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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."
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.
Wait, so it wasn`t the deregulation of corporations, with their unrestaint greed, caused a bubple and crash? t was the gov with all their rules and restictions on the freedom of individuals and companies!
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?
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.
Or are hand written.
On $100 bills
They can afford to brainwash millions of elderly tea partiers who think that the army is about to invade Texas and take away all their guns because Obama is a n****r..
Exactly, you could see fairly quickly that the 1% interest rates were creating a bubble, were excessively low, and were being held there to stop the business cycle from having an ordinary recession. Which resulted in intensifying the 2007 recession.
The current low rates are intensifying the next recession. We will have a recession every 3 to 5 years. Engage in chicanery to prevent that- and what you will get is much worse.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
I figure it was a sarcastic comment.
The right wing "news sources" and blogs have been saying that Obama is trying to take away our freedom through net neutrality all along.
Seriously.
And in the disqus comments and the like you can read thousands and thousands of hysterical old people screaming and crying about it ...
It's like that on everything. The hysteria of confused old people is a commodity bought and sold by corporations.
Kind of like the italian russian space station posting lower down? :)
Still seems to me that the AC I was talking about was just being sarcastic. No fear or ranting, just a simple ridiculous statement. Unlike some of the other posters around here. Of course, that's just a guess on my part since I can neither read minds, nor do we have a Sarcasm Element in HTML. Damn we could seriously use that one.
Actually, you missed out 'about to invade Texas' in a convoy of UN trucks paid for by the Illuminati and controlled by lizardman from Zeta Reticuli.
There is one bright light on the horizon. Bigfoot is friendly. Source: my neighbour.
It's like that on everything. The hysteria of confused old people is a commodity bought and sold by corporations.
I especially like it when someone wants their representatives to eliminate entitlements, but don't dare touch their medicare and social security.
Full disclosure: I probably qualify as "old", and perhaps "confused" too. (Though if both, the later may not be caused by the former.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But who is really capable of thinking long term?
Everyone except rich people and wannabes, apparently. It's the MAKE MONEY FAST mentality that has mortally wounded our economy over the past 35 years.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
pro government mania
Are you mentally ill or something? Rarely do I read texts as completely deluded as yours. Geez.
You should read more of his posts.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is regulation in favor of the people. We don't see a lot of that and so it's a bit of a surprise.
Naturally the right wing opposes it. It hurts the 1 percent AND demonstrates proper use of government regulation. Those are two things they can't stand the very thought of.
>Naturally the right wing opposes it.
Isn't that the Republican moto ? "America has seen great progress over the past 75 years, and we have been the opposition to all of it."
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>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
Ahem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
> the downturn caused by the government power grab and destruction of individual freedoms.
This government has less power than the previous one, and has restored some of the freedoms the last one took - and protected freedoms all previous governments have denied. None of which is actually relevant since the only government actions that preceded the recession were DEREGULATION - that is to say, the exact OPPOSITE of what you are claiming. Like the depression, this recession was caused by reckless and outright fraudulent bankers.
Where it gets really ironic is that this issue is essentially unrelated to the economy in it's entirety. You can't have a free market around a natural monopoly - it's literally physically impossible.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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
I agree with much of your post except the part where you claim this government has less power than the previous one. What are you basing that on? What freedoms have they restored? Are they allowing us to choose our own doctor again?
Just another day in Paradise
You are a RINO to the current republican leadership.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
When did they remove your ability to choose your own doctor? The ACA does not restrict your doctor in any way. Your insurance company may, but that is between you and them, not the government.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
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.
They don't want to hear it anyway.
I'd add the economic drag of 2 wars on the layaway plan though. It's a jump start at first, but is not immune from eventual accounting. Odd that the people who are all aghast about just "running the printing presses to make money" have little to say about that practice.
That we managed to avoid a total collapse in 2007-8 is as close to a miracle as you can get.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
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.
Not all Republicans. This one has been sick at the corporate welfare pushed by my own party. I've been cheering the FCC director and marveling at his backbone to push this non-partisan for the people measure through. I starting to think he'd be a good candidate for president someone that would serve the people.
I wish that the American people would wake up and stop treating politics as a sporting event and villianize everything from the other party. I wish we would start to seek and promote those that actually seek a better USA and that understand the principles that founded this country in the first place. These kind of individual are members of both the major parties and many of the minor parties. As the american people participate early we can avoid having to vote for the lessor evil and instead start voting for the greater good. If you only start to think about who to vote for in the general election it is too late.
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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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.
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?
> This is regulation in favor of the people. We don't see a lot of that and so it's a bit of a surprise.
Bernie for President !!!
...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.
I'm guessing it's either the GOP stance on abortion or immigration. That's usually how they keep commoners voting for them while they push legislation to benefit the 0.0001%.
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
It's also important to note that historically blacks and other minorities had much, much harder times getting home loans, including being denied FDIC aid (look up "Redlining" for more information on the practice). Laws like the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 were designed to help fix that by encouraging lenders to make loans to previously disadvantaged sorts. This isn't why the bubble was caused, or burst though, despite the efforts of several commentators and pundits to put the blame on 30 year old laws rather than financial deregulation and fuckery from the past 10 years).
The problem was that certain banks (like Countrywide, among others) realized that they could give these loans to people, and not care about whether they were going to get paid back, as noted before, both due to Government guarantees, and because some of the shell game stuff Wall Street invented to package the bad loans as securities (Credit Default Swaps, etc).
And at the end of the day, when the house of cards came tumbling down, the Government had to bail them out lest the economy implode with them. And yet, we really haven't done nearly enough to prevent them from doing it yet again.
Who was buying these sub prime loans?
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
Are you kidding? As long as there is any money at all to be made, they'll still be there. They were there way back when commercial traffic was still banned on half the links and for all but a .com domain.
