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Net Neutrality Goes Down in Flames as FCC Votes To Kill Title II Rules (arstechnica.com)
As we feared yesterday, the rollback of net neutrality rules officially began today. The FCC voted along party lines today to formally consider Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to scrap the legal foundation for the rules and to ask the public for comments on the future of prohibitions on blocking, throttling and paid prioritization. ArsTechnica adds: The Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 today to start the process of eliminating net neutrality rules and the classification of home and mobile Internet service providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) proposes eliminating the Title II classification and seeks comment on what, if anything, should replace the current net neutrality rules. But Chairman Ajit Pai is making no promises about reinstating the two-year-old net neutrality rules that forbid ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful Internet content, or prioritizing content in exchange for payment. Pai's proposal argues that throttling websites and applications might somehow help Internet users.
Feels like we've had a lot of those lately.
The internet was NOT invented for ISP profitability. Fuck this treasonous noise.
These are crimes against humanity... some day there will be a reckoning
If it isn't crystal-clear to everyone by now, let me state the obvious for your benefit: The FCC, which apparently is in the hip pocket of ISPs and wireless companies, does not give a flying fuck about what the citizens of the U.S. actually want the Internet to be, all they care about is being Good Little Doggies for their corporate patrons. On the other hand the Baby Boomer generation will probably love it; the Internet will likely become like a larger version of AOL.
Corruption is the biggest thing our founders were worried about as a threat to our form of government. For years it has been getting worse and worse. We've finally reached the point of critical mass and are now in a snowball or thermal runaway type of situation where we cannot recover.
This is what we get America. Voting largely along party lines or for religious reasons! You thought Trump wait till you see what Betsy Devos, Jeff Sessions, Scot Pruitt are going to do. I am hoping here the states will do the right thing and add some laws against this but I am not sure how much authority they will have. Also, state legislators are probably cheaper to buy anyway!
From a system designed to ensure information flows no matter what... to a system designed to ensure selected information flows at a rate determined by your wallet.
Another change to America that will squeeze the 99% for the enrichment of the 1%, sold with the lie that they're doing it for the exact opposite reason.
You know, I'm not big on class warfare but at some point you have to realize that your society is going to shit if its primary focus is to benefit a small subset of the population to the detriment of the majority.
Whelp, now there exists a new revenue stream - a stream of income that stock holders will DEMAND be exploited maximally.
That new income source: Asking for payments for premium treatment from uploaders.
I expect that this will get rather messy - as the financial motivations will likely upturn a lot of agreements between large networks, and the viability of many valued companies.
But, this IS what contributors paid for, so this is what they get, apparently.
Ryan Fenton
Alternative Headline: "Thing That Never Made Any Difference Never Will" When regs that never went into force are pruned in the forest, does anyone make a sound? I guess they do.
Could the big content providers (Netflix amazon spotify etc) band together to create a separate company that provides local VPN jumping on points right in front of the regional caches these providers all have? The isps could retaliate by throttling encrypted traffic but that will affect many businesses who will vote for isps with their wallets because they unlike us do have a choice.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Pay your ISP bill in increments of 0.01, preferably by paper cheque. Automation makes this easy. Offer to pay in 0.25 increments for a 'small fee', or randomize the increments. Insist on a paper bill showing all payments.
Include the following on your voicemail: "If this call drops or has lag, this is because ISP is possibly throttling packets. Please offer to pay ISP more money and hope for better service.
Throttle incoming connections from the ISPs ad servers. Setup a pi-hole for ads.
The internet itself will now quickly become a monopoly, since AmaGooBookTubeSoft can pay enough money to silence everyone else by effectively just shouting far louder than they can even afford to.
Also any political or SJW groups can now totally block any/all alternatives to their myopic world views just by paying the ISPs.
No doubt MPAA/RIAA/Hollywood are already chomping at the bit to be able to block any/every site they feel like in another gross abuse of power.
One of the things I always told my kids growing up is that a piece of the truth is almost useless by itself; you need enough of the whole truth to understand what's going on.
