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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.
I have no idea what party the one belongs to that issued this letter here. But it was the first time I saw a senator actually write something sensible about "this computer stuff".
Clean up your own act before you try to mess with the rest of the internet, will ya?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Up is down! Left is Right! Freedom is servitude!
Again, this is another case where these people are being paid to misunderstand the situation because it profits someone else much more if they do. The sad part is that they've been put in a position of power. Hopefully this bill never makes it out of committee, let alone gets scheduled for a vote.
Sounds like Ajit wasn't invited to the latest meeting at Mt. Doom.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) [says] "...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."
What a heaping pile of horseshit, afloat in a vat of raw sewage. Did the good senator's staff come up with this on their own... or did they perform a ritual sacrifice to enlist assistance from the Demon? Show me their hands... this statement was written in blood and one of Lee's staffers is missing a finger.
Let's try and fix this, shall we? Now this engine of growth is threatened by would-be monopolists and their crony politicians who would put marketers and profiteers in charge of monetizing the Internet's infrastructure to squeeze the highest prices from users of the Internet in return least possible investment .
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
It's gotta be a troll. Not even the most clueless lawyer would write "GPL = Gnu Protective License".
No sig today...
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.
Because the US already leads the world in broadband, right? Have to make it better!
Tee hee.
Except net neutrality is best done by the group that can actually punish the isps. If att said you could only talk to people on att phones is that an FTC or FCC issue? It is FCC. That is the crust of net neutrality. Isp want to limit communications from sources they don't get paid twice for.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The ISPs are messing with the Internet. Net neutrality is about regulating the ISPs and Carriers to not "shape" traffic. There is no regulations on the Internet, until they enter this legislation.
Tell everyone, keep congress out of the internet.
The bill is unlikely to receive support from Democrats in the Senate.
[...]
A full repeal of the rules would be a worst case scenario for Democrats.
The whole point is that a full repeal would be the worst case scenario for everyone except extortionist ISPs.
I find it disappointing that the actually matter at hand isn't being addressed in anything but vague quotes.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Excellent for who?
One party has all three legs of the stool and the end result is a stool of an entirely different sort.
Not so fast. AFAIK, jurisdiction over the Internet has been removed from the FTC, and it would take an act of Congress to put it back... and that sure as shit don't look likely. Any talk of the FTC, for now, is a head-fake excuse for gutting the FCC and letting Comcast and its ilk get drunk and party at your expense.
Face it, ladies. The Internet is the new telephone system - the FCC should regulate it as a common-carrier. Period. That makes it boring to the carriers, gutting a lot of "opportunities" to squeeze extra money out (like selling your browsing histories), but too fucking bad. The Internet ain't no luxury anymore - shit, your grandma needs it just to get her goddamn meds.
Besides, the FTC is not invulnerable to politics. Maybe they don't have a politically ambitious loud-mouth tool as Chairman who wants nothing more than to see himself on TV, but a GOP-controlled everything can muzzle the FTC, and they will, if the price is right.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Agreed. Troll. This is not the first time I've seen the exact same post here.
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.
The FTC has done very well going after crooks and people scamming the end users
But Trump has made it obvious that he 100% favors business profits over those end users. If he keeps on his current trajectory we can expect inflation to be through the roof a few years from now.
No sig today...
Ad hominem much there AC? Surely you have something useful to debate here, but that's not it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Obama... January 2008.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The FTC has no rule making authority, that falls on the FCC (as long as Title II remains). The FTC would not be able to enforce rules that don't exist, and without the FCC to craft rules, the FTC's hands are tied. This is why the ISPs want it so badly.
This is the biggest lie the ISPs and their paid mouth pieces have been pushing. If there were competent politicians who could craft a decent set of rules or laws that were not written by the ISPs with monstrous loopholes, then the FTC would have teeth and be able to enforce.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Yes, it's high time the FCC restored my right to have my local monopoly ISP block whatever traffic it wants, because nothing says freedom like not being able to access the content I want to access.
Your guys in congress don't give two shits about a free market. They care about their corporate lobbyists.
The trouble with something like this is that once ISP's start collecting income this way, building entire business models on charging web sites to send data over their networks - it'll be hard for future (saner) governments to reverse. Passing laws that cause businesses to fail is a tough call.
But this is a truly crazy, irresponsible piece of legislation.
The idea that allowing this makes the Internet more free shows a TOTAL lack of understanding as to what makes it tick.
Ask yourself: How will WIkipedia pay ISP's for the data people pull from it? How could some new service of a similar nature spring into existence if it had to factor in those charges? How will sites like GitHub continue to operate a free service to the OpenSource movement?
