Slashdot Mirror
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.
Doesn't it say in the Bible that corporations go to heaven? I'm sure it must.
Problem with corporations is they are immortal. They can do evil forever as long as its profitable. We need death penalty for corporations. And assasinations for corporations :)
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.
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.
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
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!
There's something in the air. Lately even Joe Scarborough and some of the FOX News regulars have occasionally balked at the bullshit.
Probably the solar system is passing through a cloud of hippie gas or something.
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 *
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 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.
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.
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?
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