The piece of truth you learn in capitalism Sunday school is that businesses try to maximize profits and that this forces them to innovate. This is true, but it misses the other part of the truth: businesses also try to minimize risk, and this cuts against the innovation impulse.
It's the force of competition that makes businesses take risks and thus innovate, and nowhere is the competition fiercer than in a commodity market. That's why businesses want to differentiate their products, and that's what net discrimination is all about. They want to make it impossible to compare different services by making it impossible or difficult to get content except through certain channels. Expect exclusive deals so you'll find yourself choosing between getting local baseball programming on one provider or the latest Star Trek series on another.
It's all about hanging onto customers, and there's two ways to do that: to make them happy, or make it painful to leave. Of the two, making it painful to leave is less risky.
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You know, it's funny. 10 years ago I would be right there with you folks, panicking and hyperventilating ( well, drinking a beer and grousing anyway. We all cope in our ways, don't judge )..but if the years have taught me anything, it's to appreciate opportunity when it comes along.
Had I my own way, my and other's lives would be infinitely better with virtually no downside. However, the world doesn't work like that ( shocking, I know ). Once I stopped fighting it, I realized that despite it's broken nature, the world still manages to push forward to society's benefit ( though most refuse to acknowledge that ). Set backs are sometimes needed to make leaps forward, and sometimes "set backs" are only considered such because individuals lack the vision to find the opportunity.
So relax; breath. Trust in yourself and find the opportunities presented. You, and society, will be fine, I promise.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
They may be able to, but the feds will likely be able to stick their hands in as well. For instance, you call your local neighbor on your phone, connecting only through local telephone exchanges, if there's a federal statute about what you're doing (say, selling pot), then (among other things) the feds claim jurisdiction because you used "an instrument of interstate commerce", or IOW, something that could have enabled you to do whatever it was in an interstate fashion.
This is one of the underlying reasons for the assertion that the feds have inverted the meaning of the commerce clause (which says they have the authority to regulate commerce "among the several states", not "within the several states") and are therefore acting in an constitutionally unauthorized manner.
So bottom line, the feds can apply their rules and make them stick. Even if whatever it is happens only within the confines of a single state.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Obama's Net Neutrality is only 18 months old. Before that, was it so bad? During it, was it better?
Here's what I'm REALLY angry about - these goddamn local monopolies. Of I have choice of a shit sandwich (AT&T) or a dick up the ass (Comcast).
I am paying $49/month for 1.5Mbps DOWN and .25Mbps up. Really AT&T? I could get better by signing up with Xfinity if and ONLY if I get one of their "packages". But Internet only? Nope, don't offer that in your area. (I didn't realize that they have to run a separate cable for internet only and it's a real burden on them. /s)
So Netflix can either pay Spectrum a ton of money or they can put a pop up on their website for all Spectrum customers saying "Your ISP is slowing down this connection artificially. If you want higher quality streaming, switch to a different carrier."
Gee, I wonder which route they'll take. Let the name and shame parade commence.
Internet is soon going to be like Cable TV you have to choose your internet package
Basic
Economy
Premium
If sites like Pandora or Youtube need to pay premiums for adequate performance over your Comcast or Verizon or whatever line, expect them to make you watch more ads to make up for it.
The long-running excuse is that the "people" don't even know what net-neutrality is, much less what it's valuable. Now they'll learn... free stuff on the Internet will get scarce, or will be delivered at crap speeds while your provider pushes their own affiliated entertainment package (with a fee), the only content that's reliably watchable.
Fees for other services you do over the net may also appear or increase. Hell, if I were Comcast, I'd hit Amazon, E-Bay, and other online merchants up hard, 'cause I know they can pass those fees onto their customers. Bye-bye, cheap Internet shopping.
