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FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Plans Fast-Track Repeal of Net Neutrality (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is moving quickly to replace the Obama administration's landmark net neutrality rules and wants internet service providers to voluntarily agree to maintain an open internet, three sources briefed on the meeting said Thursday. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican appointed by President Donald Trump, met on Tuesday with major telecommunications trade groups to discuss his preliminary plan to reverse the rules, the sources said. The rules approved by the FCC under Democratic President Barack Obama in early 2015 prohibited broadband providers from giving or selling access to speedy internet, essentially a "fast lane," to certain internet services over others. As part of that change, the FCC reclassified internet service providers much like utilities. Pai wants to overturn that reclassification, but wants internet providers to voluntarily agree to not obstruct or slow consumer access to web content, two officials said late Tuesday. The officials briefed on the meeting said Pai suggested companies commit in writing to open internet principles and including them in their terms of service, which would make them binding. It is unclear if regulators could legally compel internet providers to adopt open internet principles without existing net neutrality rules. As part of that move, the Federal Trade Commission would assume oversight of ensuring compliance.Three sources said Pai plans to unveil his proposal to overturn the rules as early as late April and it could face an initial vote in May or June.
Yeah, that worked great in the past. From companies honoring the "do not track" flag to people disabling adblockers when asked. Hey, while we're at it, could we finally implement the "evil bit"? I mean, if you think ISPs will honor this, you can as well expect internet criminals to set the evil bit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Thank goodness the news channels will all be busy today reporting the special delivery of some missiles to Syria.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If Pai is trying to compel service providers to put the principles of an open Internet in their service contracts, why not just mandate net neutrality by law? This seems to be a way to allow net neutrality to die a slow death. Begin by getting ISPs to do it voluntarily so it appears we're maintaining it, but then over time you will see companies back down from that and net neutrality will be eroded.
"voluntarily agree"
I can already hear the evil villain laughs from the boardrooms of our monopolistic content masters, lighting cigars with $100 bills and slapping each other on the back with hearty gusto.
If I could take my business elsewhere, this wouldn't matter so much. In the designated local monopoly for ISPs that most Americans exist within, it's just pathetic.
Of course the ISPs will agree to this and they won't even cheat. But your Internet service is going to have a 10GB cap on it and everything else is going to be "zero rated". And of course you'll be paying $100/mth for this 10GB to get "connectivity". Then the ISP will charge those other companies another $100 to zero rate and escape the ridiculous cap. If you want more "neutral" bandwidth, that'll cost you $5/GB.
I don't even think it would be "over time". Pretty much the instant one major ISP starts charging for premium access (or whatever the fuck they end up calling it) the rest will jump on that bandwagon like nobody's business.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
That would be the second this has been signed. You can bet the private airplanes are already booked and flying to the meetings with the CEO's.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
One thing you can be sure of, they'll go out of their way to ensure as painful experience as possible for those using services not in the "fast lane". Notice the key text in TFS "to not obstruct or slow consumer access to web content" (emphasis mine) but you can guarantee that there will be no limits on how slow the base service will be, and certainly the minimum speed will be so slow as to be ludicrous. Want more than 256kbps access to our select bundle of websites included in this premium package? Pay for the fast lane!
Telcos already pulled crap like this in past decades. Back in the 90's we had a house in a rural area, and there was some big push to get phone/dialup service to rural residents. We had a 28k modem at the time, and after upgrading to a blazing fast 56k we discovered no increase in speed. After some back and forth, and numerous technicians concluding that the issue was in the external lines and not because of a wiring issue in hour house, the phone company ultimately refused to do anything because, apparently, they were only required to provide up to 14kbps! Even by 1995 standards that was slow enough as to be practically unusable.
Most net neutrality discussion center about how shaping traffic based on tcp ports or type of media transferred is not relevant to net neutrality because that is only about sources and sinks. I agree with this.
However why is it even allowed for the ISP to interpret the TCP headers. They are not necessary to transport data to some other IP. Only the target IP should be legally allowed to interpret this data and if anyone else does it it should be considered wiretapping and prosecuted as such.
Just like the post office is not allowed to read your mail past the address it need for delivery and your phone provider is not allowed to listen to in on your phone calls the ISP should not be allowed to look at your data.
goodbye Netflix!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This has to be the most naive or idiotic bit of policy I've heard in a while. You either support net neutrality strongly or you don't support it at all. It appears that Pai is trying to uphold the idea of net neutrality, but without increasing "government regulation." But there's no incentive for ISPs to have net neutrality. This is the very reason regulations are typically called for. Asking ISPs to voluntarily give up net neutrality either 1)fails in which case you needed the regulation 2)succeeds in which case they incur the burdens that regulation would have incurred anyway.
You have it backwards. It'll be "want the people accessing your content or service to have more than 256kbps access? Pay us a monthly fee!" (a-la Netflix)
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Pai does not represent Republicans voters, in a recent poll 77% of registered Republicans disagreed with his proposals. Pai has been bought by lobbyists and represents his corporate constituency, not voters. Trump does not seem to care about FCC so I doubt if he has a clue what is happening there.
something like this happened. Wheeler got the ISP's together and came up with various rules for net neutrality...wanting them to be involved in the process so they would be happier with it.
They walked right out the door and proceeded to sue the FCC over the idea after they'd come to an agreement.
The ISP's won't agree to it. They don't want a neutral internet. They had all the chance in the world to voluntarily run a neutral internet. This is not 20 years ago...we cannot simply change ISP's by giving a CC number to another company and putting in a new phone number. The ISP's know this; they know there's no real competition.
He's going to find out they want to fuck consumers over for all they've got...and he's just going to let them do this. This man is a former Verizon laywer who seems to feel his loyalty is with big telecom; he does not care about consumers at all.
Neutrality is dead. The free exchange of information is dead. The companies that offer OTT services will be allowed to fail as 4 or 5 big corporations decide they shouldn't be in business because it's unfair to them to have to deliver a competitor's service.
Get prepared to pay a whole lot more for a whole lot less; cuz 'Murica!
Or more likely it will be both. Netflix pays a fee to be included in a bundle, then charge consumers to subscribe to the bundle.
We used to say the internet routes around blockages. How about an always on VPN to a country with better policies? I know it won't work in all cases, but it will also keep the local ISP from selling anything of interest in my history.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
I don't think "fast" and "slow" lanes even captures the horrible experience that awaits us.
Soon you will offered internet channels instead of speeds. You will be able to buy internet service that provides access to youtube and msn.com. Or maybe another package that provides unimpeded access to fox news and breitbart. Or maybe you want the "sports internet" which provides access to NFL-related sites and ESPN.
Any other sites will have ads overlaid by the ISP, or they may not be available at all.
The days of ordering just "internet service" are numbered.
How would you like a regulation having passed that made every website use HTML 3.2, Perl and Oracle 8.
This would be a good argument against the government mandating that every ISP use only 100 megabit Ethernet, or DSL lines only.
But, speaking of straw-man arguments, that is not what net neutrality is about. Net neutrality is about preventing ISPs from leveraging their near-monopoly position as last-mile gatekeepers in order to price their non-ISP competitors out of the Internet-content market.
Net neutrality laws do not specify what technologies an ISP may or may not use; it only specifies that an ISP may not privilege some content above others by charging different content-providers different rates for the same number of kilobytes of content.
If you think that's an unreasonable restriction, feel free to describe why. If you think the ISPs can be trusted not to abuse their monopoly position in short order when given the opportunity to do so, explain why you think so.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.