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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.
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.
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.
They could write legislation about anything and expect us to like it because it has a word in it like "freedom" or "patriot". Imagine: The Hero's Freedom Act. Sounds good, right? It could also potentially describe a bill that calls some group heroes while empowering them to take the freedom of others. That would be a hero's freedom act, technically.
Actually, that has more to do with freedom than this does. What they meant to call it is the "Internet Just Give Us Your Wallets And Shut Up Act".
LOL! Freedom for the carriers and big business to make more money.
It won't make it to the floor for a vote, let alone past the president.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
I'd like to see multiple ISP block all content and websites associated with those politicians and their political party. Especially during an election to give them a dose of their own medicine. See this is what can potentially happen to you if net neutrality is prevented. Eventually become as censored as China.
The best government money can buy.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
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.
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.
And how many of these cosponsors have taken large donations from ISPs, telecoms, etc. in their last reelection campaigns or recently to their PAC? It's seems that they aren't even trying to hide the corruption anymore.
Campaign Donations Appreciation Act
Corporate Fascism Reinforcement Act
Fuck the People Act
Get off your butts. Instead of whining on a forum spend the next 2 minutes of your life emailing your representative for the American slashdotter.
Remember these legislators only hear and get their information from lobbyists and pacs.
Tell them it is not acceptable to have a monopoly cut off your Netflix. If your representative has an R tell him or her that there is no free market and it harms innovation and our economy as a result. If he or she has a D explain monopolistic powers and pacs are writing rules.
Yes they check with their staff all day. If they get a surge of angry citizens they will notice. Remember the law to ban opensource and force drm? I posted that link and the bill died. We can change this if we act together. Religious right did this and won. It's time geeks do the same
http://saveie6.com/
Straight up bribery.
So now a small number of companies has more sway with this "politician" then the record breaking response the FCC received on this issue. Less then 1% of the FCC's response were against Net Neutrality, but because this Congressman's PAC received $81,000 AT&T, Comcast, the NCTA and Verizon, he feels that this is what the American people want?
Right.
Straight up bribery, and nothing will ever be done about it.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Guys, much like 1984, House of Cards is not an instruction manual...
Other than for the media companies, I can't see a downside to treating broadband access like a utility, especially since the FCC has waived the right to regulate prices. A broadband service routes packets into and out of your house, just like a water, electric or gas utility. AT&T's packets should not be any different than Verizon's packets, or Comcast's packets...it's the equivalent of the local loop from a CLEC.
It seems to me that shaking up the incumbents in some markets would be a good thing. It would probably operate the same way "competitive" gas service does now -- if someone hates their provider enough or finds a cheaper price for the exact same service, they can sign up to have another company provide it. This would be a good model to keep decent providers running, but put some limits on the Comcasts and Time Warner Cables of the world. Also, forcing some kind of universal service would mean that rural customers would get better network access. Carriers only upgrade networks when forced, and only like to operate in places where it's easy to operate...other than profits, this is probably one thing they're worried about. That, and Comcast is probably worried that Joe's Cable Shack is going to take all the business from people who don't need TV with their Internet service.
I'm also not really buying the "innovation" angle. At the core, networks are plumbing. DSL, DOCSIS, and of course Ethernet are pretty mature standards. Occasionally materials and computing advances allow for faster data rates, but these are open standards that every carrier would have access to.
I say it's the highest time for another antitrust breakup.
seems like a lose lose situation to me. Either we have an over bearing government running the show, or companies that want to gouge people and not give the service they should be providing. Either way I think that the Internet is going to suffer greatly after it is all said and done.
You're confusing QoS and net neutrality. As long as they treat torrent traffic equal to other torrent traffic, they are meeting the regulations.
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
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.
So as the parent AC stated, we were renting phones from AT&T for over 80 years.
Actually, GP AC was wrong, and here is why. Pardon the long explanation, but it's not a simple subject. It all has to do with why "Ma Bell" was broken up in the first place.
When AT&T (Ma Bell) was essentially granted "regulated monopoly" status, that monopoly applied to its status as a "common carrier". As such, its job was to deliver signals from one phone to another. (That's what Title II Common Carriers do.) It was NOT supposed to be in the business of making and selling telephones.
Eventually (I'm skipping a lot of history here), Ma Bell leased (not rented) telephones for use on its telephone system. The rationale for leasing was actually pretty reasonable: the telephones were built to last (and they did! solid durable Cycolac plastic around a solid metal frame), and when the customer was done with the phone, it would be returned for refurbishing and re-issued to some other customer. The benefits were cost, and 100% compatibility with the phone system throughout the United States. Which was no small accomplishment when you compare to, say, some countries in Europe at the time.
However, people complained of problems with this scheme: if you tried to use any other manucfature telephone on "their" system, you could not install it yourself. They charged you an exorbitant fee to have a technician come out to your house to install a "compatibility" device between your phone and "their" wires, and charged you a (rather high) fee every month to have it there.
After complaints that this was an anti-competitive practice (which, indeed, it was), a Federal court enjoined Ma Bell from being in the hardware business. However (it is not clear to me actually how), Bell got away with ignoring that Federal injunction for a full 20 years. Which is to say: they were basically breaking Federal law. Western Electric, which made virtually all telephones in the United States, was a wholly-own subsidiary of AT&T. So how they could claim "they" weren't in the phone business for those 20 years, and maintain all their old anti-competitive practices in that regard, is something I do not understand.
In any case: the complaints again became too big to ignore, and the Federal government broke AT&T up into its separate (but pretty much already-existing) subsidiary companies, which were in turn enjoined from participating in the business of manufacturing and selling telephones. Again, the whole idea was: they are in the telephone signal business, not the telephone manufacturing business.
In any case, contrary to popular belief, that's why it was broken up. And that's when manufacturers started selling more and different kinds of telephones in the U.S.
And further, that's the principle behind Title II Common Carrier status for Internet companies: they are in the business of delivering the signal. Nothing more. They are not in the business of controlling the content of that signal, any more than telephone companies were.