Thanks, ignorant American voters, who shrug it off with lame-ass both-parties-are-just-as-bad excuses. Bullshit. I didn't like Hillary much, no I didn't, but if she HAD been elected, Ajit Pai would NOT be in charge of the FCC for fucking the Internet. Now, we all get to pay.
and this big shit sandwich is just getting started... 1,265 more days to go.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
From a system designed to ensure information flows no matter what... to a system designed to ensure selected information flows at a rate determined by your wallet.
Right, because government regulation is always good?
Can any of the Chicken Littles provide any evidence of their fears actually coming true? I keep hearing about how ISPs will block access to sites, or slow your connection down, but can anyone show this actually happening?
If you want to fight something, fight the government supported cable monopoly.
Unless you're living underground, or some similarly RF-hostile environment, satellite internet is probably an option. Not a good option, but an option. Costs more than Comcast, with a bonus of higher latency than dialup and probably about the same upload throughput -___-
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I've said this before, but we can get it back. It does mean we're gonna have to vote for the kinds of politicians who support Net Neutrality. We had one, but we replace him with somebody from the other side 'o the tracks....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Don't let headlines like this form your opinion, they votes to continue with their proposed rulemaking. there will be another comment period, and it will be important to support title 2 classification still. Once that is over, the FCC will have to prove to the courts (cause they WILL be sued) that there is enough of a shift in the marketplace to require reclassification.
Its far from over, nowhere near done. Don't let sensationalist headlines make you drop out of the fight early. Stay in, stay educated, and keep punching. We can still win.
and their health care. Trump ran a populist campaign with big promises for people kicked out of the middle class by globalism. If you're an ex-auto worker in Detroit or a laid off coal miner in Ohio you don't give a flying fark about Net Neutrality. You're making $9/hr at Walmart and/or McDonald's. You want you're $30/hr Union job back, and Trump promised that.
Hilary ignored the swing states at her peril. She only shifted left when it was clear Bernie would win if she didn't. She's was always a terrible candidate that the corporate Dems shoved down our throats. These people aren't dumb or superstitious, they're being actively ignored. This is what happens when you abandon a large percentage of your population to poverty and dismiss there concerns as stupidity. Bernie didn't do that. The "Justice Democrats" (google it) aren't. If the rest of us keep doing it we're gonna be a third world hell hole in 20 years as those folks drag us down trying to find a solution in a world that's leaving them behind.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Sure. Look at how Internet service worked on cell phone networks before Apple blew the old system up with the iPhone. Apple didn't do this out of idealism, but because it couldn't differentiate itself in an environment where the carriers controlled the user experience.
In fact in general look at how inferior US cell service is to the rest of the developed world. This was a result of a deliberate calculation by the Reagan administration that a more innovative network would result if carriers were free to choose their own standards. What they did was try to make it as painful as possible to change carriers while nickel-and-diming their subscribers for all they were worth. It was a safe, profitable strategy, like auto companies taking their mediocre old car platforms and putting exciting new bodies on them.
Meanwhile, in Internet services the competition is cutthroat because a level playing field is baked into the very architecture of the system, and innovation has been moving too fast for ISPs and cellular carriers to tie down their customer bases with "exclusive content". But it is coming. I've dealt with these people before and that's their wet dream: a captive customer base.
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I'm less concerned about the decision than what it shows about the power of our voice as US citizens.
Then again we did elect most of those people.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I can't remember where I first heard this idea, but people panicking over things like this is closely related to their political ideology and worldview.
For Liberals and Progressives, they're always fighting to push forward, to progress. They view human existence as a series of events that push us ever forward as a global society to an eventual Utopia. Things were always worse in the past and will always be better in the future. Any impediment, disagreement or setback to their agenda is thus viewed as "turning back the clock", or "taking us backwards".
For Conservatives, they realize that the pendulum swings both ways. Things change. There is no simple and straight path that takes us all to a glorious future. Sometimes the change is to your advantage and sometimes to your disadvantage. They view any setbacks as temporary in nature, and don't panic about things that they know can be changed.
Life seriously sucked two years ago, and the Internet was nowhere near as free as it is today...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with how much your ISP charges you.
