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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."
A victory for THE PEOPLE'S network.
Net neutrality is such a bad idea. The internet cannot last under such nonsense.
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It is curious to observe the pro government mania taking place at this time, the time of the biggest economic downturn pretty much in history of the USA, the downturn caused by the government power grab and destruction of individual freedoms. It looks like this case, like in so many before it, the people will be looking towards the very entity that caused the destruction of the economy for solutions, 'solutions' that cannot solve anything but make it worse because the reasons for the problems are so completely and utterly misdiagnosed. It is not surprising but it is nevetherless unfortunate to see it happen again after so much history showing that this is the worst way to go about trying to fix the problems. This will not fix anything, will make things worse in the long term. But who is really capable of thinking long term? Very few, and nobody wants to hear the actual solution or indeed the problem.
You can't handle the truth.
Is this FCC a USA government institution?
I thought the US government was since Ronnie wholly owned by the corporations...
Let us (normal internet users) hope the FCC can get away with this pro net-neutrality policy, level playing field and all that!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
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?
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.
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If they can't be responsible for what they do, then they're shit at their job or at the very least not worth being paid more than the national average, and no bonuses too: the actions of the market, according to you, is always and only controlled by what Fed and government actors do. If they have all the control, then the value of those Wall St people is nil: they are merely playing around.
I didn't see a single pro-net neutrality comment that talked about The Fine Article. Lots, though, that stated anyone who opposes net neutrality is in the KKK, demonized the right wing, complained about corporate personhood, and complained that corporations have purchased the votes of Congress. The article talked about how a specific bureaucracy received a petition from those it now regulates, and told them "We thought about it and decided we're right. Go away." Normal discussions about the article would talk about strategy, "This seems like just a first step in the ongoing litigation so the corporations can say they tried to play nice," or the underlying legal aspects "wow, this administrative law thing is kinda cool, I hope we can pull more from the regular court system and get everything we like tried by the administrative branch and not the judicial branch, at least until Evil Republicans get the White House back."
You're embarrassing your own side. Please keep it up.
A tax on a commodity focuses that tax on a subset of income--you spend what you make--thus magnifying the tax. If, for example, 2% of all pre-tax income in Australia was spent on Netflix, then a Netflix tax of 10% would translate to an income tax hike of 0.2% across the board; if it were focused on high-income earners, it would affect only the small part of society at a rate almost identical (e.g. the top 50% have 87.25% of the money, 0.2% becomes 0.229%; the top 25% have 67.38%, income tax hike of 0.2968%).
A tax on a commodity also focuses on buyers. Let's say everyone buys the maximum amount of liquor, taxed at $14 per liter of pure alcohol. Rich people die of alcohol poisoning just as fast as poor people, so it's the same amount of alcohol; yet rich people have more money, so it's a smaller portion of their income. If poor people spend 10% of their income on alcohol and pay 0.5% of their income in alcohol tax, and rich people with 100 times the income buy just as much, then rich people will spend 0.1% of their income on alcohol and pay 0.005% of their income in alcohol tax.
We can surmise the rich won't spend proportionally precisely as much (or more) of their income on digital media as the poor do. They might spend two or ten times as much, and so any person with income over $1M would be taxed a lower percentage of their income by the media tax than a a person owning $100k.
Combining these two things, we see that all commodity taxes target lower-income earners with much higher income-relative tax rates than they target high-income earners, and they make those tax rates on the commodity extremely high by having to multiply them by the proportion of spending relative to the income spent on the commodity in order to derive the same income-relative tax. This means the commodity tax is a high proportion of the commodity's cost, greatly raising the price of the commodity, while also most greatly impacting the least-affluent of the market purchasing that commodity.
Taxing the shit out of the poor increases labor cost to businesses, making a transition to automation and a reduction of human labor exploitation more accessible. Simply put, raising taxes on the poor leads to unemployment, to the poor being even more poor and to more of the poor being jobless. Taxes should be kept small and either flat or progressive.
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...why did so many people have to rally, protest and sign petitions just to get Tom Wheeler to implement it instead of going with the telcos' desire for paid prioritization?
The telcos speak poison with their forked tongues.
I charge forward recklessly, leaving chaos in my wake.
Nothing really to see here. This is just the first step in the process. When the FCC makes a rule, you get to appeal it. If your appeal fails (and it usually does), then you can go to court to attempt to get it overturned. But you first have to show you tried to appeal. Mission accomplished.
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
The government policies didn't "encourage" loaning to such people. They specifically _forbade_ it. The problem was that the deregulation regime didn't provide any "stick" to back up that prohibition. So on one side it offered a financial carrot of massive proportions, the other side just said "it's your duty to not do X and Y and to make sure that you are being good."
The people who bought, paid for, and essentially wrote the legislation, that is the banks, didn't put any "and for every time you fail your duty by doing X and/or Y you will be charged $Z language.
This is called Regulatory Capture, or it's an eventual but certain outcome of regulatory capture. The law was balanced in "intent" and wording, listing things that were good and bad to do and ordering that none of the bad things be done. But it had no teeth to bite bad behavior.
Much as the entire libertarian and "small government republican" agenda, the "we all know what's right so the market will fix it" stuff falls apart in the trenches because without penalty all business and behavior becomes a choice between "do I eat the ice cream now or do I make an ice cream sandwich and then eat that"? If there is no "bad boys get their ice cream taken away" there is no reason expressed by market forces to not be a bad boy.
Example: the theory is "the market isn't going to buy his stuff if he is a bad man polluter of his river" is, in practice, "the people down stream _might_ not buy his stuff because he's polluting their water, but there are lots of people upstream who don't even want to know about the pollution and will buy his stuff."
So the "mortgage lenders" knew that they could make toxic loans and sell them upstream to banks knowing that the government who lived down stream would have to deal with the shit in the financial river eventually. But why would the mortgage broker care, the "free market" already paid him for his product.
"Free Market Capitalism" is the worship of the carpetbagger and the insistance that nobody can escape forever, but if you give everyone a head start thats longer than the statue of limitations, and you don't even make it against the law, nobody is even chasing the crooks.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I have talked with several people on the street about the FCC claim of authority, and many of those people have indicated to me that they want and expect the ISP's / Telecommunication companies to IGNORE the FCC and ignore any "fines" the fcc thinks they have a right to impose, and if the board members and officers of the ISP's / telecommunication companies fail to do this, they may find they are retaliated against, directly.
Now I don't condone violence, but at least a few of those individuals at least implied they would use violence. So it would be in the corporation board members nad their officers to ignore the FCC.
I'm just sayin.