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As Big As Net Neutrality? FCC Kills State-Imposed Internet Monopolies
tedlistens writes: On Thursday, before it voted in favor of "net neutrality," the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to override state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that have barred local governments and public utilities from offering broadband outside the areas where they have traditionally sold electricity. Christopher Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance said the move was as important for internet competition as net neutrality: "Preventing big Internet Service Providers from unfairly discriminating against content online is a victory, but allowing communities to be the owners and stewards of their own broadband networks is a watershed moment that will serve as a check against the worst abuses of the cable monopoly for decades to come." The laws, like those in over a dozen other states, are often created under pressure from large private Internet providers like Comcast and Verizon, who consequently control monopolies or duopolies over high-speed internet in these places.
Discuss.
First of all, there's basically no difference between a galaxy (or a physical body) made of matter and antimatter... Actually you wouldn't be able to tell. The major physical difference is the charge of particles (e.g. anti-electrons, or positrons, have +ve charge) but of course you wouldn't be able to tell since you would call +ve charge -ve and vice versa. There are a few differences between an antimatter galaxy and a matter galaxy like our own. For instance, in an antimatter galaxy, the element Antimony is called "Mony". They use it as a means of facilitating the exchange of goods and services. Also, in antimatter England, they drive on the right side of the road.
Good on you FCC!
Finally!
(actually, one word is impossible due to the lameness filter, and honestly some other words would be good, like: hahaha, die bastards die, suck it, etc. etc.)
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
when we all found out who was taking over the FCC, I was terrified. Former cable lobbyist, now in charge of the group intended to regulate the same people. But it really looks like wheeler may be the right man for the job
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Does the FCC even have the authority to do that? Under what legal theory does an unelected federal regulatory commission have the authority to overrule state government laws on matters of state government interest? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see such laws go, as they're a major competition inhibitor, but how does the FCC have any authority in this?
1. Myth: systemd is monolithic.If you build systemd with all configuration options enabled you will build 69 individual binaries. These binaries all serve different tasks, and are neatly separated for a number of reasons. For example, we designed systemd with security in mind, hence most daemons run at minimal privileges (using kernel capabilities, for example) and are responsible for very specific tasks only, to minimize their security surface and impact. Also, systemd parallelizes the boot more than any prior solution. This parallization happens by running more processes in parallel. Thus it is essential that systemd is nicely split up into many binaries and thus processes. In fact, many of these binaries[1] are separated out so nicely, that they are very useful outside of systemd, too.A package involving 69 individual binaries can hardly be called monolithic. What is different from prior solutions however, is that we ship more components in a single tarball, and maintain them upstream in a single repository with a unified release cycle.
2. Myth: systemd is about speed.Yes, systemd is fast (A pretty complete userspace boot-up in ~900ms, anyone?), but that's primarily just a side-effect of doing things right. In fact, we never really sat down and optimized the last tiny bit of performance out of systemd. Instead, we actually frequently knowingly picked the slightly slower code paths in order to keep the code more readable. This doesn't mean being fast was irrelevant for us, but reducing systemd to its speed is certainly quite a misconception, since that is certainly not anywhere near the top of our list of goals.
