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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...
Because the US already leads the world in broadband, right? Have to make it better!
Tee hee.
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.
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...
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 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
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.
Except those private companies used the government to grant them local monopolies on the service that you think is so simple to change.
> 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.
It's not just a troll, it's an old copypasta.
Ezekiel 23:20
> 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.