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FCC Rescinds Claim That AT&T, Verizon Violated Net Neutrality (arstechnica.com)
jriding writes: The Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership has rescinded a determination that ATT and Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules with paid data cap exemptions. The FCC also rescinded several other Wheeler-era reports and actions. The FCC released its report on the data cap exemptions (aka "zero-rating") in the final days of Democrat Tom Wheeler's chairmanship. Because new Chairman Ajit Pai opposed the investigation, the FCC has now formally closed the proceeding. The FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau sent letters to ATT, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA notifying the carriers "that the Bureau has closed this inquiry. Any conclusions, preliminary or otherwise, expressed during the course of the inquiry will have no legal or other meaning or effect going forward." The FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau also sent a letter to Comcast closing an inquiry into the company's Stream TV cable service, which does not count against data caps. The FCC issued an order that "sets aside and rescinds" the Wheeler-era report on zero-rating. All "guidance, determinations, and conclusions" from that report are rescinded, and it will have no legal bearing on FCC proceedings going forward, the order said. ATT and Verizon allow their own video services (DirecTV and Go90, respectively) to stream on their mobile networks without counting against customers' data caps, while charging other video providers for the same data cap exemptions. The FCC under Wheeler determined that ATT and Verizon unreasonably interfered with online video providers' ability to compete against the carriers' video services.
Dr. Mark Jamison is multiple economists in one body? I wonder if he knows? Thank you for sharing this obviously true fact from your amazing internet resource! Hope they make enough money to pay your internet provider for you to be able to continue reading their articles, or you may not be able to reach them for much longer. The website I work for is one piece of proof for that point. I've been there 18 years and I like the work. I'm the third most senior person in the company. But I'm also a single dad, already make little enough that I'll likely never afford to buy a new car, can barely afford upkeep on my 1970s house, never take a vacation and don't expect ever to be able to retire. If we have to start paying for access to our readers, the well will dry up overnight and I'll find myself without a job and with no safety rope. And the millions of readers who value our content will suddenly find it gone. I can't make less than I do now and get by, full stop. That the leader of the USA now wants to help Comcast and their ilk do that to me tells me everything I need to know about Donald Trump and his government, not to mention the Republican party.
Huh? We haven't HAD net neutrality regulations "all these years".
You're confused, raymorris, we had ânet neutrality' as a condition, a state of being, without regulation, but things started to change.
It's like the old song, they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.
Maybe we need some parking lots, but they do cause problems in many cases.
So they are regulated too.
PS, the issue of spamming is another one we'd like the FCC to handle. Or the FTC. Or Batman.
Trump begins to prove he is just another liar in office.
The whole reason the republican party is so willing to tolerate his bullshit theatrics is that his actual policies are a wet dream come true for the people who have been fertilizing the swamp. They are letting coal mines pollute streams again, repealing laws that protect grandmothers from being ripped off by "financial planners." And reducing the safeguards on the kind of real-estate bank lending that caused the housing meltdown. Its open season on the little guy like never before.