3. Myth: systemd's fast boot-up is irrelevant for servers.That is just completely not true. Many administrators actually are keen on reduced downtimes during maintenance windows. In High Availability setups it's kinda nice if the failed machine comes back up really fast. In cloud setups with a large number of VMs or containers the price of slow boots multiplies with the number of instances. Spending minutes of CPU and IO on really slow boots of hundreds of VMs or containers reduces your system's density drastically, heck, it even costs you more energy. Slow boots can be quite financially expensive. Then, fast booting of containers allows you to implement a logic such as socket activated containers, allowing you to drastically increase the density of your cloud system.Of course, in many server setups boot-up is indeed irrelevant, but systemd is supposed to cover the whole range. And yes, I am aware that often it is the server firmware that costs the most time at boot-up, and the OS anyways fast compared to that, but well, systemd is still supposed to cover the whole range (see above...), and no, not all servers have such bad firmware, and certainly not VMs and containers, which are servers of a kind, too.[2]
4. Myth: systemd is incompatible with shell scripts.This is entirely bogus. We just don't use them for the boot process, because we believe they aren't the best tool for that specific purpose, but that doesn't mean systemd was incompatible with them. You can easily run shell scripts as systemd services, heck, you can run scripts written in any language as systemd services, systemd doesn't care the slightest bit what's inside your executable. Moreover, we heavily use shell scripts for our own purposes, for installing, building, testing systemd. And you can stick your scripts in the early boot process, use them for normal services, you can run them at latest shutdown, there are practically no limits.
5. Myth: systemd is difficult.This also is entire non-sense. A systemd platform is actually much simpler than traditional Linuxes because it unifies system objects and their dependencies as systemd units. The configuration file language is very simple, and redundant configuration files we got rid of. We provide uniform tools for much of the configuration of the syste
Up with service! Down with monopolies! Up with net neutrality! Down with regulation! Up with Pluto! Down with Kim Dotcom!
Wait a minute - Today's stories leave me feeling edgy and confused.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'm still dubious about the end effect of net neutrality regulations being passed (remember that none of us have seen the actual regulations to take effect, and none will until they are finalized).
That said, the real road to true Net Neutrality is and always will be in allowing real competition for your ISP provider, and that's the kind of thing that this allows for. If a community cannot be well served by a "real" networking company it makes no sense to block them from taking matters into their own hands.
So I applaud this action, I just wish they would be open in other regards rather than limiting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
/. kind of runs together sometimes.
Why is the FCC suddenly being competent? Does anyone stand to gain from this financially? Is it about doing lots of happy things to the 'net to sway the public sufficiently in favour of regulation that it can then start doing things like making rules about, say... encryption keys?
Or is this one of those weird stopped-clock-right-twice-a-day things that'll be broken down when suddenly Verizon starts sponsoring all Republican candidates only at the next round of elections?
(Anyway, until FCC spends more resources dealing with equipment and people who piss on the ham radio spectrum, any respect I have for them will be limited.)
I can't wait to be able to get an @bigbrother email address.
Since the government can eat loses indefinitely, it's going to be fun to see people whine and complain and demand more taxes so their internet can reliably work.
Speaking of roads and public schools...
Work Safe Porn
They seem to be on a righteous warpath, of which I fully approve.
The net neutrality vote gets a lot more attention, but this is even more important IMHO. Net neutrality wouldn't even need to be enforced by the FCC if there were sufficient competiton.
They have these duopolies everywhere. They have it in New York city and Los Angeles and Miami and Seattle.
I'm reserving judgment until they break the monopolies that are CITY and county imposed as well. They're not any better.
A monopoly is a monopoly. I don't care who imposed it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The government is acting with sense and doing so in a honest way that fair to citizens.
This is not right, so I firmly believe that the world is coming to an end.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The biggest, most corrupt entity in your equation is THE GOVERNMENT - ie people who don't actually work but make sure to extract money from those who do work through needless regulation and taxation. GOVERNMENT is not a force for good, it is a force to reward those who choose not work, but expect to have full bellies and a warm government provided home.
FUCK YOU AND YOUR SOCIALIST COUNTRY PISSANT WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT - try working, you'll feel better about yourself.
Here's Karl Denninger's take on this. I don't agree or disagree. I just want to see what the reaction is: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-...
And I speak as a Republican. Unless there's some outrageous hidden agenda yet to emerge, net neutrality just means that Internet service over cable, because it is in many places a natural monopoly, is henceforth to be treated as a utility, like your electrical service. How you use the watt-hours you buy for your home is your own business, and we are all more free if the same applies to your Internet feed. Regulation of business is something we by instinct would rather not have, but if you live in an area where Comcast is the only game in town, treating it as a utility is more palatable than giving a single company full control of your access to the Internet.
