Slashdot Mirror
House Republicans Roll Out Legislation To Overturn New Net Neutrality Rules
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and 31 Republican co-sponsors have submitted the Internet Freedom Act (PDF) for consideration in the House. The bill would roll back the recent net neutrality rules made by the FCC. The bill says the rules "shall have no force or effect, and the Commission may not reissue such rule in substantially the same form, or issue a new rule that is substantially the same as such rule, unless the reissued or new rule is specifically authorized by a law enacted after the date of the enactment of this Act." Blackburn claims the FCC's rules will "stifle innovation" and "restrict freedom." The article points out that Blackburn's campaign and leadership PAC has received substantial donations. from Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.
and what gag order is this? I don't have it handy, but last time someone trotted this canard out they did post the link. Sorry, don't have the time to google it for you.
you mean THESE rules, that have been available for quite some time now?:
http://www.fcc.gov/document/fc...
When you cant win, ad hominem.
I'm rather Libertarian about most things in life, but I applauded the FCC's decision to attempt to "stifle innovation." That is, of course, only if you consider "innovation" to be new forms of rent-seeking.
Seriously, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. Stop trying to wring money out of both content providers and customers. This shit is getting so old.
They're stripping away Comcast's freedom to shake-down content providers for more money and screw over their customers! What is this, the Soviet Union??
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
They're locking out the PS4 client on their network. Surely this is precisely why net neutrality should be set in law, to stop corporations from blocking what you use to access third party services!
Not that Sony are in the clear either, those shitbags tied Netflix into their PSN accounts, when the PSN wasn't available, tough fucking titties, you were blocked from using Netflix on a Sony console.
That has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. They are not blocking anything on the packet level. In order to use HGO Go you have to first prove to HBO that you own a compatible cable tv package. To do this HBO contacts the cable company. In this case comcast is just refusing to authorize their customers to HBO. It's a dick move, but it's unrelated to Net Neutrality or even the internet.
The regulations are 8 pages worth. The 300 pages, that likes to be famously misquoted is for history, justification, outline of the public response period (legally required)
When you cant win, ad hominem.
There is no gag order. The Republicans on the FCC committee have refused to file the correct paperwork to allow this go forward. Pretty sleazy, but the Republicans have become pros at that.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The problem is, we could have the same problem from the FCC controlling & censoring the Internet.
How? They don't control or censor the content of my phone calls, which are regulated as a Title II Telecommunications service.
But users end up paying the subscription fee to those content providers, do they not?
Not for the service they're getting. Let's say I'm a Speakeasy customer, and I also pay for Netflix.
You're a Comcast customer, and you also pay for Netflix.
Speakeasy is network neutral, so Netflix has no disadvantage compare to any other provider. If Speakeasy has congestion, Netflix and Amazon will be just as slow. To relieve this, they increase their bandwidth do their peering points, and all networks are again running fast. I may have to pay more to Speakeasy for this speed increase.
However, in your case, Comcast segregates Netflix's traffic and slows it down to relieve congestion, instead of treating all networks as equal. Comcast says their networks are not the issue, because they show you perfect speed from Amazon. You complain to Netflix, who must pay Comcast to get their speed increased.
Now, this is where the bullshit starts: Netflix passes the cost for the Comcast toll on to both you and ME, even though I'm not a Comcast customer, and this toll did nothing to increase MY speed. In fact, I already had to pay extra to my ISP to get my speed fixed.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
This a thousand times. Everybody needs to understand that it is not the FCC that is hiding the rules, but REPUBLICANS, because they know if you saw the rules you wouldn't be likely to think they need to be repealed. And of course, like Marsha Blackburn, the Republicans responsible are bought and paid for by Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/f...
But last week, three FCC Commissioners voted to saddle the internet with a new set of constraints so complex, vague and problematic that it took over 300 pages of explanation to justify eight pages of rules. While we haven’t seen the full text yet, we do know a lot about what’s inside.
Also it is apparently the GOP FCC members holding this up:
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Most conservatives see monopoly manipulation for what it is, a product of government regulation. Comcast does not have a near monopoly position because of market forces. It has a near monopoly because of government actions which GAVE it that near monopoly.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
IT is 8 pages of regulations, 300+ of justification:
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/f...
Also it is the GOP holding up its release:
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
When you cant win, ad hominem.
I can't believe the bullshit I see from some of the "conservatives" I know who treat this like some kind of commie takeover of the Internet.
The foundational problem we're dealing with here is that the majority of the public doesn't understand how the internet works. The Slashdot crowd has long since learned to deal with that at a micro level. However, we hear different things than the rest of society. Net Neutrality to us means "the bandwidth and throughput of internet traffic won't be artificially limited based on its source or destination." To them, it means "The government will tell me what I can and can't post on my Tumblr blog". With no concept of IP routing, peering, or the Comcast vs. Netflix case that brought Net Neutrality into common vernacular.
