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The Republican Push To Repeal Net Neutrality Will Get Underway This Week (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: Federal regulators will move to roll back one of the Obama administration's signature Internet policies this week, launching a process to repeal the government's net neutrality rules that currently regulate how Internet providers may treat websites and their own customers. The vote on Thursday, led by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, will kick off consideration of a proposal to relax regulations on companies such as Comcast and AT&T. If approved by the 2-1 Republican-majority commission, it will be a significant step for the broadband industry as it seeks more leeway under government rules to develop new business models. For consumer advocates and tech companies, it will be a setback; those groups argue that looser regulations won't prevent those business models from harming Internet users and website owners. The current rules force Internet providers to behave much like their cousins in the legacy telephone business. Under the FCC's net neutrality policy, providers cannot block or slow down consumers' Internet traffic, or charge websites a fee in order to be displayed on consumers' screens. The net neutrality rules also empower the FCC to investigate ISP practices that risk harming competition. Internet providers have chafed at the stricter rules governing phone service, which they say were written for a bygone era. Pai's effort to roll back the rules has led to a highly politicized debate. Underlying it is a complex policy decision with major implications for the future of the Web.
You fools elected a nightmare scenario government. Decades of progress in human rights, science, and technology getting wiped out. Congratulations.
It's amazing that the Republicans are focusing rolling back old policy rather than making new policy with all the issues going on in the government right now!
"Pai's effort to roll back the rules has led to a highly politicized debate. Underlying it is a complex policy decision with major implications for the future of the Web"
There is no debate here. This is an ISP cronie trying to repeal a policy shoved down government throats by the collective voices of most of the people in the country. R's whore for big business and D's sell out to tech and media companies. At best net neutrality is a wash for D's with as many policy buyers in the tech and media area willing to bribe them to do it as not.
That is what you call actual Democracy. When public support is so overwhelming that it forces the hands of politicians on the things which benefit us, which almost universally neither party supports. Net neutrality, castrating domestic wiretapping, protecting whistle blowers like Snowden, spreading military power among the states, actually enforcing parts of the constitution the limit federal power, redistricting in a way that reflects the 51-49% split between urban and rural population WITHOUT trying to lump any particular special interest or minority group together, making it illegal to accept jobs or money after leaving a public office for any entity that was under the authority of that office, including indirectly (i.e. the president can have no income source but his salary for life after office and the FCC chairman can't be paid by ISP's afterward).
* Price-gouge consumers for slow, unreliable service
..yeah, the GOP can shove it up their fat asses. If what they do fucks the internet worse than it already is, I'll just refuse to play anymore. I got along without it for decades, I can get along without it again if I have to. Bastards.
* Man-in-the-middle attacks to spy on all their web traffic, collect the data, sell it to advertisers so they can spam the fuck out of everyone
* Break into customer emails for the same reasons as the above
* Effectively break the Internet by crippling competing services
* Push consumers into walled gardens 'for their own good' (and for greater profit)
* Become both content creators and content providers, effectively creating a monopoly, raise prices even more
Given their druthers:
* Make all OTA broadcasts illegal, all content reception must be PAID for
Of course Trump will probably be arrested before the year is out, and in the next general election, Republicans will be run out of town on a rail, too, for fucking everything up, so it might take a while but everything might just get set right again before they manage to blow it all up.
And yet that ignores everything that actually happened during that time span. Honestly do you think, ignoring all of the business reality that now shapes all facets of the world, that the outcomes from an academic exercise will be remotely similar to unrestrained bartering of every aspect of Internet access? If you do, then you are a fool. Look at discrete media for a counter example - every firm in the early modern age created its own format, and they all failed: LaserDisc, MiniDisc, etc. MiniNet is coming, and it will be more like MiniTrue.
The past was not as rosy as you believe, and innovation stifling monopolies in telecom are nothing new. I remember trying to negotiate a peering agreement with MCI/Worldcom/UUNet back in the 1990s: "We own 60% of the Internet, and as long as you also own 60% of the Internet, then peering is no problem. Otherwise, pay up."
Where road ownership will be privatized and each owner will get to set its own rules regarding who gets to drive on the roads, what brand of cars are allowed on the road, which destination you are allowed to go to when using said road, and where both the person driving the car and the owner of the destination where he is driving to will have to pay for the privilege of using the road.
Why do you call this a Republican plan? Trump is not paying one iota of attention to what is going on in the FCC. I doubt if he can even name the FCC commissioners. Pai took over automatically when the White House switched parties, Trump did not put him there. Also, when you poll voters on this 70% of people are for Net Neutrality and 30% don't know what it is. Republicans and Democrats poll almost identically on this. This is not a party line issue.
Pai is a member of party Verizon with constituents Comcast, Charter, AT&T, etc. Pai is not representing any block of voters.
What we should be hoping for is that he attracts the attention of Trump by throttling his Twitter, and then I'm sure Pai will get a "You're Fired!". And, by the way, he was appointed by Obama and approved by a Democratically controlled Senate.
Because here in the US, and most common among right leaning folks, we have a very unique mental ... 'condition' about the government doing anything other than shows of military force.
These rubes are told: "government is interfering with business", and the knee-jerk reaction is "regulation bad, free enterprise good". And that's how republican voters are conned into voting/supporting things that are absolutely counter their interests.
Basically, you have the FCC/government interfering with free enterprise, which goes against our notion of rustic self reliance. Notice, this only gets trotted out when the government is trying to regulate business, especially if it's in the public interest. Handouts are of course distinct, and definitely a different beast!
Technically true, Obama appointed him to the committee, but he was just one of five members, not the chairman of the FCC. Only three members of the committee can be members of the party currently in power, the other two must come from the other side. So Obama had to pick a republican.
Tom Wheeler was chairman of the FCC during Obama's second term. Pai did not take over automatically, the chairman is appointed by the president. Because this issue is essentially one group of powerful corporations fighting a second group of powerful corporations, it tends not to be a partisan issue so much as a "who gave which politician the most money recently" issue.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Your example also happened at a time when the internet relied entirely on sitting on top of a wire infrastructure that already existed and was maintained by companies not involved in the supply of internet services. Those ISPs were sitting on the phone lines - and changing ISPs was as easy as terminating your account and getting another one. It was fairly easy to switch ISPs and fairly cheap and easy to establish one - because the infrastructure costs were limited to a few routers and servers.
That era doesn't exist anymore - broadband technology came with the downside of requiring expensive new infrastructure and the ISPs converged into being the same companies that build the infrastructure.
The old ISP competitive market was lost in the process.
Your prediction then that the same would happen is not supported by the evidence you're providing since the two situations are markedly different. It's a basic principle of the scientific method that if you change the parameters of the experiment you cannot assume the results will not also change.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *