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ISPs Worry About FCC's 'Future Conduct' Policing
jfruh (300774) writes "In the wake of the FCC passing net neutrality rules, the federal agency now has the authority to keep an eye on ISPs 'future conduct,' to prevent them from even starting to implement traffic-shaping plans that would violate net neutrality. Naturally, this has a lot of ISPs feeling nervous." From the article:
The net neutrality rules, beginning on page 106, outline a process for staff to give advisory opinions to broadband providers who want to run a proposed business model past the agency before rolling it out. But those advisory opinions won’t have the weight of an official commission decision.
The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau will be able to reconsider, rescind or revoke those advisory opinions, and the commission itself will be able to overrule them, according to the order.
“It’s unclear what you’re supposed to do when you have a new innovation or a new service,” the telecom lobbyist said. “There’s just a lot of ambiguity.”
Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the most vocal proponents of strong net neutrality rules, urged the commission to jettison its future conduct standard.
This is the regulatory regime being imposed on the business practices of ISPs.
It is pretty much the SAME "regulatory regime" that was imposed on landline telephones before the cell phone revolution was granted exceptions. Did you have a big problem with landline telephone regulation, too? Your communications were carried reliably, not interfered with in any way, and you had privacy.
The intent of the regulation is clearly stated: to ensure (a) neutrality of communications media and (b) privacy.
Clearly the FCC could enforce the rules arbitrarily. But it always could. So what? None of this is new.
I didn't realize Obama was a Republican. You do know that he attended private raisers held by Comcast executives, don't you? He's golfed with the CEO of Comcast. Oh yeah, and the current FCC chairman, nominated by Obama, has close ties to the telecom industry and has long been a lobbyist for companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. In 2012 Comcast employes donated roughly 4x more to Democrats than Republicans.
But sure, keep believing all the bullshit you're fed; it will just make it that much easier for Democrats, and Republicans along with them, to screw you over.
Not really, no. Your memory is oddly (I might say pointedly) selective.
You know we had internet before 1995, right? That many of the advances happened after a regulatory nuclear option was deployed to shake things up, right?You know, the one that the anti-regulatory people decried as interference.
That we went from a human being physically connecting pairs of wires together to place a call to automated routing of digital packets through virtual circuits.
Perhaps you missed that touch tone came out during that 'stagnant' period.
When the regulations were relaxed, we saw our internet connectivity options shrink and ossify. We went from dozens of choices in a given area to 1 or 2.
Cellular service started well before the regulatory change. The big driver to the vast improvements there was a matter of signal processing and denser and more powerful ICs. Had we had better regulation like in Europe, all of our phones would freely port from one network to the other just by switching sim cards. There would be no issue of phones being SIM locked or technologically stuck with one provider. We wouldn't have all the random over-billing and over-priced service we have now.
"We"? I guess.
The speed of my own VDSL connection was deemed inadequately-quick to spool Usenet traffic well over a decade ago. And the last time I commissioned an NNTP server, it didn't even come close to burdening a T1 (close to 20 years ago).
But, I know! We can distribute the load. Use fifty-thousand volunteer servers, all with different parts and PAR files to keep up the slack, scattered everywhere in the world. ...just like BitTorrent, but worse.
The beauty of Usenet was its simple one-to-many approach on a local level. The long-distance pipes had a predictable burden and the last-mile burden was limited to the end-user requests (with proper application of nntpcache, geographically-diverse NNTP servers, et cetera), where bandwidth is cheap.
It was a system that was designed to be very efficient, and it was very efficient. But in order to re-create it efficiently takes support from TWC, ATT, COX, etc., but they've already killed it and it is dead.
(Oh, sure: Today I can buy NNTP access from any number of centralized providers with months- or years-long retention. But that's not the way that Usenet was intended to work and doing so isn't nice to the network at all.)
What we need is proper multicast IP, which IPV6 seems be implicit about: Want a 4GB $file? Sign up to the multicast feed, wait for 4GB of file to stream your way, and done.
One-to-many. It's been built into the Internet since well before I was involved with it and yet nobody seems to understand it anymore. (It used to sadden me, and then I realized that I was sad for reasons that nobody else wanted to care about, so now I just don't care about network efficiency at all. The Me! Me! Me! mentality that I've adopted instead, just like everyone else, is much more gratifying, and actually works....as opposed to Usenet or Multicast-IP today.)
Kid-proof tablet..