Slashdot Mirror
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.
I pity those who actually thought he cares about IT and science as evident by the posts.
Enjoy those non existent tax cuts and ISPs selling your browsing history and capped low QOS connections. Don't let your employer find your porn history?
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Net Neutrality was overreach, that instead of helping the people who wanted it, made sure it was harder than ever to compete agains the big ISP's like Comcast.
Are you on crack? Net Neutrality helped to kill the Comcast-Time Warner merger.
Stopping Comcast and Time Warner from merging into a super-company makes it easier, not harder, to compete against them.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
Can you give an example where the net neutrality rules actually did anything useful in terms of stopping an ISP from doing something they should not?
Like the Netflix vs. Comcast spat? Seemed like it suddenly resolved itself once the new rules came out...
> made sure it was harder than ever to compete agains the big ISP's like Comcast. ...
> It's hard to prove some company is not starting up because of regulations concerns.
You do a wonderful job of arguing against yourself.
> What we know for sure is that more regulations mean more work for companies (in terms of hiring lawyers) to make sure they are complying with rules. That is beyond dispute.
No, it's really not.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Trump is a little bitch. As are his supporters. This comes as no surprise. He meant 0% of what he said during the campaign, has near zero interest in policy details and is just interested in other people seeing him as a "winner". Which proves he and his supporters are losers. Trump is an elderly version of Charlie Sheen.
That was resolved (correctly) BEFORE REGULATION.
No it wasn't, and your link is proof of that. Your "resolution" involved Netflix paying a fee to Comcast to deliver packets that Comcast's customers had already paid for. Capitulating to extortion is not the same thing as a resolution.
It's hard to prove some company is not starting up because of regulations concerns. It's on you to prove the regulations are useful and used.
Er what? The regulation that is in place is that no one has to pay for preferential treatment. What you are saying is as asinine as saying prove to me that because anyone can drive in any lane on a freeway that no one is being harmed by that.
What we know for sure is that more regulations mean more work for companies (in terms of hiring lawyers) to make sure they are complying with rules. That is beyond dispute. That cost gets passed along to the consumer, one way or another.
Your premise is flawed in that you are asserting that companies must hire more lawyers to comply with net neutrality. No what they must do is the same thing they have done since the birth of the Internet.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You must live in an alternative reality because many consumer groups were in favor of net neutrality. Or are you just lying?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Can you give an example where the net neutrality rules actually did anything useful in terms of stopping an ISP from doing something they should not?
It is too bad for you that goalpost moving is not an Olympic sport. You would win the gold.
DMCA, SOPA/TPP (before flipflopping), the anti-encryption stuff, a bunch of surveillance bills, etc.
Between her, Pelosi, Feinstein, and others the overripe clam chowder of the DNC has been just as far in bed with Big Brother as the elephants who never forget. Incest is wincest for the political elite, no matter which side of the table they choose to sit on.
It wasn't resolved until Netflix was able to stop paying those fees, and that didn't happen until the laws were changed. Make up your own mind, by all means, but if you can't appreciate the distinction I was drawing and recognize that the other poster was being disingenuous in suggesting that things had been resolved, I doubt we'll be seeing eye to eye.
Trump voters deserve what they get. Their "analysis" of current issues proves it time and time again. Getting fucked couldn't happen to a better group of morons. Schadenfreude is rich.
Alas, Trump voters are nowhere near the only ones getting fucked.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It seems that all Trump wants to do is undo anything that Obama is credited for doing. If he can't do that, he'll settle for putting his name at the bottom of something that Obama already did so he gets credit for it. And if that doesn't work he'll make sure the media is paying more attention to his latest controversy so we don't remember his most recent failures.
Indeed it seems that Trump's agenda is primarily self-promotion. Being as that has been his primary business since his first step inside the wrestling ring years ago (and arguably his best business venture ever) this shouldn't be much of a surprise.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I agree. The GP is clearly trying to impugn the character of the President of the United States by suggesting some connection to Russia, which is ridiculous on its face. He should be modded down severely.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Huh I must have been wrong thinking that having the money power to lobby/donate to politicians was using the political system to set winner and losers, the winning going to the one who donated the most money.
Well I guess Trump better dismantle the government.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
What the fuck has happened to my SlashDot?
This used to be a place for nerds
The readers are all fucking morons now
Fuck
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.
...was resolved after the new rules came out, but when the OP shows that it was before...
Well, no, it wasn't resolved before.
Netflix decided that they stood to gain more money than they lost by paying off Comcast, so Netflix paid Comcast, despite Comcast being in the wrong for throttling traffic.
It is not an industry standard to throttle traffic on a per website basis, and this is traffic that has already been paid for by the consumer.
Amazon doesn't have to pay Comcast for me to use their site, Slashdot doesn't have to pay Comcast for me to use their site.
If Netflix and Comcast customers are both paying for access to the internet, why should Netflix be paying an additional Comcast tax on top of that?
Especially when there was evidence of Comcast throttling connections (Netflix access through VPN was unaffected, while access through Comcast was throttled.)
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.
The debate is: should there be a law preventing Comcast from doing whatever the fuck they want with their business?
My take on this is: no.
That's a fair summarization, and I would say "it depends". In an actual free market, I'd agree with you that "no" is the answer, since the same would apply equally to Netflix, who would doubtless denounce Comcast's bad behavior and then raise their rates for Comcast's customers, thus prompting Comcast's customers to look for alternative ISPs. Some would leave, some would stay, and some would ditch Netflix. No matter what, problem solved.
Unfortunately, that isn't able to happen here, since most of those customers have no one else that they can switch to, meaning that without net neutrality, Comcast can (and has demonstrated that they will) leverage their monopoly position with regards to their customers to maximize their already-substantial profits. In a free market, that sort of thing should not be possible in the first place since monopolies are either broken up or regulated to prevent them from leveraging their position for ill-gotten gain. The fact that it happened after net neutrality fell off the books proves that there are still barriers to competition, but that net neutrality is not one of them.
Fix the exclusivity agreements and local/state laws preventing new entrants and you'll fix the competition problem. In the meantime, either break up or regulate the monopolies as you should.
That was resolved (correctly) BEFORE REGULATION.
No it wasn't, and your link is proof of that. Your "resolution" involved Netflix paying a fee to Comcast to deliver packets that Comcast's customers had already paid for. Capitulating to extortion is not the same thing as a resolution.
Aaaaannnnnd SuperKendall disappears!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.