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jriding writes: The Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership has rescinded a determination that ATT and Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules with paid data cap exemptions. The FCC also rescinded several other Wheeler-era reports and actions.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 All "guidance, determinations, and conclusions" from that report are rescinded, and it will have no legal bearing on FCC proceedings going forward, the order said.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.

Comments

Sold out

[zieroh]

Well, gentleman, we've been sold out.

Re:Sold out

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump begins to prove he is just another liar in office. Any claim of any desire to "make America great again" is now revealed to be nothing more than a ploy to acquire the power to help the rich get richer, and everyone else get poorer.

Re:Sold out

[acrimonious howard]

Well, gentleman, we've been sold out.

What do you mean? If you like net neutrality (something that obviously has helped small companies and the internet grow all these years), then you should already know Republicans have always been against it, and you should have been against Trump especially. There should be no surprises here. But it should be a wake up call: Republicans are on track to kill net neutrality soon.

Re:Sold out

[Billly Gates]

You think the republicans are the 'bad guys' and the 'democrats' are the good guys?

Let me introduce you to Ty Harrell. Former Democrat representative for north Carolina. One of the early net neutrality proponents. Then the republicans took over. He got thrown out. Guess who loved net neutrality now and thought it was the devils work? When one year earlier it was the polar opposite. This is nothing more than we are being played by lobbyist who write our bills bribe our representatives and then pretend it is a partisan issue. You think Hillary would have done better? Some of her biggest donations came from AT&T, Verizon, TW, and Charter.

http://stopthecap.com/2011/03/...

Yes keep up the fight against it. But do not pretend those people in Washington support you. None of them do. Not one of them. Your real enemies are the very people you pay for internet access.

Funny under Obama under Wheeler the FCC stopped rubber stamping bills written by the monopolies and started enforcing net neutrality. You all thought Trump would support you and he would end H1B1 visas. Well you were wrong, he does not care.

Re:Sold out

[dgatwood]

Well, we said the same thing about Wheeler, who had similar credentials, and he ended up being a pretty decent consumer advocate. Pai is not interested in net neutrality, but in removing regulation and barriers to actual competition - or so he says. That could work as well as FCC regulation in theory, or maybe even better.

Only if you're in a major city, at best. Everywhere else (and even in many parts of major cities), the biggest barrier to actual competition is the cost of actually running the lines. In rural areas, the cost to run fiber to a single customer could easily be $50k. If an ISP can only make $600 per year, a second ISP would have to be utterly insane to try to compete.

What we really need—and what I suspect no Republican would ever even consider doing, unfortunately—is for the government to build out the infrastructure and create a permanently government-owned nonprofit a la TVA to maintain it, then lease access to that fiber to any ISP that wants to provide service. Once you eliminate the need for competitors to provide independent, expensive infrastructures, suddenly the barriers to competition in the ISP space become almost nonexistent.

Re:Sold out

[jtgd]

Trump will make America great again, as long as you accept the definition of "great" as maximizing corporate profits while screwing the citizens.

Re:About that

[PopeRatzo]

The problem with net neutrality isn't the stated goals, it's the way the left went about it.

You numpty. How else are you going to "go about" net neutrality without regulation?

The legislation was so overreaching and awful that dumping it along with the neutrality provisions was the right choice.

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.

(Also the economists who felt that it was unnecessary and counter-productive.)

Who are these "economists" who felt net neutrality was unnecessary and counter-productive?

Say, are you having Kellyanne Conway write your Slashdot posts now?

Trumpistas will defend this

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

How about the following type of net neutrality

[presidenteloco]

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.

Re:Democrats are not our champions

[Sri Ramkrishna]

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.

Re:In theory. A workable law would be very difficu

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:Its Open Season on the Little Guy

[PMuse]

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.