Whether this is because "understanding how the internet works and what net neutrality does and doesn't impact" is a genuinely complicated topic, or because the Kardashians have killed far too many American neurons, is a separate topic entirely. To be fair though, if the government was indeed regulating what we could and couldn't post, could and couldn't say, or how we were allowed to say it...we'd be up in arms, too.
The text making up the net neutrality rules comprises 8 pages. The remaining 290+ pages are legally mandated responses to questions and comments the FCC received during the public comment period. There are not 300+ pages of rules.
Why hasn't it been released? Because two FCC commissioners, Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly (the Republican ones) are refusing to submit their comments of record. Nothing is made public until either those commissioners make their official statements of record or the time window for them to do so expires. Taking the usual obstructionist page out of the Republican playbook, Pai and O'Rielly have decided to wait for the clock to run out instead of helping to move things along. They're the ones making us all wait to see the text.
ISPs deal with this in some legitimate ways like throttling (deprioritizing bittorrent packets so that they're first to drop when congestion occurs or policing the endpoints to a maximum throughput rate) and some not-so-legitimate ways (injecting connection reset packets to disrupt sessions).
Sounds like a strawman to me. No one (except perhaps the anti-NN folks, like yourself) has proposed that throttling excessive usage goes against the tenets of NN. What NN does argue, however, is that throttling *based on endpoint* is not kosher - mainly because it provides a strong negative incentive to customer quality.
From the FCC Commission Document ( http://www.fcc.gov/document/fc... ):
No Throttling: broadband providers may not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.
Don't confuse last-mile congestion issues (that you raise, and are legitimate) with throttling the interconnects. In your example, the BT excessive user should expect to hit monthly caps (which are not covered by NN) or overall throughput caps, especially during peak times. That's all (again referring to Commission Document) considered:
Reasonable Network Management: For the purposes of the rules, other than paid prioritization, an ISP may engage in reasonable network management. This recognizes the need of broadband providers to manage the technical and engineering aspects of their networks.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
The gag order is dependent on the last commissioners submitting their comments of record, so the chair can not release it till those last two GOP holdouts let him. I agree this is not 'the republicans', but it is two republicans creating a situation which the party is then benefiting from by painting it as a 'FCC problem'.
Damn they are good, since people tend to write it off, as you did, as republican bashing.
You mean Bell ... AT&T was one of the baby Bells.
Actually when AT&T, Ma Bell, was broken up there were seven baby bells formed. :NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, Bell South, Ameritech, USWEST, SouthWest Bell and Pacific Telesis.
They were
NYNEX and Bell Atlantic are now part of Verizon, USWEST became QUEST.
SouthWest Bell bought Bell South, Ameritech and Pacific Telesis. They first renamed themselves to SBC and later changed the name again to AT&T.
So the AT&T of today is not the AT&T of yesterday.
So as the parent AC stated, we were renting phones from AT&T for over 80 years.
Net Neutrality say if X service (lets say Netflix) is killing your entire network's performance you have to live with it. You can't partition Netflix into it's own walled garden....But the mom and pop shops have to take months to buy more bandwidth.
Keep something in mind here. Netflixs is not sending a SINGLE PACKET to Mom and Pop's ISP that their paying customers didn't ask for.
Those customers are paying Mom and Pop for a service, which in your example, seems to be getting to Netflix.
Now, if Mom and Pop don't like that and can't afford more bandwidth, they have a few choices. They can reduce the speed to all customers, thereby reducing the demand for Netflix. Their customers won't be able to stream an HD movie, for example, because the customer pipe isn't big enough.
They could also allow 30-minute full-speed bursts, followed by 30 minutes of reduced speed. This would allow all non-streaming customers faster downloads in most cases, but would limit streaming video equally, because after 30 minutes your movie quality goes to crap.
They could also prioritize ALL video as lower priority than ALL VPN or HTTP traffic. NETWORK neutrality does not mean PACKET neutrality. It just means I can't give preference to Netflix and screw Hulu over.
As for your Walmart comparison, the reverse is also true. If you allow ISPs to slow traffic from a content provider unless they pay more, only the Walmarts of streaming video will be able to pay more.
The up and coming Mom and Pop streaming video company won't be able to pay off Comcast and AT&T, so Netflix and Hulu will be the only ones that live.
Network Neutrality means NOT picking winners and losers.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Wrong. Netflix offered Comcast and other ISP's who were complaining about Netflix traffic into their networks the option of installing servers directly onto their networks. They all categorically refused. Because this is not really about network congestion. It's about Netflix directly competing with their cable businesses.