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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jriding writes: The Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership has rescinded a determination that ATT and Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules with paid data cap exemptions. The FCC also rescinded several other Wheeler-era reports and actions.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 All "guidance, determinations, and conclusions" from that report are rescinded, and it will have no legal bearing on FCC proceedings going forward, the order said.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.
its a fake like climate change!
Well, gentleman, we've been sold out.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
And rural white men with high school diplomas stood openmouthed in shock as their wives read aloud the newly opened the cable bill.
America, made great once again...
You numpty. How else are you going to "go about" net neutrality without regulation?
There has never been any net neutrality "legislation". It's only been regulation. If you can't even get the basic facts straight, you should stay out of this discussion.
Who are these "economists" who felt net neutrality was unnecessary and counter-productive?
Say, are you having Kellyanne Conway write your Slashdot posts now?
You are welcome on my lawn.
As they defend anything the cheeto insurgent does. Oh, you cry about Democrats, the corruption and how they forget the little guy, and give your vote to the guy that was already price checking stuff like this for his corporate buddies during the campaign. But this is really what you wanted, isn't it? As long as you can fuck over the liberals in your head, as long as you can stomp on people that do nothing to you, you will readily sell down the river all the principles you claimed to stand for here on Slashdot. Net neutrality? Fuck that! Who cares about that nerd shit as long as Trump does the MAGA song and dance?
You certainly don't. And we are paying for your incompetence as voters.
> something that obviously has helped small companies and the internet grow all these years
Huh? We haven't HAD net neutrality regulations "all these years". The FCC rule on network neutrality was issued in mid 2015 and the first enforcement letters sent in the last couple of months. If you think what we've been doing "all of these years" has helped the internet and small companies grow, that's an argument AGAINST Wheeler's new net neutrality regulations.
The argument FOR network neutrality is that ISPs might in the future stop continually improving service and switch to a model that would be bad. That's a legitimate concern, and the intention behind the network neutrality rules was good.
HOWEVER, modern carrier networks are exceedingly complex, and getting more complex all the time. "A packet is a packet is a packet" is a recipe to create horrible service for everyone. Modern are WAY more intelligent than that, and need to be if youb want usable voip that doesn't sound like satellite news coverage, with 1000ms of delay after each thing you say. Laws enforcing network neutrality, if they were written to avoid a lot of unpleasant, unintended consequences, would need to be perhaps 500 pages long. That's *my* issue with Wheeler's regulations - I like general concept, but it was horribly oversimplified, dumbed down to the point of being stupid. A draft rule (not the final rule) would have outlawed blocking spam - you have to treat every source equally means you can't discriminate against spammers. The final rule was *slightly* more nuanced than that, but not by much.
My own opinion is that we should have very specific rules, tailored to objectional behaviors that ISPs are actually doing or about to do, rather than a huge overbroad rule based on a nebulous fear of what some ISP *might* someday do. The overbroad, dumbed down rule criminalizes intelligent network management, in the name of trying to prohibit something that nobody is doing anyway. As an example, one sender, a major mailing list, sends emails to 35,000 of your customers. Then another sender, Bob, sends an email to *one* of your customers, an email from one person to another. It'll take your mail server an hour to churn through the 35,001 emails and deliver them all. Should Bob's person-to-person email sit in the queue for an hour while you first process the 35,000 copies of the "Deal of the Week" email? Intelligent management of your service says that you deprioritize the bulk sender. Is that allowd by Wheeler's rule? Maybe, maybe it'll get you in legal trouble. (That may depend on if the bulk sender is the DNC or not.)
It gets complicated when you get into the technical details of actually implementing it without making service worse for everyone. For that reason, I think we're better off narrowly targeting specific actual problems, rather than Wheeler's shotgun approach.
Perhaps the best compromise is to allow differential treatment of TYPES of packets / packet streams, but not allow differential treatment of packets /streams FROM particular source IPs / identities / organizations nor allow differential treatment of packets / streams TO particular IPs / identities / organizations.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Are you mad? There hasn't been any improvements to infrastructure because Republicans refuse to pay for anything. They have been actively been working against the executive branch for 8 years precisely so that you can make the above statement. They controlled the purse. If they had worked with the President we would have seen something. The Republicans are not set up to legislate anything, instead, you see Trump talking about toll roads, so yes, you will see infrastructure but likely given to private parties in which you will be paying tolls on. In fact, I will bet you, your taxes won't be going down anytime soon either, but a lot of things are going to be expensive.
In theory, you can have the general concept of network neutrality, and also have QoS.
In practice you can too. Net neutrality is about the source of the data. QoS is about the content. They are very easily distinguished by law.
Let us not forget that his very first executive order jacked up mortgage costs for home buyers. It's hard to find a total price tag reported for that move, but a naive* calculation suggests 750000 loans x $500/year x 30 years = $11 billion on loans taken out in 2017, with more to follow for next year's loans. All of it straight out of the pockets of the little guy.
*I defer to some one who actually understands present value calculations on loans.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)