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."

Comments

Good

[msobkow]

It's time to hold the players big and small accountable for their oppressive actions. They should be providing a data pipe, period. No "priority" internally hosted services, no "doesn't count towards your cap" services, no throttling of competing services.

Perhaps more importantly, classifying broadband as telecommunications opens up the possibility of monopoly breakups in some of the markets where there is a serious lack of competition.

Re:Good

[Jason Levine]

If an ISP wants to throttle video, as long as they do it equally among all providers, that seems fair. Or to give preference to online gaming, that's fair too. As long as the ISP isn't picking and choosing, or asking for money to give a higher preference.

Network Neutrality doesn't mean that an ISP can't provide QoS and say "All video streaming packets get bumped ahead of e-mail packets." What it means is that an ISP can't say "Video packet A gets bumped ahead of video packet B because provider A paid us for 'fast lane access.'" Even more, it says that ISPs can't say "All video packets get slowed down so that our service's video packets can seem faster and so we can use our local Internet access monopoly to get people to sign up for our video services." (Look at the Comcast-Netflix speed graphs for an example of this. Netflix's speed tanked until right when Netflix decided to pay Comcast for faster access.)

Good to see the FCC at least considered it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, we'd want the same treatment when we come up with petitions.

After all, companies have the same rights as citizens... no more no less... right?

Re: how long until the internet dies?

[Holi]

I get a kick out of these new ultra conservative republicans calling the people who have been the Republican Party for the past generation RINOs.

Re: how long until the internet dies?

[Rich0]

Out of curiosity, what part of the republican platform is still worth cheering on these days, unless you're just a libertarian who feels like voting as such is throwing away a vote? I don't really see much in the republican platform that looks particularly appealing to me, and this is coming from somebody who grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh.

Re:pro government insanity

[Rich0]

No one was "forced to lend to people who couldn't afford homes." They knew they were giving bad loans but they didn't care because they knew they could sell them and let them become somebody else's problem.

My understanding is that it was a bit of both. Government policies encouraged loaning to people who couldn't afford homes. However, you are correct that the folks doing it didn't care since it was somebody else's problem.

Student loans are the same thing. Companies gleefully loan to students who they know will never be able to repay, because the US government promised to bail them out if they don't. They'll even pay them collection fees on top of that to recover the money.

What I don't get is why student loan interest rates are any higher than treasury bond rates. If they're US-guaranteed investments, why should they have a higher interest rate?