Cable Companies Urge Judges To Kill 'Net Neutrality' Rules

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Trade associations representing wireless, cable and broadband operators on Friday urged the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reverse...the Federal Communications Commission's so-called net neutrality rules, put in place last year to make internet service providers treat all internet traffic equally...

The cable groups said the court should correct "serious errors" in a decision "that radically reshapes federal law governing a massive sector of the economy, which flourished due to hundreds of billions of dollars of investment made in reliance on the policy the order throws overboard".. In its filing on Friday, the CTIA said it was illegal to subject broadband internet access to "public-utility style, common carrier regulation" and illegal to impose "common-carrier status on mobile broadband."
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said he wasn't surprised to see "the big dogs" challenging net neutrality.

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Comments

comcast wants you to buy HBO with cable tv and

[Joe_Dragon]

comcast wants you to buy HBO with cable tv and not just HSI + HBO GO.

Re:comcast wants you to buy HBO with cable tv and

[Anonymous Coward]

Look no further than Canada to see what a lack of net neutrality looks like
1) Expensive (minimum $85 to get ANY internet service)
2) Unbundled packages save you nothing
3) To get things like HBO, you have to spend over $100 in package bundles
4) Each carrier has their own garbage-tier VOD service that only has the last 1 or 2 episodes, and sometimes not even that if it's a childrens show. This is because they came with their own Netflix-clones for watching entire seasons of the exact same VOD material.
5) And if you switch carriers, you have to pay for data on top of the subscription cost to use those netflix-clones.

Basically the Canadian carriers are trying to "kill netflix" by using the bandwidth caps against it's users and then go "but you can use Shomi if you use Rogers/Shaw, or Crave if you use Bell/Telus for only another $10 per month" when you can pay an extra $15 and just get the unmetered package.

The requirement, should be: The Cable, Telephone, and Fiber networks shall only be a "dumb pipe", any content can go over it. The congestion controls should be set at the switching points, not the ISP. If a neighborhood is "saturated" then that neighborhood is checked for who is using a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, sent a "speeding ticket" that tells them they will be downgraded to 8Mbits until they explain how they are using that bandwidth.

News at 11:

[Type44Q]

News at 11: Liars lie.

Re:They should be fined for acting like babies

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

On the other hand, one would like elected officials to pass a law changing the status of such a massive thing, and not just do something Congress did not envision with that law. This is a massive sector for unelected officials to rewrite.

Common Carrier

[jasnw]

It would serve them right if the court just turned around and declared that cable and internet service providers are all in the category of "common carriers" and should be regulated and controlled as such. Bazinga.

Re:Kill Violently Imposed Monopolies

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

A video byte is a video byte -- except when it isn't and it gets a free pass.

This is an attempt to stop them from acting like a gateway charging access. It isn't the difference between gramma'e email and Netflix. It is Netflix and some cable company's new video service.

Do you like the cable company selling you a service at a speed, then demanding, secretly, a cut of what you pay Netflix, or the cable company will crappify your Netflix video -- making a lie out of what they promised you for the cable service?

Really? Arguing against Common Carrier?

[PvtVoid]

Never mind that nothing fits the definition of "common carrier" better than a service which sends packets over the inter-tubes. If the Cable Co's want to argue in court that they aren't common carriers, that is terribly dangerous for them: it sets a precedent that means that they are not afforded the protections given common carriers under the law, most important immunity from prosecution for transmission of illegal content.

Careful what you wish for, Comcast.

Re:Really? Arguing against Common Carrier?

[fustakrakich]

One of the reasons they don't want to be a public utility is that they want those censorship powers. If they had their way, all you would get is Facebook and Amazon.

Insulting the judge's intelligence

[quax]

"billions of dollars of investment"

If they spent this much money without taking into account that this legislation could come down the pike they'd be amateurs.

Of course this is just a smokescreen, they did the math up front. This is still profitable, just not as much as it could be.