If you kill those vitally important sites - this would be a disaster for humanity!
Admittedly, we don't KNOW that they'd die - but we're taking a hell of a risk here. Suppose Wikipedia says "We can only provide service to countries with net neutrality." ...now the entire USA is unable to reach Wikipedia anymore.
Then there is the matter of stifling innovation - right now, a small web-based business can stick up a web site and get a service running for almost $0...this encourages all sorts of innovators to try their hand at starting an internet business. If you force them to pay for end-users bandwidth - then nobody can take the risk of providing that kind of service because you have no clue at the outset how much bandwidth you're going to be responsible for. Imagine the prospect of data caps for web site providers!
As a practical matter, there are hundreds and hundreds of ISP's - if they all start charging at different rates and with different business models, do I (as a small web business owner) have to somehow monitor which end-users consumed what bandwidth and send out hundreds of checks each month? That clearly can't happen - so you just know there will be 'aggregation' businesses that'll take a flat-rate charge from web sites and disperse this to the ISP's...so now you have yet another middle-man leaching off of all of us.
What this will do is to force small web site users to go to FaceBook and small businesses to sell via Amazon.
I can't imagine a worse thing to do to the net.
www.sjbaker.org
The only thing that will make people pay for fast lanes is a painfully slow lane. So how does a lack of net neutrality incentivize broadband investments?
It's like getting rid of traffic jams by selling left lane access separately.
Name your bill the opposite of what it is, then lie about what it does and why it's needed. It works every time, why, because their opponents have to spend all their time arguing about the republicans premise, rather than against the bill itself. Opponents to the bill pointing out the faulty logic and flawed reasoning is what they want. Anything to keep you feeling superior and not actually campaigning against them and their bill. They don't care they are wrong, they know they are talking rubbish. But to most people it sounds like something they can at least accept their senator believes, giving them plausible deniability and a strong arguing position so long as the never except that they are misrepresenting the bill, and the current law. Want to actuall stop them and scare the hell out of them. Buy billboard space in their home towns explaining the facts in short, punchy phrases.
Except those private companies used the government to grant them local monopolies on the service that you think is so simple to change.
Look, the internet had functioned quite well for 30 years. The U.S. economy as we know it and for that matter, that of much of the developed, world exists because of it. Ergo, it wasn't broken. Government, on the other hand, has been broken (and broke) for a lot longer than that. What better way to "engineer" a bailout of government than to suck wealth out of the most prosperous segment of the economy. You wouldn't realize that you've been screwed until long after that "engineering" has been entrenched. Remember: the issue is never what they say it is. What that say it's about is a misdirection while they steal your watch.
It's only if you distribute the kernel that you need to publish changes to it in source. As you're not about to distribute, nobody ever needs to get to see the kernel mods you made.
To quote a phrase, "I won".
Who said that?
Me, in a first to orgasm race against your mom.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
But the Obama Administration DID create the apparatus for net neutrality, so clearly they're not identical on this matter. Not that Obama didn't do a dozen unfriendly tech things, but on this particular file, he did the right thing, and the Republicans are going to unravel it. The only explanation being the incumbent cable companies and telcos can afford a lot more hookers and blow.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you're an advocate for this, why not advocate for competing telcos to block each others' calls? If common carrier status is wrong, it's all wrong, and the free market should reign, right?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Agreed, flat out troll.
GPLd tools do not cause the use of those tools to require your code to be GPL.
If you modify GPLd code, then you need to GPL your modifications and distribute them if you distribute to customers is probably the shortest summary. The conditions if you want to modify and distribute bits of windows are somewhat harsher!
That's not what we as a country have believed for a long time. I'm sure that you read about Teddy Roosevelt and the trust-busters in school at some point or other. There is indeed a point where privately owned companies can amass enough power that it's bad for everyone, and they need to be kept in check somehow. When that isn't happening naturally on its own, what should we do? In the past, we turned to the government, not because we expect the government to micromanage every little aspect of those companies, but because the government is the one we empowered to create and enforce the rules of the playing field.
In the case of ISPs, the vast majority of Americans CANNOT simply 'change their service/provider' because they only have one choice available. Those who have any real array of choices are a tiny minority. In cases such as these, it is absolutely the role of government to step in and prevent abuses of that monopoly, or to take active measures to introduce/encourage real competition in that market. Both of these things have occurred in the past, with power utilities, telephone, oil, railroads, etc, to the general betterment of consumers and to the United States as a whole. There is no reason why that should be any different today with internet service providers.
January 2008 was even before the primaries.
