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Obama Is Threatening To Veto the GOP's Latest Assault On Net Neutrality (vice.com)
An anonymous reader cites a Motherboard article: President Obama has long been a vocal supporter of net neutrality. In a "
Statement of Administration Policy" (PDF) released Tuesday, Obama signaled that he intends to veto Republican-backed legislation that open internet advocates say could eviscerate federal net neutrality protections. Earlier this year, a GOP-controlled House subcommittee approved the "No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act," (H.R. 2666) which net neutrality supporters say could severely undercut the Federal Communications Commission's ability to police the nation's largest cable and phone companies. The House bill would "undermine key provisions in the Federal Communications Commission's open internet order and harm the commission's ability to protect consumers while facilitating innovation and economic growth," said the Obama administration's statement. "If the President were presented with H.R. 2666, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill."Please do, Obama.
Wrong. Net neutrality ensures competition by equal availability. The packets from netflix are not more important than those from youtube or hulu, and net neutrality is about preventing paid performance advantage over common carrier networks aimed at capturing market share from competitors.
"No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act" is a purposefully misleading name. I like John Oliver's suggestion of "Cable Company Fuckery" Act. What the GOP claim is that the FCC will regulate pricing by imposing net neutrality. In a way, they are correct, the FCC will regulate pricing by ensuring that the cable companies don't use their pseudo-monopolies to gouge customers for internet access. In most markets, consumers have at best two choices so they have to pay whatever the cable company will charge for crappy service. I see it in places like Topeka and Austin where Google is coming in with fiber. Suddenly the cable companies lower their prices AND start to offer higher speeds. Suddenly they start to put in fiber where they promised they would for a decade.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Unfortunately, the concept of Net Neutrality ruins such innovative business models.
Net Neutrality also stops "innovative" business models like charging people who live where there are few broadband choices a extortionate fee to enjoy Netflix while at the same time also charging Netflix to deliver that content to those people.
Unfortunately, the concept of Net Neutrality ruins such innovative business models.
Unfortunately, your puppydog and unicorn concept of the benevolent provider allowing for humanity to reach never before achieved levels of awesomness.
All it sounds like is an overall adoption of the phone carrier's unlimited data packages concept for everyone. So at home, we'll be throttled after a few Gb's, and if we want the "real unlimited" package, we can pay 2X the amount, and get 3 Gb before they throttle us.
Which in today's internet, the ads should take care of the unthrottled data after 3 or 4 page views.
In the end? If I want to keep the service I have now, it will only cost 4 times as much.
4. Profit!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There are multiple ways of looking at this. For me, I think hard-wired networks should be so robust that no set of user demand could ever saturate the possible bandwidth. That means massive upgrades should take place everywhere and ISPs would be competing solely on bandwidth. And, that also means taxpayer dollars spent on network upgrades should be spent on network upgrades. ISP's, however, (and specifically Verizon) have spent these taxpayer dollars largely on shareholder dividends without upgrading their infrastructure. They are working hard to protect their limited-bandwidth infrastructure from market influences that demand upgrades. Economically, it makes sense for Verizon to spend little on infrastructure upgrades if they can get rid of net neutrality because it means they can completely cripple competing services citing 'bandwidth limitations' while making sure their antiquated services (like cable TV) work better than the competition. As for wireless, net neutrality is somewhat tougher to support unless existing total bandwidth was always divided equally against existing customer bandwidth demands. The whole thing comes down to who controls what and who makes money. If we don't support the FCC on this one, we are essentially handing complete control of the Internet over to companies like Verizon. I would prefer we did the opposite and gave control of the Internet to individuals as much as possible.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
He should grow a pair ans say, "I will veto this, that is a promise."
Honestly, the repubs just utterly hate the american people, and prove it by constantly trying to pass this crap.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I agree in principle that QoS is a basically good idea, and different things have different needs. VoIP, for example, has low latency requirements which web browsing does not have, and our networks should help us with it.
That said, most applications of video do not have significant time constraints.
