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Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T Want Congress To Make a Net Neutrality Law Because They Will Write It (theverge.com)
From a report on The Verge: Companies and organizations that rely on an open internet rallied on Wednesday for a "day of action" on net neutrality, and America's biggest internet service providers have responded with arrogance and contempt for their customers. Comcast's David Cohen called arguments in favor of FCC regulation "scare tactics" and "hysteria." Beyond the dismissive rhetoric, ISPs are coincidentally united today in calling for Congress to act -- and that's because they've paid handsomely to control what Congress does. There's one thing Republicans and Democrats can agree on, and that's taking money from ISPs. The telecommunications industry was the most powerful lobbying force of the 20th century, and that power endures. It's no secret that lobbyists in Washington write many of the laws, and the telecom industry spends a lot of money to make sure lawmakers use them. We've already seen net neutrality legislation written by the ISPs, and it's filled with loopholes. It's not just in Congress -- companies like AT&T have deep influence over local and state broadband laws, and write those policies, too. Some pro-net neutrality advocates are also arguing today that Congress should act, and there are some good reasons for that. Laws can be stickier than the judgements of regulatory agencies, and if you want to make net neutrality the law of the land that's a job for Congress. But there's a reason the ISPs are all saying the same thing, and it's because they're very confident they will defeat the interests of consumers and constituents. They've already done it this year under the Republican-controlled government. Further reading: 10M+ web users saw yesterday's net neutrality protest -- but rules are still getting scrapped.
net neutrality allowed me to get first!
Imagine that, it's almost as if government regulation keeps competition out of the market by letting lobbyists influence the letter of the law.
Congress is supposedly "working on" a new healthcare package. But really the work has already done by K Street insurance lobby. They wrote the bill, and handed it off to their lapdogs in congress to pass. The healthcare bill is one mamoth crony capitalist golden subsidy to the insurance companies. Corporate socialism.
Who wins? The insurance companies. Who loses? You do.
Send Hadji back where he came from and get some non-asshole in there who will stop fucking over American citizens.
"it is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics. Encryption is too important to be left solely to governments." -- Bruce Schneier
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Impromptu poll:
How many of you would be willing to abandon the Internet entirely, if it came down to that being the only form of protest against this bullshit that was left to you?
For my part, it would suck but I'd be willing if that's what it took to get the message across.
Of course I'm holding out hope in two areas: One, that there will always be companies that see profit in doing what's right, attracting customers who won't tolerate being jerked around like the Comcasts and AT&T's of the world jerk you around. Two, that Trump won't be in office for more than 1 term (if even that long, the way things are going) and the next POTUS will, hopefully, repair this and other damage being done to the country.
I got a pop-up message when I visited my web host provider, DreamHost, yesterday.
Please upgrade your plan to proceed.
Just kidding. You can still get to this site *for now*. But if the FCC ends net neutrality, your cable company could charge you extra fees just to use the websites and apps you want. We can stop them and keep the Internet open, fast, and awesome if we all contact the U.S. Congress and the FCC, but we only have a few days left. Learn more.
>> The telecommunications industry was the most powerful lobbying force of the 20th century
Hmmm...two special interests I'd stick ahead of that (certainly in terms of money-in-politics) would be the defense industry (which got theirs) and government employee unions (ditto).
I didn't see hide nor hair of your dorky protest.
TWO SCOOPS FOR ADBLOCKER PRO!
Comcast et al are scum, but the fact is that Congress is the proper place to implement net neutrality with the FCC's input. Then it can't be removed at the whims of whoever's running the FCC.
The internet companies are going to lobby the hell out of Congress, so we need to make sure that the other side is heard as well. I don't see that as a problem with Google and company lobbying heavily.
Do you have ESP?
Why don't we fix the real problem here: massive corporations. All the bad shite comes down from these massive corporations. If we limited the size of a corporation and the number of entities one corporation can "own" most of these problems would go away.
Hatchet, axe, and saw [works for the trees](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnC88xBPkkc). Some kind of metaphorical lumberjack would be nice... perhaps in the form of cheap, ubiquitous p2p wifi making the whole point moot. It's the long-distance peering that's hard to solve...
Congress should be running the show. Not a couple of GOP-appointed, former corporate shills with conflicts of interest on the FCC.
The problem, however, is can Congress get it right - with all the money that flows around in the Capitol building and K Street?
My faith in Congress is a shade above zero. Outright bribery (aka "political donations") have made it just about impossible for the Legislative branch (Congress) to do anything substantial for the common man.
Because of that, the Executive (which manages groups like the FCC) and Judicial branches (especially the Supreme Court) are becoming the only truly functioning part of the American government. That means that smaller and smaller groups of people are deciding major policy now; Meanwhile, we and our senators/reps are forced to sit and cheer on the bickering as if it actually matters - like an ancient Roman circus.
Let me start off by saying, that Net Neutrality as we understand it, is good and I'm all for that.
Net Neutrality as it would be under Title 2 of the Federal Communications Act, not so much.
Here's my reasoning: Radio is regulated by title 2. In 1949, the FCC using this authority adopted something called "the fairness doctrine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine). This law allowed them to regulate controversial speech by forcing broadcasters to provide equal time to opposing viewpoints. In essense, it severely limited free speech. It lasted all the way until it was repealed in 1987.
