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jriding writes: The Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership has rescinded a determination that ATT and Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules with paid data cap exemptions. The FCC also rescinded several other Wheeler-era reports and actions.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 All "guidance, determinations, and conclusions" from that report are rescinded, and it will have no legal bearing on FCC proceedings going forward, the order said.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

Re:Well..

[nmb3000]

Agreed. This is a sad first turn -- Trump's FCC may as well have sent a letter to the major ISPs saying "Hunting season on American Internet consumers is open! No tag limit!"

I was very skeptical when Wheeler was appointed to chair the FCC, given his corporate background, but he ended up being one of the most consumer-focused and practically progressive people in Obama's government.

And now? May as well say goodbye to net neutrality.

They also announced

[Snufu]

they are changing their name to the Ministry of Communication.

What happens next?

[subk]

Do we start peering a new Internet to steer around The Matrix? Routers of The World Unite? Or worse.. HAM radios and QPSK modulators? One can only hope it won't to that point. We shall see.

Re:What happens next?

[AHuxley]

Short term
Lots of new data caps and slowness, p2p slowness. Streaming providers get made new offers to pay to reach users with unlimited deals.
Over the next few years:
Slowness, profit making, caps and lack of network options will start to trend and users will loot for a better city or community network.
The US can then open its cities to more open telco network builds, open existing telco networks to all other telcos or build a new nation wide optical network open to all and any provider.
re ' Routers of The World"
More community and city networks will face state courts. If a telco is not longer really special under federal law, then any city can build a network to support any provider.
If existing telcos want a free for all on their own networks, then the ability to become a new telco in towns and communities will be more open :)

Re: What happens next?

[subk]

Granted, but it has been my experience of late that Fat Charlie's Crew has no resources to ride around and triangulate signals, so the chance that the FCC will catch you encrypting QPSK signals is slim to none.

Re:Impossible to be well informed

[Fire_Wraith]

You could certainly achieve net neutrality without regulating it. It's fairly simple, and many other countries have done it, by making sure that there is competition in the internet service provider space, and breaking up the monopoly/duopoly structure.

And yet, the self-proclaimed champions of the free market haven't done jack squat to try to put that into effect, and are instead happy to proclaim that the status quo of third-world internet service and bloated profits from rent-seeking monopolists is the "free market" at work, and needs to be defended against those evil leftists. In short, denying that there's any problem at all, instead of offering up alternate/better solutions.

Re:Dafuq? All thesev years no net neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

> Huh? We haven't HAD net neutrality regulations "all these years"

We had it until 2005 when the SCOTUS ruled in Brand X that the republican-controlled FCC could reclassify ISPs as "information services" instead of "communications services." Which promptly killed all of those companies like Mindspring that relied on the right to lease telco lines. So lack of net neutrality basically killed competition in the ISP business.