>who was buying the loans
Everyone. Everyone from 401Ks to mutual funds, to hedge funds, cities, states, CALPERS - i.e., Wall Street and eventually you through your ownership of a CD or something.
They were all bundled up with AAA class loans and called "mortgaged backed securities." AAA on the top, junk on the bottom. And then labelled "AAA" quality - same as cash. Which they obviously were not to anyone paying attention.
Magnetar saw what was going on and bet against all that.
"A hedge fund named Magnetar comes up with an elaborate plan to make money. It sponsors the creation of complicated and ultimately toxic financial securities...while at the same time betting against the very securities it helped create. Planet Money's Alex Blumberg teams up with two investigative reporters from ProPublica, Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, to tell the story. Jake and Jesse pored through thousands of pages of documents and interviewed dozens of Wall Street Insiders. We bring you the result: A tale of intrigue and questionable behavior, which parallels quite closely the plot of a Mel Brooks musical. (40 minutes)"
http://www.thisamericanlife.or...
I had a mortgage broker (at a fly-by-night) tell me before the crash that the only thing I needed to qualify for a loan was to breathe. This was in spite of all banking regulations about credit scores, income, etc. The broker simply fobbed the loan off to BoA or some such. It was then /their/ problem.
It horrified me, considering what I saw was happening with the price of real-estate.
It literally was criminal levels of fraud. The prisons should be filled with these people.
Yet we need less regulation, if you talk to Libertarians and Republicans.
Idiots.
--
BMO
The only buyer you didn't mention were the two largest buyers of sub prime loans. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both sponsored by the Federal government. Take away the willing buyer of crap loans, and you lose the market for said crap loans and this whole thing never would have happened.
whole thing never would have happened.
Oh look, one of those people.
Bear Stearns (or anyone else for that matter in the private market) doesn't get any of the blame for what they inflicted upon themselves? That the ratings agencies are totally innocent of cooking the books when it comes to classifying mortgage backed securities? That the ratings agencies /defended to the death/ the right to "free speech" for putting out objectively fraudulent ratings?
Nobody else would have been in the market if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weren't there? Really?
You are delusional if you think FM and FM not buying these loans would have made even the tiniest dent in the scam.
Clueless isn't enough of a word.
--
BMO
I guess the ACA had nothing to do with this then.
http://politicalticker.blogs.c...
http://www.weeklystandard.com/...
Just another day in Paradise
For a start they recognised the previously denied freedom of homosexual people to get married to the partner of their choosing.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Well I was mocking the party leadership not (all of) it's voters.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Do I you think a greedy bank would give a sub prime loan knowing that the borrower is going to default? A greedy bank will give a sub prime loian every tme if it knows it can repackage and sell the loan to the federal government
This explains exactly why you don't understand what was going on.
The banks *farmed out* their loan operations to mortgage brokers. Private ones. Ones that didn't give a /shit/ about whether or not the borrowers could pay them back.
BECAUSE THE BROKERS' INCOMES WERE TOTALLY DEPENDENT UPON HOW MANY LOANS THEY MADE. MORE LOANS, MORE INCOME. IN MANUFACTURING, THEY CALL THIS PIECEWORK.
Piecework without QC gets you CRAP. Guaranteed. Every. Time.
And these banks accepted all these crap loans, rubber stamped them, and with the AAA rating, fobbed them off to every investor house on the planet.
You have this fantasy that it was the banks' loan officers making the loans and not private contractors. That was no longer the case with the new deregulation. Yes, the brokers were supposed to follow the same rules. They didn't. Because their jobs were not dependent on making good loans. Their jobs were dependent on how many loans they could make.
>implying the banks were selling purely to the government
No, no they weren't. They were packaging them up and selling them to the likes of Magnetar and Bear Stearns. Whether Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac existed at all is irrelevant when they had so many private buyers.
I get it, you're one of those "all government is bad" people. The thing is that none of this would have happened if the Bush administration's regulators and the Federal Reserve hadn't had a totally hands-off approach to policing this shit.
"We had no idea this would happen" - everyone who was supposed to be watching the cookie jar.
Bullshit. Absolute utter bullshit. If they didn't know what was going to happen, how did Magnetar make out so well? They saw it coming, and so did anyone who wasn't turning a blind eye. Everyone who treated these vehicles as cash and rated them as such willfully closed their minds to the fact that the music was eventually going to stop in the financial game of musical chairs. FFS, I knew the game was up when I heard Alan Greenspan spout off that people should take out variable rate mortgages at the same time mortgage rates were the lowest they had been in 40 years. I saw it coming because it wasn't my first rodeo. I, my parents, and a ton of other people around me, were direct victims of the RISDIC scandal. People I knew killed themselves.
Greenspan claimed personally that he didn't know what was going to happen. I could grow roses for billions of years on that bullshit.
As long as people thought there were dumber greedy idiots to sell to, they'd be fine.
They eventually ran out of idiots.
Tens to hundreds of thousands of people should be in jail over this. But the Obama administration turned a blind eye to it too when it became his administration's problem and simply continued the policies of GWB (the new legislation has no teeth). Because of this, we are being set up for another round of this shit in another 10-15 years. It disgusts me.
--
BMO
Kind of off topic, and somewhat incorrect as it gives them no more or less power.
Just another day in Paradise
That's why I went ahead and bought my house now, with a fixed low-rate loan, and am paying more than the minimum so that I can (hopefully) have it paid off before the next bubble bursts. I was dumbfounded when I found out that my loan was sold within the first month...absolutely nothing has been done to prevent this sort of corruption, and I fear that because the general populace has no understanding of macroeconomics, there will never be anything done about it. I guess if you can't beat em...try to make sure they can't beat you either.