Classifying the internet under Title 2 would have the unintended consequence that there would be NOTHING stopping the FCC from imposing similar restraints on the internet. Theoretically the FCC could vote a law in that forces the Huffington post, to reprint half of it's articles from Brietbart and vice versa.
After all, this is the equivalent of what they did to the radio for 38 years. This is a power that I'd rather they didn't have.
I'm all for the free flow of packets, but Title 2 gives the FCC way too much discretionary power which I am willing to bet would be abused in short order.
Drafting a specific bill to prevent shit like Verizon extorting Netflix and similar BS is much better in comparison, because it only address the issue of net neutrality. From what the telcos are saying - they don't much care about the free flow of packets (or even say they support it), but care greatly about being regulated by title 2. They are throwing us a bone here, and there's no reason here yet to believe we wont get what we want (and what do we care what law the are regulated by as long as they deliver our packets correctly?). It's best to give this a chance (and only then lynch them if they fail to deliver).
And for all the crap we give politicians, I'd feel much better if they were responsible for this law rather than 4 un-elected and effectively unfireable bureaucrats.
... and it never stops.
Petrochemical companies write the EPA regulations.
Big pharma and insurance companies wrote Obamacare.
Senators and congressmen write the regulations on their income, retirement, and health care.
And now, internet service providers write the regulations on net neutrality.
Great.
All of this is brought to you not by the parties, but by the partisan. You, those people who eat, sleep and drink the words of your "political party" and violently regurgitate them at everyone you meet, are the ones that make all of this happen.
If you elect multi-millionaires to every political office in the federal government you should not be surprised if you are treated like one of their assets or possessions. You are merely another of their resources to be irresponsibly exploited for power, corporate profit, and taxes.
The only recourse against government leaders is dissent. However, in a miraculously fortunate (for our aristocratic leaders) and totally not contrived or engineered in any way sort of circumstance (yeah right!), a side effect of the two party system is that dissent and dissatisfaction against actions of the government are directed only at one of the parties and not the government as a whole.
Haven't you figured it out yet? If you are partisan, you cause shit like this because you won't keep your own party clean. You can't keep your finger out of other people's faces which means you will never deal with the issues in your own party and ultimately in your own mind. As long as you have a scapegoat to blame you will let your government get away with ANYTHING.
The result is that those of us who haven't done the Kool-Aid colonic like you have not only have to listen to you prattle on incandescently (because you get so hot about stuff that is completely inane, haha) but we also have to deal with the immense political problems facing our country which your actions create. Of course you never feel responsible for any of them because its always the other party's fault. In reality, the only reason we have these problems is because partisan people will never do the one thing that would give them incredible power to dictate the course of our country: hold their own party accountable.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
The mind boggles at how a person already too lazy to yell at their congress critter over obvious corruption and industry capture expects to thrive in a fully deregulated marketplace.
Hey, if Goldman and the Wall St. bankers can steal trillions of dollars by bribing the government, why can't the ISP's?
The current net neutrality law was written by them and allows them to do things like zero-rate and prefer their own content while discriminating against Netflix and YouTube.
Obama legalized the practices the Net Neutrality crowd is railing against. Read the current law, it has nothing to do with the bits on your Internet connection and should be abolished to the pre-Obama rules where common carriers were violating the law when they were rate-limiting Netflix and YouTube.
I'm all for Net Neutrality but the only true Net Neutrality laws (Netherlands had them at least) were recently shot down by the EU for being anti-competitive. And somehow these idiot protesters think the US laws were better than the Netherlands?
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Your fat white ass wouldn't dare say that shit to a black man's face.
I sent a letter to my representative yesterday about basically not giving the keys to the hen house to the foxes... I did receive a response within a couple hours and while it may have been a form letter it was at least somewhat on topic. Unfortunately it was partisan drivel.. blaming the far reaching Obama administration for hurting competition and stifling innovation.
I'm not sure if my response will get through but I asked "other than the dial-up era in the late 90s, when have we ever had competition? Right now it's like choosing between a voluntary enema or voluntary colonoscopy."
My rep is a freshman rep and relatively young.. but he's already been assimilated.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
or the history of AT&T you know it's basically the opposite. Government regulation is the only thing between you and the company stores. That's because little 'ole you and me with our meager wallets can't go toe to toe with mega corps let alone robber barrons. We've got to get organized and when we do we call that organization 'government'. Remember that picture of the snake cut into 13 pieces? That's you without an organized response.
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I still had to have a phone line and I only had 1 provider. Free markets and telecom don't really work. It's too expensive/difficult to build the infrastructure.
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is that if you did away with all government regulation and power then it couldn't be abused. The funny thing is if you make the same argument for guns the folks railing against government get kinda upset.
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but it'll just get circumvented through shell companies. A better solution would be a parliament system of proportional representation, and end to the electoral college and Senate systems. Careful regulation of gerrymandering and finally the crown jewels: Mandatory Voting. Everybody votes. You can send in a blank ballot if you want, but you're going to vote. And since everyone votes there's no such thing as voter suppression.
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The golden rule states "he who has the gold writes the rules"
Special interests drafting legislation has been a thing for decades.
In the old days, they’s influence legislation. Now they save Congress and legislatures the work and draft the entire things themselves.
So this should be very unsurprising. That is to say, expected, the newish normal.
You mean closed Internet.
Because net "neutrality" will be closing network connections, and now hackers can focus their efforts on those network that still remain.