Whether to build municipal broadband is a decision that any locality should be allowed to make for itself. Because wired Internet service so often is a natural monopoly, there are all kinds of situations in which towns or villages or even small neighborhoods find themselves cut off from any service by a company that simply does not feel it worthwhile to extend service to that market. Value decisions like this should be the company's right, but has no business standing in the way of any group of users who wish to band together to organize service of their own.
Disbarring the government from offering Internet service is not a state imposed monopoly. They are onyl baring one single entity from becoming an ISP.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
While it would be great if the government offered Internet and gave many an option other than Comcast, I could see it going pretty Orwellian pretty quickly. The government offering its own service pretty much guarantees that they will subsidize the service more than they already subsidize ISPs. Making it impossible to compete. And the government would not have to pass any data retention laws if they already handled everyone's internet data. There is a point to not allowing the government to compete with businesses, and there are benefits to keeping the lawmakers and enforcers one degree of separation away from citizens.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"How you use the watt-hours you buy for your home is your own business"
Under the new Net Neutrality rules, how you use your watt hours is not your own business. The FCC gets to determine what is a proper use of those watt-hours. If you want to use your watt-hours for something they don't approve of, the power company can refuse to give you those watt-hours.
Hope you fkin a$$holes who voted for Obama are getting what you wanted.
an ill wind that blows no good
As a constitutional matter, municipalities do not have any independent existence; they are organs of the state governments. Municipal governments only have whatever powers states choose to give them, and the federal government may not commandeer a state government. So if a state chooses to deny its municipalities the authority to sell Internet access (or sell it below a certain price), then no declaration from the FCC can give the municipality that power, nor require the state to give a municipality that power.
So, all this vote means is the FCC majority has decided to waste a bunch of taxpayer dollars losing a lawsuit.
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Is that right? Do you have any actual evidence, or are you extrapolating what the FCC will do?
Got a reference to that statement anywhere? I haven't seen one.
I can't quite reconcile this:
With this:
How does allowing the neighboring municipality or neighboring utility somehow allow "communities to be the owners and stewards of their own broadband networks"?
Think about it, don't react emotionally.
If I live in a community that is served electricity by power company A, and power company B in the neighboring community offers internet access that I want, allowing power company B to sell Internet access in the territory served by Power company A isn't 'self-ownership'... If the county next to me offers Internet access and now they can offer Internet service in my county, does my county now control the Internet backbone in our county or does the neighboring community?
Communities and public utilities can already offer service in thief own areas, this change would allow them to offer service in other communities, exchanging their old provider for another, neither owned or controlled by them.
I guess you have to believe that it will be better when the big power utility companies displace the big cable companies...
Ken
I do not support the ruling party in the White House or their motivations?
Hence: The devil's in the details.
$2 will get you $10, we've been well and truly fucked.
Really, because the "company simply does not feel it worthwhile to extend service to that market"?
They decline to extend services to areas that they don't think will be profitable, see they are a profit-driven enterprise in most cases.
Now, what we'll see is taxpayers absorb the losses extending services to areas that were otherwise unprofitable to service - that's a great step forward, I can just see your local taxpayer having no problem running fiber cable for miles down a rural road to offer high-speed internet service to the seven farms over 20 miles of county road...
Ken
So long as localities get to vote on this sort of situation, I see a much smaller problem than if the cable companies are able to lobby a state legislature into getting government to give them a lock on the entire state. That is the situation the FCC just ruled against.
I live in TN. And our internet sucks in counties that don't provide government sponsored (via community owned utility company that must pay its own way) internet services.