It does not seem that long ago when commercial use, fund raising, and advertising were prohibited uses of the internet. When the net was opened up to commercial activity, is when everything started to go downhill rapidly. Then politicians figured out it was a tool for social control, surveillance, and censorship.
Thank Al Gore for that.
His contribution to the Internet was legislation to open it to commercial activity. This was enabling for giving access to the general population for all sorts of uses, rather than restricting it to people with connections to large universities, the military, and companies working on networking technology (such as Xerox and AT&T). But it also legalized unsolicited commercial email.
So what Al Gore did was legalize spam.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> 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.
Total bullshit.
We the people built the telecom grid in this country. The companies were public utilities enabled and supported by the money, laws and good will of the people on behalf of the people. Libertarian bullshit had nothing to do with it.
Sorry.. You are correct... January 2009....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If you don't like your service/provider, change it. End of discussion!
Up until last year, I had exactly 1 provider that offered speeds faster than dialup. And this in a a major metropolitan area (albeit right on the fringe of one) in a town where even the townhomes are going for over 300k. In most places in the US there is no real competition for internet service. When the only option to a monopoly is a government service you are screwed, since the Republicans have trained their base to think that anything done by the goverment (except of course killing people, arresting bad guys, and putting out fires-you know, things that are as wholesome and American as apple pie) is evil, freedom-hating Communism. They bitch about $200 per month cable/internet bills but then cheer when any proposal that would actually fix it gets shot down.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
And this is where Net Neutrality is necessary.
If there's no neutrality, which businesses' profits will he favor? The ISP's profits are going to come at the expense of the content providers' profits if there's nothing to require the ISP's to play nice.
But if neutrality is the law, then he doesn't have to pick. All businesses have equal chance to profit without regulations giving their adversaries the upper hand.
Net Neutrality is an anti-regulation. And that's how it should be framed to get Trump & Co. to be onboard with it against their will. (Because they want to make money from it, but they also know it'll look bad for them and they'll lose the next election if it looks like they're "strangling" businesses with excessive regulation.)
The knife is in both parties. They can pull it out of both parties or we can twist it in both parties. Their choice, but only their backing down is going to spare everyone a lot of pain. And I mean everyone.
That's the Age of the Internet we're now entering: The Nostalgia Age, when we look back at how great it used to be during it's Golden Age, before the fucktarded politicians, corrupt governments, greedy corporations, and criminal organizations ruined it for everyone. We've reached Peak Internet; it's all downhill from here, the Internet we knew is like a massive oak tree that's rotting and dead on the inside. Wonder what'll be the next big thing, and how many years it'll last before it gets all fucked up, too?
There is a very easy solution to your problem: Fire your lawyer. He doesn't know jack shit about the GPL, or probably software licensing in general.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not just a troll, it's an old copypasta.
Ezekiel 23:20
> monopolies across wide areas, and then began trying to leverage those monopolies
That's an issue, and has been ever since cities starting granting government-enforced monopolies. Take a look at the New York City cable franchise map. It's ridiculous. Which company is allowd to serve you depends on which side the street you live on.
This isn't new with packet switching either. I'm old enough to remember when long-distance calls were $1.25 / minute, under the government-enforced monopoly rate structure. Then the telcos were deregulated and the rate IMMEDIATELY dropped to 15 cents. Then within two years it was 10 cents. Rates dropped over 90% as soon as the FCC got out of the way. Now of course most people don't pay anything for long distance minutes. Why they would want to go back to the FCC regulation, with the FCC deciding $1.25/minute is fair, baffles me.
> would whole heartedly support another Ma Bell'esq forced breakup
I'm old enough to remember that. The government broke up a national monopoly into a set of regional monopolies. Long-distance calls were $1.25 / minute, under the government-enforced monopoly rate structure. Then the telcos were deregulated and the rate IMMEDIATELY dropped to 15 cents. Then within two years it was 10 cents. Rates dropped over 90% as soon as the FCC got out of the way. Now of course most people don't pay anything for long distance minutes. Why they would want to go back to the FCC regulation, with the FCC deciding $1.25/minute is fair, baffles me.
> You should be paying to lease a line from your cable company
Yet another regional monopoly, I guess, with rates set by the government again? So you can pay $1.25/minute again. In Texas we have overbuilders in many areas. Companies compete to build the fastest, most reliable network. Some areas have 4-6 competing companies to choose from and even some small towns of 20,000 people have two cable companies. To make money in that environment, the cable companies have to get customers to choose them, by offering a better service at a better price than the other companies.
Wow - nice post. Thank you for that.
That's an issue, and has been ever since cities starting granting government-enforced monopolies.
