truly free for everyone to participate on a level playing field. After all, isn't that what's most fair to everyone? Distributing your cable TV service over your now independent internet link will open it up so you can get your TV service from anyone you want. Think of what the competition will do to the industry and how much better it will be for the consumer.
Oh wait. I forgot that the cable companies will bribe everyone in congress they can in order to keep their municipal monopolies firmly entrenched. So much for real free markets and competition. Rats.
I usually have to pay extra for that but now they can't charge more!
I think you mean 8 pages of regulations, 300 pages of summary. I mean unless you are claiming that citing justifications is the same thing as a regulation... Also what do the people lose, besides the ability for the ISPs to unilaterally act as paid gate keepers to us...
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Well, if new players can lay fiber now, we might start to see one.
The fee you are going to get is the "Universal Internet Access Fund" whereby you and everyone that has broadband internet access today will subsidize access for poor people and people in the sticks. Is that good or bad? Discuss...
I don't understand why that's so evil. That's how electric/water/gas works and the world hasn't stopped spinning. You pay a fixed amount for the capacity of your connection and a per-unit charge for what you consume. While I certainly prefer the flat rate unlimited pricing model, I can see why metered service would make more sense.
There is no what it "might do" it is what they have been actively doing, and trying to get money out of...Also there is nothing in this that allows the NSA to get taps on it.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
They've been doing that. Where have you've been.
And like it did to the only other segment under title 2 right? I mean I just hate it every time I say a curse word on the phone and it is bleeped out...
When you cant win, ad hominem.
No need. Taxpayers already gave Comcast and Verizon $2.5Bn to ensure that rural broadband is set up.
Of course, they immediately used it to increase executive salaries and pay out bonuses to themselves- but they will do as they promised eventually, right? Its only been 10 years, it would be absurd to expect some sort of progress on this already.
They do that out here. The cities have laid a fiber network and charge a small fee to anyone who hooks up to it. The providers are all given equal access to that network. We have 12 of them, and they fight tooth and nail to get your business. No caps, cheap costs, and customer service just this side of fellatio.
Your hatred of Comcast and fear of what it might do has lead to the biggest restrictions on freedom since the Patriot Act
Your sense of reality needs to be rebooted. "Might do?" They've been doing it openly, for a couple of years now, you twit. You're the one pissing your panties over imaginary "might do" and using bullshit conspiracy theorist "reasoning". Look up how much censorship power Title II gave over landlines, for starters.
Jesus Tapdancing Christ. You need your dosage upped.
Fox News refusing to show you the open and up front discussions on this does not mean they didn't happen. You should try a different source for your information.
What will happen when the FCC decides to use the new powers to "clean up" (i.e. censor) the Internet the same way it's done to TV and Radio?
Yeah, it might be like when they regulated the phone service and suddenly there were no phone sex lines -- oh, wait.
If the Federal Government can't determine what's fair, then who can?
Is it fair for someone to have exactly one choice of "broadband" ISP, when that choice is extremely unreliable, outdated, overpriced ADSL?
Is it fair that corporations get to ignore what customers want and only sell what's the most profitable for them, paying absolutely no attention to customer satisfaction, with a three-pronged "bend over and take it / don't have Internet / move house" ultimatum?
If the Federal Government won't stand up for its citizens, what recourse do citizens have left? Organize and march up to some corporate office and demand (peacefully or otherwise) to get what they want? Give up their job and completely change their life around to move to one of the handful of locations in the entire country that has actually good Internet?
Connecting to and participating in the global economy shouldn't be a privilege reserved for the upper crust elite. It should be accessible to everyone. Hell, there is an *enormous* financial incentive to do it, since without that connection, you won't sell nearly as much stuff on the 'net. Games, video, software, you name it.
You corporati would gladly tear down the national highway system to avoid paying taxes on roads, even knowing full-well that without roads, people won't be able to drive to Best Buy or Target or K-mart or Walmart to buy your shit.
Infrastructure is a special type of good. It's a GDP and productivity and economy multiplier. Infrastructure deserves special protection. Ever since man discovered the mechanical lever, we've been using infrastructure to enable us to do more than we could without it. The capitalist system has a significant weakness in that, if left completely unregulated, no one will pay for the infrastructure. Categorizing Internet service as infrastructure is exactly the move that needed to be made. IN PRINCIPLE.