Clarksville, where I know people, has great bandwidth and reliability from the electric utility run ISP. Comcast and AT&T do well in that market, just not well enough to drive out the utility ISP. It has kept prices down too. Chattanooga TN had the nations first Gig to the home ISP service available to all. While AT&T & Comcast (and others) COULD have done it, they are more interested in keeping profits up than serving customers. Not it seems that all ISPs in the area seem to come up to the level of the local utility company. ... In Clarksville the utility ISP does provide phone and TV service if desired, but that is where the others shine (better contracts with content providers). For basic ISP even at high rates, local utilities CAN be a great alternative.
In my county, AT&T and the cable companies don't serve the entire county, but they have ensured (using appropriate gratuities to local officials I am sure, just no hard evidence), that the local utility that wanted to install an ISP was not allowed to do so.
I cannot get any landline or wireless 'broadband service'. AT&T and Comcast and Charter all provide it within 3 miles. Charter wants $14,000 at one time, $24,000 at another just to install the cable service. Even when we had land lines, nice Currier 56K modems could not contact anyone anywhere at more than 20kbit rates due to had copper that AT&T installed but would not maintain. So we use cell phone now. But I do get commercial electricity here, and they read the meters via data over the power lines remotely (once a minute).
It is just politics keeping me from having proper ISP service, and I am not the only one by any means.
I suspect the more usual cause is pressure from local independent ILECS, mom and pop ISPs and WISPs, and smaller regional ISPs than the big national carriers. Typically "community" or municipal broadband tends be contracted out to the big boys anyway. The clowns won't usually spec and purchase equipment, hire engineers and IT staff themselves. Completely beyond their competence, usually. So the question is merely who is paying the bill, the users, or the taxpayers in general. And we all know what hatppens when somebody gets a bug up their ass about this or that Internet activity. Something-must-be-done!(tm) and a new ordinance is born.
When are you tools gonna stop sitting around the campfire singing Kum-bye-yah, marching on Ferguson or Wall St., and wake the hell up? If the FCC was going to do something about state sanctioned telecom monopolies it would have unbundled local loops. Do you people really think Comcast, Verizon, etc, really lost anything in the Net Neutrality vote?
Give me a break.
I, for one, am concerned over the constant use of the words "legal content"
Exactly, none of us are going to be happy when we find out what that means - because it implies a whole set of other actions for anything deemed "illegal content".
Well except for me; I plan to laugh and laugh when the other thousand shoes drop and the internet lets forth a vast and pitiful wailing. So that will offset the sadness substantially. If I can't be free at least I can be proven right.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would have thought people would be more critical on /. about this. They're *Prasing* net neutrality? Have any of you even looked at what they can do/should do? No, of course not. This is /. after all.
Well lots of people wished for it. Now they have it. Good luck to us all (as they take out the strait jacket).
Actually, the FCC's action will have exactly the opposite effect. I own and operate a small, competitive ISP, and am quite willing to (and capable of) going up against any competitor on a level playing field. But I simply wouldn't enter any market where the city was providing service. Why? Because the city would engage in all of the following anticompetitive and predatory practices:
* The city would completely control my access to rights of way and pole attachments, and would be motivated to keep me from getting that access or make it expensive;
* I would be taxed and the taxes would be used to subsidize my competitor;
* The city would engage in horizontal monopoly leverage from its other monopoly businesses (trash, water, sewer, and in many places energy) and would enjoy cross-subsidies from them; for example, it wouldn't have to build a new billing system but could use its existing one;
* The city could also use its ability to tax, and bonding authority, to obtain capital for the buildout at bargain rates;
* The city, with its deep pockets and by expending some of that capital, could engage in predatory pricing, offering its service below cost due to taxpayer subsidies. It could do this at the outset, to take customers away, or possibly permanently;
* The city, because it provided those other services, would GET PAID more easily than I would because users wouldn't want their water, etc. cut off if they didn't pay the bill;
* The city would know when both owner-occupied and rental real estate was turning over (because of changes in the party being billed) and so could always sell to people as they moved into a new home before they would have a chance to consider my service;
* The city ISP would get the lucrative business of the city itself (eliminating one of the largest potential customers), as well as that of other government entities such as the county government and state government offices; and
* The city, under the FCC's new Title II regime, could demand franchise fees from me that it would not have to pay itself.