If Netflix has time constraints, it's because they did video wrong. And Netflix traffic is fucking huge, so if anyone says that one of the biggest volume protocols is also the most fragile or time-constrained, get real: they need to go fuck themselves. That's like saying 35% of snail mail is "express" and needs to get there the next day. That's just someone saying, "I am a very special important individual, and all other people aren't, so I should always go to the front of the line when I'm at the motor vehicle department." If you're in that situation, you're doing it wrong.
Storage is cheap. Dirt fucking cheap. It's not even about hard disks anymore; you can trivially have many gigabytes of solid state (which is massive overkill for the application) storage in a less-than-$100 set top box.
So fucking buffer. Download it overnight the day before you watch the show, and nobody will give a fuck if it takes 4 hours to move 2 hours of video. Fuck streaming; it was bad tech from the beginning and it's still bad tech today. Maybe in a few decades, it's badness will be irrelevant. But stop blaming ISPs for Netflix's incompetence. Even if the ISPs really are corrupt or incompetent Netflix is the one who made the stupid decision to stream from net instead of stream from local. On technical merits, Netflix is lame. You wanna treat 'em like a special princess? Instead, tell the entitled hippie to get a job!
Anything that is using 35% of the net should be considered "bulk" far moreso than email.
Worse than that. The ISP says that the packets from the ISP's video streaming service should be given priority over the packets from Netflix video streaming service unless Netflix wants to pay the ISP for better delivery, in case, "something might happen" to their packets during delivery.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/the-emperors-new-clothes-rate-regulation-as-an-excuse-to-gut-fcc-consumer-protection-authority
I can't believe so many people believe this would be better for the general public, instead of yet another hand out to the industry...
We need this last mile provision as well as preventing companies who create and sell media be the ones to control the access to said media. Imagine if your home gas and electricity was through the same company and that company also happened to be a natural gas producer. Would it be fair for them to artificially inflate the cost of electricity to encourage the consumption of their other subsidiary's product?
Make it like natural gas or electricity. The supplier of the data and the provider of the service through the lines should be separate. The supplier of the lines can charge a connection and service fee, but not control at all what types or how much data passes through their pipe as long as it fits. Let the data providers compete over business while the lines themselves are charged for maintenance and upgrades.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
The packets that compose an email do not have the same time constraints of packets that compose a Netflix video stream.
NN can, in theory, allow packets to have different priorities based on the type of data, just not based on the source of that data.
Net Neutrality is really about truth in advertising
No. NN is about countering monopoly power. NN would not be necessary in a competitive market. Advertising is irrelevant if customers have no other choice.
Netflix, for example, could become its own ISP
Sure, and FedEx and UPS could each build their own set of roads.
That is government granted franchise agreement to the Cable Company.Government rules and regulations caused this mess, and everyone's idea of how to fix it is MORE government solutions.
The first thing you need to realize is.... laying cable or fiber, required for internet, is a natural monopoly. It is exacerbated by government regulation and only providing a limited number of entities access to "Rights of Way" required to put cables in the ground.
Preferably, the municipalities would just bring fibre to everyone, and access to communications would be like getting a Plain old Telephone or Electricity, or other utilities; then you could pick your ISP of choice, just like you call whoever you want on the Telephone.
Yeah, because BOTH the natural and the legal situation AND the lack of foresight by legislators this has created major entities, and realistically, they aren't going away, although I would like them to. Regulation is a good first step, since it's not going to be possible to eliminate these monopolies and have broad competition in the short run, without hurting everyone.
We need network neutrality as long as the monopolies and no competition continue to exist.
We should just accept the regulation and apply it only to providers WHO:
1. Own or partner with internet properties, such as competing video service companies above a certain size, and the neutrality protection rule applies to all companies in the same industry as their in-house service.
, AND
2. The operation of any broadband provider in a geographical region where there is not at least 1 competing service of a minimum size with medium of a similar level of mobility and reliability (Wireless not similar to Land) with these competitors offering service to any household in the market (Competitors that only service Urban areas do not count), and the competitors' service is either all 100 Megabits or higher, or within 10% deviation.