Now what remains is to see what actual changes fall out in practice. The principle of the matter and the actual implementation may turn out to be very disjoint, which would be unfortunate. But leaving the system as-is would all but ensure that the current bad state of affairs would continue, since the old way was backwards *just in principle*, let alone in practice.
Because of course they've avoided raising their rates out of the kindness of their hearts, but all of this new regulation is forcing them to do it against their will.
I keep hearing from free-market capitalists that prices would naturally trend towards whatever the market will bear. If that's true, then regulation would never increase prices. After all, if the sellers could get away with raising the price, they would have already done so.
Disregarding your rant against Fox News, the EFF had some serious objections too:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/dear-fcc-rethink-those-vague-general-conduct-rules
I do not know what the status is of the general conduct rules. Do you?
this ladies and gentlemen is the RWNJ Brain At Work.
They (the FCC) literally have a series of meeting, press releases, and publicly proposed rules, public commentary, all saying "Here it is! This is what we want to do, what do you think?", and still the RWNJ's decry "we have no idea what's going on, why won't they tell us what's going on, they're hiding it from us".
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
so then you're opposed to the internet as it stands right now?
you oppose the preservation of the status quo in lieu of ISP's being able to block services they don't want you do have?
Say being blocked from Amazon Prime and forced into Verizon Prime?
Or Comcast redirecting Netflix users to Hulu?
Or otherwise turning internet delivery into a fancier cable channel, with certain websites available in certain tiers of service?
You're a shill.
Or a liar.
Or just ignorant.
But likely all 3.
Net neutrality is the basis of the internet as we know it: ISPs provide access to the entire internet, not just the parts they want us to see.
If you like the internet as it stands, then you like NN. \
It's that f!@#()% simple.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I'm in a city of 50,000, in a country of 4.5 million. I have more choices than I can poke a stick at. The company that owns the copper is not allowed to sell internet access and the wholesale price they charge is regulated.
There's also fibre.
All of your "potential" scenarios are so fucking crazy, either from a technical or business standpoint I gotta ask you for the number of your drug dealer. That's some good shit.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Silicon Valley not only backs it, they created it.
The father of the internet supports it.
It's nothing secret, its simply the codification of the current status quo.
As for "what Comcast might do" ... they've ALREADY DONE IT. Several times. Tried several more. Its why they oppose NN in the first place, and if they could have gotten NN declared totally dead (instead of merely struck down on technicality a few years ago) they wou;d have been even more brazen more immediately.
"This whole thing" (your post) is a pile of BS written by an ignorant, incompetent shill trying to lie for the telcos.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I approve of the FCC decision, but I have a concern about lack of regulation on pricing matters.
I suspect this will end up like POTS. Here is a sample of a future bill.
25/5 Broadband Service Base Fee $39.99
Advertising Fee $20.00
Plant maintenance Fee $20.00
Regulatory Capture Fee $20.00
Washington Lobbying Fee $20.00
Bandwidth Fee for data over the cap limit 100.00
Total amount due this month: $219.99
Some action on the FCC's part to limit these fees will be required in the future.
Last year netflix was paying comcast extra fees to not be in a 'slow lane'. I imagine by now Netflix is going to stop payment.
People love to talk about the free market as if it were a genie.
The law of capitalism means that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a regulation to raise the price of anything - all it can do is reduce the profit a corporation takes.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
As soon as the regulations are available, search them for terms like âoehate speechâ and "disparate impact." This will be a mass of restrictions, requirements, taxes, subsidies, and pay-offs to favored groups.
Exactly, my Title II regulated Phone line is constantly being censored.
it's what the populace wants, what the corporations didn't
All sorts of corporations wanted this passed.
It's 300 pages. Does what *you* wanted take 300 pages to express? No? HMM.
Good luck with that, as the saying goes. I am really looking forward to you all finding out what has really happened today.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I am in a city of 1.26 million people, in a second world country called the United States and I have only 2 choices over 4Mbps. and zero choices over 24Mbps
As I understand it, the FCC and the description of common carriers under "Title II" of the Communications Act of 1934 was created by Congress. The FCC is ruling that Internet Service Providers are "common carriers" under the language of Title II, and not "information service providers" under the language of Title I. This ruling includes adjustments/interpretations of the Title II language as the FCC envisions it would be applied to Internet Service Providers.
The FCC didn't give themselves this authority, the FCC was created by Congress to have this authority.
Is there a definition of what is THE internet?
Its the internetwork connect. Its a framework of voluntarily linking connections for mutual
surely comcast can create a parallel construction and sell however they wish like a private toll road. It could have discrete points where it could tap into the "real" internet. Thus amazon or netflix or whomever could connect into this autobahn on the goes-into side and pop out into "the" internet at some Comcast hub in the customers town.
If this happens, I'll eat my hat. No one is going to buy anything but the real internet, and you won't see company set up shop without users, which are all on the real internet. Also, the instant they start offering an internet gateway they become an ISP and regulatable, so there is no loophole. If they don't, they will need content on their private network, which no one is going to provide, because most of the content exists outside their networks. No one wants their shitty content, and thats their problem. If people did, they wouldn't have to throttle netflix for competing with their services.
Picture it like FED Ex, transporting a package 90% of the way, then mailing it. the postoffice might not charge differently for different customers and Fed Ex might not either (or they could) but only customers with valuable deliveries would be willing to pay the cost of the combined service, which would be dominated by the Fed Ex high speed service.
almost completely diffrent because niether fedex nor the post office own any of the infrasturcture, just the delievery mechanism. Any delivery service can use the same roads.
How companies like Time Warner will defeat Net Neutrality: Self-divestiture.
The "Time Warner Cable/Internet" you know of today becomes a myriad of companies specifically designed to continue on with business as usual while still adhering to the letter of the law:
- Time Warner Broadband - a company which does nothing more than operate Hybrid-Fiber-Coax outside plant (the actual wires on the actual poles).
- Time Warner Cable - a company which leases spectrum from TWB (above), and provides cable-video service on that outside plant
- Time Warner Transit - a company which does nothing more than provide wholesale (non-retail, non-mass-market) internet connectivity to ISPs and other service providers. As a wholesaler, TWT is not encumbered by net neutrality regulations.
- Time Warner Internet - a company which leases spectrum from TWB (above) to provide IP connectivity to end-users. It obtains *all* of its internet connectivity from TWT (above), and charges metered billing to all its end-users (you pay a flat rate PLUS you pay "by the bit", the same way you pay for water or electric today).
Netflix, et al, will have to tithe properly to TWT if they want access to TWI's customers, since TWT is the only path to GET to TWI's customers. The FCC can't really punish TWI for this move, without opening up an even messier Pandora's box of trying to tell ISPs "which upstreams they HAVE to obtain connectivity from".
Yes, it'll all be a LITTLE more complicated than that, but they've got teams of lawyers to work out the details.
The law of capitalism means that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a regulation to raise the price of anything - all it can do is reduce the profit a corporation takes.
Bull. Shit.
Regulation means compliance. Compliance means paperwork. Paperwork means overhead. Overhead means expenses. Expenses mean increased costs passed on to customers.
You owe the Oracle a copy of a transcript showing that you have passed ECON101.
It absolutely was an objection! I don't see how you could possibly read the EFF's letter and think anything else.
Snippets:
Our message has been clear from the beginning: the FCC has a role to play, but its role must be firmly bounded.
But we are deeply concerned that the FCC’s new rules will include a provision that sounds like a recipe for overreach and confusion: the so-called “general conduct rule.”
First, it suggests that the FCC believes it has broad authority to pursue any number of practices—hardly the narrow, light-touch approach we need to protect the open Internet.
We are days away from a final vote, and it appears that many of the proposed rules will make sense for the Internet. Based on what we know so far, however, the general conduct proposal may not. The FCC should rethink this one.
The EFF clearly has a problem with the general conduct rule. Leave the partisan group-mindedness behind--there are clearly some not-black and some not-white (grey, you might even say) shades here.
A Republican FCC chair confirmed that the document that has been voted on today will not be made public before a few weeks.