So, if you put yourself in the shoes of a hard working local ISP (which I am), or of a customer who wants choice, this no longer seems like such a good idea. Any ISP entering the market would have to fight an uphill battle against City Hall. So, new ISPs will not enter the market and existing broadband providers will have a strong incentive to pull out, leaving a monopoly. What is needed is FAIR, PRIVATE competition, not the unfair competition that turning unaccountable city bureaucrats loose would bring.
I would just like to add that Chris Mitchell who is quoted in this story has been working to protect local internet access and community ownership for many many years and a hat tip to him!
--hongpong.com
What we need is to break the pole & tube monopolies and make it much easier for most businesses who want to run a service to all homes to do so. Make it MUCH easier and cheaper to get Pole & tube access. Easier access to this vital part of infrastructure should help get some healthy competition for Internet (and other) services going. If a Pole/tube is "owned" by a specific company but is not on (or running through) their own land, that company should be required to do one of two things.
1) Open access to the pole/tube to any business that is running services to all homes/businesses in the area.
OR
2) Pay the land owner rent for allowing their pole/tube in/through the owner’s property. Pricing of rent and terms of use to be negotiated with each land owner individually.
Either that pole should be for the public good, or the Company should have to rent the space from the land owner. This will incentivize opening up access since the companies won't want to deal with each individual land owner (and what if the land owner and company cannot agree on terms...would the company want to take the chance of having to reroute everything around that property) End result is it should be easier for "smaller" ISP's (local companies, Google, etc...) to run cable, fiber, etc.. and Consumers/small businesses will benefit from greater competition and better service.
The Internet is actually becoming less monopolistic. Decades ago, there was usually only one provider you could go to. Today, the majority of households in the US have a selection of two or more Internet providers.
Furthermore, this ruling wasn't about government-granted monopoly (which is wrong, and presumably still legal), this is about government-run Internet, which frequently turns into a monopoly as a municipality has the advantage of "free" taxpayer money.
Who is standing in the way? Link? If you want to do this, well... go do it. Form an LLC, seek investment for shares of ownership, buy capital, sell Internet. Done.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Who's standing in the way? The issue is that in several states, cable companies, after invited state legislatures out for squab and cigars, have had laws passed with expressly forbid exactly the kind of competition you cite. They love being the only game in town.
We don't know what's buried in their 300+ pages of rules, but have you read Title II? It gives the FCC an enormous amount of power, if the Internet falls under it (it doesn't).
Wonder what the public key field is for?
I will never use a competitor to the Post Office unless I have to. They are BY FAR the cheaper (better) alternative to shipping
Except that is an idealistic definition and also coming from real world examples also wrong. If that was the definition was what was used most people would not have a problem.
The problem with net neutraility as it comes from the FCC is that it could possibly outlaw the following items:
My ISP setting up mail filters for SPAM. Most of the SPAM I currently get blocked would on the look of it be legal, using the definition of net neutrality most people are using the methods to determine it is trash would not be allowed.
Can schools and businesses still block various web sites; since based on definition they are ISPs? From what is known from the FCC ruling that could be a problem unless the site is dealing with illegal operations.
Or how about something like ISPs blocking common ports used for various attacks but not for other types of traffic? The ports are most likely legal ports and the traffic is probably legal, I presume ICMP is still legal, even if is not something someone should be doing out side of their own network?
When was this time of one provider? Decades ago, and by that I mean 1995 at the very latest, most people were on dial-up. We didn't get off it until later, and we're a technophile family. Dial-up had the advantage of hooking up to any provider, and back then a 56K modem was good enough for most purposes.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes