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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."
As someone who worked for a small ISP when the transparency rules were first implemented... the transparency rules do not add burden to the ISP. It just required you to publish the truth about your business practices. If there is a data cap, you have to have the data cap listed. If you throttled the speeds, you had to say you throttled the speeds and under what circumstances (ex: if you download > 20 GB in x time, your speed will get throttled down to x speed for x amount of time). If there was any special traffic shaping to say torrent traffic, you'd have to be "transparent" that you did this. Quite literally every ISP just published a PDF on their website with the facts of the products they were selling dubbed a "transparency report".
Anyone who thinks it is a burden to be truthful to customers about the product you're selling, definitely has something wrong with them.
I'd take it to mean ISPs like Brazos WiFi, a small ISP that operates in the rural areas close to where I live. It was started about a decade back by a lone tech guy who was frustrated that none of the major ISPs were serving the town he lived in. At this point, it's his full-time job and he's putting up a handful of new towers every year to expand his region, improve his service, and lower his prices. I'd imagine he has customers in the low thousands at this point, since he's serving several rural towns and has even started getting into the outskirts of the main cities in the area.
I'd consider that a mom and pop ISP.
I just spent two days filling out forms and schedules for the IRS, in order to report the fact that I owe them $3.25. All those forms might make sense for a big company; it's asinine that I had to do all that to calculate $3.25 in federal unemployment tax because I earned $530 from a side business last year. My total tax forms for that $530 business are probably 40 pages of tax forms per year. I fully support distinguishing between a company like Verizon vs Ray Morris Inc when it comes to reporting requirements.
The subject of the present action is categorizing ISPs as common carriers under Title II - classifying them as phone companies. Title II was written with AT&T in mind, assuming the related company will have a team of people dedicated to compliance. It wasn't written for small companies. Here's the Congressional statute (not too bad) and 400 PAGE FCC order on applying it to ISPs:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
You say *complying* with the order should be easy, I dare you to even try to READ the order. There are 400 pages in the order itself, many of which refer to other FCC regulations you'll need to read. Make sure to read the part about how you're not allowed to bring up a new connection or remove an old one without a certificate of preapproval from the FCC.
I propose this to ponder:
Have you considered that other Republican actions to loosen or remove policies in industries you're less familiar with could in fact be almost identical to this case? That is to say, if you were as knowledgeable in other sectors as you are in network infrastructure, it might be the case that many of those decisions to remove "burdensome restrictions" might appear prettt BS-esk and geared to undermine the average consumer/citizen?
I'm not proposing that silly regulations don't exist that could be consolidated, streamlined, altered or in some cases, flat out removed (I see them in sectors I deal with). At the same time, the more regulations I see removed and the more I read into why they were built, look at both sides of the argument, and check the data, the less I believe your or my interests as working class citizens are being served.
As a sysadmin, speaking very unofficially, from a small regional provider, and who used to single-handedly run a small local isp (which is still a withering hosting service), fees and caps had ought to be clear up front, and network capacity reporting is not a big deal. It's something you'd better be monitoring anyhow.