Yes, that was a problem. Which ended a long time ago. Cities grant franchises, but they cannot be exclusive anymore, and haven't been so for a very long time.
Then the telcos were deregulated and the rate IMMEDIATELY dropped to 15 cents.
Not quite. The rates dropped when federal regulations required access to alternative long distance services. It wasn't de-regulation that accomplished this. It took regulation to force this to happen. And then we wound up with a world where you'd select "none of the above" as an LD provider, and sure enough, the company named "None Of The Above" charged you $1.25/min for using their long distance service. You'd call the telco who sent you the bill to complain, and they could quite legally tell you that it wasn't their problem, it was yours.
And today, under this wonderful de-regulated telco system, I'm paying several dollars a month for access to a long distance provider that went bankrupt ten years ago for a phone line I never make long distance calls on. Can I get rid of that charge? Of course not. I'd much rather that LD costs $1.25/minute on that phone line than $6.50/month for nothing.
You've got it almost right...but a little backwards. It wasn't cable companies that forced local governments to do exclusive franchise agreements. It was local governments that OFFERED exclusive franchise agreements to cable companies who then took them up on the offer.
> Cities grant franchises, but they cannot be exclusive anymore, and haven't been so for a very long time.
Every so often somebody on Slashdot says that. But somebody lied. You can read the rule for yourself if you want to know the nitty-gritty details, but essentially the rule change said:
Before granting a new exclusive franchise, the city must hold a meeting.
Didn't affect the existing franchises at all, and nothing prohibits city and state politicians from granting new monopolies to their donors; they just have to hold a meeting first, at which they declare that granting a monopoly is in the city's best interest. That's it. A beautiful lie.
Have a glance at the New York City franchise map on their web site sometime. Each block is assigned to one ISP.
Private companies took the risk to build up the web, internet lines etc.
Government has no business telling them how to run it.
If you don't like your service/provider, change it.
End of discussion!
Another view is that the Internet is like the highway system. The government (as the people's representative) created it via and owns most of the land the network flows though.
Its great that businesses create all these wonderful places to go, and you can do what you want when I get there, but don't tell me you are throttling the exit to Target because Walmart built the driveway from my house to the road.
(I was going to use an analogy of letting big trucks drive faster than personal cars but the image of that made me laugh).
Mike Lee (R-Utah) - $60,913 John Cornyn (R-Texas) - $148,800 Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) - $70,025 Ted Cruz (R-Texas) - $40,840 Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) - $123,652 Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) - $41,220 Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) - $31,800 James Inhofe (R-Okla.) - $38,000 Source : http://politicaldig.com/heres-...
Thank you very much for both links, and for your analysis. It's much more informative and interesting, to me, to look at the actual laws and regulations and discuss them, rather than arguing about what someone remembers about what they heard from someone who read a headline.
At first I was rather confused because I definitely read, and posted here, FCC documents saying otherwise just a few months ago. I'm still not 100% clear and certain, but I think the cause of the conflicting information may be ome of two things. Possibly, the document was revised or superseded in the last twelve months since I looked, but that seems unlikely. It may be because the document you referenced is very clear that it applies only to multi-channel TV services and not to either telecommunications services or *any other service* provided by cable companies (such as internet service). The document you referenced doesn't prohibit a city from granting an exclusive monopoly on internet service over cable lines. I wish I had time right now to track down the FCC document I read and posted several months ago. It would be interesting for us to both read that one and discuss our interpretation.
Maybe I'll look for it this evening, after work, after I feed and bathe the kid and get her in bed, etc. You seem to be good at finding the relevant documents; maybe you'll find the other document before I do.
Ps, until I find the document I read a few months ago and read it again, I may have to avoid commenting on the issue. At this point I've read two clearly authoritative sources that seem to conflict.
The document you referenced doesn't prohibit a city from granting an exclusive monopoly on internet service over cable lines.
Of course it doesn't because the medium does not create the monopoly, it is whether you can buy equivalent service from someone else. Since there is NO government-granted monopoly on ISP service the field is open to anyone else who wants to play. They cannot do "Comcast cable internet", but "Comcast cable internet" is not the be-all and end-all of ISP service.
The fact is, there has never been a need for legislation prohibiting ISP monopolies because there has never been an ISP monopoly.
Also of course, the cable company has a complete monopoly on their services if you want to define "monopoly" as the rather meaningless "only one company can provide a service from that company". But monopolies implicitly refer to multiple companies -- the company that can provide a type of service and all others that cannot. Of what value is the term "monopoly" if you can say "Verizon Wireless has a monopoly on Verizon Wireless"? It's a tautology, and the law should not be dealing in tautologies.