Except that my ISP is my cable TV company. Without net neutrality they can slow down Netflix, Hulu, et al. to discourage cord-cutting, or charge per-packet while zero-rating packets from their own streaming service. Plenty of other shenanigans are possible.
Whomever owns the last mile has to be required to deliver every packet without discriminating
Might wanna check on your lord and savior bernie sanders' own record in the big corp money. His wife is being investigated for alleged bank fraud related to funding for a college she ran. Not small time either. And if you think he wasn't involved or had no knowledge of this, nor had any motivation for his platform to go a certain way (FREE COLLEGE FOR ALL). Would it really be a surprise that the guy spouting off free this and free that to tantalize his followers was doing so for personal gain and not the BS altruism that they tried to portray?
Can I call bullshit on that optimism?
What would have happened if black people, women, the LGBT community just stopped fighting for their rights?
I agree if you say that stressing out too much without a plan is pointless, but please remember that you can only stop fighting because others are fighting for you.
How was it... "all it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing". Big nice dichotomy, but you get the point.
Nice strawmen you got there.
"Pai's proposal argues that throttling websites and applications might somehow help Internet users."
How can anyone be so delusioned that they truly believe limiting access to websites and applications may somehow help users!? It won't help us, it will only help internet companies make more money through literal blackmail.
This will just turn into a : Pay us a bit of "protection money" and we will make sure that no "harm"(slow down) comes to you.
This will kill off any new comers, only protecting the ones who can afford to pay out. In the worst case, it may actually drive companies OUT of the US, thus result in a loss of jobs! This "Pai" has no sense of reality and it's clear he prioritize Verizon and the likes over actually protecting consumers and small companies that can't give out the protection money. This is why republicans are the scum of the earth.
I'm a conservative, and even I believe that as things stand right now, this has the potential to be a huge mistake. However, if Pai wants to turn this into an actual good thing for consumers, he's going to need to go full-Monty on his proposals. To wit: don't just remove the restrictions, but also the protections which apply to telcos under Title II. Strip away the privileges held by telcos and cable companies alike, in the form of their protected monopolies. Maybe we could even reinstate a truly free market, by the elimination of all FCC policies, period. And then petition Congress to actually give the FCC the power to fully overrule any state or local restrictions, so that they can't blockade the free market, either.
After all, that's pretty much the party-line mantra, at this point, isn't it? Liberals legislate everything to the point where it hurts, and conservatives eliminate legislation to the point where it hurts. So then, do it, Pai. Eat your own dog food.
Of course, maybe Pai's argument would be that if he actually went too far down that path, than the telcos and cable companies would sue... but the thing is, at this point they're always suing over anything that is even remotely pro-consumer. If they're not suing the FCC after the dust clears, then clearly there's something wrong. So why the hell not?
Come on, Pai. Let's do this thing!
Are you referring to the zero-rating that was banned in India last year?
"That's a nice web site you have, it would be a shame if something happened to your packets. For a reasonable fee we can make sure they arrive in good shape."
The FCC is part of the executive branch.
Meaning, of course, that they execute the rules (laws) established by Congress.
In the absence of such rules, the executive office is free to write its own rules.
Ergo:
Stop returning 95% of incumbent congressfucks and elect representatives that will simply pass a law making 'net neutrality' a thing.
Can't do it, or can't convince at least 51% of the electorate (or, in reality, only about 30%) to agree with you and actually vote? Then it must be not such a big deal.
-Styopa
You do understand that your internet connection involves more than just an analog signal, right? TCP/IP among other standards, includes in every single routable data stream where it is going and where it came from. This can be read by the ISP and routed to lower priority for non-bribe paying websites. That sounds innocent eh? Except it unfairly degrades the services that are ALREADY paid for, and breaks the function of the internet as an open platform.
So you think that ISPs are or were deliberately throttling or de-prioiritizing traffic from specific sources?
