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Net Neutrality Is Trump's Next Target, Administration Says (fiercetelecom.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fierce Telecom: During a press event yesterday, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said that next up on President Trump's telecom agenda is to roll back the FCC's 2015 Open Internet net neutrality rules. However, according to some reports, that might not happen as quickly as Congress' recent move to rescind rules that prevented internet service providers from selling users' data. As noted by the New York Times, Spicer said that President Trump had "pledged to reverse this overreach" created by net neutrality. He said the FCC's net neutrality rules, passed in 2015, are an example of "bureaucrats in Washington" placing unfair restrictions on internet service providers, essentially "picking winners and losers" in the telecom market. In comments aimed at the wider telecom market, Spicer said Trump will "continue to fight Washington red tape that stifles American innovation, job creation and economic growth." However, as the NYT reports, the process to repeal net neutrality likely won't follow the same procedure as Congress' recent vote to remove broadband privacy rules -- since those rules were only a year old, Congress was able to use the Congressional Review Act to move forward with its action. The FCC's net neutrality rules, however, are more than two years old and so can't be reviewed by that same act. Thus, it may fall on newly installed FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to rescind the FCC's Open Internet rules, which he voted against when he was a commissioner at the agency under former chief Tom Wheeler.
Can you give an example of a situation where an Internet startup has been hampered by the net neutrality rules?
I read the internet for the articles.
From what I remember the last time this came up, there were about 150 companies that signed a letter as proponents of net neutrality including major players like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. So if were the Democrats I would frame this as Trump being anti-business.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The reason the privacy regulations were put in place by Obama was because the net neutrality rules put in place eliminated the FTC's purview over selling user data.
Once the FCC declared the ISPs as common carriers, the FTC's ability to regulate the ISPs went out the window. Because Google and Facebook aren't common carriers the FTC's regulations regarding selling data still apply to them.
If Trump is successful in rolling back the common carrier definition, which gave us "net neutrality", then the FTC's previous regulations preventing the sale of private information will be back in place.
You can see more detail about AT&T v. FTC which outlines the problem.
The problem is that there is hardly a 'good ol' free market' when it comes to the internet in the US.
As it is, pretty much all big telcos to have a monopolistic stranglehold on their market. They have no competition because they made sure in many areas that there can't be any competition, through contracts they've signed with communities many years ago. Sure, shitty decision making on the side of the communes, but such anti-free-market contracts should be able to be contested after some time.
Here in communist Europe we have regulations for local loop unbundling and bit-stream access when it comes to transmission technologies like VDSL2+, forcing the big providers to rent out their last mile infrastructure to other providers at reasonable prices. As a result there are hundreds of different ISPs, all competing with each other over price, service and similar things. As a result I get 500mbit downstream, 200mbit upstream and two hardlines connections for less than $25/month.
But not in the US. LLUB was evil communism and destroying the market, removing the incentive for smaller ISPs to build their own infrastructure. Look at what the removal of such regulations did to the diversity of your ISP market.
Of course this doesn't mean that all regulations are good, neither all of them bad. Some regulations can help to level the playing field if the oligopolies do what they do, corner the market and stack the deck in their favour.
You're looking at all of this backwards, presumably because you're not aware of the history here. Net neutrality was law from the mid-90s until about 2013 when those laws expired. Within about a year of them expiring, we saw shenanigans like the ones I mentioned above.
So when you ask what benefit we've seen from net neutrality: Google, Facebook, Netflix, and every other company that began and was able to flourish in that period because net neutrality ensured that they were able to each everyone equally. That's what net neutrality was able to foster.
On the other hand, I actually agree with some of what you've said in other posts about the free market taking care of things, but there's an issue preventing that from occurring here: exclusivity agreements. Most states and municipalities either signed explicit exclusivity agreements with ISPs (who were eventually bought out by the big players, thus conferring those rights to the big guys), or else granted implicit exclusivity by having laws on the books that prevent competitors from laying their own lines. Those agreements create regional monopolies (i.e. these ISPs are the only ones who even CAN have access to those subscribers), and where we allow monopolies to exist, the free market is incapable of addressing problems, hence why we we heavily regulate monopolies. That's why regulation is necessary here, just as it is in any other monopoly situation.
Remove the barriers to competition and I'm fine with letting the free market handle things (net neutrality or not, I would LOVE to switch ISPs, but I only have one broadband choice in my area), but don't dismantle the one and only protection we have against bad behavior until you fix the market side first.
What I find pretty ironic is that the most anti-liberty, anti-privacy, anti-accountability powerful Dems, Pelosi and Feinstein, supposedly represent the Californian techno-meritocratic, startup-minded, pro-privacy liberals.
It's an unorthodox and non-PC thought, but perhaps the Bay Area hyperintelligent technocrats are not so progressive anyway, and their representatives are actually doing a faithful job?
You obviously don't work for one of those Bay Area companies. Many of them are beginning to fall apart internally due to things like wage increases because "gender" and "Ethnicity" instead of merit, promoting technocratic policies inside the company, demanding support for those same powerful Dems, ostracizing Conservative views, etc...
I happen to work for one, hence posting AC. Moral sucks for half the company, people simply take advantage of any opportunity to "not" work, and let problems (like security issues) go without mention let alone a fix.
We all see what's happening to Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. The only people for the SJW policies happen to be the benefactor (or believe they are) of the policies. The rest of us just wait for the ship to sink and are looking for or trying to help create better alternatives. The latter being difficult due to monopoly powers.