Re:Insulting the judge's intelligence

[Calydor]

Those are the billions of TAX PAYER dollars they were given to build out the infrastructure, but they leave out that little detail.

Well no kidding

[HalAtWork]

Why work to earn loyal customers when you can just tip the scales against your competition?

Re:They should be fined for acting like babies

[fustakrakich]

This is a massive sector for unelected officials to rewrite.

It needs to be rewritten. It's past time to turn the internet (into a dumb pipe) and even cellular service into a public utility, just like the land line. If Congress won't do it, the courts must. And if they don't, we need to put the initiative on the ballot. We endure lousy service only because of public apathy.

Give the carriers a choice

[rossz]

Tell them, you have two choices:

1. You accept common carrier status, net neutrality, and you are not held liable for content you carry.
2. You are not a common carrier, you can do what you want with traffic, but you take full responsibility for all illegal net traffic.

Choose wisely.

Re:Give the carriers a choice

[Obfuscant]

Here's the excluded middle you've ignored: they are allowed to shape traffic as necessary to manage bandwidth and the people who send the illegal content are the ones responsible for it. There can be congestion that slows border traffic which is content agnostic, and having to inspect each packet to make a legality determination will only make it slower.

I hope you realize that they don't have to inspect the content to be able to prioritize services which need higher QoS and lower latency. A Skype call that talks about subversive overthrow of the US Government will look no different than a Skype call talking about Aunt Martha's cookie recipe, yet the latter is clearly a violation of several federal laws of patent and DMCA.

Re:They should be fined for acting like babies

[Obfuscant]

If Congress won't do it, the courts must.

The courts are not supposed to be in the business of writing law. That means if Congress won't do it, the courts have even less business doing it.

And if they don't, we need to put the initiative on the ballot.

You wish for a patchwork of internet regulation on a state-by-state basis? What a minefield that would be.

USA internet access is too expensive to be honest.

[choupette]

My brother-in-law lives in the usa (Seattle) he pays $80 (iirc) monthly for his internet, he said it was the cheapest. I live in france, for €32, I have a 22Mb/1.4MB VDSL connection along with a €0 euro mobile plan including 2h voice, and unlimited sms per month, and another 17€ with 50GB 4G plan with unlimited voice and sms (along with free roaming up to 3GB per year in a lot of countries including uk, germany, italy and spain). So I don't know what turned bad in usa, but it can't be that pricey.

Re:USA internet access is too expensive to be hone

[Bartles]

What percentage of your income do you pay in taxes?

Re:They should be fined for acting like babies

[AK Marc]

The FCC is supposed to be writing the rules. That's what the law says. Cable Companies are trying to strike down the FCC, because the law gives the FCC the power to write regulations.

Re:They should be fined for acting like babies

[AK Marc]

There is no process for putting an initiative on the ballot at a federal level, but many for doing that at a state level. So the comment about putting initiatives on the ballot must be about doing it at a state-level.

Re: They should be fined for acting like babies

[hackwrench]

And I would say that the only way to achieve a just ends is through just means.

Re:USA internet access is too expensive to be hone

[Sparowl]

If you are trying to point out that his taxes subsidize the cable companies there, let me be the bearer of bad news - so do ours (in America). We just don't get to see the benefit.

Privatize profits, socialize losses and all that.

Re:They should be fined for acting like babies

[Dog-Cow]

You are a fucked-up retard. Stop with the "designed by the military" shit. Arpanet was designed by universities and private companies. The funding and direction came from DARPA, but that's it. It was a way to share computing resources between institutions. They never envisioned home Internet connections, never mind cellular phones and IoT.

Re:They should be fined for acting like babies

[bluefoxlucid]

There is no "unless". If Congress looks at the FCC, determines what they're doing is in line with the best judgment of the FCC given their specialized expertise and their mission, and takes no action, then Congress has determined that the FCC is doing what the FCC is supposed to do. They don't need to pass a new law stating that the FCC's current actions are all fine by Congress and require no remediation at this time.