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Republicans Introduce a Bill To Overturn Net Neutrality
New submitter grimmjeeper writes: IDG News reports, "A group of Republican lawmakers has introduced a bill that would invalidate the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's recently passed net neutrality rules. The legislation (PDF), introduced by Representative Doug Collins, a Georgia Republican, is called a resolution of disapproval, a move that allows Congress to review new federal regulations from government agencies, using an expedited legislative process."
This move should come as little surprise to anyone. While the main battle in getting net neutrality has been won, the war is far from over. The legislation was only proposed now because the FCC's net neutrality rules were just published in the Federal Register today. In addition to the legislation, a new lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by USTelecom, a trade group representing ISPs.
This move should come as little surprise to anyone. While the main battle in getting net neutrality has been won, the war is far from over. The legislation was only proposed now because the FCC's net neutrality rules were just published in the Federal Register today. In addition to the legislation, a new lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by USTelecom, a trade group representing ISPs.
So:
Some Federal agency serves up some rules on whatever
Congress, who is actually in charge of passing laws, says, "Hey, wait a minute. Shouldn't we have looked at this first?"
This seems to be one of those "We have to pass it to see what's in it." type of deals.
I am NOT saying the Republicrats are all above board in what they're doing and why ($$$), but it does kind of seem to be in their bailiwick to investigate before things like this are approved or passed.
The open internet is one of the most democratizing things we have in a modern society, why is this even up for debate? What benefit would society have in enabling "Fast lanes" or "premium" connections or other nonsense? What do we get protecting commercial interests?
Nice in theory, but do you really think this government is going make things better? What are your examples of that? Wishful thinking? Surely not the history of telecommunications - which would be most appropriate. Damn near a century of being limited to voice-over-landline under government regulation, and once regulations were lifted look what happened - internet, smartphones, ubiquitous mobile devices.
Do you REALLY think the AT&T monopoly that ran voice-over-land-line for a century under government regulation would have done anything like cell phones?
Yeah, they had a great R&D department, winning Nobel Prizes, inventing the transistor, discovering the cosmic background radiation. And they did NOTHING with all that knowledge to provide innovative services to their customers.
Long distance calls were an expensive, big deal where everyone gathered once a week to talk to relatives for a short time.
For a fucking century.
A better question is what do we get by imposing thousands of pages of regulations on internet service other than incumbent protection and regulatory capture.
I'm pretty sure that has worked both ways. Obamacare is a massive tax increase (*cough* fine) on the working (and non-working) poor yet Democrats were all for it and Republicans were against it. Politics in America is just rooting for bad teams at this point. People get all excited when their team wins but in the end.. the people and country lose.
What's at issue is if the FCC's unconstitutional, unregulated expansion of power. Without identifying any previous violations, without even utilizing the courts, and without any act of Congress, they single-handedly declared their authority over one of the most free realms of commerce we have today.
People can keep saying that, but it's clearly untrue. Title II is part of the Communications Act, which is law passed by Congress. Now you can argue they misinterpreted that law and I'm sure someone will in court soon, but to say there was no law is either ignorant or lying.
This is a 'troll'? Somebody must have changed the moderation guidelines again.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
You mean the same Congress that delegated power to the agency in question to make just these sort of rules??? If Congress wants to pass new legislation to revoke that authority (or the budget of the agency under the Executive), it is free to do so - but that does nothing to change the fact that Congress approved it in the first place. You can find similar examples on everything from pot to DADT.
More than just lobbying. Factually, a heavily censored public communications network heavily favours authoritarian governments, which is exactly what every single for profit corporation is (an authoritarian privatised element of governance geared to favour a minority with majority share holdings). So access to public communications censored via cost ie only the rich can play, favours both the Republicans and Corporations. So net neutrality favours democracy and biased by wealth internet access favours fascism and that is an inescapable fact and exactly why the current pseudo religious, pseudo representative Republicans, want to kill it, main stream media controlled by wealth favours them and public media controlled by the majority goes against them, straight up fascism versus democracy. This is not just a US thing but can be seen the whole world over, the more pseudo conservative actually fascist a government is the more they want to privatise communications and limit access and control of access based upon wealth. Exactly as can be seen in Australia, where a labour government endeavoured to produce an equally accessible network and the conservative once in power immediately set to destroying it and are now attempting to permanently block it by crippling it financially and locking it up in privatised contracts. Opposition to net neutrality is factually treason against democracy.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The difference is Republicans speak as if all this money is their moral right to exchange. Democrats could at least be guilted into doing something about it at the national level, Republicans never will.
That's why this bill comes from a Republican who justifies it on dog whistle terms he knows his constituents will translate into, "freedom," or money out of their own pockets. No Democrat could ever get away essentially stating, "yeah, I've been bought off, but freedom 'Merica eagles you could be rich Obama."
t's gets silly these days to think of congresscritters as "Democrat" or "Republican" on issues like this. Who represents Comcast? Who represents Google? For damn sure none of them represent voters.
This is true; however, it seems the net neutrality is going to become a partisan issue, because Comcast et al can use GOP economic rhetoric (baseless or not), and the GOP leadership think the money is worth the political risk.
Once anything becomes a partisan issue, then tribalism replaces sanity. Expect some GOP faithful computer geeks to slowly edge towards the party line.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
There's also the ultra-libertarian view (which really isn't very libertarian) that the government should literally do nothing. Any regulation by them is seen as bad regulation. Damn the consumers, they think if we let something like this stand then sooner or later the government will decide to ban child labor as well.
Seriously, we have a lot of members of congress who think that their one and only duty is to oppose all government action of any kind (though a subset of them approve of military action as an exception). Then mix in the true market believers as well, who think that the free market can solve all problems as long as the government stays away from it.
Uh, no. Netflix, in case you didn't know, is a company, and (non-ISP) companies, much like individuals, purchase internet access from ISPs. Netflix purchased internet access from many upstream providers including Cogent, Level 3, and some CDNs (as well as investing in their own CDN, btw). Peering arrangements are not between companies like Netflix and Comcast. Peering arrangements are between ISPs. That's the first point.
The second point is that Comcast is not a transit provider. It is a last-mile provider. It will, by definition, have an asymmetrical flow of traffic. This is very much a part of the peering arrangements between Cogent et al. and Comcast. It is not a new change brought on by Netflix.
This is not about peering arrangements. This is about cable companies. Comcast, in addition to being an ISP, sells cable service. It gets revenue from any content delivered to its subscribers. This market is threatened by Netflix, and so Comcast wants to impose cable-like business arrangements on Netflix, which it sees as a content-provider. If you can't see how this is in opposition to the underlying principles of the internet, you are a fool. As soon as Comcast did it, Verizon had a go too. It wasn't going to take long for all of the last-mile networks to try to turn themselves into cable companies.
In other news, if you are anywhere near Texas, you would know about the contract dispute between Suddenlink (cable company) and Viacom ( the parent company of Comedy Central and some other channels). Suddenlink was (is) not delivering Comedy Central to its customers. But Suddenlink the ISP knows that its customers can stream Comedy Central from the web, so it is intentionally blocking access to streaming from www.cc.com. In other words, Suddenlink is degrading its ISP service as leverage for negotiations with its cable service. You may say this is an antitrust case, and I may agree. But net neutrality probably solves the problem more efficiently.
Net neutrality may not be perfect in every way. But to say that there are no problems out there that need to be addressed is just ignorant and head-in-the-sand.