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FCC Tosses Petition Challenging Its New Internet Regulations
A petition submitted to the FCC by several of the players (including AT&T, CenturyLink, and USTelecom) who would be most affected by the agency's recently asserted Internet regulatory powers has been rejected by the agency's leadership. The Internet providers, along with the CTIA trade association, asserted that the FCC's Open Internet order is aganst the public interest. Per The Verge, the Commission last Friday "denied the petition, issuing an order that states its classification of broadband internet as a telecommunications service "falls well within the Commission's statutory authority, is consistent with Supreme Court precedent, and fully complies with the Administrative Procedure Act."
Well, you certainly are on a first name basis with insanity. The problem in this country is idiots like you are too fucking stupid to actually learn anything about reality before opening your mouth to let out the bullshit that's seeped out of your brain.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
being allowed to bilk the whole world with junk bonds and fraudulent securities. If the government was allowed the power to regulate, that wouldn't have happened - but corporations bought the government off and apparently will continue to, forever.
They also control your mind, such as it is.
Buddy, I strongly recommend you turn off Fox news for a moment and consider the way the bubble was actually formed. (Forgive me if you're not a Fox news watcher...but your post is characteristic of the rhetorical malarkey they spread...) Big banks bought up "sub-prime" mortgages from small lenders at a massive discount. These lenders wanted to dump the loans anyway, because they were forced to lend to people who couldn't afford homes. The big banks packaged large groups of loans and called them "assets" - then sold portions of those "assets" back to the small banks and lenders, and on the international market. Now, technically, that's legal - anticipated income can be considered an asset. However, many of these loans that were part of the packages were already in default. This made the assets "toxic" - if the banks held on to them, they'd lose money, but as long as they didn't foreclose, they could claim the asset. So, each time they repackaged these mortgages, they were able to falsely inflate their reported earnings. THAT's what made it seem like there was actually more money than there really was. Couple that with the fact that by buying up the mortgages, the value of homes was artificially inflated as well. People had to invest more in their property in order to become homeowners. When the market crashed, and property values plummeted, those investments deflated or disappeared. THAT's why we had a recession. The "fake money" talk is nothing more than a failure to understand the function of a "fiat" currency - and we don't have space here for a course on global economics.
As if there aren't people on both sides for and against it.
http://www.infoworld.com/artic...
http://time.com/3578255/conser...
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
http://www.politico.com/story/...
Just another day in Paradise
ISP should be limited to purchasing more bandwidth and using anti-bufferbloat AQMs, but no throttling or QoS.
QoS may be hard. But it's necessary, because streaming and TCP don't play well together.
Streaming requires low latency, low jitter, low packet loss, and has a moderate and limited (in absence of compression, typically constant) bandwidth. TCP, when being used for things like large file transfers, increases speed to consume ALL available bandwidth at the tightest choke point, and divide it fairly among all TCP connections using the choke point. It discovers the size of the choke point by expanding until packets are dropped, and signals other TCP connections by making their packets drop. The result that TCP forces poor QoS onto streams unless the infrastructure is massively oversized.
This can be fixed by a number of traffic management schemes. But they all have this in common:
- They treat different packets differently.
- The infrastructure can be misused for competitive advantage and other unfair business practices.
The PROBLEM is not the differing treatment of different packages (which can help consumers), but the misuse of the capability (to hurt consumers).
So IMHO an "appropriate legal remedy", under current legal theories, is not to try to force ISPs to treat all packets the same (and break QoS), but to limit the ISPs ability and incentives to misuse the capability.
So the appropriate regulation is not communications technical regulation, but consumer protection and antitrust law:
- Consumer fraud law should already cover misbehavior that penalizes certain traffic flows improperly. (What is "internet service" if it doesn't handle whatever end-to-end traffic is thrown at it, just for starters) Ditto charging extra for better packet treatment rather than just fatter pipes, charging anyone other than their base customers for the service, or heavily penalizing packets of customers (or the customers themselves) whose usage is problematic for the ISP but within the advertised service. If current law needs a tweak, the enforcement infrastructure is already there should Congress choose to commit the tweak and use it.
- Penalizing packets of competitors for its own services, or giving appropriate handling to its own packets of a type and not to that of others, is anticompetitive behavior. Indeed, having such services in the same company AT ALL, let alone forming conglomerates that include both "content" creation and Internet service distributing it, is a glaring conflict-of-interest, of the sort that led to the historic breakups of AT&T and Standard Oil. Antitrust law is up to the problem: Just use it.
(I put quotes around "appropriate legal remedy" above, because I think that a free market solution would be even better. Unfortunately, we don't have a free market in ISP services, due to massive, government-created or government-ignored barriers to entry. And we aren't likely to see one in the near future - or EVER, unless the government power-wielders get it through their skulls that "competition" and its free-market betnefits don't kick in until there are at least three, and usually until there are four or more, competitors for each customer. (This "Two-is-competition, Hey! Where's the market benefits?" error has been built into communication law ever since the allocation of bandwidth for the early, analog, AMPS cellphone service.) With only two "competitors", market forces drive them to cartel-like behavior and all-the-market-will-bear pricing, without any collusion at all.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way