FCC Votes To Lift Net Neutrality Transparency Rules For Smaller Internet Providers (theverge.com)

The Federal Communications Commission today voted to lift transparency requirements for smaller internet providers. According to The Verge, "Internet providers with fewer than 250,000 subscribers will not be required to disclose information on network performance, fees, and data caps, thanks to this rule change. The commission had initially exempted internet providers with fewer than 100,000 subscribers with the intention of revisiting the issue later to determine whether a higher or lower figure was appropriate." From the report: The rule passed in a 2-1 vote, with Republicans saying the reporting requirements unfairly burdened smaller ISPs with additional work. Only Democratic commissioner Mignon Clyburn opposed. Clyburn argued that the disclosures were an important consumer protection that was far from overbearing on businesses, particularly ones this large. Clyburn also argued that the rule would allow larger internet providers to avoid disclosing information by simply breaking their service areas up into different subsidiaries. Republican commissioner Michael O'Rielly voted in favor of the change, saying he actually would have preferred the subscriber exemption to be even higher. And commission chairman Ajit Pai said the rules were necessary to protect "mom and pop internet service providers" from "burdensome requirements [...] that impose serious and unnecessary costs."

Comments

Wow, just wow.

[Qzukk]

So apparently an ISP being able to tell people up front what their fees and charges will be is a

burdensome requirements [...] that impose serious and unnecessary costs

I guess this explains why big ISPs like Comcast and such manage to fuck up billing people on a regular basis. It's just too goddamn hard for companies to know what they charge for their services.

Re:Wow, just wow.

[gweilo8888]

No, the cost is small. It's just that the cost of institutionalized bribery (ahem, I mean lobbying) is even smaller, as far as your company is concerned. I'm sure the money your lobbyist threw around was greedily gobbled up by Trump and his cronies, though.

And no, you're being disingenuous: It's stated right in the freaking summary how it will affect the large ones too: They just split their business into multiple distinct 100,000-person "businesses", all of which are owned by Comcast or whomever. These then tell the customers that since you're only doing business with the "tiny company", you aren't entitled to any information on fees, performance or data caps. And that's the real concern here.

Re:Wow, just wow.

[Phasedshift]

Wow. Lots of armchair quarterbacks who have no real concept of what it is to run an ISP from a business (and quite a few comments have no idea on the technical side either.)

I used to be involved in a smaller ISP. Costs are already working against them when competing against larger providers due to the peering arrangements, etc...

Just to list a few things as to why this is a "good" thing, as otherwise it just hastens the demise of the small ISP:

#1 Enterprise level billing systems for internet providers cost a lot of money. The more regulations/rules/requirements the system has, the (likely) more expensive it will need to be. In my past experience we "rolled our own", but, this isn't feasible for most in the arena for many reasons and in hindsight it was a bad idea for liability reasons.

#2 99% of users would save money on a metered plan if fairly priced. 1% of users use 99% of the bandwidth. However, most people would rather have an "unlimited" plan, even if more expensive because they have no real concept of what bandwidth and usage are and how to control that.

#3 Smaller ISP's are unlikely to have peering points at places like MAE East, etc and far more likely to have to purchase their bandwidth from a larger backbone provider. This means that the "cost" for bandwidth is far, far more for a local ISP. It also means they have to oversubscribe more than a larger provider to pay the bills. EVERYONE oversubscribes bandwidth sold vs. what they have, it is just different levels.The economics don't work for smaller internet providers in reselling bandwidth if the oversubscribing rate isn't above a certain percentage.

#4 the 1% of users that use excessive bandwidth can be easily mitigated by rate-shaping certain types of traffic to a lower "speed", or any number of ways that don't impact 99% of the users.

The proper way to handle this is to remove net neutrality, make it so that local cities, etc can't grant a monopoly to certain companies when running cables so anyone can do so (probably cities, which is best esp. if they resell the raw transport.)