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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."
So apparently an ISP being able to tell people up front what their fees and charges will be is a
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.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Transparency = Informed Consumer = BAD
Hidden Fees = Data Caps = Higher Revenue = GOOD
{GOP in unison} SO SAY WE ALL!
As a Republican I 100% agree that this is bull. I think it likely the issue though is that republicans instinctively lean toward less regulation and if you are not technically literate, then these requirements could be phrased by someone in such a way as to seem burdensome.
Under 250,000 subscribers should not be considered "small". By this definition, an internet provider who serves every single resident of Reno, Nevada would be considered "small", because Reno has fewer than 250,000 residents.
Everyone on the 21 pages after page 4 in this list:
http://broadbandnow.com/All-Pr...
Most are rural providers that only cover a few thousand subscribers over a large area, and only have a few employees. Installation and cable work are contracted out, and lines are piggy-backed on existing telecommunication wires. Equipment is co-located at the telcos. Most of the "offices" I've seen are storefonts in strip malls.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
under this rule.
The problem is there are are a total of 39,010 Incorporated Cities in the USA (source: https://www.statista.com/stati...).
So, for 99.79% of all US cities, net neutrality isn't a thing.
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How long until all the big ISPs do whatever corporate-legalese-bullshit to split into enough "small" ISPs to effectively screw all the customers in the U.S.? By which I mean that they don't actually break up, they just appear to, and legally meet the requirements.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
You know, a small two-person operation that serves fewer than a quarter million people.
The third largest city in Denmark has 175k citizens. So if that rule applied there, well. Two cities total would have a chance at getting net neutrality.
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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.
Considering how the current administration appears to feel about consumers rights, I'll take this as them setting precedent to deregulate internet regardless of how large the ISP is, so they can charge you whatever 'fees' they want to charge you on top of the actual service, and you won't have any say in the matter because you signed a contract. You thought Comcast violated your anus before? Just wait.
If NO ONE else were interested in servicing your entire town sure. Even then, this clause would apply if and only if they ONLY serviced your town and nothing else. Unless your town is 100 miles away from anything else, I don't see that being a real problem in Denmark.
Reno is not a bad example of a town literally in the middle of nowhere.
You would probably think of it as living on the Moon and net neutrality would probably be low on your list of complaints.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
LOL, yup that would be a mom and pop shop
That would be a good thing if it were to happen. Self regulating Anti-Trust.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
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've talked to that guy before.
ISPs are now subject to Title II regulations as common carriers - the rules written for Verizon and AT&T now apply to ISPs. Ponder for a moment how many regulations a thousand bureaucrats have written over the last several decades for phone companies.
The order which lists which regulations now apply to ISPs as well is 400 pages. Here is is for your reading pleasure:
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
Note that's not 400 pages of regulations, that's 400 pages of REFERENCES to regulations. The total regulations will be in the thousands of pages.
I've never actually talked to him, nor am I a customer, but I want to see him succeed since it's clear that he's providing a useful service to a number of people. Plus, if he gets big enough to expand just a tiny bit further into town, he may actually reach my house, which would let me ditch the big-name ISP I'm incredibly dissatisfied with.
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.
The trouble comes when these small "rural providers" get bought up by giant conglomerates. These "holding companies" can cheat the system, claiming the benefits of small when they've actually got deep deep pockets that could pay for compliance, but instead ear-mark that money to lobbyists and the "regulation hurts business" crusade.
The original exemption for ISPs with 100,000 or fewer subscribers was applied to the aggregated total of subscribers "across all affiliates," so that small ISPs owned by big holding companies wouldn't be exempt.
The new regulations change that. I think it's bad enough screaming vicious hate toward a known enemy like Comcast, but it's gotta be worse for people relying on some small service-provider that enjoys small-business exemptions but without any folksy small-business courtesy and service we're supposed to associate with small business, 'cause the small businessman sold out to an offer he don't refuse years ago, and now that "small business" is just one of a thousand pages in some nameless guy's portfolio whose only interest is income and territory.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Wow, I'm blown away. I had no idea there were that many ISPs left after the move from dialup to broadband.
What mom and pop internet service providers? Please name them. Please detail how the transparency rules were overbearing.
To the extent the regulations were influenced by the phone company's lobbyists, I'm fairly sure Verizon's lobbyists weren't trying to make sure that small companies could fairlt compete with Verizon.
Keeping the service offerings up to date in a list like that is an impossible task. They change rapidly. For that matter, the list of providers itself is surely no longer 100% accurate; some of the small providers have probably merged, been acquired, or folded.
But it conveys an important truth. Most of us are served by a few large providers, but there is a long tail of smaller businesses that provide internet service.
> This action isn't about what businesses have to read. It's about what information they have to disclose to their customers.
Well no, THIS action has little to do with what has to be disclosed to consumers. If you want some regulations about that, if you see small ISPs engaging in funny business about pricing, make some appropriate regulations. This action is about title II - regulations written for the big phone companies, many of them written for THE phone company, Bell, before it was broken up. They cover many things, but the common theme is that they have to get FCC approval before doing almost anything.
If that guy only has "low thousands" of customers then no, that isn't what it means. They already exempted ISPs with fewer than 100,000 customers. What they're talking about now are "mom and pop" ISPs with more than 100,000 but fewer than 250,000 customers.
This is why it's so important to study the politician you are going to vote for. Are they for big money? Or are they determined to serve the average person? Mid-terms are crucial voting times. People stay home and the greedy, vicious, ones sneak in; Starving the system till they break the back of their local economy. Then the people get wrongly mad at the government and want it smaller.