This has been a great demonstration as to how easily the ignorant Republican masses are controlled by right-wing media designed to keep them frothing at the mouth so they never stop, think, and realize that the conservative movement is a scam. They'll come out against individual rights, and in favor of corporate masters whenever Fox, wingnut blogs, and hate radio tell them to.
Yeah, I'm getting annoyed at this whole "years in court" thing too. Title II is NOT new. It was established in 1933-4? and lasted until the late 90s I believe. Title II is very well tested. Further, we've had several DC circuit court cases in 2014 where the judges said that the FCC had the authority if they reclassified. They have. Done Deal.
They left out one important detail though... we didn't get unbundling back. It used to be that the phone carriers had to lease their lines to whomever asked for a decent price. That let mom and pop ISPs into the field to compete on service, and it was awesome for creating competition.
Tweet from the FCC Text of #netneutrality rules are only 8 pages. Rest of proposal responds 2 record submitted by millions of Americans, as required by law.
Now don't you feel ridiculous?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Elections matter :)
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
It was not an objection, it was a request for clarification.. Here is the snip it you conveniently left out:
Late last week, as the window for public comment was closing, EFF filed a letter with the FCC urging it to clarify and sharply limit the scope of any “general conduct” provision:
When you cant win, ad hominem.
second world country called the United States
Can you people please learn what first, second, and third world mean/meant.
First world - Connected to the United States and the West diplomatically.
Second world - Inside the Soviet sphere of influence, I guess this applies to Russia today.
Third world - Nations not allied with any side in the cold war. This had a connotation of rather backwards less developed. This was not necessarily the case of all Third world places though. It simply meant they were not strategically interesting enough to First or Second world parties to have a close relationship. Often the reason for that was because their economies were small and the natural resources they controlled were few, hence the associate with poverty in common language.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
If this is true, where's the link to the rules? Where can I find them? By the way, Google had them changed (apparently some lobbyists got a sneak peak) so of you have the pre- and post- Google version, I'd appreciate it.
Rush Limbaugh remembers the days of the fairness doctrine. There are a handful of politicians who think it should make a comeback. I'm not a big fan of Mr. Limbaugh's but in his defense if you read what has been said by supporters of the Fairness Doctrine it would send shivers up your spine:
The shooting is cause for the country to rethink parameters on free speech, Clyburn said from his office, just blocks from the South Carolina Statehouse. He wants standards put in place to guarantee balanced media coverage with a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, in addition to calling on elected officials and media pundits to use 'better judgment.'
Most people, left or right would recoil whenever a politician starts talking about a need to rethink the "parameters of free speech."
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
*shrug*, Rush makes his living by being a showman. I don't really care for the show, though as a human being I have respect for anyone that can laugh at himself, which Rush does (he has played himself on Family Guy, amongst other things), so there's that. If you're looking for an in-depth and impartial analysis of the issues you're probably not tuning into The Rush Limbaugh Show. Conservatives see a slippery slope here to further regulation. I don't entirely discount that argument and it's hard to escape the fact that the internet became what it is today by being unregulated and free of top-down mandates that impede innovation.
I'm generally supportive of what the FCC is trying to accomplish but I think the means they're using is questionable at best. They're also going after hypothetical impediments to innovation (the oft-discussed fast lane hasn't actually happened) while ignoring real threats (data caps) to innovation. Frankly I'd rather see them in the business of regulating tariffs than telling the ISPs how to run their networks (*), because I view data caps as a far more serious threat to internet video (the "killer app" that started this whole conversation) than a fast line that has yet to come to fruition.
(*) Here's a hypothetical for you: Is it "reasonable network management" to prioritize one's voice service over other applications? Keep in mind that circuit switched voice is fast becoming a thing of the past, on both wireless and wireline. On the wireline side you've got the cable company's VoIP service running on the same DOCSIS node as your neighbor's bittorrent download. On wireless you've got VoLTE replacing circuit switched voice, so voice is just another data application there as well, one that's competing for bandwidth on an increasingly congested wireless data network.
If the answer is "Yes" then you've advantaged Time Warner/Verizon/et. al's voice product over Skype and similar offerings. If the answer is "No" then you're placing phone calls at the same "best effort" level as your neighbor's porn addiction.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.