FCC Announces Plan To Reverse Title II Net Neutrality (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Federal Communications Commission is cracking open the net neutrality debate again with a proposal to undo the 2015 rules that implemented net neutrality with Title II classification. FCC chairman Ajit Pai called the rules "heavy handed" and said their implementation was "all about politics." He argued that they hurt investment and said that small internet providers don't have "the means or the margins" to withstand the regulatory onslaught. "Earlier today I shared with my fellow commissioners a proposal to reverse the mistake of Title II and return to the light touch framework that served us so well during the Clinton administration, Bush administration, and first six years of the Obama administration," Pai said today. His proposal will do three things: first, it'll reclassify internet providers as Title I information services; second, it'll prevent the FCC from adapting any net neutrality rules to practices that internet providers haven't thought up yet; and third, it'll open questions about what to do with several key net neutrality rules -- like no blocking or throttling of apps and websites -- that were implemented in 2015. Pai will publish the full text of his proposal tomorrow, and it will be voted on by the FCC on May 18th.

Comments

This just in

[Moheeheeko]

Cable company lobbyist who sleazed his way to the head of the FCC wants to make cable companies more money at the expense of consumers, more info at 11.

Re:It's not just money

[dywolf]

pissed they got it...
and pissed it actually does work.

not as well as single payer.
but better than the status quo before it.

Exactly

[rsilvergun]

because (in their own words) private industry can't compete with a heavily subsidized government one. Not because the gov't industry is better, but because it's got the full weight of the government behind it. The little guy running his business will get run out by the government and the government will cock it all up with waste and inefficiency because it has no incentive to improve. After all, the government can always use violence (aka 'laws') to prevent competition. What's the definition of a government again... An organization with a monopoly on violence.

Everything I just wrote is straight from the GOP's platform, and it's all utter bollocks. The government doesn't have a monopoly on violence because a) self defense and b) the government is only allowed to use violence either in war or self defense (cops don't get to shoot you for the hell of it... well unless you're a minority). Private ISP aren't little guys, they bought their own monopolies. Infrastructure is always going to be a monopoly because you need eminent domain to run cable/roads. etc, etc.

But, none of this matters once you've accepted as a truism that government interference with the market is inherently bad. That's the trouble with the GOP. They've already come to that conclusion and they have to warp their world view to fit it. Here's another saying: Reality has a liberal bias.