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Senate Republicans Introduce Anti-Net Neutrality Legislation (thehill.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced a bill Monday to nullify the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules. "Few areas of our economy have been as dynamic and innovative as the internet," Lee said in a statement. "But now this engine of growth is threatened by the Federal Communications Commission's 2015 Open Internet Order, which would put federal bureaucrats in charge of engineering the Internet's infrastructure." Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), and James Inhofe (R-Okla.) co-sponsored Lee's bill. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai introduced his own plan last week to curb significant portions of the 2015 net neutrality rules that Lee's bill aims to abolish. Pai's more specific tack is focused on moving the regulatory jurisdiction of broadband providers back to the Federal Trade Commission, instead of the FCC, which currently regulates them.
The FTC has done very well going after crooks and people scamming the end users, while the FCC has really done nothing. These nebulous rules from the FCC can be easily bypassed, while the FTC will normally crush companies for lying and stealing from their customers.
There's nothing anyone can do to help you, but if you were to be strangled with your own entrails, you'd make the world better for everyone else.
For centuries the intellectual basis for conservatism has been set, not by Jesus, or Adam Smith, but by Edmund Burke, whose philosophy could be summed up this way: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Burke was the kind of man who could defend the monarchy while despising monarchists: he thought the notion that monarchy was an ideal form of government was fatuous twaddle. But he thought all grand, all-encompassing theories were foolish, so he wasn't any more enthusiastic about pure democracy. Burke preferred a monarchy restrained by a democratically elected parliament not because it was the best system, but because it worked, experience showed that men could be tolerably free and prosperous under such a system.
So the notion that we need to "fix" an innovative segment of the economy to be more like what our theory of what an innovative industry should look like is about as un-conservative as you can get. It is, in fact, radicalism of the sort Burke detested.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> Educating one's self is pretty much all that matters, however that occurs (incidentally, due to my experience, I probably have more tech-savvy in my little finger than most millrnnials).
Agreed. I've made my living doing internet technology since 1998. As a member of IETF, I helped develop and draft standards such as HTTP and SMTP (web and email). During those years, I put my degree on hold while I working on developing the technology of the internet. For example, I developed the first live video with sound on the web. I won't be until six months from now that I get my degree. Yet at work, when a young programmer is working with some open source software such as Apache, there's a good chance I contributed to writing the software, so you could say I'm technically literate.
> Anyone with two eyes can see exactly what is happening here. They have been trying to convince people that protecting our rights on a free and open resource is somehow 'bad' from the start.
Since the 1990s I've seen, and participated in, the web's development from a mostly text-based medium at 28Kbps to what we have today. I've queued up a few gifs to download overnight, then a few years later helped people find the optimal encoding for HD video streaming. I've participated as consumer demand took us from AOL and Prodigy to "best viewed on Internet Explorer" to the open internet we have today - sites today on expected to work across all different kinds of devices, certainly they are tied to a specific browser anymore. What a difference from when you had to choose between the content available on Compuserv, different content on AOL, or another set of content on Prodigy.
Smart techs and market forces have created something pretty amazing in a very short period of time here -remember it takes five years for the federal government to just order and install new desktop computers. Then in 2015 the FCC decided that what we'd been doing was a failure. This is the same FCC that takes a decade to update one of their software programs. We've had Title II and net neutrality for 18 months. Exactly what good did that do? Did that spur innovation better than, or even comparable to, the incredible innovation on the web under the FTC since the 1990s? I haven't seen it, so please point out for me what great benefit there was, tell me how that helped. From where I sit, the development of the internet from the 1990s to 2010s, with the FTC rather than the FCC, and without bureaucratic neutrality rules, is one of the greatest success stories of all time.
Yep. This is being bought and paid for by large ISPs.
of course it is. Net Neutrality also has backers, mostly liberals who want to control everything via Government decree.
Your assumption is that one is better than the other, where mine is that both are equally valid. One view is no more valid than the other. Government has no right to decree what goes on the wire, because it isn't government's wires.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
mostly liberals who want to control everything via Government decree
Versus the free market fairies who will always do the right thing and don't have to deal with physical constraints, like a limited footprint in which to connect services. Seriously, we've already established above that your alternative to government control is government control. Are you a "liberal" in disguise?
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.