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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jriding writes: The Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership has rescinded a determination that ATT and Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules with paid data cap exemptions. The FCC also rescinded several other Wheeler-era reports and actions.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 All "guidance, determinations, and conclusions" from that report are rescinded, and it will have no legal bearing on FCC proceedings going forward, the order said.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.
Well, gentleman, we've been sold out.
Yeah, well... about that.
The problem with net neutrality isn't the stated goals, it's the way the left went about it. instead of a law saying "no paid prioritization, no throttling, and no blocking", they pushed through a bill that reclassified the ISPs as utilities, opening them up to enormous regulation in addition to net neutrality requirements.
Pai is against this (Title II) classification, and that's all he's against. He's stated several times in the past that he wants a free and open internet, and has specifically mentioned the "no paid prioritization, no throttling, and no blocking" thing as something he supports.
Furthermore the bill was passed with no study, and several economists have chimed in saying that zero-rating (the practice mentioned in the OP) isn't necessarily a bad thing, sometimes it's a good thing, and that there's no clear indication overall that can be used to guide legislation.
So yeah, it 'kinda looks like neutrality is the right and obvious way to go, and it makes perfect sense to us technical people, but that's not the whole story here. The legislation was so overreaching and awful that dumping it along with the neutrality provisions was the right choice. (Also the economists who felt that it was unnecessary and counter-productive.)
Perhaps if the left had passed legislation that confined itself to the obviously good parts we wouldn't be in this situation.
But hey, don't let me get in the way of a good Trump bashing.
It's Trump's fault that we have to roll back the good parts along with the bad.
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.
Let's face it, not much had improved with the telco/ISP situation, after all, and there are a lot of problems beyond net neutrality that more competition could fix. Here's my simple litmus test for a free market solution, as he claims he wants: Any community should be allowed to form a local co-op to provide broadband services and tax themselves to do it, and there should be no barriers to other private competitors from entering a market and bidding for services.
If those two conditions aren't enforced nationwide, then the new FCC head is full of shit, and the current telcos will have near free reign to do whatever they want in their monopoly markets (at least 30% of the US, last I heard).
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
The Democrats are not, and never have been, the "champions of the free market" as you describe. They've been the ones in power for the last 8 years, and have done nothing to improve any of our infrastructure. Capital buildout for the last 2 years or so (since the Title II rule) has been less than the buildout before the rule.
Here's a good quote, something you can find if you bother to try:
Pai’s first big crusade as commissioner has been addressing what the “digital divide,” or the discrepancy between areas with abundant broadband and those without it. On Tuesday, he announced the formation of a new committee that will give advice on how to expand fast internet to more areas, and develop a general set of policies that communities can use to purportedly make deployment easier. Who exactly will be on that committee is yet to be determined. Pai laid out a wider plan for this initiative in September, where he mentioned creating tax incentives, reducing “unfair and unreasonable fees,” and adopting more “shot clocks” to encourage ISPs to build out sooner.
So it seems like the Democrats failed to do anything to help us build out the internet and, in fact, slowed it down a little.
The Republicans plan to address the actual issues, without resorting to socialism.
Or terrorism, which is what they're doing now.