I think that they will, because business forces are monotonic toward increasing profits in the USA - where you all ignore the other aspects of a running a business within society. It is entirely appropriate to take action early when foresight allows for clear awareness of the outcome of a process. That's called management! Personally I have no dog in the show, except when traveling. My motive is to prevent this BS from spreading through hiding its true nature.
If a doctor doing tele-surgery on a child over the internet isn't more important than the next season of "13 ways I killed myself" then I don't know what you guys are smokin'. Up to this point I haven't seen widespread blocking of applications based on data. Maybe based on security, but not data and if AT&T wants to not ding me for Directv content, then so be it. The others can still use the pipes. If I go to T-Mobile I can watch unlimited YouTube.
does that not mean ISPs would no longer be under liability protection and be able to turn a blind eye to the data that crosses their networks? If they inspect the data traffic, and throttle the rate of some packets vs others, are they not signing up for being liable for illegal or copyrighted content that traverses through their switches?
Or is this they get to keep the Title II protections but do not have to abide by any of the specified regulations? In which case we have just fundamentally altered what "common carrier" means.
But also what I find worrisome is the ISPs ability to restrict access to certain sites of open information, possibility for censorship (even if just unwittingly by favoring OTHER sites which pay to get better service), the snuffing of open discourse and equal access to all participants... as someone previously mentioned - I do not want to see the current Internet turn into a modern AOL or CompuServe, where you can subscribe to the content machine, but cannot use the Internet as you see fit.
WAR IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
I think they won't because it will only cause huge legal headaches for them.
Disrupting their own customers is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Disrupting the customers of a paying peer is also a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Disrupting the customers of a settlement free peer is grounds to terminate the agreement, which hurts the interfering side more than they're hurting the customers they were interfering with.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and sometimes "set backs" are only considered such because individuals lack the vision to find the opportunity.
Sometimes those "setbacks" can last 1200 years.
Looks like Trump thinks the best way to Make America Great Again is to take the whole country back to the 1950's.
This is brilliant, the USA is proving WHY government regulation is required for many areas of business, especially those that have natural monopolies.
The world gets to learn while to US gets to burn.
Thanks, and may I add another Hahahahahhaha
Like that worked the first fracking time -_- . They'll just get China to create more bots and DDoS to illegitimize any suggestions like before.
Yes. Now imagine Apple owning the link to your home, business, and phone.
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I didn't come up with that idea and I really wish I could find the source. For all I know I heard it during a segment on NPR.
I did find the following, but I'm sure that's not where I heard of this.
Citation needed.
The articles covering the issue show ISPs like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Level 3, etc. either dropping settlement free peer links due to traffic imbalance or throttling the whole thing to bring the inbound levels inline with the outbound. Usually this affected all of the customers of that ISP (Cogent).
Cogent is, at best, grossly irresponsible for allowing its settlement free link to go that badly imbalanced that the other side has to take such serious action.
They know what they were doing, as does Netflix. Netflix chose the shittiest provider it could to cut costs and then pretended not to know that the provider was abusing settlement free links.
I want to start an ISP that sells internet access super cheap to ultra-high volume customers and then manipulate uninformed rubes into fighting the ISPs I connect to into upgrading their peer links, and eventually their internal links, to handle all the traffic my customers are generating. One NN advocate would see to it that I only have to pay for the actual costs of the interconnect hardware.
I don't have to pay to build and maintain a residential/business size/scale internet service provider, nor do I pay much at all to access those networks. It's win-win for me and my customers.
On the other hand, ALL of the customers of those ISPs get to cover the ever increasing costs of upgrading the ISPs internal network to handle the added bandwidth demands of a few of them, so it's not so great for them.
It's like the Mexicans who voted for DT and are now facing deportation even though they were the "good hombres" (hard working people, just not american citizens).
If they aren't citizens, then they couldn't vote....
There is no natural law that says that all societies will last forever - history in fact demonstrates quite the opposite. And societies don't usually collapse because of one gigantic catastrophe - they collapse because of millions or trillions of small "well whatever" failures. It's apparent in the US and some other cultures that the proportion of people who don't give a shit is growing, and once they reach critical mass we'll be living in a shithole where the only way to live let alone succeed will be through avarice and meanness. There are any number of cultures in the world where this is already the case. (I'm looking at you, Africa.)
