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House Republicans Roll Out Legislation To Overturn New Net Neutrality Rules

Posted by Soulskill on from the hooray-politics dept.

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.

12 of 550 comments (clear)

  1. Lift the gag order first... by bhlowe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How can everyone argue about all this when the FCC has imposed a gag order that prevents the public from seeing the regulations? The gag order and secrecy surrounding the regulation of the internet is the only concern I have at this point.

    1. Re:Lift the gag order first... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

      No. He means the complete rules that are over 320 pages that were kept secret until the vote, but even after the vote we STILL are waiting for their release.

    2. Re:Lift the gag order first... by nofx911 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If the small shops / "mom and pop shops" are overselling the bandwidth that they have by that much, then I would say that the issue is with the small shops themselves. There is no issue for the small shops if they are not massively overselling their connectivity.

      I also do not think there are many small shops selling broadband Internet Connectivity in the USA. Where I have have seen small shops is in rural areas where they are selling Microwave based Internet which is usually very expensive for the bandwidth compared to cable/dsl and has much lower throughput and high latency.

      Anything that requires "cables" generally has a monopoly. Sometimes this is shared in the cases were you have both a telco and cable provider servicing the same residence. In extreme cases you may have a third entity if Google or another company is running fiber lines, but that serves less than 1% of the population. These monopolies are granted to the service providers by the municipalities so there is no "true" competition or incentives for the service providers to increase bandwidth. In most cases there is a disincentive since that could spark a "bandwidth race" with the other service provider in the area which just increases the operating costs.

      Now, if they do not have to invest in their networks, but they can charge companies on the Internet that rely on bandwidth (such as Netflix / streaming services in general / gaming / etc) so that they can be prioritized on their over saturated networks without investing in their infrastructure - it is a win win for the service providers. Which is why, IMHO, Verizon/AT&T/Comcast/etc are so against Net Neutrality being enforced. Without Net Neutrality, to me, it is like Google Adwords were the Telcos/Cable Companies can have all of the services that want bandwidth bid against each other to have top priority or even exclusive access to their networks.

      If last mile Internet Service was actually a free market commodity were anyone could be a service provider, and lay their own cables, I would not see this as such a big issue since people would be able to vote with their wallets if they did not like the fact that X company was restricting their access to Y service. But, the way it stands right now, the end consumer really has little to no choice over their broadband provider which means someone (or some governmental entity) has to prevent them from abusing their monopolies.

    3. Re:Lift the gag order first... by Aqualung812 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Peering is a good thing. Peering can *save* money for the content producer.

      Sure, and I never said it was a bad thing. I just don't think it should be legal for a duopoly to impose a fee for peering, nor should they be required to peer. The ISP and the content producer can look at their costs and decide if they want to peer or not.

      Netflix has not asked for a dime of ISP money to peer, and will even provide caching devices for free. They're not keen on paying for ISP infrastructure, though, and I don't see why they should.

      Stop talking about stuff you do not understand.

      I'm a network engineer that has been working with ISPs since the early 90's. I do understand this.

      --
      Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
    4. Re:Lift the gag order first... by lgw · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That fact that they happen to be Republican is irrelevant because both parties are thoroughly corrupted by the corporate interests that actual net neutrality threatens!

      Both parties are quite corrupt - we know this. But if on some specific issue like this, one party or the other was not corrupt, that would be interesting. And that often happens, as the businesses in question pick one party or the other as the target of all their bribes for efficiency reasons. But that's not the case here. The safe assumption here is that any net neutrality laws will be a bribery contest between the cable companies and the content providers (mostly Google and Netflix), and anything shat out of that process is highly suspect.

      Party doesn't enter into it - this is about the Senator from Google vs the Senator from Comcast!

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  2. They do what they're paid to do... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They know it can't get past the president's veto, and probably not past a fillibuster, but if they keep this up they PAC will keep lining their coffers.

    1. Re:They do what they're paid to do... by drakaan · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Worse...I requested a response, which I just got. It begins:

      Thank you for contacting me to voice your opposition to the recently released regulations by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Having recently been elected to my second term in Congress, Iâ(TM)m honored to be able to represent the people of Ohioâ(TM)s 14th Congressional District...

      --
      "Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
    2. Re:They do what they're paid to do... by drakaan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually, after my follow-up email pointint out the idiocy of the reply I got, a staffer sent me a *real* email asking if I'd like to call and talk to him about it. Not that it means that they're really listening, but at least they have enough sense to not just ignore it completely. Meh.

      --
      "Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
  3. "Conservatives" hating neutrality baffles me by swb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    One guy I used to work with was trying to run an SMB network off his cable modem service from home and did nothing but complain for weeks about the runaround he got trying to get multiple static IPs due to ridiculous cable vendor policies (solved with some MAC spoofing/VLAN hackery in his firewall) and the pathetic bandwidth allocations he was able to get in addition to the general lack of alternatives in his area.

    Yet this same numbskull is parroting this ridiculous "Obama takeover of the Internet" bullshit against net neutrality.

    I just don't see how "conservatives" are willing to go totally rabid when it comes to government meddling yet so many (but not all) see outrageous monopoly manipulation and rent-seeking as just the good-old free market working like it's supposed to. I can't make this dichotomy make any sense.

    1. Re:"Conservatives" hating neutrality baffles me by halivar · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The conservative bias is "don't regulate what you don't have to," and House Republicans are trying to argue that the regs are unnecessary, first because they ban practices not actually in practice, second that when they do come in practice (Netflix vs Comcast, for instance), they are resolved between the actors in the existing legal framework with no deleterious effects to the consumer.

  4. Re:DOA by MachineShedFred · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The House doesn't operate under rules that prevent singular persons from bringing things to the floor like the Senate does. A bill gets written by a member, and gets referred to the proper committee. If the committee votes in favor, it goes before the full House for debate and voting.

    There is no filibuster, nor super-majority cloture vote as in the Senate. House rules go back to Thomas Jefferson, and have been changed very little. The Senate was modeled after Parliamentary procedure, thus has some odd things such as cloture votes to end debate, which is the primary mechanic used for obstruction - you need 60 votes to close debate so that you can see if there are 51 votes to pass the bill.

    Either way, the second part of your statement is absolutely correct. Even if this thing comes out of the house, and by some oddity of politics or monied influence gets through a cloture vote and passes the Senate, it's highly unlikely that the President would put his name to this piece of trash on parchment. Don't know if he's straight-up veto though - he'd probably want a piece of the monetary influence after he's out of office too. Maybe a pocket veto.

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  5. Re:Throw "Freedom" On It by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you see any bill with "freedom", "family", "patriot" or "protection" on it, your first inclination should be to think that there's something evil hidden in the bill. And more often than not you'd be right.

    --
    If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...