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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.
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".
There are a lot of issues with it.
I'd like it if the whole thing were nothing but unicorns and rainbows. But the secrecy is not a good sign and we need to think to the future... the FCC might do something good with this today... but the government has a tendency to push the bounds of their authority.
They get some power to take the goods away from drug dealers and before you know it they're confiscating the homes of poor people with basically no justification.
They get the mandate to go after terrorists and a few years later the NSA agents are spying on ex girlfriends using the government terror databases and NSA agents are putting ex wives on no fly lists.
The internet is a big deal. And I just don't want the FCC to ruin it.
I hate the big ISPs too. Everyone does. But the solution to them is competition. Not government regulation. Just remove the stupid laws that make it illegal for rival companies to lay cable in their territory.
Here someone will say those laws don't exist. Both Google and Centurylink were recently complaining about just such laws. So either they do exist or those companies were lying.
Its a real thing. Possibly the new FCC regulations will settle that issue. Which if that was all they were doing would be fine by me. But I worry about the unintended consequences and the long term power creep. The FCC could be a white knight today... but tomorrow? You don't know.
The whole thing could be a devil's bargain. You get something you want today... and later... your soul is forfeit.
You can't say it isn't going to happen... they're keeping the regs secret. That in and of itself is suspicious.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
I agree it likely wouldn't make it out of Congress let alone past the President, but how do you figure it won't make it to the floor of at least the House?
Unless your link is bad, what you read there is NOT "these rules". It is a description of what the "rules" are meant to accomplish.
And even if these are the "rules" you think they are, note that they specifically set aside the question of how to actually pay for this regulation for discussion at a later time.
For the record, I'm pretty much indifferent to the whole issue, as long as it doesn't increase my monthly internet bill. Though I do find myself curious how you can have tiered service (pay X for Ymbits/sec throughput, or pay 2X for twice that) under these guidelines, since they explicitly disallow paying extra for faster service.
Also for the record, I expect that within a year, it WILL increase my monthly internet bill. I've never met a bureaucrat yet that didn't like a few more dollars of taxes collected.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
The pay for speed guidelines cover content providors, not end users. Also what is there to pay for?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
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.
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.
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/
I expect that ISPs will add a "fee" for net neutrality compliance. This fee will have zero connection to any taxes or costs incurred by ISPs -- it will be a hidden price increase and extra profits by ISPs.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
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.
These rules prevent that. Without these rule that is possible, with these rules it is not possible. The ISPs are not allowed to slow down content or charge for faster delivery of content (same thing in practice) but they can still charge end users in a tiered manner.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
You are hoplessly naive. In order to compete with incumbent ISPs you have to have massive resources. If you start with small, local deployments, the incumbents will make local price cuts to drive you out of business. Even if you have the resources to make deployments across most population centers in a short time, the result will be lower prices and no profits. If you just built out, your equipment costs will be much greater than incumbents.
The only way to get competition is to force unbundling of local loops. This means more regulation.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
As all these extra cables are not needed for providing service, their sole purpose is to feed some free market fundamentalist pipe dream. The more sensible solution is to have only one provider for each type of cable technology, and have sensible regulations in place to make sure that there is a competitive market for service providers. Saves a lot of money, as otherwise you will be paying in some way for the twenty identical cables going to your house.
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.
I hate the big ISPs too. Everyone does. But the solution to them is competition. Not government regulation. Just remove the stupid laws that make it illegal for rival companies to lay cable in their territory.
Those laws don't exist in general. The primary thing preventing Time Warner from running cable to my house is the fact that Comcast already has a wire there. Comcast has already spent the millions of dollars required to wire my neighborhood, and the tens of millions required to wire my town. Whatever price Time Warner can offer, Comcast can beat, because they've already sunk costs. Time Warner can, optimistically, hope to get 50% of cable subscribers, meaning at most half the revenue that Comcast projected to pay off their capital. There is no way for a new cable company to compete effectively with one that's already laid out the major capital expenses. The only reason DSL is competitive is it doesn't require laying new copper to every home.
Likewise, there's no way multiple electric or gas companies could compete with an incumbent who had already wired/plumbed a neighborhood. When cities deregulate gas/electric service, they do so by transferring the wires to one company, and forcing that company to sell transit to all comers at regulated rates. If you want to see competition among ISPs, nationalize the coax, copper and fiber, and let the ISPs rent bandwidth to subscribers' homes and manage their access.
I predict that your monthly internet bill will increase regardless of these regulations. Because inflation. And greed. And because they can.
You're a dumbass if you didn't think of that first, and if you did, you're being a disingenuous asshole. So which is it?
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.
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.
As a Comcast customer, it's also bullshit. I'm *already* paying them for my internet service, so if part of my Netflix bill is going to pay protection money to Comcast (and, that's what this is: a protection racket) I'm paying Comcast twice. I fundamentally have a problem with that.
Do you have ESP?
According to his last Comcast bill he is "Mr. Dumbass Asshole", so that settles that.
You're confusing QoS and net neutrality. As long as they treat torrent traffic equal to other torrent traffic, they are meeting the regulations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.