If you think the US or the West is different, it's only because there's a critical mass of people who'll give a shit and who'll fight for what's best and right.
So fuck you for telling people to relax and just get theirs.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
The answer to all three is pretty much "I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further." Where their are no contracts with the customer, just change it. Where there are contracts, change it upon renewal. If the customers don't like it, they can go to a non-existent competitor.
Meanwhile the rest of the world will carry on pretty much as usual, but with the Internet doing what it was designed to do.
Recognize a compromised site (America) as damage and route around it.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
This is so monumentally stupid and short-sighted. The Internet is one of the most tremendous forces in human society, and allowing corporate interests to control it more than they already do will inevitably lead to an imbalanced and unfair system. Anyone who honestly believes in the tired old canard of "those awful freeloaders" needs to pick up a fucking history book once in awhile. Trust me, they can easily deal with bandwidth hogs already if they really want to. This is not an issue of "oh, we just need more corporate power". Anyone who thinks corporate interests exist to serve anything other than their bottom line needs to seriously consider psychiatric medication.
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"The FCC voted along party lines today to formally consider Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to scrap the legal foundation for the rules and to ask the public for comments on the future of prohibitions on blocking, throttling and paid prioritization. "
I fail to see the point in asking what the public thinks when they blatantly ignore what the public wants.
*sigh*
I guess we can try again in 2020.
Any ISP that tries to impose a fast lane needs to go dark. Immediately. Google, Amazon and every single website on the Internet needs to cut them off with a page that explains how their ISP is screwing them, and they will be changed more for services now. Internet access has no value if you can't get anywhere. Keep this up for a weekend. Then, add a Comcast tax to everyone's bill. You buy anything on Amazon, and you get charged extra, as a separate line item. Same with Netflix. Make everyone aware of what' going on. If a week of no Internet for Comcast and AT&T customers doesn't convince them to knock it the hell off, nothing else will.
Your point was what? That such a situation would be bad? yes....what does your prompt have to do with Title II Internet regulation?
Stop blocking traffic and hitting vehicles that wish to get by and this won't happen.
What the ISPs want to get back to is called Rent Seeking. They want to make money by milking something that isn't theirs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They discovered they can extort money from companies they have no business relationship with by throttling bandwidth to *their own customers* (who pay for a connection with specified bandwidth, not a website) in order to harm those companies. They were stopped. Now they want that ability back.
Verizon did this blatantly with NetFlix, who was dumb enough to pay up (they should have sued them for extortion).
To anyone who believes the absurd tagline "the market will sort it out", there is no market here. The vast majority of Americans don't have a choice, those who do have two choices, and both companies are guilty of numerous violations of consumer trust (and occasionally, the law). When a local community or government attempts to address this with a community or public internet provider, the big ISPs sue or bribe (sorry, "lobby") the local government officials to get it shut down. This is not a free market if they can eliminate competition without actually competing.
To take this from another angle, a very serious question: Are ISPs an "information service" or a "telecommunications service"?
Seriously, what "information" do you get *from* your ISP? They don't even host usenet servers anymore. Everything that comes to and from your computer goes _through_ your ISP, it doesn't come _from_ them.
This is precisely the question being answered by this re-classification (they're saying your ISP is an information _service_).
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
Feel free to negotiate a paid peering agreement then.
You, and society, will be fine, I promise.
People kept telling me this after Trump was elected. Now pre-existing conditions are back on the menu. Yeah, I'm sure society will be just fine.
If you give something an nice-sounding name, it doesn't matter how useless or even bad it is. You'll get people to support it.
Like this "net neutrality" thing, that is a "solution" in search of a problem.
Nobody likes temporary solutions, or an endless chain of partial solutions, of half-assed solutions, of interim fixes.
Give them a solution that is the last one. The final one.
Godwin!
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.